The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The two menacing gray cruisers wallowed in a wind-scoured sea, radar disks alive, sullen missile launchers lining their decks. They were the instruments of a half-century of a calculated war that never happened, a war constrained by the brutish power of just such ships.

Ironically, they were shepherds of peace last week, anchored in Marsaxlokk Bay. Malta is a scarred limestone fortress fought over for centuries, the gashes of German and Italian bombs still visible from the battering it took in World War II. George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev searched for a way to dismantle their huge arsenals even while transported and comforted by their monstrous machines. Their task will not be easy. Everywhere one looked along this peculiar journey were reminders of how much the military structure girdles, orders and even calms the world. Anybody who tries to change it quickly had best be careful.

When Bush climbed aboard his jet for this odyssey, he was in the hands of the U.S. Air Force. The President's three Marine helicopters had been ferried in the belly of an Air Force transport and were waiting for him on the Malta ramps. From there the machines whirled him 50 miles to the aircraft carrier Forrestal, then settled him back feather-like on the fantail of the Belknap. Rubber-suited Marine divers bounced in dinghies along the tops of the rising waves, patrolling for any suspicious movement in adjacent waters. A shabby little barge, old tires festooning its scuffed sides, turned out to be in the employ of the Navy, the keeper of the communication cable to the Belknap. That allowed Bush to monitor events in the Philippines, where U.S. force once again had to be committed to help stabilize a friend.

To stage this informal "feet on the table" pageant of peace took the skillful services of thousands of soldiers, sailors and Marines. While gratified by their new mission, they and their Soviet counterparts retained some of their fighting spirit. Soviet sailors interviewed by the Malta press implied that the older Belknap was a bit of a clunker compared with their cruiser Slava. An American gob, eyeing the Slava's conical superstructure, sniffed, "It makes a good target." But that was about as hostile an environment as could be found until the weather struck, an adversity that may actually have encouraged deeper thought.

Before he sat down with Gorbachev, the President pointedly gloried in the thunderous launching and recovery of F-14 Tomcat fighters on the Forrestal. Down in the carrier's hangar bay, Bush stood before the quieted planes and crews and talked about his view of war. "There's a painting in the White House, upstairs in the little office. It pictures Lincoln with two generals and an admiral meeting on a boat near the end of a war that pitted brother against brother. Outside the battle rages. And yet what we see in the distance is a rainbow, symbol of hope, of the passing storm. The painting's name? The Peacemakers."

Gorbachev picked up the beat. When he arrived, he noted, "The naval ships have come on a mission of peace. This symbolism gives expression to the radical changes now sweeping the world as it shifts from confrontation." When wind forced the first meeting to be moved to the dockside Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky, Gorbachev remarked wryly, "The first thing to do is to eliminate those ships you cannot board in this kind of weather. We will have a secret agenda in this way to disarm the Sixth Fleet." That's the whole point, but it is quicker said than it should be done.