The White House: In a Sentimental Mood

By Michael Duffy/Washington

George Bush's first brush with death left barely a scratch on him. As a young pilot in 1944, he bailed out of a burning plane and spent several hours bobbing aimlessly in the Pacific before being picked up by a submarine. If, as Bush later claimed, he took time "to talk to God" after his rescue, crew members of the U.S.S. Finback didn't notice: what they most remember about the young man they nicknamed "Elephant" was his thunderous imitation of a pachyderm on a mad stampede.

Scoffing at mortality is normal at 20, but impossible at 66. Bush again came face to face with the prospect of dying five weeks ago after his heart began to fibrillate as he was jogging at Camp David. The result has been a subtle but unmistakable change in Bush's outlook and demeanor. In both public and private, he has become more candid and confiding, less guarded and much funnier. His patrician reserve has cracked a bit and the emotions he has long held in check are suddenly visible.

Last week, addressing the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta, Bush admitted that he cried while wrestling with the decision to begin the air war against Saddam Hussein. "You know us Episcopalians," Bush said, his eyes moistening again. "Like a lot of people, I have worried a little bit about shedding tears in public. But as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David . . . we were thinking about those young men and women overseas and the tears started down the cheeks, and our minister smiled back and I no longer worried how it looked to others."

For Bush, who tends his public persona more carefully than it often seems, this is a startling departure. Until recently, he routinely skipped over highly emotional lines in speeches out of fear that his voice would crack and he would lose his composure. As he told reporters after the Atlanta speech, he's now willing to take that risk. "That's the way it was, why not say it?"

That was the best example of Bush's new expansiveness, but it was hardly the only one. Old friends say Bush's handwritten notes have become more thoughtful than usual, and longer as well. In recent weeks, Bush has been positively confessional in public, extending press briefings beyond normal time limits and having full conversations with strangers when a handshake or a photograph used to be the order of the day. It isn't only because he wants to prove that he is healthy enough to handle the job, though he has certainly worked hard at that. Bush is talking about himself more, how he's feeling mentally, and why. As Bush told an aide last week, "I didn't use to do that kind of stuff."

Uncomfortable indulging in what he derides as "climbing on the couch," Bush has in the past loathed this sort of self-analysis. Now his aides are noticing more introspection. While confidence born of Bush's Desert Storm success accounts for some of his new candor, his aides date the introspection to early May, not March. "You really are seeing a lot more of the personal side of George Bush," said one. "Part of it is that he's more confident as President. But it's more than that, and part of it is the heart thing."

Nowhere is the President's new openness more evident than in his self- conscious attitude toward his health. Instead of "keeping it all in," as he did with a bleeding ulcer in 1960, Bush provides an almost daily commentary on his sleeping and eating habits, weight, morale and energy level. Though some might think it politically wiser to omit any mention of presidential maladies or medications, particularly with Dan Quayle as Vice President, Bush apparently does not. At a horseshoe throw last week on the South Lawn, Bush appeared in a T shirt featuring the milking end of a dead cow, its feet straight up in the air, with the caption REALLY, I'M FINE.

Such winning gestures reveal a side of the President only glimpsed before. By being less calculating and more confiding -- acting less like a politician, really -- Bush could become even more appealing to voters. For Democrats, the President's new human dimension is another piece of bad news.