The Presidency Motion Sickness

By Hugh Sidey

The malady that caused George Bush to throw up on Kiichi Miyazawa's suit was identified as gastroenteritis. Actually it was an ailment that has afflicted the presidency for 30 years. Call it excessive travelitis: jetting around the world too far, too fast, too often.

| We are just lucky that before last week there had never been such a public presidential barf. But in the culture of obsessive motion that has seized the government for the past three decades, Bush has gone farther (350,000 miles), faster (in three years) and through more countries (36) and their exotic germs than any other Chief Executive.

"We ruined the presidency when we gave him that jet," the late Peter Lisagor of the old Chicago Daily News once mused. "A President gets on that plane, leaves his problems behind, looks down on a beautiful globe and thinks he can run it. We ought to take the jet away and make him fly USAir."

Surely the time has come for all these top government officials to curtail their frantic dashing about. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk has never stopped pointing out that the diplomatic service is a 500-year-old invention designed to make it unnecessary for Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Secretaries to be everywhere at once.

Of course, some presidential travel is necessary. Considerable good comes from personal contact between heads of state. But travel for travel's sake, the current malady, is a waste and a danger. We still wonder if Nikita Khrushchev's sizing up of John Kennedy, whose back was throbbing from an injury sustained while planting a tree in Canada, inspired the Soviet leader to send missiles to Cuba in 1962.

Presidents are only part of this unwitting conspiracy. Politics is now a drama of motion. The media love the exhilaration of nomadic statecraft. Anchors like Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather climbed the ladder by breathless appearances at exotic summits from Beijing to Moscow.

The Air Force, which spends millions on its fleet of 43 planes for the VIPs, relishes the chance to curry favor with its sources of money and influence, including Congressmen and Senators, whose taste for junketeering is legendary. The White House advance teams, the Secret Service -- which deploys hundreds of agents on some presidential trips -- are made up of young men and women who are thrilled by the adventure. Concocted and hyped crowds roar approval. Add it all up, and a President gets the feeling he rides with the gods. It is an illusion.

Ronald Reagan flew to Moscow through seven time zones in 1988, when he was 77 years old, and at moments responded like a sack of potatoes. Jimmy Carter frazzled himself and his entourage by racing through seven countries in Europe, Asia and Africa in nine days in 1978. Lyndon Johnson went on a whimsical and wild four-day flight around the world in 1967. When he found out he had overspent his travel kitty, he sent his Bible-thumping aide Marvin Watson skulking around Washington seeking secret funds from other departments.

Bush does not have travel-budget woes yet, but his 67-year-old frame is plainly protesting. He began this 25,000-mile trip with a 20-hour hop to Australia that he admitted gave him jet lag. His antidote for fatigue was, as usual, a jammed schedule, plus jogging and tennis. Through some 20 diplomatic meals in four countries, no strange sauce or Asian delicacy was barred from his long-suffering stomach. He could not have been more beautifully prepared for a ravenous microbe if he had planned it.