The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

GEORGE BUSH TURNS 68 ON JUNE 12. A RIPE AGE -- THOUGH he does not yet seem to be a senior citizen, or even a Gray Panther. He's fighting it. "I don't feel old," he says. "I feel young. I feel competitive. I'm ready to charge. I still go to work at 5 a.m. and stay late. I don't get a lot of sleep. I'm not slowing down. Once in a while I get grumpy, but no more than usual."

By G.O.P. nomination time in August, he will be the fifth oldest of the 40 men who have been U.S. Presidents, passing the luckless William Henry Harrison, who was 68 when he got chilled at his Inauguration, caught pneumonia and expired after only 31 days on the job. Some said he deserved it: his speech ran an hour and 45 minutes.

Midway into his second term -- if he is re-elected -- Bush will have charged by other golden oldies, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan, both 69, and Dwight Eisenhower, 70. That would leave Bush second only to Ronald Reagan, who retired to California at age 77. Bush's thyroid problem, his doctor's public concerns about job stress and his televised throwing up into the lap of Japan's Prime Minister have underscored persistent questions about the President's health. There was even the wild media speculation earlier this year that Bush would cite health reasons to make a dramatic exit from his re- election bid, opening the contest to the cadre of younger Republicans waiting in the wings.

Yet the statistics that emerge from the frequent medical probings of the presidential physique suggest robust health. The greater question is, How does Bush really feel? Energy level and mood, which are not on the charts, are as important as blood pressure. John Kennedy's nagging backache surely encouraged his dark and fatal mood in the grim summer of 1961 and made him think a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union lay ahead. Lyndon Johnson's downer after his gall-bladder operation may have resigned him to war in Vietnam. Actually, Bush confesses a few tiny signs of his age -- but mighty few.

"There's a little extra gray these days," he says, describing the guy that he sees in his shaving mirror each morning. "It's on the sides and filters through the top. But I don't notice wrinkles. The aging process is pretty gentle. I'm sure I'm different than what I looked like before. But I don't feel it."

His elixir is exercise. "It is euphoric; it releases me," he claims. "I run two miles three times a week at about 9 1/2 minutes a mile. I play tennis, golf and horseshoes. Keeps you human, keeps you going. Take fishing. It is not competitive, but it is totally relaxing. I concentrate on where the cast is going. I can get my mind free of other things.

"I don't feel any pain while I'm exercising," Bush insists. "The only aches I get are after I'm done. Sometimes at night, after I've run for three days, my hips bother me. And when I run on hard surfaces, my knees can bother me. I thought about it, and I asked the doctor about a replacement hip. But he said no. I take a little pain-killer now and then." No food or drink is off limits, Bush says. "Peppers? I love peppers, and I love hot sauce. I splash Tabasco all over."

Bush, like other Presidents before him, recognizes the danger of fatigue, which can affect judgment in mysterious ways. "Going out in the evenings over and over in the same week, I find, makes you tired the next day. Too much travel can make you tired," he says, a tacit admission that sometimes he went too far too fast. "You must watch that you don't get cumulatively tired. Long meetings -- yeah, they affect you, but it depends on the subject. I don't associate any degree of tiredness or enervation with any particular controversy. But there is a big adrenaline factor in this business. I know in an important speech there is a euphoric feeling right afterward, a little bit of a high; then you kind of get tired afterward. Like sports again. It builds to something, and then it is down."

Bush has another special potion that he takes in one form or another each day: family. "The grandkids come running into the Oval Office or upstairs. It is marvelous. And there is that little swing out behind that I can see out of the office window, down toward the southwest gate. I can see them swinging and hear them yelling. Little Marshall, Marvin's daughter, was over the other day, and she has this big, unruly golden retriever. The dog was pulling her towel, and it ran away with one little girl's bathing suit, and they were trying to tackle the dog. I loved it all. I just sat and watched."

His upper-body strength is largely intact, Bush insists. "I can still lift the grandkids like before." But in one physical test this spring, his left arm faltered. "My fast ball was a slow ball this year," says the former Yale first baseman, a lefty. "They clocked it at 39 m.p.h. over in Baltimore. It was a little embarrassing."

Even in that experience, Bush squeezes out a lesson valid for all seasons. "It is doing things that is important," he claims. "It is getting ready for whatever comes, staying up with it and getting ready to charge downstairs and compete."

So what might he do on the day that the big six-eight actually arrives? "If I'm off somewhere," the President answers, "I'll probably run a mile."