Stolberg continues: "Mr. Bush was asked last week if he had
experienced any pain, given his own acknowledgment that things in
Iraq had not gone according to plan. He spun the question toward
the military families' pain -- 'My heart breaks' for them, he
said -- before turning it back to his own: 'The most painful
aspect of the presidency is the fact that I know my decisions
have caused young men and women to lose their lives.'"
It isn't possible to leach from the mind the human element
that travels from the executive order to the wounded private. But
it should be possible to disdain as contemptible public
references to it. To approach a president at a press conference
and ask him to explore, step by step, (1) his act as commander in
chief, and (2) the final moments of men who obey his orders in a
foreign land is to abuse the powers of the press. A civil society
supposes -- has to suppose -- that normal reactions affect our
leaders. But there is the phenomenon of such as General Patton in
high glee as heads are smashed and bombs explode. It can be said
to be human to take pleasure from the theatricalization of
war.
"Being commander in chief," writes Ms. Stolberg, "means
learning to cope with stress. Abraham Lincoln went to the theater
to relax. Franklin D. Roosevelt, paralyzed from polio, lulled
himself to sleep by imagining himself as a boy sledding down a
snowy slope at Hyde Park."
It isn't right to ask a president, or his wife, how they
manage to take their minds away from the bloody frontiers of
national life.