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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Writing on the op-ed page of the Times the other day, Christopher Buckley reminisced about a previous era when Europeans turned out by the million to demonstrate in the streets against what they took to be American bellicosity. Twenty years ago, Buckley, who is now a well-known satirical novelist, was an aide to the then Vice-President of the United States, George H. W. Bush. What Europeans were protesting in 1983 was the pending deployment on their territory of Pershing 2 missiles, which their governments had earlier demanded in order to offset similar Soviet missiles that were already in place. At a Q. & A. session in London's Guildhall, with demonstrators shouting outside, a clergyman got up to say indignantly that he didn't want to see his children incinerated in an American-initiated nuclear war. According to Buckley, Bush managed to defuse the moment. "Look, I have kids, too,"the Vice-President said plaintively. "Don't you think I want to see them grow up?"
Although Buckley doesn't mention it (he is making a different point, about the value of diplomatic tact), and although his boss probably didn't mean to be taken literally, the five Bush kids, at that moment, were not exactly toddlers. They ranged in age from twenty-three to thirty-six. But the eldest, if no longer a child, had not fully made the transition to adulthood. He had fumbled a congressional campaign that seemed to voters little more than a rich boy's indulgence; he had blown the first of his subsidized forays into the oil business; he was partying...
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