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President Bush was working the crowd at a campaign event in Lebanon, Ohio, recently when he encountered a man named Lynn Faulkner and his 15-year-old daughter, Ashley. Bush dutifully shook their hands and started past them when someone pointed at Ashley and said, "This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9/11."Bush stopped and turned to the girl.
"How are you doing?" he asked her.
"I'm okay," she said, trying to fight back tears.
Bush then hugged Ashley tightly.
"I can see you have a father who loves you very much," Bush said as he held the girl in his arms.
The incident happened so quickly that no one in the national press corps noticed. But the father told a local reporter that his daughter showed more emotion than she had in two and a half years.
"The way he was holding me, it felt like he was trying to protect me," Ashley explained later. "I thought, Here is the most powerful guy in the world, and he wants to make sure I'm safe."
It is often said that the attacks of 9/11 made a wartime President out of George W. Bush. In a nation split along partisan lines, Bush's response to those attacks -- here at home and in Afghanistan -- bridged those divides. But only for a time.
Bush soon led America into Iraq, and now he must console the families of those killed in a war that divides us once more. Most have stood behind Bush when he assured them that their spouse or child or parent did not die in vain. Not all.
After Army Staff Sgt. Michael W. Mitchell was killed in Iraq, his father, Bill Mitchell of Atascadero, California, marched in a peace rally and wrote to his son's commanding officer about the "irony" of his son's death at the hands of the very people he was trying to liberate. "This is insanity!" the grieving father stated.
History is a constantly flowing river. But for now, these two snapshots bring Bush's legacy into focus: He's the decisive President who met the hard challenges of 9/11. Or he's the immovable chief executive who ignored much of world opinion to lead his nation into a quagmire in Iraq.
And if 9/11 made Bush a wartime President, it also made him into a Washington President, with all the strengths and pitfalls that such a conversion implies.
On March 19, 2003, the night he launched the invasion of Iraq, Bush spoke to the nation from the Oval Office. An American flag was visible over one shoulder. Also shown was the Presidential seal: not the part with the eagle holding the olive branch but the more ominous part, the one showing the slew of arrows in the eagle's left talon.
This warlike image was no aberration. In the Presidential desk, made from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute, a former British Royal Navy ship, Bush keeps a classified list of the most-wanted Al Qaeda suspects. When one of the terrorists has been apprehended or killed, he takes the list out and makes a check mark next to the name.
Bush clearly knows the power of the office, which he calls "a shrine to democracy," and he uses it consciously. He gives visitors a quick lesson in the artifacts there, including the rug designed by First Lady Laura Bush with its distinctive rays of sun.
"I want people to have a sense of optimism when they come in here, that this is a guy who sees a better world, not a worse world," he explains.
In his much-watched February 8, 2004, interview with NBC's Tim Russert, Bush mentioned four times that he governs from this room. "I've shown the American people I can sit here in the Oval Office when times are tough," he said, "and be steady and make good decisions."
Bush emphasized the same themes in an interview with Reader's Digest. "Nearly every world problem makes it right to this desk in the Oval Office," he said. "And you've got to have a clear vision about what the world ought to look like."
Whether a majority of Americans concur with Bush's vision will be decided in November. But the essence of the man's nature, and the effects that his character have had on world affairs, exist in plain sight.
"More than any recent President, we know who he is," says political scientist Martha Joynt Kumar, an expert in Presidential communications at Towson University in Maryland. "He's comfortable with himself; he's willing to take risks; he has a sense of his moral compass. People may not like it, but they know what he stands for."
These traits are embodied in three pieces of art that Bush chose to put in the Oval Office: busts of Lincoln, Churchill and Eisenhower. "Isn't it ironic?" Bush confided to top aide Karl Rove after 9/11. "All of them were known as wartime leaders."
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