American President

Chicago. -- Lord Bryce, in his classic work ''The American Commonwealth,'' which appeared at the end of the last century, explored many reasons for the lack of American statesmanship. One explanation he found is the lack of any political use found for ex-presidents. It is absurd, he argued, that a man who reaches the pinnacle of American power should, after four or eight years, be consigned to permanent irrelevancy.Jimmy Carter has solved the Bryce conundrum. He is an ex-president, and he has found many uses for himself.

LONDON -- After 100,000 unnecessary deaths, 40,000 ''disappearances'' and 440 ruined villages, peace formally comes to the last redoubt of the Central American war zone, Guatemala, on Sunday.It was, with Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, one of the great killing fields of the ''post-war'' world. The violence never reached an apex equal to that in neighboring El Salvador, nor did as many people just ''disappear'' as in Chile and Argentina, nor did the war last so long as it has in Peru or Colombia.

If, my friends, your ultimate aim is to provide independently for your own defense, the time to tell us is today.Good for George Bush. With French President Francois Mitterrand shooting ironic Gallic barbs at the American military presence that has protected his country all these many years, and with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wavering between his contradictory commitments to Paris and Washington, it was indeed time for an American president to speak...

Chicago.--Why should a president under whom America is prospering be so low in the polls -- down in the 30s, which is as low as modern presidents tend to go?Some attribute this to Bill Clinton's personality, or morals, or character. Some of the problem is there; but the distrust of him, and of government, and of authority is general, and has deep roots.Mr. Clinton has had the bad luck to take office at a time when the country is undergoing a crisis in its values. Fifty percent of the people say that the president does not share their values.

There is no denying that George Vafiadis resembles Abraham Lincoln. Even dressed down in khakis and a deep-blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Vafiadis has the look - the thick, dark hair, the 6-foot-plus stature, the appearance of one who might have been gangly in his youth. But if Vafiadis does his job right, the resemblance is more than skin deep. "When I first walk out on the stage, I know some people think, `Oh, there's a guy with a big nose who is dressed like Lincoln,'" Vafiadis said.

Anyone who maintains that Bill Clinton is a Hollywood hero hasn't been paying attention. While there's no doubt much of filmdom supports him over the alternative, it's just as obvious that many of the same people find him a disappointment, a man whose presidency promised more than it delivered. From "Bulworth" and "The American President" to TV's "The West Wing," Hollywood's liberal filmmakers have made clear the sort of president they'd like to see: principled, unabashedly liberal, willing to say what he thinks and stand up for what he believes.

A DOZEN YEARS ago, an American president named George Bush was the toast of all Germany. Alone among top foreign leaders, he had championed the reunification of West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. More than any other non-German, he made reunification happen. Today, ironically, another American president named George Bush is "toast" in the united Germany his father helped to create. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder trumpeted his opposition to Bush II's belligerence toward Iraq in a successful ploy to win re-election two weeks ago. His stance was so popular among Germans that his more conservative opponent did not dare challenge it in substance.

WashingtonSOME 73 YEARS ago, President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points for peace after World War I called for a diplomacy of "open covenants . . . openly arrived at." It was a fine principle, but what the world has been treated to by the Bush administration's diplomacy-by-television in the Persian Gulf crisis has been a ludicrous, even grotesque, distortion of that idea.The spectacle of Secretary of State James Baker and President Bush parading out before the television cameras after Mr. Baker's marathon private meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and in effect continuing the debate, was a measure of how far the Bush administration has gone to undermine traditional diplomacy as the country moves to the brink of war.On one front, Mr. Baker's building of an international coalition -- against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and behind strong United Nations resolutions to force its withdrawal -- was brilliantly handled.

WASHINGTON -- It may not seem possible that such a hallowed thing as the Nobel Peace Prize could be getting a bad name. But Norway's esteemed award has taken some hits in public commentary as its 1990 recipient, Mikhail Gorbachev, has been crumbling to repression from the reactionary Soviet Army and KGB in the Baltic states.The fact that Gorbachev won the prize for his conspicuous role in lifting the heavy hand of Moscow from the countries of Eastern Europe and encouraging liberalizations at home is brushed aside in allegations that he is now showing his true colors as a committed Marxist or even, some say, a Stalinist.

J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT, a distinguished visitor from Washington, came through Arkansas last week on a trip down memory lane. Everything was as it once was: The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still bad-mouthing American foreign policy, the American military, the American president . . .It could have been the Seething '60s again. The more things had changed, the more J. William Fulbright had remained the same. It was kind of assuring in a a zany way -- like going back to your past and finding at least somebody who hadn't changed a bit.This time it wasn't the defeat in Vietnam that was a misconceived adventure of the military-industrial complex but the victory in Iraq.