Washington Post - 06.19.2001

 

 

The Washington Post

Sizing Up Putin

By Richard Cohen

George Bush (not to mention Gunga Din) is a better man than I. After spending less than two hours with Vladimir Putin, he not only took the measure of the Russian leader, he was able "to get a sense of his soul." I, on the other hand, spent about the same amount of time with Putin and came away with only one firm impression: short. The man is very short indeed.

Other than that, he remained a mystery to me. Maybe that's because our meeting took place at a dinner for journalists in a New York restaurant -- hardly a one-on-one affair. Nonetheless, I sat very close to Putin, listened carefully to what he had to say and remembered always that he was a spy, that he had been a KGB agent and was once head of his country's domestic intelligence service -- in other words, a trained liar. I had no idea what to make of him.

Bush, though, did. And he did so knowing not only what I did but -- one would hope -- much, much more. He would know, for instance, that Russians themselves are fearful that their country is reviving more from the old Communist days than the recently refurbished national anthem. Civil liberties are being pinched, telephones are being tapped, academics are being tried on what seem like sham charges and, sometimes, harassed by the security services. Is Putin responsible for the new chill? Bush would know. He's seen his soul.

I leave it to the specialists -- not to mention history itself -- to decide whether Bush is right about Putin. The more interesting question is what this remark says about Bush. It is breathtaking in its self-confidence or, maybe, its arrogance. After all, anyone with a knowledge of history could summon up all those quotes from someone who took the measure of Stalin or Hitler and found him downright trustworthy. And anyone else could find plenty of examples from his own life where he severely misjudged someone he had just met.

So you might have expected Bush to say how he found Putin personable or smart or witty or whatever -- but time would tell. You might have expected him to utter some version of Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" or, at the very least, bite his tongue lest he say something that down the road would come back to haunt him.

But not Bush. Here is a man of consummate self-confidence. He is a man whose faith in himself can seem smug. Here is a man who has such trust in his instincts that he has seemed to banish doubt altogether. This is the man, after all, who told visitors while he was still officially mulling a presidential race what he would do when -- not if he became president. (One of those things was a missile defense. Bush will have it. Count on it.)

The mythology, especially of late, is that George Bush is an oilman, a product of Midland, Tex.

Not so -- or not entirely. He is much more a product of baseball, of his time as president of the Texas Rangers. It was then that his innate leadership talents showed. He was adept at sizing people up, and he was the guy others were drawn to. Those were the talents his fellow governors saw when they coalesced around him, making him their choice for president. Bush is a coach.

I do not say that to denigrate. The coach's ability to motivate, to assess talent and set strategy is not only valuable, it is rarely found. (That's why winning coaches, like winning CEOs, make so much money.) But the so-called "personal touch" is hardly all there is to foreign policy. Putin, regardless of what's in his soul, is not totally his own master. Huge economic and social forces roil Russia. They, more than the man of the moment in the Kremlin, will affect us.

Just as I reserved judgment on Putin, I reserve judgment on Bush. His self-confidence can be reassuring or it can be downright frightening. It can bespeak a rapid processing of both information and impression, or it can suggest an imperviousness to counter-argument and the smug certainty only the ignorant can possess. For instance, no matter what the economic circumstance, Bush insisted on his tax cut. His rationales changed, his goal didn't.

Bush may or may not have sized up Putin. But he certainly told us a good deal about himself. He is supremely confident, a man who judges others as he judges himself, and does it all in a flash. It's all too quick for me. When it comes to Putin, I respect Bush's take, but if it's all right with him, I'll stick with what I know: short.