Thanksgiving in The Desert

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Have 747, will travel . . . and travel . . . and travel.

George Bush -- after nearly 17,000 miles, six countries, a sweeping accord to reduce conventional arms in Europe, a 34-nation peace charter, a dozen speeches, untold private diplomatic understandings, a quart or two of ceremonial champagne, at least 25 clean shirts, eye contact with nearly a million people and G.I. turkey in the Saudi desert (twice) -- came home to roost (certainly not rest) for the weekend. He sent his laundry out, had Air Force One fueled again (53,611 gal.) and got ready to head for Mexico this week.

When he gets back from that jaunt, he plans to hang out at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for only four days, then to roar south to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and Uruguay. In January it must be Moscow, if Bush's pal Mikhail Gorbachev is still in charge, followed by stops in Turkey and Greece. By the end of February, Air Force One is expected to be riding the billowy cumulus above Australia, headed for South Korea and Japan, leading to the dark suspicion that Bush may be trying to emulate Lyndon B. Magellan (a tag pasted on L.B.J. when he flew to Australia in 1967 and just kept going in the same direction until he was back where he started).

The global President, the diplomatic road warrior (a rattled rocket here, a helping hand there), Bush has raised presidential motion beyond art to religion. He has always been nervous sitting still. He is at his absolute best in some wind-scoured distant city like Prague, raincoat crunched around him, hair blowing, lifting the hopes of more than 100,000 Czechs -- or in Paris, glad-handing his way through mirrored halls while the First Lady is off in the Grand Palais viewing one of Picasso's works, cocking her head this way and that, deciding "it had about 18 different ideas."

Almost everything Bush did on last week's eight-day junket was good and even necessary, urgent business he had pushed back during the U.S. budget struggle and the election. In Wenceslas Square, Bush's evocative words raised a great roar: "There are no leaves on the trees, and yet it is Prague spring. There are no flowers in bloom, and yet it is Prague spring." In the huge crowd, vendors sold copies of the U.S. Constitution for 8 Czech crowns (30 cents) each.

Bush spent hours in Paris patiently listening as the reborn international consortium, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, debated the structure and methods for preserving peace in the years beyond the cold war. When he talked, Bush emphasized the threat of war in the Persian Gulf, a dose of reality for a city of countless dreams, many of them shattered.

Before he left Paris to spend Thanksgiving with the troops in the gulf, the President vainly pleaded with Gorbachev to support publicly a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. to use force to drive Iraq from Kuwait if the economic sanctions fail. But the Soviet President, while supporting Bush in principle in private, wanted to be sure the Arab nations were on board. "Everybody takes comfort from everybody else," explained a White House aide. Bush laid on an extra stop in Geneva at the end of his trip to talk to Syria's President Hafez Assad, in part to try to ease Gorbachev's doubts.