Kennedy honor reveals rift between the presidents Bush

WASHINGTON — It's not as though Osama bin Laden gave a Jihad Award to Ariel Sharon, or Donald Rumsfeld gave his Good Pal Award to Condoleezza Rice. It's not even as though Dick Cheney gave his Favorite Foreigners Citation to the French.

But the news from College Station, Texas, this week — that the First Father, former President George H.W. Bush, has given his own most treasured award to Sen. Edward Kennedy — is nearly as astonishing.

When it was announced (with amazingly little fanfare) that the pugnaciously anti-Iraq war Democrat Kennedy had been awarded the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service, so many jaws dropped all over Washington that usually voluble politicians were only heard swallowing their real thoughts.

Since the current President Bush veered away from the real war against terrorism in Afghanistan and went a'venturing in Iraq, much to his father's dismay, just about everybody close to Washington politics has known of the policy schism between father and son.

It was politically and philosophically obvious. But people around Father Bush, a coterie of traditional internationalist conservatives who protect him like a wolf mother does her cubs, would heatedly deny any family rift — and nobody spoke publicly about it.

Now it's all out. Father Bush has done it in his own preferred nuanced way — the way Establishment gentlemen operate — but he has revealed the depth of his disagreement with his impetuously uninformed son.

And won't it be interesting to analyze the speeches citing Teddy, who is surely one of W's primary political nemeses, for his public service and principles at the Bush Library Center on the Texas A&M campus on Nov. 7? One can bet they will be subtle — but also very clear.

The ideological rift between father and son has been growing ever since George W. began focusing on Iraq and, with that obsession, proposed "theories" of unilateralism (America needs room in the world) and pre-emption (kill even your perceived enemy before he kills you). But while family friends say Father Bush has made his disagreements known to his son, they clearly have not found fertile soil in this White House.

More curious, and in many ways depressing, is the fact that this President Bush has embarked upon a policy designed to counter, or even to wipe out, his father's entire political legacy.