Illustration by KAL

With Jimmy Carter it was the teeth, big, straight and white as a set of country palings. With Richard Nixon it was the eyebrows, surely brooding on Hell. Abe Lincoln had the ears (and the beard, and the stove-pipe hat); Bill Clinton had a nose that glowed red, almost to luminousness, as his allergies assailed him. But George Bush's most extraordinary feature was his nostrils, and they will be missed.

It is not just that they were large, and lent his face a certain simian charm. They were also uncontrollable. When the rest of the presidential body was encased in a sober suit, and the rest of the presidential face had assumed an expression appropriate to taking the oath of office, or rescuing banks, or declaring to terrorists that they could run but they couldn't hide, the nostrils would suddenly flare and smirk, as if Mr Bush was about to burst out with something outrageous or obscene, or flash a high-five, or hail his deputy chief of staff as “Turd blossom”.

Occasionally, a real gaffe was about to emerge. Watched closely, the nostrils no doubt gave advance warning of the moment when, addressing the Pentagon's top brass, Mr Bush said: “Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” More often, nothing exceptional was on the way to being said. But the nostrils ran ahead, twitching like a bull in a rodeo or a frisking wild horse, hinting at danger to come.

When he was debating with Al Gore in 2000, Mr Bush's language was polite and the policy statements well coined, but the nostrils declared they couldn't take the whole thing seriously. With hindsight, when the 2000 election became the closest ever, the Florida shenanigans seemed prefigured in that sniggering expression, which less became the 43rd president than Alfred E. Neumann of Mad magazine.

Being bigger and better than most people's, the presidential nostrils were also more acute. They could sniff out WMD in Iraq as snappily as hot dogs at a football game, though it took the UN many years to come up with nothing. Yellow-cake uranium could be nosed as far away as Niger, and Saddam Hussein's connections to al-Qaeda were as odorous as a Texas feedlot. The nostrils could smell victory, too, especially on that morning in May 2003 when, standing on an aircraft-carrier with “Mission Accomplished” fluttering on a banner behind him, Mr Bush breathed in the tang of the ocean and of power.

The nostrils ran ahead, twitching like a bull in a rodeo or a frisking wild horse, hinting at danger to come

Much else alerted those nostrils when others were indifferent. Oil, for example, even when buried under hundreds of feet of environmentally protected Arctic tundra. Cheese, as eaten by the feckless French and other effete gastronomes of old Europe. Red meat, when demanded by the right-wing base which so often found this president disappointing, in the form of tax cuts and suspended regulations. And danger, as personified by suspicious individuals from faraway countries, whose proper place was to be in orange pyjamas at Guantánamo Bay, well out of reach of a lawyer.

An aroma of pork

Disloyalty, or the whiff of it, set off a particular quivering. When Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's ex-treasury secretary, revealed that Saddam had been targeted from day one of Mr Bush's first term, and when Scott McClellan, his former press secretary, wrote that the Bush White House lacked both candour and competence, the nostrils assumed an air of outraged innocence: the same look, in fact, they had assumed on the worst day of Mr Bush's presidency, when an aide leaned down to tell him of the attack on the twin towers and the president, busy reading “The Pet Goat” to a class of Florida children, could not for a moment engage either his brain or his mouth to take the news.

All the stranger, therefore, that the noble orifices had their shortcomings. They could not smell the putrid mud that covered the ninth ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina passed, or the stink of subprime mortgages leaching their poison into the financial system. They found nothing especially noisesome about the presence of Dick Cheney and his oilman cronies in charge of the national energy task-force. Sensitive as they were, they were unimpressed by levels of arsenic in drinking water or particulates in the air. And though Mr Bush had sold himself as a lean-spending, small-government man, they could not resist the aroma of a trillion-dollar budget stuffed with choicest pork.

Most curiously, they failed to detect the poisonous atmosphere that swirled around him abroad. Granted, the most revolting protesters were kept away. But even so the nostrils, proudly set even when the eyes blinked and the mouth pursed and wavered, maintained an extraordinary belief in the wisdom of the president and the rightness of his cause. One day the rest of the world would wake up and be grateful. One day the Bush administration would come up smelling like a rose.





Ann Wroe: obituaries and briefings editor, The Economist