CRAWFORD, Texas — There yesterday, here today.
His lifestyle — both presidential and personal — was as different from Thursday to Friday as it could be. There, indeed, was a nocturnal landing near here, but nothing that could rival the spectacular, lights-out landing in Baghdad on Thanksgiving Day.
President Bush made it back to his 1,600-acre Central Texas property shortly before daybreak after a nearly 36-hour journey that had him starring at a holiday dinner for U.S. troops at Baghdad International Airport.
But a presidential trip so secretive that it was almost without precedent was possible partly because the White House falsely told news reporters he was enjoying Thanksgiving here with his family Thursday — information that was published and broadcast to the world even as Bush's darkened plane soared toward Iraq.
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, however, assured reporters that Bush really was there Friday.
He taped his weekly radio address, which offered a similar message of resolve and gratitude to troops in Iraq. Bush also saw his parents briefly in the morning before they had to leave.
He went fishing with his father, George H.W. Bush, the 41st president. Neither his father nor his mother, Barbara Bush, knew of their son's absence until they arrived at the ranch Thursday morning and had to eat their holiday meal without him.
The president also chopped cedar and did some other mind-clearing chores around his land, Buchan said.
But though the trip was over, the airwaves still were full of talk of the Baghdad visit. Some carped that it appeared a political stunt designed to produce striking images and public sympathy for a president under fire about his Iraq policies.
"Let the chips fall where they may," said Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who accompanied the president to Baghdad. "But for the American people, I don't care what your party, they know that the president of the United States, as commander in chief, going to see these troops is an important step."
At a school where the White House press corps set up shop when the president is in town, Rice was questioned about the deceptions the White House used with reporters, and thus with the public, to protect the secrecy of the trip.
"It wasn't going to Cleveland, we knew that," she said. "Everyone knew that this was extraordinarily sensitive and it would have to be scrapped if word leaked out." Rice dodged questions about whether the Secret Service had lodged objections to the trip, saying only that agents were "prepared to go forward" and were "right in the middle" of the planning.
"I'm not going to try to characterize what they thought, but they were involved in the planning from the very beginning," Rice said. "The president made clear that he wasn't going to take undue risk."