WASHINGTON — On Feb. 28, 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, the first President Bush confided to his diary: "Still no feeling of euphoria," and added: "The television we see accurately reflects the humiliation of Saddam Hussein and it drives the point home to the American people. But internationally, it's not there yet, at least in the Arab world that has been lined up with Saddam.
"He's got to go," George H.W. Bush concluded.
Now, after more than a dozen years, the drama for both generation of Bushes is over. When American soldiers uncovered Saddam, dazed and dirty in an underground chamber, one of them had a terse greeting: "President Bush sends his regards."
The soldier meant the son, but the words could fit the father, who compared Saddam to Hitler.
Last year, the current President Bush said of Saddam: "There's no doubt he can't stand us. After all, this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time." He was alluding to an attempt to kill the older President Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993, after leaving office.
For his part, Saddam used to refer to the 43rd president as "little Bush," and "son of the viper."
At his White House news conference on Monday, the president went out of his way to offer the gentlest sort of public correction of his father's declaration in a congratulatory phone call to him on Sunday that the capture was "a great day for the country."
"I said, 'It's a greater day for the Iraqi people,' " President Bush recounted, "and that's what I believe."
The first President Bush has never expressed public doubt about his decision to stop the 1991 war with Saddam still in power. He did so in part because the international coalition that he had assembled to repulse the Iraqi army from Kuwait would have crumbled, and because he assumed Saddam, humbled by his military defeat, would fall.
"We were disappointed, but I still do not regret my decision to end the war when we did," the elder Bush wrote in his 1999 collection of letters, "All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings."
On Monday President Bush acknowledged, "The work of our coalition remains difficult and will require further sacrifice."
Asked at his news conference if he had a greeting of his own for Saddam, Bush replied: "I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole and you crawled in it. And our brave troops, combined with good intelligence, found you. And you'll be brought to justice — something you did not afford the people you brutalized in your own country."