Heart ripped out of Bush team

By ANDREW GUMBEL

WASHINGTON - Call it the Case of the Missing W. The W that is President Bush's middle initial.

Members of his White House team sitting down at their computer terminals for the first time over the past few days have found themselves on the receiving end of a practical joke by the outgoing Administration: the Ws on their keyboards are gone.

Some of them have been taped over, and many more simply removed. A search of the Old Executive Office building, where the prank was pulled, revealed that several dozen of the keys had been taped to the top of doorways nearly 3.6m off the ground.

"There are dozens, if not hundreds, of keyboards with these missing keys," a Bush aide told the Washington Post. "It has the technical and computer support people very busy.

They already have quite a lot to do. I don't believe they expected to be coping with this as well. I think they're working to repair or replace the equipment, whatever they can do."

When asked his reaction, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer replied: "It would have been 'Wow.' But the W was removed, so now it's just, 'Oh'."

The joke was not entirely without a certain meanness of spirit. Some of the keys had not simply been removed but had been yanked out along with their springs, making them impossible to replace.

W is not just a middle initial, it is also the President's nickname, the way his family refers to him to avoid confusion with the other President George Bush, his father.

During the campaign, supporters would hold up the three middle fingers of their right hand in a W formation.

If the Bush team did not see the funny side of the joke, they nevertheless refrained from indulging in a knee-jerk bout of Clinton-bashing.

There were no references to the moral laxity of the freshly departed President, nor a renewed call for a restored sense of integrity in the White House.

The old Administration, meanwhile, was playing it coy. "My guess is that the White House did not have many reasons to use the letter W over the last couple of years," was one of several suggestions offered by Chris Lehane, erstwhile campaign spokesman for Bush's rival, Al Gore.

Another guess anticipated possible howls of indignation from the new executive team.

"I think the missing Ws can be explained by the vast, left-wing conspiracy now at work."

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT

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