Cindy Sheehan's attempt to have President Bush tell her — again — how sorry he is about the death of her son in Iraq escalated into a protest more political than personal. As such, it has been a legitimate expression of anti-war sentiment. But the individual cry for attention at the heart of it — "Mr. President, feel my pain!" — was misguided. Sheehan shouldn't expect a commander in chief to emote on demand.

I once spent two days at Ronald Reagan's side for the purpose of seeing what it was like to be president of all the people all the time. (At least, from his morning emergence from the White House elevator until the equally prompt moment when, tapping his watch and chuckling, he would say to the host of his evening function, "The fellas tell me it's time to go home.")

Long before that moment — in fact, within a couple of hours — I was so emotionally exhausted that I could hardly stand. It was not that Reagan, 30 years my senior, set the pace that some hyperactive presidents have kept. What drained me was my writer's tendency to feel what people in the room are feeling.

The hundreds who shook his hand (he told me that he averaged 80 new acquaintances a day for eight years) were avid to make the most of the window granted them in the president's schedule, whether it was an interview, conference, ceremony, drop-by or photo opportunity. With the exception of a few disapproving Demo-crats, they all bore the strange smile that celebrity imprints on the faces of supplicants and spectators: a fixed grin below dilated eyes, expressive more of yearning than delight.

The president's very first appointment was not even on his printed schedule. An aide, waiting with me at the elevator door, told Reagan that he would have to pause in the conservatory en route to the Oval Office. "There's a Louisiana state trooper there, Sir, with his wife and daughter. He had his eyes shot out in the line of duty. Just a few words and a photograph."

We rounded the corner and came upon the little family, with the father in full uniform and mother and child radiant at his side. All three wore the smile, rendered still stranger in the trooper's case by his sightlessness. How long had they been dreaming, planning, saving for this catharsis? Reagan was masterful, enveloping them in his kindly aura even as he maneuvered them, with practiced ease, toward the camera.

The whole encounter lasted less than a minute. It was so harrowing that I was taken aback by the president's instant switch to joviality as he continued toward the West Wing. He actually seemed to be looking forward to the rest of his day.

Not everybody who approached him after that first meeting sought consolation. But they all wanted something: decisions, commitments, encouragements, congratulations, interested frowns, laughter in response to their jokes, and always the photograph — to be mailed later, signed usually with an autopen, ready for framed display in dens from Anchorage, Alaska, to Key West, Fla.

Some presidents are better than others at handling this relentless demand for a show of personal involvement. Theodore Roosevelt exuded such cheerful charm that one visitor wrote about going home from the White House "to wring the personality out of your clothes."

But T.R. did not like to have his deeper sentiments presumed on by "milksops" and "mollycoddles." No weeper himself, he recoiled from public displays of grief. Not so Bill Clinton, who (as a video of Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown's funeral demonstrated) carried his own automatic sprinkler system, responsive to the proximity of any TV camera.

Richard Nixon was not unsympathetic so much as transcendently awkward. His way of dealing with a situation only half as fraught as Reagan's encounter with the state trooper was a desperate attempt at wit: "Don't worry, soldier, you see too much out of the other eye, anyway."

The allegedly chilly Jimmy Carter was a warm man face to face, curious, a careful listener, at ease with children. Yet he kept a tight rein on his emotions and real opinions. I recall one of his oldest friends saying in bemusement, "The moment he was elected president, a glass wall came down between us."

I have had few chances to observe George W. Bush close up, and can say only that he appears to have Theodore Roosevelt's muscular positivity (what Owen Wister, author of "The Virginian," described as "his determination to grasp his optimism tight, lest it escape him") and Reagan's benign lack of interest in individual human beings — without either man's ability to silently convey that they had, at least in private, pondered the larger questions of life and death.

But who am I to know? He has, after all, the loneliest of jobs. The Oval Office is not always disrupted by visitors. A president occasionally has (and needs) what Reagan used to call "quiet time." Except for the great wooden clock ticking, there is no more silent place in the world. Here — since we do not, despite frequent exaggerated misgivings, elect insensate persons to high office — a wartime commander in chief has to acknowledge that far afield, men and women in uniform are dying because of him.

Which may account for how Reagan found comforting a state trooper and his family relatively easy: the officer, after all, was not blinded in response to a White House order. But when for the first time he had to salute a row of coffins with dead Americans in them — after the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 — he was, by his own admission, "too choked up to speak."

Possibly the family members he greeted that day were puzzled by his silence. They should see the words he drafted in his private shorthand, words that he did not utter, presumably at the urging of White House spinmeisters:

TODAY ... FAMLYs ... THS. HONORD DEAD ...

GALLANT AMs UNDRSTOOD ... DANGER ...

WNT WILLINGLY ... BEIRUT ...

DASTARDLY DEED — UNPARALLELD COWARDICE

AFLICTD MNKND LOOKS ... US ... HELP ...

COWARDLY, SKULKING BARBARIANS

Maybe one day some such document will reveal what Bush really feels about his own "honored dead." For the meantime, he is our elected president, with the business of a nation to run. Sheehan has gotten more time with him than most grieving mothers, and if she felt, during those unsatisfactory minutes, that there was a glass wall around him, it unfortunately comes with the job. A president has to protect himself from emotional predators or he'd be sucked dry within a week of taking office.

Edmund Morris is the author of “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan,” “Theodore Rex” and a forthcoming biography of Ludwig van Beethoven.