TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082189/08218900.042

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 26.3 KB | 505 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 16

COVER STORY: Mr. Consensus


Cautious and personable, George Bush is a President who
listens, leans heavily on advisers -- and usually comes down in
the middle

By Michael Duffy


    Most evenings between 8 and 10, George Bush excuses himself
from the company of friends and family in order to be alone. As
he has done for years, he retreats to a private study, now on
the second floor of the White House, to read and write cards
and thank-you notes to friends, political allies and even
perfect strangers. This ever growing list of correspondents has
served Bush well in difficult times, and may soon do so again.
Last week the President added a new name to his address book:
that of Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

    The two men are hardly likely to become pen pals. But as
the U.S. Government once again searched for a way to free
American hostages held in the Middle East, Bush's communications
with Rafsanjani have moved from cautious feelers through
intermediaries to more direct, leader-to-leader messages.
Working closely with his top foreign policy advisers, the
President personally authored several of the diplomatic notes
sent to Iran through Swiss embassy channels.

    As his Administration explored this latest opening to Iran,
Bush was at pains to steer clear of the mistakes that toppled
Jimmy Carter's presidency and badly tarnished Ronald Reagan's.
While pointedly refusing to offer any quid pro quo, he stepped
carefully back from Reagan's stated policy of never negotiating
with terrorists. If the hostages come home, Bush hinted, he
might consider releasing Iranian assets -- principally
undelivered weapons paid for in advance -- that have been frozen
by the U.S. since 1979. "Goodwill begets goodwill," he said,
quoting his own Inaugural Address.

    George Bush's handling of the hostage crisis illustrates
some of the main characteristics of his decision-making style:

    He is a cautious, reactive President, whose first concern
in a crisis is to avoid mistakes.

    Bush cares deeply about a handful of core values -- family,
loyalty, service to country -- but regards almost everything
else as negotiable.

    He searches out advice and prefers to choose among
alternatives rather than devise his own solutions. "Have Half,"
his childhood nickname, suits him: he still likes to split the
difference.

    When persuasive leadership is required, Bush instinctively
reaches not for a TV camera but for a telephone, working his
will among fellow heads of state and Washington insiders rather
than through Reagan-like appeals to public opinion.

    Guided by an inner clock that sometimes frustrates his
aides, Bush decides at his own speed and rarely looks back in
doubt later.


    After seven months as President, Bush has emerged as a much
more complex Commander in Chief than expected, a hybrid of
presidential personalities served and observed. Bush possesses
Lyndon Johnson's penchant for secrecy, without retributive
sense of justice. He has Richard Nixon's feel for foreign
policy, but so far lacks his mentor's grip on grand strategy.
He shares Jimmy Carter's fascination with the fine details of
government, but understands better which pieces are most
important. Bush says he learned from Reagan the importance of
stubborn principle in politics, but he sees more clearly than
Reagan the sweet reason of expedient compromise.

    Bush's cautious, calibrated style has made for largely
surefooted policy. Despite a sluggish first four months, the
President has launched initiatives on difficult issues --
savings and loans, clean air, arms control -- that he might have
ducked. He has kept a Democratic Congress off balance and has
mollified the conservative wing of his own party. If he has hit
no grand slams, neither has he committed any egregious errors.
"I'm reasonably pleased where, at the end of six months, things
are," Bush told TIME. "I'm not relaxed about it. I'm not in an
everything's fine mode at all. But in terms of how the decisions
are made, I'm very pleased with the way our team is operating."

    His inherent prudence is now alloyed with what close
friends and aides say is a noticeably more sober demeanor. The
presidency has made Bush more circumspect than the sometimes
loopy, arm-flapping creature of the campaign trail. He assumed
a grim visage throughout the first week of the hostage crisis,
despite efforts by aides to play down the preoccupation with
Lebanon. Says an old friend: "The boyish enthusiasm is still
there, but he's more careful, more one day at a time." Bush
himself acknowledges as much: "Have I learned a lot? Sure. Do
I think I'm maybe a little wiser from the way things are here?
Yeah. Do I still have a lot to learn? Certainly."

    Even when Bush gambles, he does so only after carefully
researching the odds. His boldest move so far was his
unexpected proposal at the May 29-30 NATO summit in Brussels to
slash U.S. and Soviet conventional-force levels in Europe. Last
winter and spring Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was beguiling
European public opinion with frequent disarmament offers while
the President stood pat, waiting for his aides' review of
American foreign policy. NATO allies were growing impatient, and
Bush's popularity in some polls was inching downward. By early
May, despite his public denials of concern, the President was
feeling anxious. "I need something," he told his aides. "I want
to do something."

    Early in the Administration, Bush and National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft mulled ways to bring Soviet troop levels
in Europe into rough parity with NATO's. At one point they even
contemplated a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe.
But the national security bureaucracy "absolutely hated it,"
said a White House official. "The idea just sank like a stone."

    Unlike Reagan, Bush does not like to flout his own
bureaucracy. But now he had reason for boldness: Gorbachev had
ponied up deep cuts in Soviet conventional forces in Europe at
a May 11 meeting with Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow.
"That was really the green light," said an official. "If we
didn't move then, we were going to go to the NATO summit without
anything." In a May 15 Oval Office meeting, Bush, Baker,
Scowcroft, chief of staff John Sununu, Joint Chiefs Chairman
William Crowe and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney gathered to
discuss ways to make a proposal with "punch." Scowcroft
suggested that Bush propose deep reductions in U.S. and Soviet
ground forces and combat aircraft in Europe. The President liked
Scowcroft's idea but wanted to make sure the Pentagon was on
board. "I just don't want to do anything militarily dumb," he
said repeatedly.

    Moving quickly, Crowe and Cheney formed a small task force
to study the force cuts in time for a May 19 visit to
Kennebunkport, Me. That session was followed by a
Monday-afternoon meeting in the Oval Office. There, Crowe told
Bush the military could accept a 20% reduction in manpower and
a 15% cut in aircraft without significantly weakening NATO's
plans for fighting a European war. Baker argued that 25% would
sound more dramatic. The President listened closely and asked
a lot of questions. Finally, he settled on the lower, safer
number. "O.K., I think we can go to 20%," he said. Turning to
Cheney, he double-checked. "Now, is 20% all right? You can live
with that?" Cheney nodded. "O.K., that's consensus," Bush said.
"Let's go."

    Bush generally feels more at home with foreign policy than
with domestic issues. Little wonder: in serving as U.N.
Ambassador, American envoy to China, CIA director and
funeral-hopping Vice President, he amassed a detailed personal
knowledge of world leaders. Like Nixon, Bush has a habit of
adding intimate footnotes when intelligence briefers provide him
with thumbnail biographies of figures making news overseas.
"That guy isn't like that at all," he told an analyst who was
profiling a foreign politician. "He goes back a long way with
some of these cats," a senior official recounted. Two weeks ago,
in a remarkable display of Rolodex diplomacy, Bush telephoned
Kings Hussein of Jordan, Hassan of Morocco, Fahd of Saudi
Arabia; Prime Ministers Turgut Ozal of Turkey and Margaret
Thatcher of Britain; Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany;
Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Chadli Bendjedid of
Algeria; as well as the Pope -- anyone who might have a direct
or indirect line to Iran or the Iranian-backed terrorists who
were threatening to kill hostage Joseph Cicippio.

    On domestic matters, however, Bush relies on a highly
structured decision-making process that even has a name. Known
to government-school types as multiple advocacy, it is designed
to refine options and allow the President to hear his top
advisers argue them out. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser,
Roger Porter, wrote a book extolling the virtues of the system
after watching it work in the Ford Administration. Though
multiple advocacy is time consuming and difficult to manage,
Bush has peopled his Cabinet with the sort of collegial
generalists necessary for success. The President apparently sees
little irony in the fact that he campaigned against Michael
Dukakis' "Harvard boutique" of advisers but now has erected a
system staffed by his share of Kennedy School alumni: "I've
known pretty well how I want to reach decisions -- get good,
strong, experienced people, encourage them to express their
views openly, encourage them not to hold back."

    The recent clean-air proposal was a textbook case of
multiple advocacy. With Bush's campaign promise to reduce acid
rain and toxic waste as guidance, Porter assembled five
Administration officials: Energy Secretary James Watkins, EPA
Administrator William Reilly, Assistant EPA Administrator
William Rosenberg, Associate Budget Director Robert Grady and
White House Counsel Boyden Gray. They met 16 times during the
spring, and on other occasions with lawmakers, industry
officials and environmentalists. Gradually they fashioned a
package they thought all parties could support.

    The plan was presented to Cabinet officers whose
departments would be affected. This second group narrowed down
the options. The Cabinet postponed one meeting with Bush after
the EPA's Reilly, in a move supported by Boyden Gray, argued for
an idealistic plan that would have required half the cars in the
nation's 20 largest cities to be powered by alternative fuels
by the year 2000. Budget Director Richard Darman and Economic
Adviser Michael Boskin worked for weeks to come up with the
scaled-down version that eventually went to the President. Bush
never saw the EPA's 50% proposal.

    To help Bush think through an issue, White House aides
stage debates, which they call "scheduled train wrecks." Aides
once invited opposing sides to lobby the President separately,
but quickly realized that Bush prefers -- and benefits from --
live skirmishes. Bush asks questions during the back and forth,
takes copious notes on White House pads and often asks
lower-level officials for their views. "He doesn't want
filters," said a participant. "He actually wants to sit there
at the table and listen to Darman fight with Reilly." Darman
argued in one meeting that the clean-air proposals were too
expensive for the health and safety benefits gained. "For the
same amount of money," the Budget Director said, "we can buy
everyone in America rubber-soled shoes, because the chance of
being killed by toxic gases is about the same as being killed
by lightning." Bush is proud of these bouts and prefers them to
the staged-managed sessions held for Reagan. "I've been to
Cabinet meetings when (they have) been a show-and-tell," Bush
said. "We don't do ours that way."

    After the Cabinet sessions, Bush repairs to the Oval Office
and widens his net. He often invites Darman or Treasury
Secretary Nicholas Brady along to go over this point or that;
sometimes he turns it into a working lunch. Bush is soon on the
telephone shopping the options around to his "sources" on
Capitol Hill: Senator Robert Dole on political matters, Ohio
Congressman Willis Gradison on health care and economic matters,
Tennessee Republican Don Sundquist on tax questions. Following
the May Cabinet debates over which countries to name as unfair
traders under the new "Super 301" section of the 1988 trade
bill, Bush's consultations with key lawmakers stiffened his
resolve to name Japan, India and Brazil. Telephoning "gets me
more knowledge," the President explained."... I try to keep in
mind what's doable from a political standpoint."

    It can also bail him out of trouble. Last March, William
Bennett, the new director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, temporarily banned imported assault weapons.
Bush, a life member of the National Rifle Association, kept his
distance in public. Opinion polls backed Bennett's move, but gun
owners did not. N.R.A. lobbyists complained bitterly and even
withheld a pivotal endorsement of Dan Heath, a Republican
congressional candidate from Indiana, just a week before the
March 28 special election. Heath lost the race by 1,778 votes.

    Hours before Bennett issued his ban, Bush tracked down
Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fuelner by car phone and
asked the conservative for help. In a confidential memo to the
President three days later, Fuelner suggested that Bush could
"retain the support of your gun-owning constituency" by changing
the subject: propose the building of more prisons, hiring more
prosecutors and enforcing existing laws. Bush sent the ideas to
his staff, and when the Administration released its crime
package two months later, the initiative followed Fuelner's
recommendations down the line.

    While Bush, like most people, makes up his mind gradually,
his strategy is to wait until the last minute to tip his hand.
Bush holds his cards so closely that his top advisers often do
not know what he is thinking. By playing coy, aides say, the
President hopes to prevent leaks, keep special interests and
congressional coalitions from forming in opposition, and give
his eventual decrees a thrust that White House announcements
often lack.

    In the case of clean air, Sununu carried the final options
to Bush at Camp David to review each one and note the
President's preference. "Nobody knew which boxes he was going
to check that weekend," said a person involved. "Not Reilly, not
Sununu, not anybody. Bush never showed his hand."

    Sometimes Bush delays just to keep everyone guessing. In
early July he postponed a final decision on a pay raise for
Government executives until two hours before the planned
announcement. That morning, he thumbed through a decision memo
prepared by Gray and Darman. The memo barely camouflaged their
impatience: pressing for the pay hike, Gray and Darman wrote,
"We would like to confirm what we believe to have been your
decision." They recommended raising the salaries of some 200
high-ranking federal employees to $150,000.

    In a surprise move, Bush balked at the suggestion. In
felt-tip pen, he scribbled instructions to pay the officials up
to $124,400 instead. Aides scrambled to rewrite stacks of
printed fact sheets as the announcement neared.

    Once Bush finally decides, his aides seem to fall in line
rather than make their complaints public. After all the trouble
the President has taken to hear them out, Bush's Cabinet and
staff, unlike Reagan's, feel obliged to support him even if they
disagree. "You haven't heard much carping about this or that,"
says Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, "because we do all our
yelling ahead of time." Aides also know Bush is almost never
willing to reconsider. "Once he's decided," says Peter Teeley,
Bush's former press secretary, "you'd better have some bombshell
of a reason why he shouldn't do it."

    Bush seems to know his limitations as a decision maker, and
has attracted advisers who can compensate for his shortcomings.
White House aides say the President is adept at reducing policy
questions to their essentials. But Bush rarely redefines an
issue or proposes a novel solution. Instead, he relies heavily
on counselors like Baker, Darman and Scowcroft, who, as a
staffer put it, "see Door No. 3 when everyone else sees only
Doors Nos. 1 and 2." Just before Bush decided to extend
restrictions on imported steel, Roger Porter called on the
President in the Oval Office and said, "I think I've got this
figured out." Replied Bush: "I certainly hope so."

    When he sees no easy way out, Bush often just splits the
difference, an inclination that frequently angers
conservatives. Bush has repeatedly opted for this route as
President. He decided to build both the MX and mobile Midgetman
missiles, when either might suffice. He backed a boost in the
minimum wage to $4.25 an hour, 30 cents less than Democrats and
labor unions wanted. Bush supported a wage increase during the
1988 campaign, but after his Inauguration, White House economic
advisers opposed it as inflationary. "He had to deliver on a
promise," said a top official. "The easiest thing he could do
was pick a number. So he did."

    Bush also displays a sense of fairness that one adviser
described as "an almost procedural due process." In February he
reopened the complicated question of whether the U.S. should
provide sensitive technology to Japan for that country's FSX
aircraft after learning that the Reagan White House had ignored
Commerce Department doubts about the deal. During Cabinet
meetings, when political considerations are paramount, Bush
often asks, half-seriously, "What should we do in case we just
want to do the right thing?"

    But Bush certainly is not innocent of political
calculation. In Cabinet meetings, he is often the first to shoot
down ideas that won't fly in Congress, as he did when aides
suggested buying Democratic support of a capital-gains tax cut
with a White House retreat from the campaign pledge not to raise
other taxes. "We'll get clobbered for that," Bush said. When
pressed on a political question, he has a playful stock reply:
"If you're so damned smart, how come you aren't President of the
United States?"

    Bush can be defensive about admitting political
considerations, as in his June decision -- largely unassisted
by aides -- to propose a constitutional amendment against flag
burning. "I've been accused of draping myself in the flag for
a political reason," he told TIME in an unprompted aside.
"That's not why I proposed a constitutional amendment. And now
I'm reading that people aren't interested in that (issue)
anymore. Well, my (internal) clock tells me that's wrong, and
I don't need (Republican pollster) Bob Teeter to show me a poll
to make me convinced it's wrong." Although Bush insists that he
does not steer his policies by the polls, he loves to use survey
data to silence skeptics. After he permanently banned imported
assault weapons, for example, he privately brandished poll
results showing support for his position in the home states of
some of his congressional critics.

    Bush may have less to fear from critics than from his sly
habit of promising big things but providing few dollars for the
tasks. He has called himself "the education President" but
budgeted little more for schools than did Reagan. His proposals
to cut violent crime by doubling federal prison cells sounded
commendable, but even top aides acknowledge that the
construction program will have almost no effect on the problem.
This bait-and-switch game is considered clever in Washington but
not in many other places. Democrats are sure to seize on the
rhetoric-reality gap in next year's congressional elections.

    For now Bush seems genuinely to enjoy being President. He
works as hard at the job as Carter did, yet wears the office as
lightly as Reagan. He takes unusual pleasure in secretly
arranging small parties for staff and Cabinet officers in the
Rose Garden, in his horseshoe pit or around the White House
pool. After a twelve-hour workday last April that began in San
Jose and ended in Los Angeles, Bush had completed his scheduled
events but, in a typical burst of spontaneity, summoned four
Chinook helicopters to ferry him, his staff and reporters to a
baseball game in Anaheim.

    Most evenings, though, Bush retires to his note writing,
thanking friends and advisers for help or requesting more
information on a particular topic. He carries this
correspondence to work the next morning, having already scanned
six newspapers* in bed, while sipping coffee and watching the
television news shows with Barbara.

    Bush is often in the Oval Office before 7 a.m., talking
with intelligence briefers and later with Scowcroft. He meets
with Sununu for an hour each morning, quickly working through
a notebook of "action items." These can range from learning the
results of a new statewide poll in Kentucky to approving a
compromise position on the savings-and-loan legislation.

    Later, between greeting dozens of visitors, Bush will
peruse articles, mail and briefing papers on a variety of
subjects. He prefers that "backgrounders" not exceed five pages,
but he often asks for details that demand twice as much space.
He seems to edit almost everything presented to him; he made
several revisions in the fact sheet and speech announcing his
crime package, saying, "Here, this reflects my decision better
than the other way." At 4:30, Sununu returns with "the p.m.
agenda," a second notebook full of items for Bush's O.K.

    Underlying this process is a lack of ideological conviction
that has helped Bush cut deals on policy matters like the
Nicaraguan contras, clean air and the savings-and-loan crisis
that have stalemated the capital for years. Bush's "ideology,"
as it is, can be summed up in a few words: hard work, family,
country, public service, loyalty. These priorities have allowed
Bush to change his views on many controversial subjects --
abortion, gun control, "voodoo economics" -- during his 25-year
political career. They explain why he stuck by John Tower, his
choice to run the Pentagon, long after others had abandoned him.
"George Bush is very loyal to people," says a close adviser,
"more than to ideas."

    Bush doesn't directly deny this. "I think there's an
ideological underpinning to what we as an Administration are
trying to do," he told TIME. "But I think I would give much more
credit to able advisers, in that I don't sit down and tell those
who are wrestling with the S & L problems, `Do it this way.'
They're telling me, and that's why they are in their jobs."

    This problem-solving approach to government has proved
effective in the short run; long term it could signal a
leadership vacuum. In a study of presidential decision making,
Porter notes that the White House, no matter how it is
organized, rarely anticipates problems well. Within the
Administration, there is some concern that Bush is often tied
to his In box, dealing with crises and other immediate matters.
A senior adviser admits that Bush's long service in the Federal
Government has left him overdependent on the Congress and the
bureaucracy to set his agenda: "He is a prisoner as well as a
product of that experience."

    Roger Ailes, Bush's campaign media adviser, exhorted the
President before his NATO trip to show the American people that
"you can knock one out of the ball park every now and then."
Bush did just that in Brussels, but the former Yale first
baseman was always valued more for his defensive play and team
spirit than for his batting. To help nudge the Administration
from its reactive mode, Sununu, Darman, Bennett, Vice President
Dan Quayle and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp have begun meeting for
breakfast every few weeks in the White House mess in what has
become known informally as the "forward strategy group."

    Several members of this gathering played a key role last
month in urging Bush to support a U.S. mission to Mars as a way
to restore vision to his Administration. (After he did so, the
President complained that he was criticized for earmarking too
little money for the program.) "We've got this competence thing
knocked," said an Administration official. "Now we have to
figure out how we're going to leave our mark on the country."

    But if Bush does not anticipate every problem, it may not
matter. Most Presidents ultimately are measured not as
visionaries but by how well they perform under fire. So far,
Bush has responded ably to his few minor crises, mostly by
staying calm and remaining steady. Moreover, after eight years
of the Reagan revolution, Bush's modest pragmatism seems more
welcome than unwavering single-mindedness.

    While Bush has not addressed the nation's festering social
problems and has all but ignored the federal budget deficit,
American voters seem to reckon that at least he will do them no
harm. Most polls put Bush's approval ratings at around 65%,
typical for this point in a President's first year. One can at
least make out a cogent political strategy in his performance
to date: his broad proposals on clean air, education, ethics in
government, crime and child care may promise more than they
deliver, but they have co-opted the Democrats' best talking
points. Tougher tests lie ahead.

    Bush seems both impatient and amused by examination of his
motives and methods. One day after talking to TIME about his
decision-making style, the President posed for a gag photo
showing him rubbing his hands over a crystal ball, with smiling
aides hovering nearby. Says Bush: "Hey, listen, right now things
are going pretty good, but tomorrow it will be another kind of
ball game. So just keep doing your best. Back to my mother --
do your best. Do your best."

    That sounds like a nascent -- and ironic -- re-election
slogan. Last year Dukakis declared that the contest for the
White House was about "competence, not ideology." Bush won the
election by campaigning on "values." After seven months as
President, however, Bush seems to be betting that what he
accomplishes will matter more than who he is or what he stands
for. As Reagan fades from the public's mind, a clearer portrait
of Bush is emerging, and his problem-solving style and
relentlessly cautious decision making suggest that he is already
positioning himself to run on the Dukakis slogan in 1992.


-- Dan Goodgame/Washington