Fast-Tracker’s Ability in Crises Brings Attention

John M. Poindexter, the U.S. Naval Academy yearbook said in 1958, “brought his baby face and amazing brain . . . to startle and sometimes perplex us all.”

That same John M. Poindexter, now a vice admiral and baby-faced no longer, was named Wednesday as President Reagan’s fourth assistant for national security affairs in five years. The round-faced, bespectacled Navy officer, who has spent 12 of the last 19 years as a deputy or assistant in a variety of Washington offices, is moving up to a senior position.

“Thoughtful, professorial, a fast-tracker in the Navy,” was the description offered by one Pentagon official, who has known him for more than a decade.

But others who have worked with him question whether he will be able to break out of the mold of what one Pentagon official called the “mili-crat,” or military bureaucrat, to bring a special flair to his new job.

“This is an Administration that is afraid of talent. John Poindexter won’t threaten anybody,” said a Republican foreign policy expert, speaking on the condition that he not be identified by name.

“He doesn’t bring very stiff credentials either politically or academically,” a State Department official said.

McFarlane Philosophy

Poindexter appears philosophically aligned with his predecessor, Robert C. McFarlane. But he is unlikely to assume even the relatively low profile of McFarlane in the job--and spacious corner office diagonally across the White House west wing from the Oval Office--once occupied by Henry A. Kissinger and Alexander M. Haig Jr.

He once told a journalist that he simply does not talk to reporters. And, just hours before U.S. troops invaded Grenada in 1983, it was Poindexter who instructed White House spokesman Larry Speakes to tell a reporter it was “preposterous” that the forces were about to land on the island.

It is his ability as a manager, in a high-pressure, crisis-oriented role, that has brought attention to Poindexter, who has served since 1981 as military assistant on the National Security Council and, more recently, as McFarlane’s deputy.

Interception of Jet

He was the initial architect of the successful interception in October of the Egyptian airliner carrying the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. It was Poindexter who, remembering a World War II interception, called a vice admiral at the Pentagon to ask if a similar exploit would be possible.

But Poindexter, who holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Caltech, was said by a Pentagon official to have been deeply involved in the White House end of the President’s “Star Wars” plan to build a space-based missile defense system.

He took part in an initial White House meeting in early 1983 when Reagan discussed his ideas for the project, known formally as the Strategic Defense Initiative, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Key Role in SDI

“John was very much a part of the creation of SDI, from a point of view of the technology and his knowledge of it and his ability to say to the President: ‘This is something that really may work. Maybe we should give it a chance.’ ”

John Marlan Poindexter was born 49 years ago in Washington, Ind., and was graduated first in his class at the Naval Academy--embarking on a military career that saw him reach flag rank just short of his 44th birthday.

Interspersed with a variety of sea duties, he served as an administrative aide to Navy Secretary John W. Warner and executive assistant to Adm. James L. Holloway III, chief of naval operations.