A National Loss

Donald R. Fortier, the deputy director of the National Security Council staff who died of cancer a few days ago, was not one of the better known White House officials. But the Reagan Administration needed him, and could use more like him.

Self-effacing is the term used by several colleagues to describe Fortier. The 39-year-old native of Ohio didn’t appear on television interview shows. He rarely attended the A-list parties to which his rank entitled him. Most unusual for a well-placed government official, he had a habit of letting others take credit for his ideas.

Fortier, a respected foreign-policy expert who served in the State Department just before moving over to the NSC staff in 1983, fitted comfortably into a GOP Administration. He worked for Republicans on Capitol Hill in the 1970s, and helped to draft the foreign-policy plank in the 1984 Republican platform. Yet he didn’t come through as an ideologue; his forte was quiet persuasion and consensus-building, both within the Administration and between it and Congress.

Consensus-building is a talent in short supply in this Administration, which has too frequently ignored Congress and been notably unable to speak with one voice on issues ranging from arms control to the appropriate limits of military action in Third World trouble spots.

This White House, like others before it, will staff the national-security apparatus with people whose views are reasonably close to the President’s. But Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, Ronald Reagan’s chief national-security adviser, would do the President a favor by bringing in more men and women who, like Fortier, also understand the need for careful homework and a bipartisan spirit.