Brady, Mosbacher and Baker : Three Early Disciples Cap Legions of Bush Advisers

In the jumbled, faded offices where the stoop-work of the Bush for President campaign goes forward in a maze of posters, coffee cups and rented furniture, they are known as The Adults.

They are the Big Three, the vice president’s early disciples, men whose friendships span Bush’s varied political incarnations and who have prospered with him: a pinstriped executive from Wall Street, an oilman from Texas and the incumbent secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

If George Bush were President and if he had a kitchen cabinet, as have various presidents from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan, charter membership would go to the three of them. Were George Bush in the White House, these men would have a bearing on the substance, the personality and the membership of his Administration:

Nicholas F. Brady, chairman of the Wall Street investment firm of Dillon Read & Co.; Robert A. Mosbacher Sr., a Houston oil millionaire and veteran Republican fund-raiser, and Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III.

Others--notably, Robert S. Teeter, the vice president’s campaign pollster-strategist; Peter B. Teeley, the campaign press secretary; Washington lawyer Richard A. Moore; World Bank President Bar ber B. Conable Jr., and GOP fixture Dean Burch, now director-general of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization--can also be counted members of Bush’s nuclear political family. But they have not been so unequivocally Bush men for so long.

Brady, Mosbacher and Baker are at the tip of a massive collection of advisers--hundreds, maybe even thousands--available for on-demand policy advice to the man who will be the 1988 Republican presidential nominee.

The candidate with a resume that would choke a paper shredder began collecting his legions of advisers even before he arrived in Washington as a freshman congressman from Texas.

According to his close associates, he still works just as assiduously at keeping up his contacts. He collects experts, dashes off notes to new acquaintances, builds on a Christmas card list said to have surpassed 50,000 names.

Bush’s advisers include Republicans from all known families of the species, and even a few Democrats who have been friends since he worked to make himself the most popular freshman in the House class of 1966.

Scattered through his Rolodex, his Christmas card list and his campaign hierarchy are valuable contacts he acquired at Yale University, the U.S. Navy, the Houston Petroleum Club, the United Nations, the Republican National Committee, the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, the CIA and tennis courts from sea to shining sea. He may be the most advised presidential candidate of the ages.

The sheer numbers of his personal contacts, says former White House National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen, would preclude Bush from ever being isolated by a coterie of insiders, as was Richard M. Nixon and, some say, Ronald Reagan.

“If he had a kitchen cabinet,” said Allen, who consults with the vice president on national security matters, “the numbers would already be in three digits, maybe four.”

The vice president’s most important advisers are white, male, well-seasoned, old-line Republicans like himself.

There are few ideologues to match the conservative firebrands who energized Reagan’s long quest for the White House. More prominent in Bush’s ranks are advisers associated with the brief presidency of Gerald R. Ford.

‘A Ton of People’

“He talks to a ton of people, high, wide and handsome,” said Teeter, the veteran Republican pollster who has emerged as an intimate day-to-day campaign strategist and adviser. “But the frequency of talking with somebody does not necessarily correlate with the impact they have on him. I’ve seen guys come in and talk with him for an hour and a half on the first time they have ever met him, and listened to the stuff come out in his speeches for two months afterward.”

As with most politicians, there is an inexorable shifting and reordering of the favored.

But looking at The Adults beside the young tacticians who engineered Bush’s successful travels through the Republican primaries, it is evident that the vice president follows the dictum of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who said: “I’ll get my advice from the old men, and I’ll get my action from the young men.”

The Big Three of Bush’s inner circle share not only the vice president’s outlook but much of his background. Their lives have been intertwined for years.

“Brady and Bush are almost clones,” said one close acquaintance of the two, who refused to be identified. “Bush is more outgoing, and Brady is more intellectual, but they are very, very similar men.”

The Dillon Read chairman entered Yale the year after Bush departed. But he was indirectly acquainted with the Bush family because his father and Bush’s uncle had been business associates in G. H. Walker & Co., founded by Bush’s grandfather. Brady became acquainted with the future vice president in the early 1970s through his brother, Jonathan Bush, and they struck up a close friendship.

When Bush left the CIA in 1976, Brady tried to recruit him as a partner in Dillon Read, but with a race for the White House already in mind, Bush opted for Texas rather than Wall Street.

Role in Appointment

Bush is understood to have played a role in Brady’s 1982 appointment to fill out the U.S. Senate term of New Jersey Democrat Harrison A. Williams Jr., who was convicted of bribery and corruption in the 1980 Abscam scandal.

Over the years since then, the Reagan Administration has returned to Brady for consultation. He was on the Packard Commission that studied defense reforms, the Scowcroft Commission that studied MX missile deployment and the Kissinger Commission that studied U.S. policy in Central America.

And he was chairman of the presidential commission that investigated last year’s stock market crash--inevitably, the Brady Commission.

When his name did not appear in the membership of the Administration’s controversial AIDS Commission, he joked that he had refused a blood test.

Robert Mosbacher and George Bush met in Houston. Like Bush, Mosbacher grew up in a wealthy family in the East. Just out of college at Washington and Lee University, he struck out to make his own fortune in Texas oil.

While Bush moved to Midland and went into the drilling equipment business, Mosbacher headed straight for Houston, where he survived a conflict with the legendary Clint Murchison and eventually amassed a $150-million fortune in oil and real estate.

Mosbacher and Bush became acquainted after Bush moved his base of operations from Midland to Houston.

“We talked about some oil deals back then,” he recalled, “but somehow never did get into any of them together.” He supported Bush when Bush was elected to Congress from Houston’s white-collar 8th District on the west side of town, but his first serious involvement in politics was as Harris County finance chairman for Nixon in 1968.

Political Money Collector

Mosbacher has arguably become the Republican Party’s most accomplished collector of political money. He was finance chairman for the 1976 Ford for President campaign and for Bush’s unsuccessful race for the GOP nomination in 1980. He is Bush’s finance chairman now, heading a fund-raising effort that had brought in $29 million at the time of its last report to the Federal Election Commission in March.

In spite of his wealth, accomplishments as a yachtsman, fund-raiser and civic activist, Mosbacher is seldom in the spotlight.

It is Ronald Reagan’s Treasury secretary who is, by all accounts, George Bush’s closest political confidant, adviser and friend--his alter ego.

James Baker and George Bush also became acquainted in Houston, where Baker was also a friend of Mosbacher. The friendship began when they joined forces as tennis partners.

When Bush gave up his House seat to run--unsuccessfully--for the Senate, Baker was his choice to succeed him in the House. But Baker turned down Bush’s overtures because of his wife’s illness.

But he did help with Bush’s Senate race and he became a Texas fund-raiser for Nixon in 1972. Disillusioned by the Watergate scandal, he dropped out of politics.

His return was inspired by Bush, then the national chairman of the GOP. According to Republican sources, Bush encouraged then-Commerce Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton to bring Baker to Washington as his undersecretary of commerce.

Two years later, Baker was head of Ford’s presidential campaign. He led Bush’s 1980 campaign and, along with Mosbacher, is said to have encouraged Bush to leave the primary struggle against Reagan, opening up the later opportunity to join the Reagan ticket.

Among prognosticators, it is taken for granted that Baker would be secretary of state in a Bush Administration. It is widely forecast that Brady would become secretary of the Treasury, and there is speculation that Mosbacher would become a counselor in the White House.

The three say they have never discussed with Bush the subject of a Cabinet appointment.

“I don’t believe that kind of speculation is productive,” Baker said. “I don’t think he is going to get into that with anybody until he wins that election.”

Brady passes himself off as “an old fogy” who is on hand to help out anywhere he can.

Although Mosbacher’s chief role is as fund-raiser, campaign sources say that Bush seeks his views on energy policy and that Mosbacher, like Baker and Brady, advises on economic questions.

Mosbacher and Brady are in Washington weekly to confer with Bush and campaign officials. And now that the vice president has sewn up the GOP nomination, Baker has begun to take part in occasional campaign strategy sessions.

Other close and trusted allies throughout Bush’s career in public office, although not now engaged in the campaign, are Dean Burch, Barber Conable and Richard Moore, who were activists in Bush’s first run for the nomination.

Burch, who arrived in Washington as an aide to former Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, is a fixture of the Republican Establishment. Chairman of the Republican National Committee at 36, he later headed the Federal Communications Commission, was a principal aide in the Nixon Watergate defense and served as counselor to President Ford. For more than a year, he has headed Intelsat, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, precluding him from political activity, but Bush associates say he remains no less a Bush confidant.

Conable, Bush’s one-time colleague on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, developed a reputation as one of Capitol Hill’s foremost economic philosophers. He retired from the House in 1984, a skeptic about much of Reagan’s economic policy.

Support for Conable

According to knowledgeable sources, it was the staunch support of Bush and Baker that landed Conable the World Bank presidency. Still intensely interested in politics and said to be frustrated in the World Bank post, he also is precluded from political activity. Acquaintances say they would not be surprised to see him give up the job if offered a post in a Bush Administration.

Moore arrived in Washington in the service of Nixon, whom he served later as a Watergate trouble-shooter. He has advised Bush on press relations in the past but now contends that their relationship is purely social. Associates of the vice president insist, however, that Bush maintains a high regard for Moore’s opinions on a wide spectrum of political and policy matters.

Beyond these insiders, Bush tends to look toward the nation’s Republican governors as sources of domestic advice and to well-established Washington figures for consultation on foreign policy and national security.

Benefits From Governors

“He has said to me that he gets more benefit from the governors than anybody else he talks to,” said Teeter, the senior adviser who traffics in both policy and campaign strategy.

“He has found them to be smart, and very hands-on with the domestic problems we are dealing with--drugs, education, job retraining, economic development, competitiveness. I would rate them a hell of a lot higher than I would rate the influence of people around town.”

Over the last year Bush has, according to campaign aides, spent hours talking with the Republicans who now hold 23 statehouses. Some of them are longtime acquaintances, such as Gov. Bill Clements of Texas, and others are important recent allies, such as Gov. John H. Sununu of New Hampshire.

Sununu, a conservative whose support helped Bush bounce back from his Iowa defeat and win the critical New Hampshire primary against Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, has the vice president’s ear on energy, competitiveness and technology.

Practical Leaders

Bush is drawn to state leaders he considers practical. Among the others said by aides to have captured his attention are Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, Robert D. Orr of Indiana, James R. Thompson of Illinois, Carroll A. Campbell Jr. of South Carolina and George Deukmejian of California, as well as some former governors, such as Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Governors have been particularly influential with Bush on the issue of education, which Bush has sought to make his own. Alexander was one of the first governors to push through legislation establishing a program of incentive pay for teachers, which was one of the topics that Bush and Alexander discussed early in the year.

The systematic use of the governors as a source of campaign advice was launched of perceived necessity as much as opportunity. When Dole appeared to be a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush was having difficulty lining up support among other Republican senators, and so he turned to the GOP governors for advice.

President of Senate

Although Bush, as vice president, serves as president of the Senate, his closest congressional advisers are House members whom he had known before becoming Reagan’s running mate in 1980.

They include Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, who became a Bush friend 16 years ago when the candidate was the Nixon Administration’s ambassador to the United Nations. A fiscal conservative, Leach is a liberal on foreign policy and votes with the Democrats more often than with his Republican colleagues.

Another is Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt of Arkansas, an odds-on favorite to be a member of the Bush Cabinet if Congress approves the Reagan Administration’s proposal to make the Veterans Administration a Cabinet-level department.

Counted among senators with the closest ties to the Bush policy brain trust are Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, the assistant minority leader, and James A. McClure of Idaho, who was elected to the House with Bush in 1966.

Democrats’ Close Ties

A few scattered Democrats have maintained close ties with the vice president for years. Among them are Sen. J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, a candidate to become Senate majority leader next year, and Rep. G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery of Mississippi, another House freshman of 1966.

In addition, former Rep. Thomas L. Ashley (D-Ohio), a Yale classmate, continues to provide Bush with both solicited and unsolicited advice.

Bush, according to Ashley, who is president of the Assn. of Bank Holding Companies, goes to his advisers for facts but stubbornly provides his own judgments.

“He’s a smart business school major, and he thinks he can run anything,” Ashley said. “He is a very management-oriented guy.”

“When he was selected to the U.N. job, I said: ‘What the hell do you know about foreign policy?’ And, he said, ‘It’s just a management problem.’ The same thing came up when he went to the CIA.”

Tied as he is to advisers who have demonstrated dependability over many years, the circle around Bush sometimes evolves. In no area is that more apparent than economics.

One addition to the front ranks of Bush advisers in recent months is Michael J. Boskin, Stanford University economist. It is Boskin who is said to be largely responsible for the Bush proposal for a “flexible freeze”--a selective freeze on government spending programs--as the solution to the federal budget deficit.

With the election perhaps turning on the condition of the economy, Bush is also surrounded by some big-name analysts. In addition to Baker and Brady, this category includes Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, and Martin S. Feldstein, who earlier headed the panel under Reagan.

Back at Harvard

Feldstein, now back at Harvard, was considered the most influential economist around Bush during the 1980 presidential campaign. Now Boskin, who helped prepare Reagan for his debate with Carter during the 1980 campaign, is moving into that position, having met regularly in recent months with both Bush and campaign officials.

Less involved than Boskin, but a figure said to have created a deep impression upon Bush, is Paul H. O’Neill, a deputy budget director during the Ford Administration. Now chairman of the Aluminum Co. of America, O’Neill has spent little time with Bush. But acc1869767785can tell that the vice president listens very carefully.”

One of Washington’s enduring verities is that John Tower wants to be secretary of defense. If George Bush makes it to the White House, the former Texas senator and U.S. arms control negotiator may at last get his chance.

Tower, who in bygone years was not closely identified with Bush, did yeoman service for the Bush campaign before the March 8 Super Tuesday primaries in the South, and he is now counted among the important advisers on defense, foreign policy and national security.

He is in the company of a long list of advisers, including such Washington fixtures as former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former State Department counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt and William G. Hyland, former chief of intelligence and research at the State Department and now editor of the journal Foreign Affairs.

Former Navy Secretary

Also on the list are former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., who is also said to covet the top job at the Defense Department, and former Deputy Defense Secretary David R. Packard.

Notably missing from it are former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick.

Close advisers predict Bush would make a clean sweep of Reagan Administration national security officials, perhaps leaving out even Donald P. Gregg, his own controversial national security adviser.

“It is not that he doesn’t think well of the people,” said a longtime adviser, “and he would want to keep some people to provide institutional memory, but has a very strong belief in the concept of renewal, and he believes that change is necessary.”

Differences Hard to See

Yet it is hard to define where Bush’s views on national security differ from those of the Reagan Administration, and some specialists who have discussed foreign policy with Bush have been uncomfortable presenting views that are implicitly critical of present policy. In some cases, Bush finds himself differing with his own advisers.

Scowcroft, for example, has sharp reservations about the U.S.-Soviet treaty banning medium-range nuclear missiles, while Bush immediately endorsed the pact unequivocally. It is difficult, Scowcroft acknowledged, to recommend to Bush a course at odds with one he is supporting as Reagan’s vice president.

“For that reason,” Scowcroft said, “there was no point in talking to him about the treaty beforehand. There was no point in my giving him my reservations because he has to be a captive on something like that.”