Sununu Known for Delight in Exerting Power

The chief of staff George Bush chose to give his White House a “refreshing new perspective” is a brainy political brawler, a squat bulldog of a man whose intellectual brilliance and flying temper alternately have thrilled and rattled Statehouse veterans and voters alike in the tiny arena of New Hampshire.

To fill a job usually thought to require the negotiating finesse of a Washington insider and the calming instincts of a behind-the-scenes conciliator, Bush on Thursday tapped New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, possessor of a profound self-confidence, an occasional flamboyance and an unquenchable delight in the sheer wielding of power.

As governor, Sununu rented baby elephants for Republican get-togethers, dressed them in Sununu sandwich boards and flipped peanuts toward them, wearing an elfin grin. As Bush’s national surrogate, he savaged Michael S. Dukakis from one end of the country to another this year in what seemed an intensively personal mission.

So brazen is he that, as most Administration-hopefuls played it coy and demure, Sununu marched out and delivered what amounted to a public notice to Bush, citing which jobs were beneath his ambitions. He would not accept secretary of education, he said. He would not accept secretary of energy.

In the space of a few days, he got what he wanted.

Around the Washington office of New Hampshire GOP Sen. Warren B. Rudman, a former Sununu foe and now an ally, no one was surprised as word of Sununu’s selection spread.

“He’s already waged his first high-stakes Washington power struggle and he’s won,” said Rudman aide Bob Stevenson.

But others suggest that the going may only get rougher. For every Sununu friend who praises his candor, there is an opponent who scorns his abrasiveness. For every Sununu backer who lauds his success, there is a skeptic who replies that he has been borne aloft on the peculiar demographics of Republican-dominated New Hampshire, where he has spent his entire political life.

“He is an arrogant, cocky know-it-all,” said Peter Goelz, a former aide to Gov. Hugh Gallen, whom Sununu upset in 1982 to win the New Hampshire Statehouse. “The problem is that he’s also very smart.”

“Intellect is his Achilles’ heel,” says Ned Helms, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services when Sununu became governor six years ago. “. . . His intellectual capacity has made him what he is. But at times his intellectual arrogance keeps him from getting beyond that. The first time he talks to (House Speaker) Jim Wright the way he’s talked to some Democratic leaders in this state, he’s going to be in big trouble.”

But Sununu’s confidence knows no bounds. After the New Hampshire primary, which Bush won with a huge assist from Sununu, for example, the governor placed on his blue station wagon the very license plates that a previous Granite State governor, Sherman Adams, had on his car when he was the powerful chief of staff to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Of all the traits on which friends and foes of Sununu disagree, there are some which are universally endorsed: He is persistent, tenacious, aggressive, unwilling or unable to suffer fools. Indeed, both Sununu’s personal and political life has been marked by a sense of haste and accomplishment that suggests he has spent little time accommodating detours.

Sununu was born of a Lebanese-American father and Lebanese-Greek mother in 1939 in Havana, where his father was working as a distributor of French motion pictures. The name “sununu” is colloquial Arabic for a small bird, or swallow, a fact which sparks guffaws from Sununu friends who see him as most unbirdlike.

Moving with his family to an exclusive section of Queens, N.Y., as a child, Sununu attended the La Salle Military Academy, a Catholic high school on Long Island, and received so many medals at his graduation that the administrator on the podium presented him with a silver bowl to put them in.

He moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would earn bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, marrying at age 19 an Irish Catholic named Nancy Hayes, and starting what would become a family of eight children.

A year before he received his undergraduate degree, Sununu went to work for a firm called Astro Dynamics, staying five years and becoming chief engineer. In 1966, he joined the faculty at Tufts University, later becoming associate dean of the engineering college at a precocious 29.

Sununu’s commitment to private enterprise has known few bounds. After earning his doctorate he started two Delaware-registered consulting firms--JHS Engineering Co. and Thermal Research Inc. And when he became associate dean, he won permission from the dean to run the businesses out of the dean’s own office, infuriating some other faculty members.

Sununu’s political experience began after his growing family moved in 1969 to Salem, N.H., a town of 30,000 just north of the Massachusetts border.

From a seat on the Salem planning board, he won a New Hampshire House seat in 1972, then lost four successive races--including a 1980 run for the U.S. Senate, where his brochures, displaying what friends said is characteristic humor, were entitled “What’s a sununu?”

But in 1982, he defeated incumbent Gov. Gallen and promptly found himself facing a deficit that exceeded $40 million. According to political allies, Sununu brought in teams of private industry experts to canvass the state government. He dismantled budgets, focusing on sometimes minute matters.

Temporary surcharges were added. Departments were streamlined and services computerized. In Sununu’s six years as governor, the deficit was erased and a $26-million rainy day fund was established.

But the accomplishments were achieved with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature, whose makeup is almost the exact opposite of the Congress he will now face. And even in a GOP-dominated state, Sununu engaged in sometimes furious debates and went out of his way to exert his power.

“When someone did something that he disapproved of, he would summon them in and dress them down,” said Joseph Grandmaison, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. “ . . . What emerges is professorial. You are certainly talked down to.”

Democrats were not the only combatants. According to Senate President William Bartlett, a Republican, Sununu once became angered at two GOP senators who disagreed with his plan to reorganize the state’s environmental department.

“He said, ‘Look, I don’t even want to talk about it. Take this with you and get out.’ And then he picked up the bill and threw it at them,” Bartlett said.

Although Sununu cites the state’s fiscal turnaround as his greatest achievement, one of his lingering frustrations and the root of much of his disdain for Massachusetts Gov. Dukakis was the stalled, $5.7-billion nuclear power plant in Seabrook, N.H. By refusing to cooperate in emergency planning, Dukakis effectively blocked licensing of the nuclear reactor, which Sununu has consistently championed.

The New Hampshire governor’s role on the Bush campaign team--and ultimately, his chances for a place in the Administration--were cinched nine months ago, when Bush rebounded in his state after a feeble third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

Many Sununu watchers predict that the incoming chief of staff will smooth out his approach and force himself to listen to others, at least initially, to avoid a full-scale uproar in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

“Sununu is a very capable guy,” said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Democrat. “He’s partisan, but he’s smart enough to know when to be (confrontational) and when not to be.”

Others, particularly those who have worked with Sununu within New Hampshire, predict a raw transition to chief of staff.

“He’s going to have to trim his sails a bit,” said Mary Chambers, the New Hampshire Senate minority leader. “He’s acted sort of like a pit bull . . . . He has the capacity to control himself. But he’s got to work at it.”