Bush Keeps Thornburgh, Cavazos : Fills Education and Justice Posts; Darman to Be Budget Director

President-elect George Bush, reaching again into the ranks of Reagan Administration officials, announced Monday that he wants to keep Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh and Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos and that he will nominate Richard G. Darman to be his budget director.

All five of Bush’s Cabinet-level appointees so far have worked for the current Administration. But none has possessed the ideological bent of many of President Reagan’s top officials, and all have reputations as pragmatic problem-solvers.

In Darman, the President-elect opted for a master of detail who has developed a reputation as a skilled bureaucratic infighter and hard bargainer. Darman served as a senior White House aide during Reagan’s first term and then as deputy secretary of the Treasury until last year.

Thornburgh, the attorney general since August, has avoided the highly ideological approach adopted by his predecessor, Edwin Meese III, in running the Justice Department. He promised to make the drug battle his first priority.

Cavazos, a former president of Texas Tech University, reportedly encountered some resistance among Bush advisers, who thought that the new President would be better served by a new education secretary.

Bush, in describing his three new appointees, said that he had sought to name “people of outstanding quality (and) integrity . . . as expeditiously as possible.”

His other two Cabinet appointees were former Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III, whom he chose for secretary of state, and Nicholas F. Brady, whom he said he would keep as Treasury secretary.

When asked whether he had finished appointing holdovers from the Reagan Administration, Bush said: “In all likelihood, but I reserve the right to retain flexibility there. But I will keep my commitment to bring in lots of new faces and that means at the Cabinet level and that means in other levels as well in the government.”

Congressional sources and others close to the Bush transition operation have indicated that the President-elect may be ready as early as Wednesday to announce his choice for defense secretary. Former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), an arms negotiator for Reagan in 1985-1986, has been said by sources close to Bush to be the favored candidate.

Bush announced his latest personnel decisions at a news conference in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House.

Will Focus on Deficit

Darman, whose first priority will be trimming the federal budget deficit, told reporters that he would view Social Security as untouchable. But Medicare and other health care programs, he said, would be fair game to budget cutters.

Controlling medical costs, Darman said, provides “a big challenge, but it’s also a big reward in terms of budget savings. So I don’t think that those can be excluded.”

The President-elect made it clear that he and Thornburgh agree that the anti-drug campaign is the Justice Department’s top priority.

“I’m appointing him,” Bush said, “because I know that he will work with me to fight drugs with every tool at our disposal: stepping up the interdiction efforts by various arms of the federal government, many of them housed in the Justice Department; establishing an attitude nationwide of zero tolerance for drug use.”

‘Special Emphasis’

Thornburgh said that he is committed to placing “special emphasis on fighting drugs, enforcing the civil rights of all of our citizens, being attentive to the needs of the environment and imposing a crackdown on white-collar crime and official corruption.”

Bush said that he would work with Cavazos to implement “greater rewards for excellent teachers (and) making higher education more accessible to families of low and middle incomes.”

The appointment of Cavazos, a Mexican-American, fulfilled Bush’s campaign pledge to name a Latino to his Cabinet. In his job for just two months, Cavazos has yet to make a significant mark, but he declared his readiness to help Bush meet his campaign goal of becoming “the education President.”

Bush said that when he and Reagan meet early next month with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in New York, he will avoid committing his Administration “to specifics in arms control or anything else.”

“I will not accept or reject any proposals until I become President of the United States,” he said.

Bush’s press conference opened a busy day in which he received a report from former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter advising him, despite his campaign pledge that he would not raise taxes, to accept at least $13 billion a year in tax hikes as part of a deficit reduction package.

And he called Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, whom he defeated for the presidency, and held what his transition team’s press secretary, Sheila Tate, described as a “very pleasant” conversation. “It was a ‘let’s get together’ talk, kind of breaking the ice,” Tate said.

She said that Bush extended “an open invitation” for a meeting with Dukakis. No time was set, but she said Bush and Dukakis could get together when Bush spends the Thanksgiving holiday at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., a two-hour drive from Dukakis’ home in Brookline, Mass.

The President-elect will fly today to Mobile, Ala., to meet with Republican governors and then will have lunch at the Johnson Space Center in Houston with Mexican President-elect Jose Salinas de Gortari.

He will also spend part of the day meeting with Brady on the problems facing the nation’s savings and loan industry, according to Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former Carter aide who attended the meeting of the former presidents with the President-elect. Brady and Baker are to accompany Bush to the meeting with Salinas.

Staff writers John Balzar and David Lauter contributed to this story.