Team Effort

No incoming American President can hope for a perfect score in putting together a new team.But President-elect George Bush could come close if he would just apply to future appointments the high standards that he already has set with some of his choices and find ways to pay off political debts that do not involve Cabinet posts.

His selection of retired Air Force Gen. Brent Scowcroft, more scholar than warrior, as the national-security adviser is an example of the high standards that are within Bush’s reach. So is the nomination of Richard Thornburgh, who will stay on as attorney general in the Bush Administration, as are, to a degree yet to be tested, Bush’s choices of James A. Baker III as secretary of state and of Nicholas Brady as secretary of the Treasury.

Choosing former Texas Sen. John Tower as the secretary of defense, an appointment once rumored to be all but signed and sealed, would be settling for less than the best or even the quite good. Tower is a cheerleader for defense, not a quarterback. He represents most of the excesses and enthusiasms for defense budgeting that now have the Pentagon on a financial roller-coaster; putting him in that job would simply confuse the armed services about Bush’s intention to run a tight--as in frugal--ship.

Scowcroft is in the mold of White House staff analysts who once were proud to be known around Washington as the President’s Men--pragmatic professionals, avoiding the limelight without fearing it, giving their best estimate of prudent policy without particular regard for how the President’s reaction might affect their chances to become rich and famous.

The National Security Council is familiar territory for him. He first served there, as an aide to Henry A. Kissinger, in the 1970s, and was a member of the small panel commissioned by President Reagan to determine whether the machinery of government broke down in ways that made the Iran-Contra scandal possible. He and his colleagues, Tower and Edmund G. Muskie, concluded that the fault lay not with the machinery but with the men who ran it.

Scowcroft’s views of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” may be at variance with Bush’s public views on Reagan’s plan to shield the United States from nuclear missiles. Scowcroft opposes early deployment, even if U.S. scientists could come up with something to deploy, and would be more comfortable negotiating limits on defenses along with limits on offenses. One of his strong points is that he not only speaks the arcane language of nuclear strategy and can keep up with the numbers games of arms control but also can translate all of that into plain English.

As for the top Pentagon job, there is no urgency about filling it, except perhaps in the minds of the Bush transition team. Frank C. Carlucci has handled the job well for the past year, and could so do indefinitely--an arrangement that would better serve the nation than rushing to put the wrong man into the job.

The situation is almost identical at the Central Intelligence Agency. Director William H. Webster has the agency back on track after years of ill-conceived covert activities and shading the truth with Congress. He certainly can keep it on track for as long as it takes for Bush to find someone to run the agency as it should be run--as the President’s window on the world, not as a circus of cat burglars.