A Kinder, Gentler Transition : Bush-Reagan Partnership Breaks Precedent, Happily

The President worked actively for the succession of his vice president, whose election was a referendum on the previous eight years. Indeed, several Cabinet members were reappointed. The euphoria of victory obscured the looming financial crisis, however, and the new President, who had been solicitous of his predecessor’s “kitchen cabinet,” was left to deal with the results of economic error. Thus Martin Van Buren entered the White House in 1837. And George Bush now follows in his footsteps--the first sitting vice president in 152 years to be elected to the presidency.

This comparison--the jinx that Bush had to overcome--is not just historical trivia. Two weeks into the transition from Ronald Reagan’s Administration, there is an uncanny quiet in Washington that hasn’t been witnessed in any modern transfer of presidential power. The orderly way in which Bush is preparing to take command promises to have a significant effect, especially on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

The tone of any transition is set at the top. At the 1953 inauguration, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower barely spoke to one another during the ride to the Capitol for the swearing-in. Eisenhower had little enthusiasm for John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson had no use for Richard Nixon except in a shared commitment to the Vietnam War. Gerald Ford departed in defeat, and his vanquisher, Jimmy Carter, followed suit four years later--in each case giving way to a new President who claimed a mandate to clean house that willing subordinates would implement with a vengeance.

By contrast, since Bush locked up the GOP presidential nomination last spring, Reagan has shown an unprecedented warmth for his vice president. This behavior contrasts with the disdain--or worse--visited on most other recent vice presidents, especially those who have sought to succeed a retiring President. Even Herbert Hoover, the last U.S. Chief Executive to follow an incumbent of the same political party, received less than wholehearted support from Calvin Coolidge.

Reagan’s backing for Bush has extended past the election. In a series of actions that presumably were delayed to avoid campaign controversy--from issuing farm foreclosures to relaxing requirements to license atomic-power plants--the retiring President has taken the blame for unpopular steps that he could easily have pushed onto his successor. Reagan has also accepted changes in the U.S. position on some key issues about verifying a strategic-arms-reduction treaty, giving Bush political cover against right-wing critics of arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union. For the nation’s foreign policy, the most striking value of the friendly takeover can be found in continuity. While Bush has said that he will replace most current officials, he has so far not wielded a meat ax. No army of office-seekers has yet descended on Washington to validate Louis XIV’s lament: “Every time I fill a vacant place, I make a hundred malcontents and one ingrate.” To assert his authority, the President-elect does not need to execute a rapid purge of incumbents, nor will vital institutional memory be quickly dissipated. In fact, unlike eight and 12 years ago, the State Department has not been invaded by a transition team of political stalwarts bent on ferreting out secrets about the departing Administration’s failures or chastising career diplomats considered to have been too loyal to the old regime.

More important, during the past two weeks Bush has been able to work effectively with the departing President to begin a useful continuity of foreign policy. He has an office in the White House to receive visitors. When leaders of key allies--like West Germany’s Helmut Kohl and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher--come to bid farewell to Reagan, Bush is grandly presented in presidential surroundings, not relegated to courtesy calls in some hotel room or seedy transition headquarters.

The teamwork of the outgoing and incoming Presidents will be especially important when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, comes to call in two weeks. The Soviet president’s visit reflects more than a desire to display before the U.N. General Assembly a bold blueprint for international action. It is certainly not just an act of courtesy. Instead, Gorbachev will attempt to establish an agenda for East-West relations that will help him to out-compete a fledgling U.S. President in key areas of the world, especially Western Europe. That tactic might work if Washington were in turmoil during this period, or if the transition were dominated by wholesale firings and bad blood at the top.

In fact, Reagan and Bush will wisely limit contact with Gorbachev to an informal lunch, and Bush has clearly stated his unwillingness to do any U.S.-Soviet business before he assumes the reins of power on Jan. 20. He can approach Gorbachev, symbolizing both continuity and transition, without seeming to usurp Reagan’s authority, but he can also keep his distance without appearing to be inadequate in comparison with a predecessor who in other circumstances might be tempted to upstage the President-elect in one last act of statesman’s vanity.

As befits the quality of presidential power, Bush has refrained from assuming any executive duties before Inauguration Day. Yet the mandate is inexorably becoming his with each passing day to a degree without precedent. He has no need to conquer Washington as an outsider hostile to it, as Carter and Reagan were before him, or to battle dispossessed and perhaps bitter officials from a defeated Administration. Jan. 20 will not cleave U.S. foreign policy into past and future. And those abroad who wish America well, or who depend on the consistency of its policies, will feel relief.