Bush, Dole Vow Harmony; Fitzwater Keeps Press Job

All smiles and good humor--could it be that these two men were the bitterest of campaign rivals only months ago?

President-elect George Bush and Sen. Bob Dole, the Republican Senate leader whose cooperation is crucial to the new Administration’s legislative fortunes, claimed Monday to have buried their substantial differences and pledged to work together in the upcoming session of Congress.

Bush and the GOP contender he defeated and then passed over as his running mate echoed the uncommon harmony after a long-anticipated fence-mending meeting in the vice president’s office. It came as Bush labored to heal political wounds and fill out his Administration’s top posts as the presidential transition nears its second month.

In an appointment to one highly visible job, Bush announced that Marlin Fitzwater, now the chief White House spokesman, would retain that role. Fitzwater, formerly Bush’s vice presidential press secretary, took over as President Reagan’s top spokesman nearlytwo years ago during the President’s most troubled months in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Fitzwater has been credited with relieving to a degree the angry tenor of relations between the White House and the Washington press corps at a volatile time. Under Bush, he will get the title of press secretary, which has been held by James S. Brady for the eight years of the Reagan Administration. Brady has been recovering from a head wound suffered when the President was shot in a March, 1981, assassination attempt.

As the vice president met with senior advisers, he appeared Monday to be on the verge of deciding on two more Cabinet posts--commerce secretary and defense secretary, expected to be filled by longtime friend Robert A. Mosbacher and by former GOP Sen. John Tower of Texas. The timing of the announcements remains uncertain.

Mosbacher, the finance chairman of Bush’s presidential campaign and a wealthy Texas oilman, was said by a source on the transition team to be “pretty close” to final selection as head of the Commerce Department. “If he wants it, it’s his,” the source said.

Tower, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, appeared to have weathered questions about his suitability for the job, as well as attacks from some in the defense industry smarting from Tower criticisms during his Senate days.

Three weeks into his transition effort, Bush continued to strive to put his own stamp on the presidency without alienating his predecessor’s supporters or inflaming tensions in a Congress girded for battle over the budget deficit.

After his lunch of hamburgers and french fries with Dole, Bush scheduled a breakfast meeting today with the Republican congressional leadership on Capitol Hill.

But how he fares in Congress may rest to a large degree on the depth of the good will he and the powerful GOP Senate leader effused.

“As soon as they get a common cause, they will be arm in arm, battling the infidel,” predicted Washington lobbyist Tom Korologos. “Dole is enough of a partisan and enough of a politician to do just that.”

Bush and Dole, the senior Republican senator from Kansas, have been on-again, off-again competitors for more than a decade. But their scrap, which generally had remained within the boundaries of their political family, grew to a full-scale battle during the crucial New Hampshire primary election in February, when Bush defeated Dole and ended his rival’s hope of obtaining the presidential nomination.

At one point, after a round of tough campaign rhetoric, Dole confronted Bush on the Senate floor and angrily demanded that he “stop lying about my record.”

Now, Dole, as the skilled leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, is charged with being “the messenger who takes the White House message back to the Republican senators. The Republican leader can pack a lot of wallop and the President-elect realizes that,” Korologos said.

Despite the pledges of cooperation, Dole has demonstrated a willingness to chart his own course, said Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

Dole “won’t be totally subservient to the White House. He never has been. There’s a streak of independence there. He will go only so far,” Bentsen told a group of reporters at a luncheon Monday.

For his part, Dole told reporters, with Bush at his side in front of the White House: “The election is over and we both have obligations and certainly mine is to help him become a great President and I intend to do that. That’s what it’s all about. The other things happened in the past. We’ve both been in politics quite a while and we’ve both agreed to go back to work.”

Bush and Dole were joined at the lunch by Richard G. Darman, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury picked by the President-elect to be director of the Office of Management and Budget.