Good Cheer Is Absent as Bush, Dukakis Confer

President-elect George Bush, capping a week of meetings with former rivals and potential adversaries, sat down Friday with his defeated opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, on a December afternoon when the chill in the air matched the chill in their words.

All week, Bush has breakfasted, lunched and shared warm words with political figures from Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and the Rev. Pat Robertson on the Republican side to Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell and the Rev. Jesse Jackson among Democrats. Each time, he and his guest would emerge and deliver a cheery homily for the cameras. The Dukakis get-together was the last meeting of the series and with it came the reminder that some political wounds are too deep to be cured by a single chat.

Cursory Courtesies

As a brisk wind whipped across the grounds of Washington’s Naval Observatory, where the vice president’s official residence is situated, Bush stood next to Dukakis for only the briefest of photo opportunities and offered only the most cursory of courtesies.

“I look forward to working with the governor and other governors,” he said.

Dukakis, for his part, said that he had talked to Bush about the importance of health care, anti-drug programs, homelessness and college opportunity and that he is “more than willing to work with (Bush) . . . if we can establish these as priorities.”

“On the other hand,” Dukakis said, “I don’t want to see this budget balanced on the backs of the people who don’t have decent health care or housing or education.” Bush “faces a very formidable challenge,” Dukakis added. “We’ve had eight years of endless borrowing and spending, and the chickens are coming home to roost.”

Asked how he thought Bush was doing in his first few weeks as President-elect, Dukakis demurred: “I think we’ve got to wait for a while to start grading anybody,” he said. “When he sends up his plan for getting that deficit down . . . we’ll have a better sense of just what his priorities are.”

The tone of the Bush and Dukakis comments were in sharp contrast with Bush’s meeting earlier in the day with Robertson, who waged an intense, sometimes angry, struggle against Bush in the early part of the Republican presidential nomination process.

“Some people don’t understand the campaign,” Bush said later. “They think that when you run against someone in a campaign, that that injures friendships. And, as I saw the other day with the Democrats, that’s not true. It’s wonderful the way the American political system works.”

Carries Message

Later, Robertson told reporters that he had carried a private message from South African Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha to Bush. Robertson recently visited South Africa, and spoke favorably of such steps as the decision not to execute six blacks who had been convicted in a death that occurred during a racial disturbance.

He did not mention several contrasting developments, such as political gains by ultraconservative white parties in South Africa and the resulting return of strict racial separation in several South African communities.

Robertson said that Bush expressed an interest in having “American black leaders go to South Africa . . . people like Jesse Jackson . . . to explore firsthand what’s happening.” Bush aides said they would not confirm or deny that Bush had made such a remark to Robertson.

While the meetings occupied Bush’s public calendar this week, personnel remained his main preoccupation in private meetings. Craig Fuller, Bush’s transition director, indicated to reporters at a briefing that the President-elect was trying to pick up the pace of his Cabinet announcements.

“Next week, the vice president will be in a position to make some additional announcements,” Fuller said. “We looked at this week as a week to review the names that were pending on other Cabinet positions and some of the agency positions.”

Suggesting that Bush did not want to name too many more Cabinet members until he is able to produce a few who are not white males, Fuller said that Bush had taken his time this past week “to try to ensure balance in the Cabinet, and preferred not to, on a piecemeal basis, make announcements one at a time.”

Fuller also said that former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.) remains under consideration for secretary of defense but that he did not know when Bush would announce his decision for that sensitive position.

“Sen. Tower’s somebody in whom he (Bush) has a tremendous amount of confidence and a close relationship,” Fuller said. “There may be others, there may be other approaches,” Fuller said. But Tower, he added, “is one person who is, has been, and will always be seriously considered for the position.”

But Fuller refused to specify when a final decision on the job might be made. “It’s conceivable that within the next couple of weeks we will have reached the point where he’s pretty comfortable with a final set of candidates,” he said.

Bush has been meeting with potential candidates for the Pentagon’s No. 2 job, deputy secretary, in an attempt to put together a defense team that would harness Tower with a high-ranking corporate manager from the defense industry. That second person would take the lead in attempts to streamline and reform Pentagon management practices, transition sources say.

Among those who reportedly have met with Bush to discuss the job is Donald B. Rice, president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corp., the Santa Monica-based research firm.

Rice, who has been interested in Pentagon posts in past administrations, has a key supporter in Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga), the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rice was one of the Defense Department’s “whiz kid” specialists in systems analysis from 1967 to 1970. In 1971-72, he was assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Similar Rejection

One of Rice’s colleagues from his OMB days, Paul H. O’Neill, who had been widely mentioned as a candidate for the defense post, Friday took himself out of the running. O’Neill, now chief executive at Aluminum Corp. of America, told the Associated Press that he has no interest in going to the Pentagon. “I can’t come back” to Washington, O’Neill said, noting that he has only been in his current job 18 months.

Earlier in the week, Bush got a similar rejection from Norman R. Augustine, a Martin Marietta executive, who expressed reservations about his prospects for a return to the private sector, given restrictive conflict-of-interest laws now in place and tighter rules under consideration in Congress.

Those rejections have begun to raise concern that Bush’s strategy of building a defense team before announcing a defense secretary could backfire.

Putting a secretary together with a deputy not of his own choosing could be a formula for trouble, said one Defense Department official. “Who needs the aggravation?”

While most of the public speculation about Cabinet posts has focused on the Defense Department, transition sources suggested that progress on other positions is being made. Bush has been reviewing potential nominees for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, transition sources said, and one aide suggested that Alan L. Keyes, a former Reagan White House aide and unsuccessful GOP Senate candidate in Maryland, is prominently on the list. If named, Keyes would be Bush’s first high-ranking black nominee.

And Washington lobbyists have been busy lining up support for competing candidates for secretary of the Interior, a post that traditionally has gone to prominent politicians from the West. Former House GOP leader John J. Rhodes of Arizona, who retired in 1982, and retiring Sen. Daniel J. Evans of Washington are believed to be leading candidates for the job.

Staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this story.