Despite Role as Understudy, Bush Will Be a Summit Star

For nearly a month, George Bush has confounded his opponents and surprised even his friends by his aggressive performance in a new part: President-in-waiting. This week, perhaps for the last time, he plans to go back to his old role: Ronald Reagan’s understudy, the seen-but-not-heard vice president.

That is the part that Bush aides insist he will play when he and Reagan meet with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev this week in New York. Although “image-wise, it’s natural that he would be there as the President-elect,” said a senior Bush aide, “the vice president, and I use that term advisedly, is going to this meeting as the vice president.”

This time, however, no matter how Bush tries to keep his head down, the meeting with Gorbachev inevitably will be more than a ceremonial parade. In the American presidency, once the votes are counted, there are no timeouts for the winner, there is no stopping the clock or turning off the tape. Everything counts.

As a result, especially since the agenda includes such sensitive issues as arms control and human rights, the sessions with Gorbachev almost certainly will leave their mark on two evolving processes:

-- The process that will shape U.S.-Soviet relations over the next four years, the policy formulations and one-leader-sizing-up-another chemistry which, together with future events, will write the next chapter in the history of the superpowers.

-- The process that is even now shaping the public perception of Bush as a President, the accumulation of things large and small, said and unsaid, which are already building the image of the next President.

Reflecting on the importance of the first impressions that will be formed in the New York meeting, Kenneth L. Adelman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, last week recalled that the almost legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn “said a good politician could walk into a room and size up everyone in it within a few minutes of coming in the door.”

“You can get a feeling of what the other person is like, size him up, get less bureaucratic responses and more personal responses,” Adelman said. “That . . . becomes important if you’re in a crisis; you know a little of how the guy thinks.”

The strategy that Bush and his advisers have developed for the New York summit is a political tactic Bush used with masterful effect during his bid for the White House--lowering expectations. By repeatedly emphasizing that “it’s President Reagan’s meeting; I will be there as vice president,” Bush hopes to be able to claim at least partial credit for what works and to avoid blame for what fails.

Many Soviet experts believe that Gorbachev’s own domestic political needs are likely to dovetail with Bush’s desires. For example, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official who worked on summits during the Nixon and Ford administrations, suggested that the current unrest in the Soviet Union would give Gorbachev powerful incentives not to create distractions.

Momentum Back Home

“This kind of foray helps him remind people in Moscow what an enormous asset he is internationally,” Sonnenfeldt said. “A lot of his razzle-dazzle is intended to . . . give him some momentum at home.

“In a way,” Sonnenfeldt added, “this meeting helps Bush because it takes the heat off that he’ll feel from some quarters to have an early summit.”

In addition, the recent history of frequent summits may help Bush by lowering the pressure for any dramatic outcome.

“This one is sort of frosting on the cake after the series of four summits with Reagan and with the expectation on both sides that there will be a Bush-Gorbachev summit in due course,” said Brookings Institution foreign policy scholar Raymond L. Garthoff. “The need for a breakthrough in that sense is quite small, quite different from earlier summits.”

Also, no previous summit has had this meeting’s air of studied nonchalance. Gorbachev’s presence is being treated, at least officially, as a fortuitous by-product of his visit to the U.N. General Assembly.

Parallel to Glassboro Talks

The closest parallel is with 1967, when President Lyndon B. Johnson invited Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to a hastily arranged meeting during a Kosygin visit to the United Nations. The two leaders met for 10 hours over two days at a state college campus in Glassboro, N.J., halfway between New York and Washington.

Yet the Glassboro parallel underscores the potential importance of even the most casual meetings between U.S. and Soviet leaders. Though the New Jersey summit was superficially uneventful, it set in motion the first serious negotiations between Washington and Moscow over controlling nuclear arms.

“What do you do if Gorbachev comes in with a proposal,” asked Richard N. Perle, a former assistant defense secretary and longtime conservative skeptic about U.S.-Soviet summit negotiations. “You don’t attempt to negotiate issues of importance over lunch.”

And Gorbachev has a history of popping unexpected proposals. At the October, 1986, summit in Iceland, for example, he suggested a 50% cut in strategic nuclear weapons and the total elimination of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe. The ensuing discussion turned into a free-wheeling negotiation that almost produced a sweeping commitment to ban all nuclear weapons within 10 years--a promise Reagan was ready to make, although most U.S. strategists thought it both unwise and unrealistic.

A similar Gorbachev effort this time could put Bush in a delicate position. A summit that broke up with an aura of failure, as the Iceland meeting did, would start off his relationship with Gorbachev on a sour note.

Bush Approach Different

In the end, the main result of the summit may be to give Gorbachev a clearer picture of the great differences between Bush’s view of the Soviet-American relationship and Reagan’s.

Reagan, since his first summit, at Geneva in 1985, has seemed to put great weight on his personal relationship with Gorbachev.

“In the President’s constellation of factors, that man-to-man contact was far and away the most important,” then-White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan wrote later. Reagan has a “basic and abiding belief that two men of good will could move the world together if they could only speak as one human being to another,” Regan wrote.

At the Washington summit, aides said, Reagan even asked Gorbachev to let them call each other “Ron” and “Mikhail.”

Reagan’s view is reminiscent of that held by another American President who dominated Washington more by the force of his personality than by his grasp of policy details. Franklin D. Roosevelt often dismayed his advisers by insisting that his personal relationship with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin could allow them to reach successful agreements.

History’s Judgment Negative

History has recorded a fairly negative judgment on Roosevelt’s faith in the power of personality so far as Stalin is concerned and many foreign policy experts take a similarly dim view of Reagan’s approach. Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, for example, has said that U.S.-Soviet disputes “cannot be removed by the personal relationship between two leaders and it is not in our interest to create the impression that they can be.”

Bush, for his part, seems to share some of that skepticism. While he talks often about having met world leaders, his usual emphasis is not that his friendships enable him to charm others into moving away from their own vital interests but that his experience makes him better able to detect foreign leaders’ treachery.

“In general,” said Sonnenfeldt, the Bush-Gorbachev relationship that will begin this week “at either extreme is not likely to be as emotional as it was with Reagan. When things go well, it’ll be less romantic. When things go badly, it will be less emotional.”