Will Be Working at White House : Quayle Abandons Plans to Concentrate on Capitol

Vice President Dan Quayle, continuing to flesh out what his role in the new Administration will be, Tuesday made a round of calls on Capitol Hill but said that he has abandoned earlier thoughts of making such visits a dominant part of his job.

For weeks before being sworn in, Quayle had toyed with the idea of spending most of his time at the Capitol, serving as President Bush’s “eyes and ears” in Congress and trying to influence deliberations in the Senate by exercising the vice president’s little-used powers as presiding officer.

Will Be ‘Downtown’

Tuesday, however, he told reporters that “most of my time is going to be spent downtown” at the White House. Having met with Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), Quayle realizes that “the powers of the presiding officer are extremely limited,” said his press secretary, David Beckwith. And as for being the eyes and ears, Quayle said: “I’m going to be as effective in getting that kind of intelligence and information from down there as up here.”

Instead, Quayle will be fulfilling more traditional vice presidential duties, including foreign trips, the first of which will come next week, the White House announced Tuesday. The trip, Quayle joked in a meeting with House Republican leaders, will be for a happy event rather than a funeral--the swearing-in of Venezuela’s new president, Carlos Andres Perez.

After a day in Venezuela, Quayle will stop briefly in El Salvador to deliver a message of good wishes from Bush to ailing President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

The trip, Quayle said, “will be a good signal and symbol” of the importance the United States places on Venezuela’s tradition of democratic elections. In addition, he said, he hopes to “have some bilateral discussions with other leaders while I’m there.”

But he replied with an abrupt “no” when asked if he would meet with representatives of Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government.

Stern Lecture

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan sent Bush on a mission to El Salvador. Bush at the time delivered a stern lecture to that country’s military and civilian leaders about the need to end right-wing “death squad” violence. This time, however, Quayle’s mission is far less sensitive, simply to deliver a message of the “friendship and concern the United States has always had for El Salvador,” said White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

On Capitol Hill, Quayle presided at a brief news conference, then was photographed in a series of meetings with House and Senate leaders, including Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas, who kept him waiting for half an hour.

While the sessions were largely courtesy calls, complete with lighthearted chatter about golf games and football tickets, they fit in with the Administration strategy of keeping Quayle in the public eye in positive settings, an attempt to counteract the negative images with which he was barraged during the fall election campaign.

Quayle’s decision to stay “downtown,” meanwhile, appears to be part of his own strategy to maximize the access he will have to White House policy-making. The idea of spending large amounts of time on Capitol Hill had been advocated by several senior Republicans, including Howard H. Baker Jr., the former Senate majority leader who served for a time as chief of staff in the Reagan White House. So far, Quayle seems to be having considerable access to the President, meeting seven times with Bush on Monday and four times on Tuesday, Beckwith said.