Host With the Most Sets Fast Pace for White House Protocol : Government: Chief of Protocol Joseph Verner Reed has battled dripping faucets, barking dogs and political waters to serve his President.

“OK, get this scene,” Protocol Chief Joseph Verner Reed instructs his current chronicler.

“Blair House dining room. President of Philippines at the head of a sit-down dinner for 18. Everything to perfection: glass, china, silver, flowers, guest list--including Cabinet and senators.

“OK, are you ready?” he asks, about to resume his rapid-fire burst of staccato. “You will not believe this. Somebody left the bathtub running upstairs! This was not a drip. This was not a glass of water. This was Niagara. This was an Indonesian downpour!”

And how did the nation’s chief host, protector of all things proper and right, handle the crisis?

Says he, simply: “Equanimity under duress.”

He let it drip.

No one expects the ship to sink, but one moderate rainstorm not unlike the one at Blair House three weeks ago could certainly dampen Saturday’s historic Seabound Summit. After all, who would unobtrusively carry President George Bush’s umbrella when he strides from U.S. to Soviet cruiser? Who would pick him up if he slips on deck? Who would produce the Dramamine if National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft starts to get that rocky feeling?

No doubt it would be Joseph Verner Reed, the U. S. chief of protocol, Host With the Most, the man who must know Haviland from Herend at a glance, never confuse his forks and always stay on top of rhymes and rituals.

“You don’t go to the Middle East with an owl--bad luck,” he lets you know with a straight face. “And if, in your innocence, you present a letter opener (to foreign hosts), it would be a catastrophic--a threatening gesture.

“And never will I forget, as long as I live, the 40th President of the United States offering a luncheon for the king of Morocco,” he says, still exasperated at the memory of Ronald Reagan’s New York gathering for King Hassan II during Reed’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Morocco. “You’re not going to believe this but it’s true. The first course was what? Melon and prosciutto!”

The Moslem religion prohibits the consumption of pork.

In one of his many elegant Savile Row suits, he sits in his office at the State Department and rolls his eyes heavenward.

“The king,” he says, “looked at me across the table with knowing eyes.”

Joseph Reed’s affectations and flamboyance are renowned and have gotten him labeled everything from “devoted patriot” to “nitwit.”

He’s also been called a very close buddy of the 41st President of the United States, a tie that goes back to their parents and social milieu in Greenwich, Conn.

Which is why those who do not cotton to Reed’s bursting-at-the-seams style feel much safer telling you that in confidence.

When he was Ambassador to Morocco from 1981 to 1985, he once sprinted through a Moroccan marketplace during a visit by George Bush shouting, “The vice president is here”--as the motorcade followed 100 feet behind.

He’s enormously rich, wears a broad-brimmed fedora and has acquired the nickname “Cuffs” for his many pairs of fancy cuff links--and his habitual shooting of his crisp cuff to meticulously frame his suits.

He was not hard to spot among the gray pinstripes and white button-downs earlier this month, listening to Lech Walesa on the House floor. Looking more regal than the Prince of Wales himself, Reed glowed in a glen-plaid suit and bold red-striped shirt with white collar.

And while most White House aides adore parceling out presidential tie clips, Reed, the master of gestures big and small, has amused Washington by handing out the same personalized plastic ballpoints he’s been giving away since his days with David Rockefeller.

After a 20-year career as Rockefeller’s gatekeeper and vice president at the Chase Manhattan Bank, his controversial walk through Morocco as ambassador and a stint as the undersecretary for political affairs at the United Nations, Joseph Reed, 52, may have found his life’s work in the fussing, primping, traveling and very proper world of protocol.

“People have asked me, why did I step down as the highest-ranking American (in the Secretariat) at the United Nations and accept chief of protocol?” he says, “and the answer is very simply, it was my President, my friend and my nation.”

He’s serious. And very serious about the business of protocol, which he insists entails much more than just fancy table settings and foreign travel.

“Protocol was invented by the Chinese,” he explains, “in order to establish a set of rules of order that sets the stage of the conduct of substantive diplomacy. These arrangements are extremely important. . . . Setting the stage . . . is very important to a nation.”

Let’s consider JVR’s Rules for Proper Stage Settings and Success.

* No. 1: Mix With the Middle Class.

For all his privileged upbringing and theatrics, Reed did learn one critical lesson on his way up: Never step on the crickets. They’ll get you on the way down. He’s a master at receding into the woodwork, sharing credit and avoiding the dangerous “I” word.

When an important visitor was expected during his years as ambassador to Morocco, according to a former embassy official, Reed would stay up around the clock with his staff, making great demands--but also sharing in the menial tasks if needed. And when the visit was over, everyone received a handwritten thank-you note and a small gift.

“Once, after we put David Rockefeller on a plane, Joseph just collapsed on the ground at the airport, as if to say ‘I’m glad it’s over,’ ” recalls Ted Curran, former deputy chief of mission. “It broke the tension. . . . It made you feel he was one of the guys.”

At the United Nations, where Reed served, first as member of the U. S. delegation, then as the senior American representative on the U. N. staff, he made a special effort to reach out to non-superpower nations.

With the African countries, for example, Reed courted their opinions, called an unusual special session on African concerns, and entertained them grandly at his New York apartment and Denbigh Farm, his Greenwich estate.

“In the end, he makes you feel so obligated to his appeals,” says Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Michael Okeyo, “because he never treats you like a fool. He makes you feel special.”

And when Reed arrived in Washington last February, he pleasantly surprised the White House worker bees who were apprehensive about this scion of WASPdom and wealth.

In a town where proximity to the President means power, the advance team was rendered speechless when, preceding Bush’s very first overseas trip, Reed requested a seat on the backup plane.

“He actually asked for the plane that was not carrying the President,” recalls Stephen Studdert, former assistant to the President for special activities. “It was amazing. It was like ‘Give me instructions and send me in. It doesn’t matter if I’m the quarterback or the water boy.’ ”

No. 2: Let Nothing Interfere With the Show.

When a perpetually barking dog at the adjacent Bulgarian Embassy started interrupting Reed’s dinners in Morocco, the ambassador instructed his staff to feed the animal continually to shut him up.

Last spring, as Reed was in the midst of his protocol confirmation hearings, a caller to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee claimed that Reed also had ordered the dog shot.

Reed has denied this.

“We may have suggested that as a joke,” explains Ted Curran. “And while we may have wanted to shoot him, that option was never considered seriously.”

No. 3: Know Your Guest.

Reed dislikes surprises when entertaining.

When Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto made a state visit to Washington earlier this year, Reed came across Peter Galbraith, a Senate staffer who happened to be a personal friend of Bhutto’s from her Harvard days.

For days preceding Bhutto’s visit, he called Galbraith to seek his counsel, then took Galbraith’s pulse daily during the visit.

Galbraith greatly appreciated the gesture.

But the truth of the matter is that either you take to Reed’s solicitous and exuberant style or you don’t.

And while he’s fond of insisting “I am who I am who I am,” he may have wished he were someone else the day former Sen. Tom Eagleton arrived in Marrakech.

Probably nothing has damaged Reed publicly as much as a letter the Missouri Democrat sent then-Secretary of State George Shultz following his 1982 trip.

The letter, which mysteriously finds its way into print every time Reed is up for a new post, is how many have come to know him in Washington.

Eagleton referred to his host as a “14 karat nitwit.”

“In short,” Eagleton wrote, “he suffers from an acute strain of Yalerock. He runs around the hotel grounds in his Yale jogging suit with Yale emblazoned fore and aft. All he needs is a bulldog to make the act complete.”

Like all stories, this one has two sides.

Reed’s spin doctors insist Eagleton was simply put out when Reed, for all his professed closeness to the Moroccan king, failed to produce a meeting for the senior senator.

“The king was not available,” explains Charles Francis, an executive at the Hill & Knowlton PR firm and a longtime Reed friend. “And Joseph was very dismayed that the senator so rebuffed his hospitality.”

But a Hill aide who was in the traveling party contends that Reed “used poor judgment, and had little sense” of his guest’s increasing ire.

“Why show up in a jogging suit when the senator is wearing a coat and tie?” asked the aide. “Eagleton was clearly miffed he couldn’t see the king, so why rub it in by making it appear that he wasn’t taking the trip seriously?”

Eagleton says he stands by the letter.

And Reed will say only this: “I was only sorry that I could not, as chief of mission, satisfy the aspirations and hopes of the senator of Missouri.”

However, as an aside, he does note that Eagleton, once a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posed no objections to Reed’s confirmation to the U. N. job in 1985, three years after the fateful trip, and in fact voted in favor of Reed’s nomination in committee and on the Senate floor.

* No. 4: Check It Again.

A perfectionist by nature, Reed drives everyone crazy by insisting on dozens of rehearsals--for everything.

He gleefully tells how, during a recent state arrival at the White House, he nudged the military office to check once again the music for that nation’s anthem. Alas, the band was about to strike up the wrong note.

“What did Fred Astaire say when they put the film in the can?” asks Reed. “All the producers said this is great and Fred Astaire came back and said, ‘Let’s do it again.’ ”

No. 5: Wear Comfortable Shoes.

As Rockefeller’s first lieutenant, Reed handled the passports when the two bankers traveled abroad. The former chairman of Chase still marvels over how Reed once rescued him in Zurich after Rockefeller inadvertently wandered into a restricted customs area--sans passport.

“They wouldn’t let me out and they wouldn’t let him in,” recalls Rockefeller. “Finally Joseph leaped over a huge barricade. . . . The man knows how to get things done.”

White House aides agree.

At Emperor Hirohito’s funeral earlier in the year, Bush held a series of back-to-back meetings at the U. S. Embassy in Tokyo with just about every world leader in town. As presidents and prime ministers began to form something of a diplomatic traffic jam, Reed was in his element--an impresario racing between rooms to keep up.

The protocol chief jumps up in his office to demonstrate the scene: Two chairs serve as the drawing room and the library at the embassy. A third chair represents the dining room.

“It was shuttle diplomacy,” he says, explaining that the ultimate challenge was to keep each fellow from seeing the other. After all, says Reed earnestly, “that’s not why they came.”

“Get this scene,” the chief of protocol is instructing again. “The Ellipse. Beautiful fall day. Marine One, through a 21-gun salute, lifts off with President Corazon Aquino heading for Andrews for her departure. Marine Two doors close. Rotary blades up. Lift off. Follows Marine One.

“I get in my car to go back to work. I look around. I find the foreign minister of the Philippines wandering around the monuments . . . HE GOT LOST!

“I leapt out of that car and I did the 500-yard sprint as if I was an 18-year-old. I got hold of a colleague in the military office and he brought Marine Two back and then kept Mrs. Aquino’s helicopter on a sightseeing tour of Washington. Now that was high drama.”

There was some talk earlier in the year that perhaps Permelia Reed (Joseph’s mother) and Dorothy Bush (George’s mother) had gotten together in Hobe Sound--the exclusive Florida enclave developed by Reed’s father--and cooked up this protocol job for Joseph.

“Whole cloth,” says Reed crisply.

Reed first came to the attention of the Reagan White House in 1981 through Rockefeller, who had just retired from Chase Manhattan and believed his former aide-de-camp would be the quintessential protocol chief.

The job ultimately went to Reagan loyalist and pal Lee Annenberg. But Reed was named Ambassador to the Kingdom of Morocco as a consolation prize--a deal cinched by none other than “Poppy” himself.

Bush and Reed go back to Greenwich, where the two families would often convene for gamesmanship at either the Bush home or Denbigh Farm. Their fathers, Prescott and Joseph Sr., were good friends, and their mothers remain close.

“I remember when George Bush was tapped for Skull and Bones,” Reed says of the secret society Bush belonged to at Yale. Reed would have been about 11 when George Bush entered Yale after the war. “We were all sitting anxiously by the telephone at my mother’s house waiting for the news. . . . It was a big excitement. And we raised a glass of orange juice to his success.”

Reed is a direct descendant of Edward Doty, who arrived here on the Mayflower. His financial statement reads like a page out of the New York Stock Exchange, with investments listed for everything from Exxon to Hewlett Packard to IBM.

Those close to him say he spends considerably more than his $80,000-plus salary for things like flowers and gifts. (The pens alone must cover a month’s wages.)

When in Washington, Reed and his wife, Marie, reside at the Watergate. They have two grown daughters.

The Reed wealth comes from grandfather Verner, an early oil-and-mineral man. His father, Joseph, worked the family investments, underwrote Broadway shows and was the major backer of the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Conn., while mother Permelia became the matriarch of Hobe Sound.

Legend has it that Permelia Reed would show her disfavor with house guests by sending them a black sweater when they left--a message that they were not welcome to return.

“Whole cloth!” repeats Reed.

After graduating from Yale in 1961, Reed became private secretary to the president of the World Bank for two years before going to work for Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan.

Reed’s name first entered the public arena in 1979, when Rockefeller dispatched him to assist the ailing shah of Iran. Reed played a major role in bringing the shah into this country for cancer treatment.

Two years later, he was back in the news again when Reagan gave him the Moroccan appointment. “Of all the appointments we made, that one generated the most criticism,” says one high-level Reagan White House official, “because it was so political.”

Indeed, from the start, Reed had a rough go of it.

One former Foreign Service officer who manned the cable desk at the State Department says that foreign service officers would sit around and guffaw at the verbose memos Reed sent.

“I mean, you read these things from all over and they usually say, ‘Met with so and so. Meeting was uneventful. This or that discussed,’ and so on,” says the source. “But Reed’s were like ‘His Royal Wonderful, Gracious Highness, received me today in the grandness of his glorious palace as our flag waved in the Moroccan wind.’ These things were hilarious.”

Histrionics aside, those who worked with Reed in Morocco say they quickly saw Reed’s substance through the style. “I had heard all the stories before I got there,” says one, who asked that his name not be used. “Once I got past his style, I found him very hard-working and eager.”

“The man knocked himself out,” says Curran, Reed’s deputy in Morocco. “He completely modernized the (Voice of America) office in Tangiers, which is critical for transmission to the Soviet Union. . . . He had a great relationship with the king--all of which, I think, is a lot more relevant than how he shoots his cuffs.”

Reed, too, points out that he was greatly appreciated by the Moroccans, receiving the prestigious commendation of the Order of Commander of the Throne--the first non-Moroccan to receive the honor.

And in the end, Morocco was a cakewalk compared with the heat Reed would take at the U. N. for writing a letter to Ronald Reagan criticizing George Shultz’s decision to deny PLO leader Yasser Arafat a visa to address the United Nations.

Reed wants to make it clear that he was serving as an “international civil servant” when as undersecretary general for political affairs, he advocated a visa for Arafat.

Bush was clearly unfazed by the United Nations flap because, as White House aides tell it, Reed was the President’s first and only choice for chief of protocol--just months after the Arafat incident.

And what is the best part of this job for Joseph Verner Reed?

“Serving George Bush, President of the United States, and Mrs. Bush, as a result of their personal request,” he says without missing a beat.

“I am so proud and so privileged to have their confidence. And I must say that every time I participate in an event at the White House, I just can’t help but think how lucky I am to have the coincidence of the relationship between our two families.”