REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Bush’s Budget Tour Mixes Theme of War, Issues of Peace

At 10:46 a.m. Thursday, President Bush, wearing his favorite macho grin and a pilot’s leather flight jacket, was hunched over the electronic warfare display in the cramped cockpit of a B-1B bomber on the runway of a Strategic Air Command base in Omaha, Neb.

Three and a half hours later, the same President Bush, now wearing suit jacket and grandfatherly demeanor, was surrounded by children at the Head Start day-care center in the St. Aloysius Family Service Center here in Columbus.

With the ease of Mr. Rogers donning his cardigan sweater and sneakers to begin his children’s television show, George Bush slipped comfortably between the theme of war and the issues of peace on Thursday as he completed a three-day, cross-country trip intended to provide visual reinforcement to his campaign to maintain defense spending “in a time of uncertainty.”

On Tuesday, Bush visited soldiers training in California’s Mojave Desert for war against a Soviet force. On Wednesday, he toured the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, a center for Strategic Defense Initiative research to develop a space-based missile defense system.

And on Thursday, touring Omaha’s Offutt Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command headquarters, he spoke by telephone hookup with the folks who are supposed to be ready for the real thing: the men and women in buried capsules at SAC bases who would launch the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the event of a nuclear war, and the crews that would fly the bombers.

Patched through SAC’s communications network to Air Force crews stationed around the globe, Bush faced the seemingly contradictory aims of preparing for war in a time of rare optimism about peace.

“As we push for a major new arms agreement with the Soviets, to increase stability we will continue to modernize strategic forces,” the President said.

He spoke from the SAC Command Operations Center, nicknamed “The Underground,” 40 feet below the Earth’s surface and encased in steel to resist the communications-disrupting electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast.

Giving the nuclear deterrence offered by the Strategic Air Command credit “for the historical changes we are seeing in the Soviet Union,” Bush told the air crews: “Keep ‘em flying.” And for the missile crews, there was this reminder: “The pointy end is up.”

From this updated land of Dr. Strangelove, where the President strolled past a B-52 equipped with mock-ups of just the sort of air-launched cruise missiles that U.S. and Soviet negotiators are working to eliminate, Bush later found himself in the cinder-block preschool classroom in Columbus.

Gone were the menacing bombers of the morning, painted in mottled gray and green camouflage. Now the President was nose-to-nose with the smiling, if anxious, faces of little children on a sunny afternoon, in a room decorated with red and white paper cutouts of hearts for Valentine’s Day.

The Head Start program--for which the President is seeking a $500-million, or 36%, increase nationally--offered Bush a counterpoint to his daily hammering away at defense issues.

It is just the sort of budget decision he likes to cite when he points to his pledge to make the United States a “kinder, gentler” nation.

Asked by a reporter when he would provide maximum funding for the program, he said: “We’ve proposed the whole thing.”

Actually, by his own account two weeks ago, the budget request would allow the program to reach 70% of the nation’s disadvantaged 4-year-olds--a figure that falls well short of the entire population of impoverished preschool youngsters.

Indeed, it was not the easiest of trips for the President, a man who seems to draw energy just from climbing aboard an airplane and flying somewhere--anywhere. It is something he has been doing at least once a week since the start of the year, with no letup in sight.

By the start of the third day of the journey, Bush found himself eating Special K cereal in honor of Nebraska Gov. Kay A. Orr, at whose reelection campaign fund-raising breakfast he was the central attraction.

But he stumbled twice as he completed his speech, first as he told a story about the man he called “America’s greatest writer,” whose name he pronounced “Mark Train” instead of Twain.

As for the woman for whom he was campaigning, he told his audience: “Thanks for your support for Fay.”

Nor was it an easy trip for the President’s staff. After more than a year in office, aides found themselves still plagued with the logistical glitches that they encountered during their successful 1988 presidential campaign, and their early months in the White House.

Sound systems were flawed, schedules weren’t prepared until late at night, and security personnel had not been clued in to the movements of the press accompanying the President, resulting in frayed tempers all around.

But perhaps more significantly, and certainly more substantively, Bush kept the focus on military operations and the tough battle his Administration faces in seeking to secure $295 billion for military expenses in the next fiscal year--a prospect that is complicated by the fact that even as he carried on his budget campaign, the very forces the Pentagon would fight appeared less menacing each day.