REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Bush Diplomatic Style: ‘Laid Back’

Diplomacy, as offered by George Bush: Come on over. Informal. Talk about it.

That diplomacy, in a style unique to the man conducting it, is coming out of the White House these days in staccato maxi-bursts that mimic the monologues--the verbal shards of thought, they’ve been called--of the President himself.

Helmut Kohl? Up to Camp David.

Toshiki Kaifu? How about next weekend? Meet in Rancho Mirage.

Every day, it seems, brings a new example of the way this President--the man who took Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to opening day at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium to watch the Orioles and Red Sox--likes to run his White House, the nation’s foreign policy, and even his leisure time.

This weekend, they all came together in a sand-trap summit.

That is why Toshiki Kaifu, a 59-year-old Japanese politician trying to ride the tiger of a surging Japan while balancing the demands of his own constituency and that of an increasingly wary United States, traveled more than 10 hours from Tokyo to find himself snaking along in an armor-plated Cadillac limousine between towering walls of hedges along streets named Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. Waiting at the end of the ride through the desert was an informal dinner with Bush and senior aides.

If there was anything atypical about this weekend’s version of global Life with Poppy--a one-time nickname of the President’s--it was the setting.

To be sure, Walter H. Annenberg, the publishing magnate and former ambassador to Britain, has played host for years at his Sunnylands estate to Presidents (Nixon and Reagan, among them) and royalty (Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, to name two), so there was nothing unusual about President Bush’s coming out for the weekend or about Kaifu’s having dinner there with the President. Nor, given Annenberg’s hospitality for prime ministers and potentates and the extent of his desert domain, was there anything out of the ordinary in Bush’s readiness to invite Kaifu to dinner at someone else’s house.

But Rancho Mirage, in general--and a 32,600-square-foot home decorated with Cezannes, Van Goghs, Renoirs, a Rodin bronze of Eve and flowers from two greenhouses on the 250-acre property, in particular--just don’t have the flavor of the other presidential hangouts: Kennebunkport, Me., the prim, understated summer hometown of the Bush family diagonally across the continent; Beeville, Tex., the rough-edged South Texas town where a Bush buddy keeps a hunting ranch that the President visits each late December, or Islamorada, the little town in the Florida Keys where Bush likes to take up the challenge of reducing the Gulf of Mexico’s population of the wily bonefish.

No, this is much more of a resort--a community where tennis and golf and spas are the raison d’etre ; where people live, literally, on the grounds of their country clubs, like the Morningside Country Club where the Bush-Kaifu talks were held. In Rancho Mirage, garages have separate little doors for golf carts; the carts bear markings of prestige (reserved for Bush and Kaifu were identical carts with shiny grills that replicated the distinct front of a Rolls-Royce), and house guests, particularly visiting heads of state, don’t have to share the bathrooms.

The President’s visit here was originally scheduled as a nearly 48-hour vacation at the end of two hectic travel days that included Republican fund-raising events--lunch one day in Staten Island, N.Y., and dinner in San Francisco, in a typical Bush itinerary--and four speeches in Southern California.

Instead of vacation, Bush spent Friday afternoon and evening with Kaifu, and met with him again Saturday morning and at lunch, after having awakened him in the middle of the night just a week earlier to invite him here. It wasn’t until after Kaifu left that Bush had time for golf on Annenberg’s private course.

Rancho Mirage is accustomed to such comings and goings, and appeared to take the 25-hour summit in stride. But in nearby Palm Springs, Mayor Sonny Bono pronounced the events “totally awesome,” and his wife, Mary, was reported by the Desert Sun to have picked out the outfit she wore to await the arrival of Bush aboard Air Force One on Friday with an eye to coordinating her colors with that of the jet, which bears a distinctive Raymond Loewy design in blue, white and silver.

For all the focus during the talks on the U.S.-Japanese relationship, an undercurrent was the U.S. public’s view of that relationship.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll taken in January, one-quarter of those surveyed expressed “generally unfriendly” feelings about Japan, an increase from 19% last June and 8% in 1985.

And Bush went out of his way at a news conference overlooking the Morningside Country Club golf course after the talks to tell his American audience that his visitor’s readiness to fly over to the United States at a relative moment’s notice “should be interpreted in this manner: that the Japanese feel this relationship is very important.”