Bush Plans Talks With Thatcher, Mitterrand

President Bush, stepping up his personal diplomacy, will meet separately next month with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand to discuss the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, it was announced Wednesday.

Bush also will confer with Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki next Wednesday at the White House.

Bush will meet with Thatcher in Bermuda on April 13 and with Mitterrand in Florida on April 19.

“As the year unfolds, the President will continue to consult closely with his counterparts in the Atlantic community on the historic changes in Europe,” presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

Roman Popadiuk, White House deputy press secretary, said, “This is part of the consultations he’s doing with Western allies and as well as Eastern European leaders.”

Issues expected to be discussed include the rapid move toward reunification of Germany and the emergence of democractic governments from former Communist states in Eastern Europe.

Since the beginning of the year, Bush has met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Czechoslovak Prime Minister Vaclav Havel, Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, former Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita and Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey, who is president of the European Council.

In addition, Bush held a December summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

After a day of talks with Thatcher, Bush will stay overnight on Bermuda. He will return to Washington on April 14.

Fitzwater said the precise location of the talks with Mitterrand had not been determined, although it probably will be somewhere in southern Florida.

On April 20, a day after the meeting with Mitterrand, Bush is scheduled to make a speech in Orlando and then fly to Islamorada, in the Florida Keys, for three days of vacation.

The meeting with Thatcher will be their third one-on-one meeting after talks last year in London and at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

Bush saw Mitterrand during the economic summit in Paris last summer and again in December on the French Caribbean island of St. Martin.

In London, a spokeswoman at Thatcher’s 10 Downing St. office said the prime minister had been due to meet Bush in July, when a seven-nation economic summit is planned in Houston, but the April meeting was set up “by mutual agreement because of the pace of world events.”