Sununu Well Suited for Tough-Guy Role

The phrase was political dynamite. Speaking to a group of Republicans last fall, White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu called anti-drug proposals put forward by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) “mostly plagiarism.”

The barb cut deep because Biden had been driven from the 1988 presidential race by charges that he plagiarized a campaign speech from a British politician. A Sununu aide proceeded to rub in the insult by circulating the boss’s remark to reporters. The hot-tempered Biden hit the roof, and Sununu appeared to have needlessly alienated a key Senate committee chairman.

But several days ago, when the White House needed the vote of one more senator to defeat a pivotal amendment to the Clean Air Act, Sununu called on Biden, who had been counted as favoring the amendment. When the roll was called, Biden voted the Administration’s way. Bush won, 50 to 49.

That episode says a lot about George Bush’s right-hand man. In Washington, personality matters. But power matters more, and John Sununu has it.

The former governor of New Hampshire, who had no Washington experience, was at first dismissed even by many congressional Republicans as “basically a country bumpkin,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita). But today, he has emerged as Bush’s No. 1 adviser.

From his corner office a few yards west of Bush’s, Sununu pursues the President’s modest domestic policy goals with immodest ferocity. When Bush took office, most forecasters expected conciliation, compromise and only limited success.

But 14 months later, the Administration’s record looks far more aggressive--and far better. The President has made each of his 10 vetoes stick despite the heavily Democratic Congress.

“Bush has always liked to be surrounded by tough people,” said one senior White House official. “It enables him to appear softer and more reasonable.”

And the 5-foot 9-inch, 190-pound, 50-year-old Sununu fits right into that pattern.

Machiavelli wrote that a leader must usually choose between being liked and being feared. With Sununu at Bush’s side, the White House gets both.

Sununu has placated conservative activists by blocking some appointments. He has served as a convenient foil for White House publicists who often prefer to portray Bush as less conservative than he really is.

And he has settled a few scores.

Proud of his background as a state chief executive--his memo pads bear the words, “From: Governor John H. Sununu”--the chief of staff delights in proving that he can prevail despite his inexperience in Washington.

Proud, too, of his training as an engineer--a doctorate from MIT with a thesis on fluid mechanics--Sununu is inclined to use his scientific background to overpower those who lack it. He can appear insensitive, even dismissive, toward those whose approach to issues lacks his analytic rigor.

Unlike many senior government officials, he seldom tries to conceal his views or cover his tracks. Earlier this year, for example, Sununu criticized Congress for giving “anybody with an idea a platform” even if their policy views were not backed by good science. “You are much too fair,” he told legislators at a Republican conference.

“He tends to react very quickly, sometimes before he’s heard the whole story, because he’s such a quick study,” said one aide, echoing a comment made by several other officials, most of whom agreed to discuss their boss only on condition of anonymity.

Witty (sometimes biting), tough (sometimes mean), Sununu and his temper have become a popular subject in Washington. In a recent dinner speech, Bush joked that he had to remind Sununu during the Colombian drug summit in February to “bite the taco, shake the hand.”

Sununu himself, in an interview, described his approach as “the courtesy of clarity. There are times when you want people to know unambiguously that you’re not happy with what they did. You can spend two hours in a long circuitous discussion. Or you can say: ‘Dammit, that’s not right, go back and do it again.’ ”

Sununu has a “historic inability to suffer fools, and in Washington there are a lot of fools,” said Jay Smith, the Washington political consultant who managed Sununu’s New Hampshire campaigns. From the beginning, Smith said, “the question was whether Sununu would be able to play the game.”

At the outset of the Administration, the accepted wisdom in Washington was that he could not. He might serve as the Administration’s in-house conservative, it was thought, but he would be eclipsed by Bush’s longtime friend, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and by Baker’s protege, Budget Director Richard G. Darman.

“There was a perception that I was an outsider and, therefore, would have trouble coping . . . a perception that nobody can survive in Washington that is not a Washington product,” Sununu said.

Critics also focused on the aides he hired. His staff members are still widely characterized, as one Administration official put it, as “nice guys, but . . . not independent heavyweights.”

Indeed, “the first month or two were a little bit rocky,” conceded Ron Kaufman, the deputy director of the White House personnel office and one of the longtime Sununu associates sprinkled through the Administration’s ranks.

When the Senate rejected John Tower, Bush’s first nominee as defense secretary, many critics laid part of the blame on Sununu. The chief of staff, they said, was too slow to respond to signals that Tower’s support in the Senate was crumbling. Today, Sununu concedes at least part of that criticism.

The White House depended too heavily on vote estimates by congressional leaders, he said. “We’ve discovered we have to do our own vote counting in certain conditions.”

There have been other glitches as well, but overall, the White House staff system now draws little criticism.

And within the White House compound, said Rohrabacher, who served as a mid-level White House staff member during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, “what you don’t see is a lot of (the) acrimony and backbiting . . . that took place at this time in the Ronald Reagan White House.”

Kenneth M. Duberstein, Reagan’s last chief of staff, said of Sununu: “He is filling the essential ingredient of being a good chief of staff, and that is to satisfy your constituency of one. From every indication, John Sununu is doing things precisely the way George Bush wants them done.”

Working for an emphatically “hands on” President--Bush likes to see everything from the details of legislation to the play list for the White House tennis courts--Sununu has developed a White House staff with minimal structure and only one important piece of hierarchy: He is on top. Even Darman, although he has become a key ally of Sununu, has taken a subordinate place.

“It would be hard to overstate his influence,” a senior official said of Sununu. “Look at the way he has the President’s day organized. He’s the first guy to see him in the morning and the last to see him at night. . . . He’s the lens through which everything that goes to the President passes.”

The job of chief of staff has evolved and grown in power as the complexities of the presidency and the size of the staff have expanded. To Sununu falls the task of steering the President away from political hot water, reining in the independent Cabinet members, making sure the President is presented with a wide series of policy options and keeping track of the many avenues Bush follows in reaching out to friends and advisers across the country.

“There are a million things on his plate,” said a senior official. The big question is “whether he can keep it up and whether we’ll pay a price for that dependence.”

So far, the approach appears to be working.

“The Administration has stolen a page from the Democrats on issue after issue, from drug education to clean air, and made it very difficult for the Democrats to develop a cohesive strategy,” said Stuart E. Eizenstat, domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “They’re always there with enough to take the bite out of the issue.”

“That doesn’t happen by accident,” Eizenstat said. “Sununu is the one who has really orchestrated that.”

With Bush devoting the bulk of his time to foreign affairs, Sununu has been the chief strategist shaping the Administration’s domestic agenda. And while that agenda shows little indication of what Bush once called “the vision thing,” the White House has been successful in achieving the goals Bush has set.

The centerpiece of Sununu’s strategy is an aggressive wielding of the President’s authority to veto legislation and a willingness--backed by enough congressional Republicans to make the vetoes stick--to threaten legislative gridlock if Bush’s objections are not met.

The 10 vetoes in Bush’s first year in office compare to the two that Carter and Reagan used in that period. The vetoes have forced congressional Democrats to retreat; Bush’s veto of minimum wage legislation forced Congress to accept a smaller increase closer to White House preferences.

“The Reagan Administration was famous for saying they’d veto almost everything and vetoing almost nothing,” noted one White House official. For Bush, the veto has become a “crucial strategic tool.”

Sununu himself said Congress “can’t feel that this White House is a pushover. . . . I don’t think that the constitutional balance between executive and legislative is intended to force you to take bad legislation just because some of the things you want are included.”

What critics have questioned--particularly on environmental issues--is whether the policy choices being made are those of the President or his strong-willed chief of staff.

In recent months, Sununu has held up approval of an agreement on wetlands protection that had been reached by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers. He has delayed a decision on whether to ban oil drilling off the California coast. He helped tone down a Bush speech on global warming that EPA officials had helped draft.

Initially, the White House seemed happy to maintain a public perception that Sununu was the Administration’s environmental holdout. But when repeated stories began to foster the image that Bush was being led about by his chief of staff, Administration officials changed their tune.

Bush personally tried to dispel the impression “that Sununu is putting words into the mouth of the President.” Sununu, he said, is “very respectful of where I want to see us go in terms of federal participation in environmental matters, also knows that I am determined not to shut this country down and throw everybody out of work.”

Sununu, while not denying that he has strong views, insists that he plays the role of an “honest broker” within the White House. “When the President has questions, I know he’ll ask,” Sununu said. “I wait until he cares to hear my opinions.”

On the environment, Bush made campaign promises that he has been reluctant to redeem. Allowing Sununu to serve as what White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater called his environmental “lightning rod” has helped Bush escape severe political damage.

On some issues, most notably abortion, Sununu, who has eight children, “holds down the right flank,” as one White House official put it. On others, such as the minimum wage and the Clean Air Act, Sununu has taken a middle position on the spectrum of Bush’s advisers, a relatively narrow band in which there are no liberals.

But what makes Sununu stand out among the relatively colorless White House staff is his personality.

Nothing in his appearance signals the snarling watchdog that is his image in Washington. He greets questions about his temper with a beatific smile. His parents, whose last name means “little bird” in colloquial Arabic, emigrated from Lebanon to Cuba, where Sununu was born in 1939.

Sununu’s scientific leanings--he delights in teasing himself with impossibly complex mathematical word puzzles and writing seemingly interminable equations in a precise engineer’s hand--are uncommon in Washington.

“I’ve often said I’m going to die an old engineer, not an old politician,” he said. He often approaches issues differently from the lawyers who dominate Washington’s top ranks.

“An engineer will do an analysis and work things out and then draw a conclusion,” he said. As for the law, he said: “There is a profession where the conclusion is drawn first and then the rationalization and the analysis follow.”

Sununu’s personality recurrently threatens to become a liability. One Bush adviser recalls watching as Sununu glanced at a magazine story that quoted a member of Congress who called him a “mean SOB.”

By this account, Sununu perked up: “Heh, look. Now that’s what I regard as a compliment.” Sununu says he doesn’t recall the incident.

“I don’t feel I have a darker side,” he said. But few who have seen him in operation--friend or foe--agree.

In one New Hampshire campaign, opponents circulated a button with Sununu’s picture and a caption: “Will Rogers never met this man,” a reference to the famous comedian’s line that he “never met a man I didn’t like.”

Sununu delights in wisecracks. Told at one meeting that the Senate planned to take up a bill on high school dropouts, he responded: “Don’t they have a conflict of interest?”

He does his homework and demands that others do, too. He is a big man when it comes to the small print.

“He does tend to scare a lot of people,” another close aide says. “He’ll fire questions at you rapid fire. He’ll argue with you.”

Much of the temper is for effect. But not all.

“I’ve seen a lot of people cower,” the aide said. “You shouldn’t. He’s like a horse, he senses it. He can’t help himself.”

At a White House meeting last fall, two high-ranking Commerce Department officials arrived to brief Sununu on a study designed to justify regulations that would require shrimp fishermen to use “turtle excluder devices” on their nets. Fish and wildlife officials and environmental groups say the Kemp Ridley sea turtle has become an endangered species, in part, because so many are killed each year in shrimp nets.

Sununu, the engineer, had read the study beforehand and found its methodology and evidence weak. “He walked in, slammed the thing down on the table and said: ‘This is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever se” recalled one aide.

“He ripped them to shreds,” recalled another aide. “It was almost a game to him.”

Sununu himself, recalling that incident, said his remarks “weren’t heated . . . they were pointed.”

His tough-guy approach, said one former occupant of Sununu’s office, has worked so far but carries longer-term risks. “He hasn’t developed close friends, including members of the Cabinet. Part of that is the occupational hazard of being chief of staff. You’re not only the spear thrower. Your job is to catch the incoming.”

So far, however, Sununu has dodged his opponents’ spears. One White House aide remembers encountering Sununu’s wife, Nancy, during a recent period of controversy over Sununu’s role on environmental issues.

“I told Mrs. Sununu I was worried about her husband,” the aide recalled. “She said: ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s having the time of his life.’ ”