PREVIEW / U.S.--SOVIET SUMMIT : For Gorbachev’s Visit, the Buzzword Is ‘Businesslike’

George Bush is a President who likes to talk with other presidents. He calls them on the telephone. He takes them to baseball games. He meets with them in sunny resorts and rain-soaked harbors. He bounces them over the whitecaps of the North Atlantic aboard his speedboat, Fidelity. For George Bush, these encounters are the very essence of his stewardship of the nation’s foreign policy.

So why are arrangements for the May 30 summit with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev so low-key? “It’s a normal state visit,” said a senior White House official. In fact, it will be accomplished, he added, “with very little glitz.”

“Businesslike” has become a popular buzzword to describe the sort of summit that the White House is trying to orchestrate. This meeting, said one senior official, should provide “an example of substance over style.” In short, travel is out and treaties are in. Administration officials say that a visit by the two presidents to Kennebunkport, Me., where Bush has a vacation house, has just about been ruled out.

“You want to maximize the time for meetings and conversations, and too much moving around minimizes the time for discussions,” said a White House official.

Instead, according to his aides, Bush wants to use the summit not only to spend time with Gorbachev but also to sign a host of treaties. U.S. and Soviet officials are conducting negotiations on 10 topics--ranging from nuclear, chemical and conventional arms control to trade and maritime issues--in the hope they can have a stack of agreements ready for signing.

Gorbachev’s crackdown against the Soviet republic of Lithuania for declaring its independence also has militated against choreographing the summit for high drama. Lithuania “damps down a lot of creative ideas you might come up with to highlight the summit,” one official said. “There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for planning spectacular things.”

At the same time, White House aides say, Bush plans not to lambaste Gorbachev publicly over his Lithuania policy.

Gorbachev likewise has an interest in a businesslike summit as opposed to a theatrical one. At home, his challenges include not only the Lithuanian secession movement but also growing dissatisfaction with the Soviet economy. With a Communist Party congress awaiting him upon his return, Gorbachev can ill afford to engage in anything other than serious discussions with Bush, White House officials say. This does not rule out the possibility that the Soviet leader will once again, as in 1987, leap from his limousine to converse with passers-by on a busy Washington street. But it does suggest that Gorbachev has no more interest than Bush in spending a chunk of the three-day summit going to Kennebunkport.

Some change of scenery is likely, however. Bush and Gorbachev are likely to break away from Washington to spend time at Camp David, the rustic presidential retreat in Maryland.

Gorbachev will not be the first Soviet leader to make a stop at Camp David. Nikita S. Khrushchev, whose U.S. grand tour took him from New York to Los Angeles, discovered Camp David’s charms 31 years ago.

“I remember a conversation I once had with President (Dwight D.) Eisenhower when I was a guest a his dacha at Camp David,” the former Soviet leader wrote in his memoirs. “We went for walks together and had some useful informal talks.”

Camp David may lack Kennebunkport’s New England charm, but it offers something that the White House finds far more valuable: a peaceful setting that conjures up images of world leaders working out their differences.