Bush Refuses to Let Superpower Summit Spoil Holiday Weekend : Foreign affairs: The President spends the days before Gorbachev’s arrival on the fairway instead of in the briefing room. ‘I don’t detect that he’s a crammer,’ one White House official observes.

Four days before Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrives in Washington, the President of the United States was on the fairway Saturday, joined by his secretary of transportation--the two of them aggressively pursuing a weekend of recreation.

The President’s predilection for golf in even the foulest of weather has led him to the links in near gales and wintry gloom. But on this day, he was blessed with crystalline sunshine on a becalmed afternoon at the Maine seashore.

If the weather was remarkable for the President’s four-day Memorial Day holiday, his golf game was not, and the topics of the day--Soviet SS-18 missiles, the dilemma posed by German reunification, the Kremlin’s objections to Baltic independence and the obstacles to greater U.S.-Soviet trade--were just so many pages in the thick briefing books he carried up from Washington.

Is this any way to get ready for a superpower summit?

If you are George Bush, it most certainly is.

“I don’t detect that he’s a crammer,” a senior White House official said Saturday in a world-class display of understatement.

It is to Kennebunkport and hamlets like it up and down the rocky coast that many of the well-heeled residents of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington and their suburbs have flocked each summer for the better part of the century. Although schools do not let out for several more weeks, and the nighttime temperatures still dictate an extra blanket on the bed, the Memorial Day weekend marks the start of The Season--for the innkeepers, lobster shacks and T-shirt salesclerks who depend on the steady flow of summer people. And for George Bush, too.

Just as Ronald Reagan returned to California for rejuvenation throughout his eight years in the presidency, Bush recharges himself in Kennebunkport. He just does it at a pace that would wear out the batteries on others.

So this is what he did Saturday:

* He reviewed his national security and intelligence briefing, a daily report updating him on events around the globe.

* Aboard his blue-hulled speedboat Fidelity, he crashed about the North Atlantic, through a moderate chop that lapped against the shores of his storybook home.

* He played tennis on his private court. (He won, he claimed).

* He played horseshoes. (Ditto).

* He played golf, of course. (Ditto).

And it was on the golf course--the first tee of the Cape Arundel Golf Club, to be exact--where the business of recreation and the business of the presidency collided.

In the days before the summit, which gets down to business Thursday after Gorbachev’s Wednesday evening arrival in Washington, the air is fairly electric with signal-sending.

In the view of Administration officials, Gorbachev’s seemingly alarming threat on Friday--to pull the Soviet Union back from talks intended to reduce conventional arms in Europe if the West persists in its demand that a unified Germany retain West Germany’s membership in NATO--was pre-summit posturing intended to send a message of resolution directed as much to his own right flank and still-powerful Soviet military professionals as to the West.

Reacting to it for the first time in public Saturday, Bush changed his approach not one iota from what he had said Thursday, one day before the threat was aired.

“Now that’s . . . a subject for real discussion, and my job is to convince him that there is no threat to the Soviet Union from a united Germany in NATO,” Bush told reporters as he was about to tee off.

“Really I can make the case that it is in their interest. So that’s what we’ll be talking about,” Bush said.

“They have a different position than we do right now. I think it’s going to take a while before we have agreement on how a post-German-unification Europe looks,” he said.

Eight months ago, the presidency, presidential golf and superpower summitry were similarly entwined on the same golf course.

On a blustery September afternoon, Bush took a telephone call there from Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who reported from Jackson Hole, Wyo., that he and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze had just reached agreement on holding the summit conference that is about to begin.

Did he crack open his briefing books? Yes, reported deputy national security adviser Robert M. Gates.

But did he spend much time with them? Bush was asked on the golf course.

“Not much,” he confided.

“Brought two big fat ones,” he added, with a disapproving frown that suggested he thought he should be spending more time hitting the books.

The seasons have nearly gone full cycle since the summit was first announced. In the late spring of northern New England, the forsythia, tulips and jonquils that faded two months ago in Washington are painting the landscape with precise dots of red and yellow.

In the interim since September, Bush has met at the storm-tossed Malta summit with the Soviet leader. His secretary of state has met in Washington and Moscow with Shevardnadze. While a summit may focus attention on the superpower relationship, the issues with which it deals are never a great distance from the top of a presidential agenda.

Thus, positions are constantly being updated, and although the President has met in recent weeks with a variety of academics and other experts from within the Administration, preparations for this week’s meetings are “careful but fairly relaxed,” a Bush aide said. “There’s not a rush-rush. It’s a fairly steady diet.”

The final briefings will wait until Tuesday and Wednesday, after Bush returns to the White House.