Bush’s Doctor Is Not the Silent Type : White House: Burton Lee looks after the health of his friend, President Bush. He also offers opinions on other health-related topics.

When President Bush went to violence-torn Colombia to talk about drugs, no one worried more about his safety than White House physician Burton Lee.

“I thought it was a dangerous play,” Lee said. “I didn’t particularly want him to go. I thought it was asking for it.”

Lee and his staff of 16, together with a handful of civilian and military surgeons, set up a seagoing trauma center on a U.S. aircraft carrier. It was equipped to deal with casualties up to the level of what Lee likened to “invasion catastrophes.”

The well-guarded President was not his only worry.

“One of the principal concerns of the people in the White House was that we thought the press corps was going to get it. I was set up for 20 or 30 of the press corps if they had gotten hit,” he said.

To Lee’s relief, the facility went unused during the one-day presidential trip that ended without violence.

“I think it was really quite dangerous, and when it was over, we were all very happy,” he said in an interview.

The drug summit was by far the biggest operation yet for Lee, the doctor with principal responsibility for the President’s health.

It was not the job he had in mind when Bush, a longtime friend, tapped him to come to Washington.

“I wanted something in the drug-fighting game,” he said, perhaps the drug czar post that went to former Education Secretary William Bennett.

But ultimately, he gave up his large lymphoma practice at New York’s Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to become White House physician.

As such, he or someone from his staff must be within a few steps of the President at all times.

He travels with the President aboard Air Force One. He oversees the President’s and Mrs. Bush’s physical exams. He joins Bush on fishing excursions, their shared passion.

And he often pokes into health-care policy issues that are not within the purview of his office, earning a reputation in some Administration quarters as a gadfly. One conservative official called him “a well-meaning kibbutzer.”

Lee said ministering to Bush’s health is fairly uncomplicated because the 65-year-old President is in excellent shape.

During a rapid-paced “power walk” along the shore of Kennebunkport, Me., last winter, the 60-year-old Lee, trim and fit himself, ended up having to hitch a ride in a police car because he couldn’t keep up with Bush.

“I got so far behind, the police started asking me who I was,” he lamented.

Lee is close to both the President and Mrs. Bush and is known as a great raconteur.

A lifetime medical professional, he has an intensity befitting his profession, his Administration colleagues say. Perhaps because of that, he has had a tendency to speak his mind, even if it doesn’t follow the official Administration line.

He got into a bit of hot water by disclosing that he does not hew to the GOP’s anti-abortion position. He was quoted as suggesting that the Administration used an abortion litmus test in appointing high-level officials, and he said that Bush would never pick him as surgeon general.

Explaining the flap now, he said, “I think that the person that fills that particular position should agree with the President on his stated views on abortion.”

Working on President Ronald Reagan’s AIDS commission was one of Lee’s proudest accomplishments.

He was a key architect of the committee’s 200-page report that generated considerable controversy when it was released in June, 1988.

“Burt was enormously influential” and dedicated on the committee, even though he still had his New York practice, said Polly Galt, former executive director of the commission. “He really puts his money and time where his mouth is.”

Lee’s passion these days is health care financing reform, a topic on which no dramatic steps are expected from the Bush Administration.

“Since I was originally mainly interested in dealing with issues here, I’m trying to spread my wings in this job,” participating on government panels dealing with health care financing and liability reform, he said.