NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush’s Hands-On Style to Be Tested in Upcoming NATO Summit Talks : Diplomacy: He has developed a good personal relationship with Kohl, Mitterrand and Thatcher. This week he’ll try to use that to help the alliance shape its future.

On a crisp day last February, in the rustic dining hall at Camp David, Md., President Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were huddling with aides over a list of questions the two leaders might face at an impending press conference.

Bush, pointing to a question about German guarantees of Polish borders, asked his guest, “Helmut, what would you answer on this one?”

When Kohl suggested an answer, Bush turned to his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, who agreed that the response meshed nicely with U.S. policy.

Moments later, as they faced the reporters, the first question posed to them was the one Bush had pinpointed. And Kohl, with Bush at his side, responded on cue: “Nobody wants to link the question of national unity with changes in existing borders,” he declared. “And nobody is permitted to doubt my attitude there.”

The ease with which the two leaders agreed to handle the potentially explosive question reflects one of President Bush’s most important assets as he begins a summit meeting today with his North Atlantic Treaty Organization counterparts.

With Kohl, and with other NATO leaders, Bush has developed what aides see as unusually smooth personal relationships that enable him to take up difficult issues with a minimum of strain or tension. It also reflects--in the view of senior presidential advisers and others who track diplomatic developments--Bush’s own preference for dealing with problems in the context of personal relationships, conferring regularly with key European leaders by telephone and other direct forms of communication.

And this week’s summit meeting of the leaders of the 16 NATO members behind closed doors at Lancaster House, a posh, old-style British conference center, will impose a particularly difficult test of Bush’s hands-on approach to foreign policy.

The overall goal is to try to sort out the impact that the stunning changes in Eastern Europe’s political structures will have on the 40-year-old military alliance, and, in particular, to adjust the alliance’s military strategy to take into account the disintegration of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.

With so much up in the air, the way the leaders work together is expected to be critical.

While Bush’s deliberately hesitant relationship with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lacks the ideological simpatico that she and former President Ronald Reagan built on the foundation of their shared conservatism, Bush is said by aides to have succeeded in striking up easygoing ties with a number of the politicians he will meet today and Friday, particularly Kohl, French President Francois Mitterrand and even Thatcher, with whom he speaks regularly.

“With Thatcher, Bush’s relationship is not what the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was, but it is pretty solid. With Mitterrand, it is probably better than any American President has ever had. And with Kohl, it’s very close,” said a senior State Department official, speaking privately. He praised what he said was Bush’s success at carrying off “a personal relationship with these three leaders who are such different personalities and rather prickly ones at that.”

Said Andrew J. Pierre of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington, “He’s done it by being on the phone all the time.”

Indeed, if there is a sitting slogan for the President’s operation of foreign policy, it could very well be “reach out and touch someone”--especially if they are far away. In his Administration, the telephone is as much a symbol of foreign policy as striped pants once were. For instance, it is not unusual for Bush to speak by telephone with Kohl once a week.

Such routine contact may be extreme--Kohl is also a regular visitor to Washington with whom Bush deals as easily as though they were two powerful, confident city council members pursuing similar goals. But in style if not in frequency, it typifies the President’s effort to develop personal relationships with other allied leaders.

The value of such relationships goes beyond simple friendship. In the long run, the understanding that comes with familiarity can produce dividends.

“The degree to which you’re prepared to be flexible is to some respect a matter of how much you trust the other person,” said a well-placed State Department official who has also served on the National Security Council’s staff.

“Bush feels it’s the personal chemistry he can establish that will serve him well in the long term when there are ideas that need to be pushed,” said a former White House official.

Bush’s approach is in sharp contrast to that of Reagan, who, according to those who worked closely with him, preferred a much more formal approach--often drawing out broad themes and then letting his senior assistants carry out the policy he had set.

Reagan, said one of the former President’s aides, was “less buddy-buddy” than Bush in his dealings with other heads of government.

“What Bush is essentially trying to do is personalize his relationships. He’s looking for buddies who he can throw horseshoes with or take to a ballgame. Everything is the personal chemistry rather than the community of ideas,” said the former presidential assistant, who has observed Bush at close hand.

The President’s activist approach to foreign policy has won applause among Europeans, who are often skeptical about the abilities of American leaders. Such approval among voters here and on the Continent makes it easier for the European leaders to go along with his proposals.

Bush is, said Robert Hunter, director for the National Security Council’s European office during the Carter Administration, “the first genuinely popular President since (Gerald R.) Ford.”

“Bush has an IQ. They can deal with him directly. The European leaders had question marks about Reagan.”

Given the crumbling of Communist power throughout Eastern Europe, Hunter said, the Western European allies recognized that “you need someone with the adeptness of a Bush, who can engage the Europeans in an intellectual give-and-take.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this story.