Insider : On Managing a Crisis in the Chilly Gulf of Maine : The President and a handful of his advisers found the waters off Kennebunkport a quiet place to consider options to Hussein. In those sessions, Brent Scowcroft emerged as first among equals.

In the midst of the country’s greatest foreign policy crisis since the Vietnam War, the inner circle of the U.S. government has become so small that it fits--literally--into a small boat: Fidelity, George Bush’s blue-and-white speedster.

The August crisis in the Persian Gulf, which caught many senior officials away on vacation, has demonstrated how easily President Bush--who prefers to work with only a small group of advisers--can manage without the enormous entourage that usually surrounded his predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

Several key strategic decisions have been made as Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, plied the chilly waters of the Gulf of Maine on early morning trips in Fidelity, accompanied only by a Secret Service agent and a Coast Guard aide.

The trips became a fixture of Bush’s stay here as the two men took advantage of what was termed “a rare opportunity” to talk--uninterrupted by aides or unwanted telephone calls, an official said.

As the crisis has rippled, Scowcroft has clearly surfaced as the first among equals in Bush’s tiny crisis-management team--at least partly because he rarely leaves the President’s side.

The first day after the invasion, for example, Bush gave a foreign policy speech in Aspen, Colo. As he spoke, Scowcroft, who had helped draft the President’s remarks, looked on, standing on the edge of the stage, half-hidden by a potted palm.

The retired Air Force general, a soft-spoken man who is little known to the general public but well-known to Washington reporters from hundreds of “background” interviews, lunches and dinners, has--like Bush--been a fixture of Republican Administrations for two decades.

He first served in the White House as a military aide to President Richard M. Nixon, and then as an aide to National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger while Bush worked as U.S. envoy to China and to the United Nations.

During the Gerald R. Ford Administration, when Bush served as director of the CIA, Scowcroft was national security adviser. Dick Cheney, now the secretary of defense, and another key adviser during the current crisis, was White House chief of staff under Ford.

The other adviser who has often joined Scowcroft and Cheney publicly at Bush’s side during the crisis is another former national security adviser--Gen. Colin L. Powell, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

While those advisers have clearly gained in stature during the gulf confrontation, others have diminished.

Much has been written, for example, about the influence within the Bush White House of Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. But as Bush, Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III were laying plans last week for a hastily called summit meeting in Finland with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, according to White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, Sununu was uninvolved--even though he was in Moscow at the time.

The chief of staff, along with both his deputies and several other senior White House aides, were holding talks with Kremlin officials about how to set up an executive office--one part of an offer Bush had made earlier this year to give the Soviet leader technical assistance in organizing his newly created presidency.

Meanwhile, the Moscow trip effectively took the former New Hampshire governor--who has little experience in foreign affairs--out of the decision-making process as the gulf crisis unfolded.

Vice President Dan Quayle has also largely been absent. During the first weekend of the crisis, Bush made a point of inviting Quayle to meetings at Camp David, ensuring that he was photographed at the President’s side.

And a few days later, when Quayle made a previously scheduled trip to South America, Bush asked him to discuss oil production with Venezuela’s President Carlos Andres Perez. Since then, however, Quayle has been on vacation in Arizona.

The role of Secretary of State James A. Baker III has been more ambiguous. Baker was out of the country, meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze in the Siberian city of Irkutsk when the invasion took place.

He has continued talking to Shevardnadze ever since, telephoning him frequently as he worked to cement U.S.-Soviet cooperation in managing the crisis, officials say.

But Baker has generally not been at the President’s side, and in status-conscious Washington, that has been seen as a negative mark, deflating overblown talk from earlier in the Administration that had depicted Baker as a “deputy president” for foreign affairs.

In the Bush Administration, that position does not exist. Bush himself serves not only as commander-in-chief--the ultimate decision maker in the government--but also as the “chief action officer,” calling dozens of world leaders, devising strategies, mapping out options.

And unlike the senior officials of the Reagan era, who battled to control policy in the name of the President, the senior figures of the Bush Administration have so far been content to accept a system in which each serves only as one spoke in a wheel.

Bush and Scowcroft are at the center of that wheel, parceling out tasks to other officials as the need arises.

Baker, for example, was given the chief responsibility for handling the U.S.-Soviet dimension of the crisis, keeping the Soviets lined up in unprecedented support for U.S. military action in the gulf.

Cheney was assigned to handle relations with Saudi Arabia, while officials at the Treasury Department were given the task of analyzing how to organize international efforts to aid countries like Egypt and Turkey that have been hurt economically by their willingness to back the trade embargo on Iraq.

There’s a similar system for developing the options papers that sketch out the choices Bush and his aides have. Mid-level officials in several departments have prepared options papers for Bush--diplomatic from State, military from the Pentagon, economic from Treasury.

But, in keeping with what has become the Administration’s standard operating procedure, the officials charged with preparing the options often have little, if any, information about how their proposals may be used or whether they have been adopted further up the line.

Meanwhile, while the principals in each department sorted out their roles, several key deputies--whose names are largely unknown to the public--have played key roles.

Administration officials cite, particularly, Robert Kimmit at the State Department, who organized U.S. diplomatic efforts during the early days of the crisis, and Richard Haas, Scowcroft’s principal aide on Middle Eastern issues.

There also was the Treasury’s John Robson, who headed the team that worked through the night in the first hours of the crisis to draft an executive order that prevented Iraq from taking over Kuwait’s billions of dollars in assets in the United States.