Insider : Bush as Road Warrior: Hands-On Diplomacy

There’s a refrigerator aboard George Bush’s new Air Force One that carries a supply of his blood type in the event of an emergency while the President is traveling. Maybe there also should be a case of Geritol on board.

Try this out for an overseas travel schedule, coming on the heels of this past weekend’s summit with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Helsinki:

* Oct. 3 in Berlin, for a ceremony--possibly with Gorbachev--marking the reunification of thetwo German states.

* Thanksgiving week in Paris, for a treaty signing a conventional weapons accord--again, with Gorbachev.

* South America for a week in early December.

* Christmas in Saudi Arabia.

* And back to Washington throughout, to keep up the regular speedy pace of business and congressional campaign travel during the autumn.

That itinerary is not locked in, although it is on the drawing boards at the White House, as Bush carries to new extremes his established preference for personal diplomacy.

Which leads to this question: Why does he go dashing about--and engage in frequent, seemingly nonstop telephone calls--as he carries out the duties of the presidency and, from time to time, of the secretary of state, director of central intelligence and ambassador plenipotentiary?

That, in the view of some at the White House, is like asking why the swallows visit Capistrano each year. It’s very much an act of nature.

Other Presidents “were content to operate at a distance,” a White House staffer notes. Not George Bush.

Hence, the busy days in the White House scheduler’s office, and the busy days at the White House switchboard.

“That’s always been the way with him,” says a White House staff member. “That’s the way he’s done business and diplomacy. It’s a matter of personal style.”

So, here is a senior government official, returning from a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office:

“Some briefing. One minute, it’s ‘Hello, Helmut.’ As I was leaving, it was Ozal,” complained the official, who had the misfortune to catch Bush as he was in the midst of a morning of calls to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, President Turgut Ozal of Turkey, President Hafez Assad of Syria and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain.

Indeed, if the President of the United States can’t sit still on a vacation, why should he at work? After all, this is a man who has been in constant motion all his adult life. Here he is in Beijing in the 1970s, the most senior U.S. official in the Chinese capital, riding around on his bicycle. And here he is in 1981 with his wife of 36 years, moving into a new house for the 28th time.

Bush has made personal diplomacy so routine these days that the word summit , as in “summit conference,” carries all the excitement and discriminating descriptive qualities of the word jumbo , as in “jumbo olives.”

“They shouldn’t call it a summit. They should just say ‘the President of the United States and Gorbachev will meet every Friday,’ ” says James David Barber, professor of political science and policy studies at Duke University. He remembers that once upon a time the news that a summit conference was in the offing “lent a dramatic air” to an approaching meeting, “a sense that this was a marvelous moment of unusual discourse.”

But does this flurry of diplomatic activity get him anything?

Take the presently unhappy example provided by his friendship with King Hussein of Jordan.

For years, Bush has worked on this relationship. On a vice presidential trip to the Middle East, the king entertained Bush aboard a royal speedboat. And after the king visited the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport, Me., last month, there was First Lady Barbara Bush, leading a troop of family members to wave goodby as Hussein lifted off in an olive green Marine Corps helicopter from the presidential fleet.

But White House officials have done little to disguise the frustration, and personal disappointment, that Bush has felt in the wake of the king’s refusal to fall closely in line with his attempt to isolate the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.

“Personal charm doesn’t work 100% in every case,” said a White House official.

But such incidents as the President’s failure to gain complete cooperation from the Jordanian monarch notwithstanding, the White House official maintains, there are many more examples where such relations, among them some of more recent vintage, have accomplished “a great deal.”

“The international coordination in this (Persian Gulf) crisis wouldn’t have come together as easily if he didn’t know the people,” the official said.

No doubt, says Prof. Barber, the routine nature of international contacts has been a plus.

On the other hand, he said, “at the time of George Washington it took six weeks for a letter to go across the Atlantic Ocean. That meant you had time to think.”

Now what must be done, he said, is to slow the pace down a bit.

“Sometimes the summiteers, Bush or Gorbachev, must say, ‘I hear what your lips are saying, but I want to go off and think about it for a while,’ ” he said.

A President on the Move

Since his inauguration as 41st President of the United States on Jan. 20, 1989, President Bush has traveled extensively, forging strong ties with other world leaders. His travel diary looks something like this.

-- Feb. 10: Bush confers with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in Ottawa.

-- Feb. 23-27: Attends the funeral in Tokyo of Japanese Emperor Hirohito and visits Beijing, China, and Seoul, South Korea.

-- May 26-June 2: Unveils surprise plan for major reduction in conventional forces in Europe during NATO summit in Brussels; also visits Italy, West Germany and Britain.

-- July 9-18: Visits Warsaw and Gdansk, Poland, and Budapest, Hungary, promising help for their shift to democracy; also attends French bicentennial celebrations and the economic summit in Paris, and visits the Netherlands.

--Oct. 27-28: Attends the Western Hemisphere summit on democracy, held in Costa Rica.

--Dec. 2-3: Meets Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev off Malta in a storm-tossed summit.

--Dec. 4: Stops in Brussels to report to NATO allies on the Malta summit.

-- Feb. 15, 1990: Meets with the presidents of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia in Cartagena, Colombia. The leaders sign an accord pledging to cooperate in the fight against illegal drug trafficking.

-- April 10: Travels to Toronto for meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney.

-- April 13: Meets with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Bermuda. Principal topic is the Soviet embargo threat against Lithuania.

-- July 5-6: Attends summit meeting of NATO leaders in London.

Compiled by TOM LUTGEN / Los Angeles Times