NEWS ANALYSIS : Firing Confirms Bush’s Grip on Policy, Power

The abrupt firing Monday of Air Force Chief of Staff Michael J. Dugan for discussing possible wartime tactics against Iraq dispelled any doubts that President Bush maintains an extraordinarily tight grip over policy and power inside his Administration.

Unlike previous high-ranking military officers who were sacked, Gen. Dugan did not get into trouble by opposing a presidential policy. The policy he outlined--bombing raids aimed at “decapitating” Iraq’s leadership--is a fairly standard Air Force doctrine.

Instead, Dugan’s sin was forgetting that in the Bush Administration, only a handful of officials are allowed to talk about sensitive matters in public.

“There are only five people who make decisions--the President, Scowcroft, Powell, Cheney and Baker,” said one White House official, referring to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

As for everyone else, “they don’t get paid to make those decisions,” the official said.

That sharp division--the small group at the center that makes decisions and everyone else, even four-star generals, who are paid to carry out the decisions and keep quiet--has minimized unauthorized leaks of information. And Dugan’s firing, the first sacking of a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in more than 40 years, is certain to further cut down on unauthorized talking.

But outside analysts and some career government officials suggest that there may be a price to pay down the road.

About a week before taking office in early 1989, Bush gathered his Cabinet nominees for a dinner at Blair House, the government guest house across the street from the White House. Before the dinner, Bush told reporters he planned to tell the nominees to “be on the record as much as possible,” meaning that they should allow reporters to quote them by name.

“I’d rather see their name on the record than insidiously leaked to somebody,” Bush said.

In practice, however, the Administration’s clear preference has been to discourage public comments on policy by anyone other than the White House. And “on the record” comments, such as Dugan’s, have become increasingly rare.

One Administration official on Monday described Bush’s preferences this way: “Information is funneled from the bottom up, and the guys on the bottom don’t know what the decisions are,” the official said. “You can’t leak if you don’t know what the decision is.”

The policy has all but eliminated the sort of public feuding among agencies and White House factions that bedeviled the Reagan and Carter administrations. Bush and his top aides are clearly pleased with how well it has worked.

But by stifling public discussion, critics say, the White House may cut itself off from valuable ideas and insights. Bush also has reduced his Administration’s ability to build support for policy changes by preparing the public in advance through the time-honored Washington system of leaks and trial balloons.

“This is like no other Administration,” one State Department official said. “They hold things very closely and keep things in the dark until the very last minute. We can’t really prepare Congress or the press for what’s about to happen because we don’t know ourselves.”

Lack of advance preparation for policy shifts has caused Bush some trouble already.

On domestic policy, Bush’s decision this summer to abandon his “no new taxes” pledge, caught Republican candidates and members of Congress by surprise. As a result, Bush may not have the support from his own party that he will need to make a budget deal with the Democrats stick, assuming he can reach such a deal.

On foreign policy, Bush faced a storm of criticism last December when the public discovered that he had secretly sent top-level officials to Beijing to try to warm relations with China. The move caught nearly all officials in the government by surprise. Senior State Department officials emphasize that even the nuances of China policy have been personally handled out of the Oval Office.

“Few Presidents have had the success” Bush has achieved in controlling the Administration, said Stephen Hess of Washington’s Brookings Institution.

Jimmy Carter, for example, presided over “a government of strangers”--most had never worked together, and they quickly went their own way once policy conflicts began, Hess noted. Ronald Reagan assembled a government made up of officials with clashing ideological positions, leading to frequent internal fighting and many leaks to reporters by officials attempting to influence policy.

Senior officials say that Bush, by contrast, made willingness to work within the sort of system he wanted a prime consideration in choosing his aides. The group he assembled is remarkably harmonious, in large part because of long years of working together. Bush, Scowcroft and Cheney all served in top national security posts during the Ford Administration. Baker, one of Bush’s oldest friends, worked with both Bush and Powell in the Reagan Administration.

A change in law also helped. In 1986, a major reorganization of the military command structure made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the President’s chief military adviser and gave theater commanders overall control of U.S. forces in the field.

Before that change, Dugan, as head of the Air Force, would have been in direct command of planes and pilots in a deployment like Operation Desert Shield. Now, the chain of command bypasses the staff chief altogether, running from Bush through Cheney and Powell to the theater commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of the military’s Central Command.

Scowcroft made that point bluntly when he issued the Administration’s first official response to Dugan’s comments in a television interview Sunday.

“Gen. Dugan is not in the chain of command,” Scowcroft said.

Times staff writer Jim Mann contributed to this story.