COLUMN ONE : The Man Behind the President : Brent Scowcroft serves as Bush’s counselor and sounding board. Disciplined and unflappable, his influence on national security continues to grow.

It is Aug. 3, Iraqi troops have invaded Kuwait, and President Bush has flown to the Colorado Rockies for a meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a speech to the Aspen Institute.

As he begins his address, Bush pauses to thank his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. He looks around and finds him standing at the edge of the stage, half-concealed among a collection of potted palms.

In memory, it seems as if Scowcroft has always been there, half-hidden near some President’s side.

There he was, two decades ago, the White House military aide, carrying the briefcase containing codes for nuclear war as Richard M. Nixon strode through history.

There he was, telling Gerald R. Ford of the helicopter evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon at the close of a war that Scowcroft still believes the United States could have won.

And here he is now, the short, slender, balding figure at Bush’s side--at the golf course, on the speedboat, in the Oval Office, the ever present adviser, the confidant. The man who wakes the President up in the middle of the night with news of war.

Over the past year and a half, no other Bush adviser has had more influence on the agenda of American national security policy--from the “go-slow” approach toward changes in the Soviet Union to the drastic scaling back of Ronald Reagan’s brainchild, the “Star Wars” space-based Strategic Defense Initiative.

And today, as the United States inches toward war in the Persian Gulf, the path it is following is one that has been laid out by Brent Scowcroft, the man in the background.

For a man who has played a key role in national affairs for nearly 20 years, Scowcroft remains almost unknown. A deeply private man--”I’ve never been to his house,” says one longtime friend. “I don’t know anyone who has”--Scowcroft has appeared in countless newspaper photographs and television clips. But he is almost always in the shadows.

In a capital full of officials energetically creating larger-than-life public personas, Scowcroft has cultivated anonymity. His spacious White House office, dominated by a score or more of neatly stacked piles of paper, each with the top sheet turned over to avoid prying eyes, contains not a single personal photograph and only one memento--the three-star flag of an Air Force lieutenant general, the rank with which he left active duty.

Others in Washington seek power by publicity. Scowcroft has cultivated a different route--proximity. His thin, reedy voice, which has the timbre of a clarinet without the lower register, does not carry far. But seldom has it had to travel more than a few feet to reach the President’s ear.

Scowcroft’s image in Washington’s energetic gossip mill is more that of an institution than of a person. “People talk about ‘the Scowcroft Model,’ ” says one White House official who has worked closely with him, suggesting the way the individual has been able to disappear behind the image of the institution.

The image is that of the discreet, hard-working, self-effacing coordinator, above all that of a man “who doesn’t have ideas or an agenda of his own.” And that, says the official, “just ain’t true.”

Still, parts of the image are correct: hard-working, for example. Scowcroft routinely arrives at his desk in the White House West Wing by 7 in the morning and is nearly always there until 8 or 9 at night.

And discreet, as well. Scowcroft’s thin lips are quick to break into a smile. They are also quick to purse tightly shut. Words leave his mouth slowly, with long pauses between phrases, each carefully weighed to ensure that they contain not a gram more of information than their author wishes to convey.

Henry A. Kissinger, a former national security adviser himself, recalled in his memoirs that when he won the Nobel Prize for his role in the Paris peace talks, it was Scowcroft, then his deputy, who passed him the word. In the middle of a meeting, Scowcroft handed Kissinger a copy of a news wire story announcing the award. He did so, Kissinger recalled, without a word of comment.

Even close aides often do not know what he has in mind. When Bush announced his Helsinki summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, among the many people surprised by the announcement was Condoleeza Rice, the NSC’s director for Soviet affairs--and one of Scowcroft’s most trusted deputies.

At a press briefing, Scowcroft had unabashedly “stonewalled” reporters asking about rumors of a summit, declining even to hint that something was planned until Bush interrupted the session by calling to say that the announcement was ready.

“I thought I was doing pretty well,” Scowcroft quipped when Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater handed him a note telling him he could stop refusing to comment.

And he is self-effacing, as well. Until recently, Scowcroft almost never spoke to reporters for quotation or appeared on a television interview. In large part because of the long illness of his wife, Marian, who has been an invalid for most of the time that Scowcroft has been in the public eye, he seldom appears at Washington social events.

The avoidance of publicity is often mistaken for an absence of ego. And the presumed lack of ego caused many to assume--when Scowcroft accepted the job as White House national security adviser--that he would play a sharply restricted role, sandwiched between an energetic President with extensive foreign policy experience and the President’s closest friend, James A. Baker III, as secretary of state.

As Ford’s national security adviser--following Kissinger, who remained secretary of state--Scowcroft had had a relatively confined role. But this time, he made clear to friends, he had a different concept of the job in mind.

In Bush, Scowcroft told friends, the country had a President with extensive knowledge and experience in foreign affairs, but one who was more comfortable with handling problems one at a time than with developing overall strategy. Nor, he believed, would strategy come from Baker--a master tactician but an impatient one and one with relatively little experience in foreign affairs.

Strategy, Scowcroft made clear, would be his job.

Scowcroft “does not see himself as being only a general or only a policy adviser to presidents,” says his friend, John Deutch, a former deputy secretary of energy and now provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “He sees himself as one of the individuals in this country who really understands three things that are vital: foreign affairs, the military and domestic politics.”

Scowcroft’s aides delight in telling stories about his ability to fall asleep during meetings, even sessions with Bush. The White House staff has even invented a “Scowcroft Award” for the person who most blatantly falls asleep in public.

But what is often missed among the jokes is what stunning self-confidence such easy dozing reflects: Few people are sure enough in their position to fall asleep on the President of the United States.

“He’s 65 years old. He’s made his mark. He’s at ease with himself,” says Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert M. Gates.

Bush puts the matter another way. Among his ambitious advisers, the President reportedly has told friends, he trusts Scowcroft because “Brent doesn’t want anything.”

As a child, Scowcroft recalled in an interview recently, what he did want--from the age of 12 when he read a book about the U.S. Military Academy--was to attend West Point.

Born in 1925, Scowcroft was the only son and youngest child of a prosperous, influential family in Ogden, Utah, a city of 42,000 just north of Salt Lake City, dominated by the rail yards of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific that made the town the largest freight-switching center between Omaha and the West Coast.

His father ran a wholesale grocery business serving the mostly Mormon communities of northern Utah and southern Idaho. The business succeeded so well that shortly after the birth of his son, James Scowcroft built a new house for his family in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains.

The young Brent Scowcroft was a bright student. “Brent was a speed reader when we didn’t know what speed-reading was,” recalls his oldest sister, Janice Hinckley. “In elementary school, the principal wanted to skip him a few grades,” she says. Their father rejected that idea, feeling that his slightly built son would be unable to take part in sports if he were thrust among older boys.

Instead, he was put on a special reading program and ran track--100-yard dashes--as he passed through high school.

By then, the nation was at war. When the family traveled east in the fall of 1942 to examine colleges for Brent, they stopped at West Point to allow Janice to visit her fiance, a cadet at the academy and the son of a high official in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration.

One look around the campus and the decision was made. “I don’t think there ever was a point when I said, ‘I want a career in the military,’ ” Scowcroft recalls. West Point, he says, “just sounded fantastic.”

He enrolled in the class of 1947. And in a move that foreshadowed the sort of roles he would take on later, he quickly became a manager of the Army football team.

“He wasn’t big enough to play, but he wanted to make a contribution,” recalls his classmate and friend Air Force Gen. William Y. Smith, now the head of the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analysis. “He always wanted to do that.”

In 1948, Scowcroft earned his wings as a fighter pilot. And then, flying a training exercise in a P-51 Mustang over a forested region of New Hampshire, “I lost the engine,” he recalls.

“I thought I was too low to bail out,” Scowcroft says, matter-of-factly describing the crash that nearly killed him. He found a small clearing and went in.

The crash--”I prefer to call it a forced landing,” he says--broke Scowcroft’s back and left him in a military hospital in Boston for two years. When his father died later that year at the age of 57, Scowcroft flew back to Utah in a body cast, stretched out in the aisle of the airplane.

In the hospital, Scowcroft met his future wife, a military nurse who, as a captain, then outranked the young lieutenant. There, too, he began what would become his lifelong career, deciding to earn a graduate degree and become part of a new weapon that the American military was developing--a group of people who would become known as the “defense intellectuals.”

World War II had convinced many American leaders that brainpower--in both the hard sciences and the social sciences--could be a major military asset for the United States. In time, the community of defense intellectuals would grow to be enormous, spinning off institutions ranging from the national weapons laboratories to think tanks such as Santa Monica’s RAND Corp.

In time, too, many of the young men (and a few women) who devoted their brainpower to the national security apparatus--”the best and the brightest,” in writer David Halberstam’s phrase--would grow disillusioned by the horrible failure of their strategies and weapons in Vietnam.

But in the early 1950s, when Scowcroft, then married, finished his graduate program at New York’s Columbia University and took a teaching post at West Point, the defense intellectual community was still young, idealistic and small.

At West Point, the chief proponent of the role of intellect in war--and a chief recruiter of intellectuals for the Cold War--was the head of the school’s social sciences department, Col. George A. (Abe) Lincoln, an adviser to George C. Marshall, the onetime Army chief of staff who later became secretary of state. Lincoln was one of Scowcroft’s early mentors.

Scowcroft is not a man whom others recall as ever seeming young. Even as a junior faculty member at West Point, Scowcroft was “a very serious guy,” recalls another classmate and friend, Wesley Posvar, now chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. “I don’t think Brent has changed much in the past 40 years, even in appearance,” Posvar says.

Nor, as he advanced through a series of choice career posts--air attache at the American Embassy in Yugoslavia, stints at the Armed Forces Staff College, the National War College and the Air Force Academy, and staff jobs at Air Force Headquarters and the Pentagon--did Scowcroft fundamentally alter the beliefs that had animated his career at the outset.

They are a set of assumptions that once were virtually a consensus among American policy-makers, but which now have become embattled: a belief that America’s No. 1 international interest is its relationship with Europe; an emphasis on the strategic competition with the Soviet Union, rather than economic competition with other industrial nations; an insistence that the United States must maintain the role as military and political leader of the Western alliance, and a willingness to use military power as an instrument of policy.

Even the experience of Vietnam, which traumatized so many of his colleagues, seems to have left Scowcroft relatively unscathed. “I was not in the group that became disillusioned,” Scowcroft says, “--the ones who were involved in the policy, and then, if you will, became ashamed.”

Having spent the war years in military academia and long-range planning posts before moving to the White House as Nixon’s military aide in 1972, Scowcroft continues to believe, he said, “that even as late as the Paris peace agreement” in 1972, “(the Vietnam War) could have worked if we had done it differently.”

During Ronald Reagan’s tenure, Scowcroft’s beliefs set him at odds with the Administration’s ideological hard-liners. He worked as an executive for the international consulting firm that Kissinger founded, traveling the world meeting with leaders of nations and multinational corporations.

Although Reagan named Scowcroft to head a commission to study U.S. strategic forces--a panel that helped establish his reputation as a policy-maker independent of Kissinger--Administration policy makers kept him at arm’s length.

And Scowcroft became a sharp critic of the Administration’s policies. No overall strategic sense seemed to animate either Reagan’s huge military buildup or the Administration’s policies toward arms control, he argued. Scowcroft opposed the bombing of Libya, believing that economic sanctions should have been used against Moammar Kadafi. And he criticized the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, saying the operation had been too costly politically, damaging the CIA and harming American ability to use covert actions in the future.

But while he argued that the Administration was too quick to use force against little countries, he was even more critical of then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger’s restrictive criteria for when military power should be used. Weinberger’s policies, he argued, meant that armed might could be employed only in no-risk adventures such as Grenada or in “crusades” such as World War II.

In Weinberger’s reluctance to let the military be used, Scowcroft discerned a hangover from Vietnam--a fear on the part of military leaders that if they once again became involved in a major conflict they would, once again, find themselves without public support.

For him, and for Bush, the current crisis in the gulf has been, in part, a chance to show the world that America’s post-Vietnam blues are over.

American goals, he believes, are fundamentally good. And the nation should not be reluctant to threaten the use of force to achieve those goals, not only in cases where absolute national survival is at risk, but also in cases, as in the gulf, where the stakes include the economic health of America’s allies and the political strength of international institutions.

Failure to deter Saddam Hussein, he says, would “give a green light to every tinhorn dictator” in the world. At the same time, he has resisted pressure from many outside the Administration--and some within--who argue that the United States should pledge now to use force not only to push Hussein out of Kuwait, but also to destroy Iraq’s war machine and end Hussein’s rule. Just as the country should not be reluctant to use force when necessary, he argues, it should not overestimate the ability of military power to solve all problems nor underestimate the unpredictability of war.

For a time, Scowcroft thought he might not return to government. Well paid in the consulting business--he earned more than $500,000 in 1988--he told Bush in 1987 that he would advise his campaign, but that he desired no job after the election.

But Scowcroft’s personality--co-workers and friends describe him over and over with adjectives such as fair, calm, disciplined, cautious, pragmatic, careful, unflappable--and his experience fit the description of the person Bush wanted to head his National Security Council. The two are old friends who share similar senses of humor. They have known each other since the days when Bush was Ford’s CIA director and Scowcroft the national security adviser.

So when the call came, Scowcroft could not say no.

The chance to influence the course of events once more, to be at the center of them, could not be turned away. International affairs, he explains, “are not only my profession, but my hobby.”

Or, as one senior Bush aide puts it, Scowcroft “is a man who lives for his work.”

The gulf crisis has magnified Scowcroft’s influence in the Administration. The need to coordinate both military and diplomatic policy has prevented either Baker or Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney from dominating the stage alone.

And Baker, preferring to concentrate his energies in one or two areas that he can control, has not tried to challenge Scowcroft’s lead, instead sticking close to the negotiations with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze over the future shape of Europe.

Moreover, Bush’s own personal day-to-day involvement in the details of the policy have ensured that the crisis is run out of the White House, rather than the Pentagon or the State Department.

Scowcroft serves as Bush’s counselor, his sounding board and often, even, as his speech writer. The night before Bush gave his early morning Oval Office speech announcing that he had dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia, Scowcroft and his Middle East deputy, Richard Haas, sat on the couch in Scowcroft’s office until 3:30 a.m., revising the speech word by word. After a few hours of rest, they returned before 7 for a final check.

Even before the Iraqi invasion, however, Scowcroft was in a clear ascendancy.

During the Administration’s first year, he had crafted an overall foreign policy strategy for Bush that emphasized a cautious approach to the Soviets and focused on maintaining NATO with Germany as a central member of the alliance.

The critics, who were legion, said that Scowcroft’s innate caution, reinforcing Bush’s own aversion to risk, was itself running the risk of missing the historic opportunities offered by Gorbachev.

Today, however, with the Berlin Wall down, Germany unified, NATO intact and the Warsaw Pact essentially gone, Scowcroft and his aides are understandably feeling vindicated--enough so that the critics’ charge of plodding unoriginality has become an in-house joke.

“Brent has a turtle-like demeanor,” said one aide. “He just keeps moving forward slow but steady, and he always gets to the end.”