For Postwar Press, It’s Bermuda Storm

The Persian Gulf War and the international attention it has drawn have greatly increased the number of foreign reporters covering George Bush. But even so, the size of the Italian contingent on Bush’s latest trip baffled fellow correspondents.

Why had six Italian reporters--nearly the entire resident Italian press corps in Washington--decided suddenly to trek along as Bush flew from Washington to Ottawa, Canada, to Martinique to Bermuda for meetings with three foreign leaders?

The answer is as Italian as mascarpone cheese.

Italy’s national newspapers, were on strike over the weekend. With the contract between the publishers and the Italian journalists’ union up for renewal, the union was indulging in the fine Italian tradition of a short work stoppage. But under the contract, reporters traveling on assignment continue to get paid--even though, because of the strike, they needn’t do any work.

Seeing the strike coming, the six reporters hastily decided to cover Bush’s first postwar trip, flying their families to Bermuda for a brief company-paid vacation.

Viva la dolce vita.

Well, not quite. The Italian correspondents forgot to reckon with Bush and his infallible affect on island weather.

A little more than a year ago, Bush met with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on the Mediterranean island of Malta, which promptly suffered its worst gale in more than a generation. And last April Bush came to Bermuda to meet with then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That time, his presence summoned up a storm so fierce it ruffled everything but Thatcher’s indomitable hairdo.

True to form, Bush arrived in Bermuda again just behind a storm that brought 25-m.p.h. winds and a steady, drumming cold rain.

Memo to Pete Wilson: Invite Bush to California. He might cure the drought.

Bush’s island rain record is not only some weird meteorological karma. White House travel involves a lot of people. Bush’s flying office, Air Force One, is a converted Boeing 747, filled with aides, aides to aides, secretaries for the aides to aides and Secret Service bodyguards. To keep track of all those people, the press corps that follows Bush can mount into the hundreds.

And a cast of hundreds require a lot of hotel rooms, which, for islands, means that meetings must be held in the off-season. That is why Bush spent an afternoon in warm, lovely, tropical Martinique to meet with French President Francois Mitterrand, then flew off to spend the night, and the next several days, in chilly, rainy, decidedly non-tropical Bermuda, where the tourist season will not begin for another month.

The rain, of course, did not slow America’s hyperactive President before he flew back to Washington on Sunday. Up at dawn Friday, his first day in Bermuda, Bush donned a blue windbreaker, tennis shoes and khaki pants, picked up a long fishing pole and headed out to sea, dragging Bermuda’s premier, John Swan, and U.S. Consul General Ebersole Gaines along for a morning of fishing in the choppy Atlantic.

Back shortly after noon, he hopped onto a helicopter, flew to the golf course--”beautiful day,” he shouted through the wind--changed into golf shoes, carefully put shoe trees into his sneakers and headed off for a quick round on the links.

Meanwhile, with the war over and many long airplane rides filling their time, White House correspondents have returned to a favored game, figuring out whom to cast in a hypothetical production of “Bush: The Movie.”

Herewith the leading selections, which provide some insight into how the Washington press corps views some of the Bush Administration’s leading figures:

Danny DeVito would be a natural as Bush’s short, pudgy and quarrelsome chief of staff, John H. Sununu. Ricky Schroeder would be adorable as ever-boyish Vice President Dan Quayle. Carol Burnett has been widely touted for the role of State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler. And Anthony Hopkins, fresh from his role as a psychotic killer in “Silence of the Lambs,” would seem unbeatable as Bush’s silky-smooth, ruthlessly cold and efficient secretary of state, James A. Baker III.

Still undetermined, however, is an actor who could capture the inimitable mixture of goofiness and gravitas that makes up the President himself. But the finest journalistic minds are working on it. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.