PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : Bush Cannily Goes for ‘Cover’ : By nominating Strauss as envoy to Moscow, the President hopes to snare bipartisan support for risky policies.

In a dramatic break with tradition, President Bush has sent to the Senate the name of former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss to be the United States’ new ambassador to Moscow. To designate one of the most prominent Democrats to one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts, just as this country is having to decide to what extent it wants to bail out the tottering Soviet Union, underscores the risks that the President sees. And should the Soviet Union go down the tubes and take a lot of American taxpayers’ money with it, Bush wants to make sure that the blame is shared equally by Republicans and Democrats.

Waving the wand of bipartisanship over thorny issues is one of the most noteworthy American political innovations. Especially in foreign policy, any successful major initiative will usually carry distinct fingerprints from both Democratic and Republican hands.

The practice goes back at least as far as President Harry S. Truman’s decision in 1947 to give anti-communist military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, and the establishment the following year of the Marshall Plan. Both of these dramatic gestures signaled to war-weary Americans that they would have a continuing stake in the affairs of the world. It was not a message that isolation-minded citizens wanted to hear. And while Truman had the congressional votes to make both programs strictly Democratic initiatives, he knew that the only chance for an enduring U.S. commitment was to get the Republicans on board.

As Bush has turned to a prominent Democrat to put the stamp of bipartisanship on his efforts to throw a lifeline to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Truman in his time enlisted the help of one of the most visible congressional Republicans, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a contender for the 1948 GOP presidential nomination. He was the acknowledged Republican spokesman on foreign policy and his enlistment in the Truman programs was indispensable to their success in Congress. Such was Vandenberg’s standing among his congressional colleagues that his endorsement of Truman’s efforts gave political cover to Republicans and other conservatives who approved of the programs but feared losing votes among their isolationist constituents. Today, if massive aid for the Soviet Union is in the offing, Strauss could serve as inoculation against defeat for wavering members of his party.

There is, however, the nagging question of where this leaves the Democrats as a party. If the trade concessions already granted to Gorbachev by Bush, combined with significant future economic aid, do no more than shore up the decrepit communist structure or underwrite Soviet moves against the Baltic states, the Democrats would otherwise be presented with a powerful campaign issue in an area in which the President has been unassailable. With so prominent a Democrat identified with the President’s policy, partisan advantage is substantially reduced. Democrats would find themselves disarmed by their former national chairman.

But there would probably be little grumbling even among Democrats who yearn for an issue to use against Bush, because they also understand the enormous value of political cover.

Policy-makers of both parties know that when the going gets tough, the tough get chummy. They’ve seen it all before: on Social Security reform in 1982, with the bipartisan Greenspan commission that immunized Democrats and Republicans from charges of tampering with a popular benefit program; with the Kissinger commission on Central America; with the bipartisan panel that came up with a basing formula for the MX missile, and most recently with the Courter commission that has provided a mechanism that will enable Congress to close down obsolete bases without costing members their jobs.

Perhaps, someday, there will be a George Bush memoir that will recount the resourceful way in which the President picked his way through the political minefields that he encountered. He couldn’t get away with calling it “Profiles in Courage,” but he might be right on target with “Profiles in Cover.”