Sealing a Big Deal? : Diplomacy: Robert S. Strauss, who makes millions mixing business and politics, is tapped for Soviet ambassadorship. “He’ll probably get a lot done over there, but he’ll want 10%,” an insider says.

Moscow has never seen anything like this.

After all the other things the United States has sent the Soviets--Billy Joel, McDonald’s, minor-league baseball--now, instead of billions of dollars, George Bush is sending them a millionaire named Robert S. Strauss.

Strauss is the ultimate Washington insider, a consummate schmoozer who can deal with anybody and has. He trades on talk and introductions; he is a politician’s politician who knows no party bounds, be it Democrat, Republican and now, with any luck, Communist.

For though it might also take some luck, it’s likely that Strauss will rely on his reknowned talent for telling people what they want to hear to get tight with the Kremlin, the way he does with everybody who lunches at Duke Zeibert’s, a Washington power restaurant.

In an interview after President Bush stunned the diplomatic and political Establishment on Tuesday by announcing that he was sending a Democrat as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Strauss relished being at center stage.

No, he says, he doesn’t know Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--well. Of course, they have met twice around a dinner table, Strauss’ real office and terra firma. And Strauss knows people in Moscow. “I have some friends there,” Strauss says, the networking synapses in his brain clicking so fast that they are almost audible.

A 72-year-old lawyer from a dusty hamlet in South-Central Texas, Strauss has made a career off of those who want to have a meal with him, and off of the legions of friends he has acquired.

And while the think-tankers and Sovietologists in Washington may be going ballistic because Bush bypassed career diplomats for this important posting, Strauss’ cronies think they know better what Moscow is getting.

“Strauss will get along famously with everyone, especially Gorbachev,” says Bob Newman, a public relations consultant who, like Strauss, served in the Jimmy Carter Administration. “Their self-confidence will make them a perfect match.”

According to another old friend from Texas politics, Strauss is exquisitely qualified to phone Bush and tell him whether the Soviets really are interested in a market economy or if all the talk in the Soviet Union is just a lot of, well, talk, and Americans would be crazy to invest there.

“There’s no better person to spot b. s. than Bob, mostly because there’s a little b. s. in Bob which people acknowledge and like,” this Texan says, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Bob started out in the rough-and-tumble world of Texas politics and just kept broadening and broadening his reach. This is a perfectly logical expansion of his talents.”

Strauss was born in Lockhart, Tex., a town of 6,000, the son of the owner of a local dry-goods store. After college and law school at the University of Texas, he served in the FBI as an alternative to the military during World War II. In 1945, he and a few other FBI agents started a law firm in Dallas that developed an extraordinarily powerful Washington office--mostly becuase of Strauss’ contacts.

Although he dabbled in politics, handing out leaflets in college for John Connally’s campaign to be campus president, Strauss didn’t throw himself into it until Connally’s 1962 run for governor of Texas. Later Connally named Strauss to the state banking board and, after that, appointed him to the Democratic National Committee.

Strauss came to Washington in 1970 to be treasurer of the party’s finance committee--a job everybody, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, had told him to not take it.

“Nobody wanted the job,” recalls a former aide to L.B.J. “The finance committee was deep in debt. The Democrats were out of favor. L.B.J. told him, ‘You’re a friend of mine, which will make you unpopular; you’re Jewish, and that will make you unpopular. Don’t do it.’ But he took it anyway, because it represented a big challenge and he wanted to show people he could do it.”

As chairman of the Democratic Party in 1973, Strauss gave Carter, at the time a not particularly popular Georgia governor, the job of overseeing the 1974 congressional election campaign. Never before had there been such a job--nor has there been one since--but it gave Carter a chance to get known around the country. Although Carter and Strauss weren’t close friends when Carter was elected President in 1976, Strauss got into government.

Carter briefly made Strauss his special Middle East ambassador, then special trade representative (with Cabinet-level rank) and, finally, inflation czar. By Strauss’ own admission, he found the titles a thrill. And he adored the power.

“I’m very much like a drug addict,” he once told a reporter. “I need all this attention. It’s not so much the narcotic of applause. It’s the narcotic of power.”

Anybody who has ever seen Strauss use his power of persuasion to squeeze money out of someone for a campaign comes away with a story of a man who can flatter without seeming too obsequious and can leave toting a fat Manila envelope stuffed with cash.

Either on the phone or on the rubber-chicken trail, there’s always a story that begins with an anecdote, usually about Helen, his wife of 50 years (“Now, this particular evening Helen and I were on the way home when . . .” or “So Helen said to me . . .”). And there’s always a self-effacing punch line, with Helen gently putting his ego in check or him poking fun at himself with a slightly off-color remark.

“He has this talent for making people feel included in his jokey macho world,” says Hendrick Hertzberg, editor of the New Republic, who was also a Strauss colleague in the Carter White House.

Bob Newman says Strauss’ main tool is the telephone. (Strauss had a car phone in his baby-blue Lincoln Continental during the Carter years, before they were de rigueur .)

“He works a phone like Pinchas Zukerman plays a Stradivarius,” Newman says.

Almost 15 years later, those times at the White House come up occasionally at the regular lunches at Duke’s, usually in the form of “in” jokes that Strauss makes about himself and usually with a little nostalgia for being in the hot seat of American power, the White House.

But it is also clear that Strauss has loved the high-wire act of being a fixer. His lunch partners report that more than once he has said, “I started out with dirty little nothin’ in Texas, and now I sit around my pool with a tall drink and I say to myself, ‘Strauss, you’re one rich sonuvabitch.’ ”

At Strauss’ table just inside the entrance of Duke’s, John White, another Texan and former Democratic National Committee chairman, and a few others spend long lunches talking politics and kibitzing. Strauss, a medium-sized man with a slight paunch, usually orders broiled fish because he is on a diet but dives into the bread basket for three or four onion rolls.

“We always are telling Strauss that he is some kind of survivor ‘cause he suuuuuure knows when to quit,” White says. “He left the trade office after a few negotiations; he went to the Mideast to settle a couple of things and quit that. And he took the inflation deal at 10% and left when it was up 20%. Yeah, he suuuuuure knows how to look good.”

Since the Carter years, Strauss has been involved in campaigns--but mostly he has built a premier list of business and political clients for his law firm. His biggest deal on record came just last year, when his law firm pulled in $8 million for representing MCA, the entertainment conglomerate, when it merged with the electronics giant Matsushita. (MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman and Strauss go way back. Wasserman was an early backer of Carter, and he named Strauss to MCA’s board of directors in 1982.)

But in this deal Strauss also received an additional, undisclosed amount of money for representing Matsushita in Washington. What he did to make all that cash was preempt anyone in the nation’s capital from messing up the deal--although there are plenty who say the $6.6-billion merger would have happened with or without him.

It is such deals that cause Strauss’ critics in Washington to wonder--though rarely out loud--what he really does to earn a living: How much is smoke and mirrors, and how much is real savvy and acumen? How much clout does Bob Strauss really wield behind the scenes?

It’s hard to say. Why has he been able to make money as business’s super-conduit to the pols? Is it because he knows a lot of people who know a lot of people?

Recently, Washington commentator Michael Kinsley took a hard hit on Strauss in the New Republic by raising questions about whether he had any ideology at all, or the fortitude to maintain a principled disagreement with anyone. Kinsley concluded that Strauss lacked depth and passion; he also argued that Strauss has made a career of seducing journalists by “giving good quote” and lunching out on his connections to Presidents.

“Virtually everyone in Washington recognizes that Bob Strauss is 99% hot air, yet they all maintain this ‘elder statesman’ and ‘Mr. Democrat’ routine like some sort of elaborate prank on the rest of the world,” Kinsley wrote. “Is it unsporting not to play along? I don’t think so. It’s a little too convenient for conservatives and Republicans that ‘Mr. Democrat’ should be a man obviously more interested in being seen as a friend of the President than in who the President happens to be.”

This week, some people also are worried that in Moscow Strauss might forget that his main priority is supposed to be the interests of the American taxpayers, rather than former clients who might try to do business with the Soviets. One Republican political consultant cracks, “He’ll probably get a lot done over there, but he’ll want 10%.”

But Newman, White and other friends who have worked with him in the public and private sectors insist it would be outrageous for anyone to question Bob Strauss’ integrity, especially in serving the public.

“There’s a wisdom about Bob Strauss that people respect,” says Newman.

“Serving the public,” notes White, “has been the basis of his life. He would never betray that.”

Staff Writer Robert Shogan contributed to this story.