The Clutch President : George Bush Loves a Crisis; It’s Everyday Issues That Leave Him Cold

MAY 15 DAWNED BRIGHT, SUNNY AND CRISP--THE RARE SPRING DAY that lets Washington residents temporarily forget that theirs is a city built on a swamp. In the White House, George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, rose 15 minutes before the sun, read the morning news summary prepared overnight by his aides, ate some fruit and then walked the 40 yards from his residential quarters to the Oval Office.

Seated at his large mahogany desk, Bush picked up a brown leather folder embossed with the presidential seal and the words “President’s Daily Briefing.” He began to look through a top-secret packet containing analyses from the Central Intelligence Agency, diplomatic cables from the State Department, updates from the top-security Situation Room in the White House basement and reports from the Pentagon.

Reading intriguing segments of the written briefing aloud in a matter-of-fact tone and passing papers to Vice President Dan Quayle across the desk and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft to his right, Bush surveyed the world. In northern Iraq, U.S. troops were poised outside the provincial city of Dohuk, trying to coax Kurdish refugees back without taking over the city. In the Middle East, Secretary of State James A. Baker III was having little success bridging the gap between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In Bangladesh, American soldiers were about to arrive on a mission to aid starving cyclone victims.

The range of domestic concerns was much narrower. Bush and Chief of Staff John H. Sununu spent most of a short session reviewing the script for a lunchtime meeting and political pep talk with Republican Senate members. According to the plan, Bob Dole of Kansas, the Senate Republican leader who was Bush’s rival for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination, would give Bush a giant poster-size mock credit card--a “Republican veto card” good through 1996. Bush, in turn, would ask his fellow Republicans to support his “veto strategy” and continue his unbroken string of 21 successfully vetoed bills.

“I am sick and tired of people saying we don’t have a domestic agenda,” Bush would tell his audience on Capitol Hill. “We’ve got a good one,” he’d say, making quick references to the Administration’s education program, its highway bill and its energy proposals.

“When we’re in a minority,” the script continued, “the only way we’re going to get something done is to beat down the bad idea.” In other words: Stop--don’t go.

Those staged remarks, like most Bush pronouncements on domestic policy, broke little new ground and attracted small notice when he delivered them. But an off-the-cuff statement on foreign policy that he made minutes after the Senate meeting echoed across Washington like a thunderclap.

“Did you discuss China, sir?” a reporter asked him when Bush returned to the White House.

“We discussed China, MFN,” Bush said, using the bureaucratic acronym for most-favored-nation trade status. “I want to see MFN for China. . . . I made a strong pitch for it.” Bush’s words, though obscure and filled with jargon, threw his top aides into a frenzy and plunged his Administration into a controversy destined to last much of the summer. They put Bush behind a policy that strengthens ties with China’s leaders rather than imposing sanctions for human-rights abuses. Within hours, members of Bush’s inner circle, surprised by their boss’ sudden decision, were scrambling to put their “spin” on what he had said, telling reporters that China policy was still “under review.”

In fact, Scowcroft and Secretary of State Baker had been reviewing the policy for weeks, and Baker recently had sent Undersecretary of State Robert M. Kimmitt to Beijing to meet with China’s leaders.

But before his aides had finished their work, Bush had reached a decision. He blurted it out to the media just half an hour before Kimmitt was due in Scowcroft’s office to report on his trip.

“I knew we were going to have a hell of a fight on our hands,” Bush explained a few weeks later in an interview. He wanted to control the timing of the announcement. The deadline for arriving at a China policy fell on June 3, the eve of the second anniversary of the Chinese government’s attack on student protesters in Tian An Men Square, and “I wasn’t particularly anxious to do all this on Tian An Men Square day,” he said. So, driven by that sense of urgency, he trusted his gut, ignored his advisers and made a decision alone.

Bush’s staff had devoted hours to developing policy alternatives, a bemused senior aide said later. “He swept some of the options right off the table.”

THE TWO EVENTS, COMING BACK TO BACK, capture the spirit of the Bush presidency.

On domestic matters, Bush’s policy is carefully staged, defensive in tone, with limited goals. It emphasizes the President’s power to stop legislation he dislikes rather than pushing programs he prefers.

On foreign policy, he is secretive, quick-moving, dynamic.

And on both domestic and foreign issues, his motivations and underlying purposes often are obscure or, at least, unstated.

As Bush nears his widely anticipated campaign for reelection, his rhetoric has yet to explain exactly what his presidency is about. To the recurrent questions about “the vision thing,” Bush offers vague phrases: A “kinder and gentler” nation at home. A “new world order” abroad. Pressed to define those terms, he frequently seems tongue-tied or evasive.

Of the “new world order” phrase, a senior aide says: “I think he sees it as an asset that it doesn’t have a quick definition.”

“The President is uncomfortable with words,” adds another aide. “He’s more interested in getting things done.”

Although the Administration’s goals may be unclear, a pattern to Bush’s presidency does exist. Bush lacks visible grand design, but he operates on the basis of several fixed instincts, rules deeply embedded in his character. Foremost among them: Keep moving.

Bush “has sort of a Yankee dis-affinity for verbiage,” says longtime friend and political associate Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa). “The Bush presidency is being defined in action more than in rhetoric.”

Ceaseless action. Frenetic action. Thirty months into his term, George Bush has sent U.S. troops ashore on three continents, presided over victory in two wars and hit all-time records in polls of political popularity. He has logged air miles--321,249 as of mid-June--made telephone calls, held summits, met foreign leaders and penned thank-you notes at a record pace.

Much of the action has involved foreign affairs. Bush’s interests, a longtime White House aide says, fall into a series of concentric circles. Most domestic-policy issues lie in the outermost circle of issues that “he really doesn’t give a damn about” or in another ring, just inside, of issues with which he involves himself only sporadically.

Closer in are foreign-policy issues that Bush monitors but leaves largely to others to handle. With considerable shrewdness, for example, he has dropped the intractable problems of the Middle East into the lap of his old friend, Secretary of State Baker.

And in the center lie two concerns that Bush will not delegate--relations with Moscow and Beijing. There, his approach has been shaped by an insider style of personal contact with foreign leaders.

Several factors explain why Bush prefers foreign policy to domestic issues. A man who tends to make decisions on the basis of gut feeling, Bush “trusts his instincts in foreign policy,” says David Bates, a longtime Bush aide who served as the White House’s director of Cabinet affairs during the first year and a half of the presidency. Those instincts have been honed by a background that has a distinctly international focus. He has been ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But unlike Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, or Ronald Reagan, Bush has never run a housing program, governed an urban area or designed a welfare program.

Handling foreign affairs also appeals to Bush’s desire--shared with most presidents--to have an immediate impact. “With foreign policy, he can take an action and see a result. He can order in the troops. He can send the defense secretary to see King Fahd,” says Craig Fuller, Bush’s former chief of staff. “On the domestic side, you can launch an education initiative and you can send the details to Congress, but then you’re at the mercy of the Congress for them to legislate.” Particularly when Congress is controlled by the opposition party.

And Bush’s friend Leach points to a third factor. “I don’t think it can be underestimated how chafingly this President wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessor,” Leach says. Bush “came in under the shadow of Ronald Reagan,” he adds. With little ideological inclination or money to make bold strokes on domestic policy, Bush made foreign affairs the vehicle that would showcase him as a man of action and purpose.

Yet Bush’s tendency is to react, not initiate--even in foreign affairs. Although the Gulf War solidified Bush’s image as a foreign-policy activist, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was a circumstance beyond Bush’s control. Before the war, Bush had spent 18 months defending himself against charges that he was behind the curve on the vast events overtaking Eastern Europe. “Prudent” and “cautious” were his bywords.

Since the war, Bush has stopped hinting, as he did for a time, that the Administration will take bold steps to shock Israel and its Arab neighbors into negotiations. The Administration now appears committed to a dogged but low-risk strategy that calls for continually prodding both sides to talk.

There as elsewhere, a senior adviser says, the President is content to let his “new world order” be “worked out by the events of history.”

In his influential 1972 book “The Presidential Character,” political scientist James David Barber wrote that two simple tests of character determine how presidents will perform. He analyzed chief executives by determining whether they are active or passive in their approach to the job, positive or negative in their view of their work and surroundings.

In Barber’s view, active-negative types--presidents as diverse as Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and, more recently, Jimmy Carter--approach the job with tremendous energy, often succeeding for a time. But their grim, inflexible and suspicious natures lead stubbornly toward disaster when trouble begins.

On the other hand, passive types--Reagan fits the pattern well--tend to drift, Barber says, although they, too, may be successful for a time, particularly if their staffs are good. These presidents resist the hard work of mastering their jobs and avoid making decisions, particularly when doing so requires choosing among friends.

Bush is neither grim and stubborn nor lazy and reluctant to make decisions. But if he dreams great dreams like an FDR or a JFK--both classified by Barber as active-positive--he hasn’t shown it.

This President is frenetically passive: Always running--but often running in place.

THREE MONTHS AFTER BUSH’S INAUGURAtion, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak came to Washington. Bush spent hours in discussions with him, taking him to Baltimore to watch an Orioles game and hosting a state dinner at the White House.

And at one point, Bush said recently, Mubarak offered a suggestion. “He said, ‘George’--we have a good relationship, and I’ve known him a long time--he said, ‘Let me give you some advice.’ ”

“And I said, ‘What is it, Hosni?’ ”

“And he said, ‘You ought to get on the phone once in a while when there’s no problem. Call somebody up. Ask them how they’re doing,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised what a phone call from the President of the United States would mean to another leader in the world anywhere--some small country.’ ”

Since then, the telephone has become the symbol of Bush’s touch-tone foreign policy.

For example, from Aug. 2, the start of the Persian Gulf crisis, through early February, when tired White House aides gave up counting, Bush made 231 telephone calls to other heads of state, 29 in the first week of the crisis.

“In past administrations, a presidential telephone call was a major thing,” says one Administration official. “Now it’s every day. You can’t keep track of them any more.”

By regularly calling world leaders, Bush takes the insider game of Washington politics--working behind closed doors with a tight circle of friends and advisers--and, to an unprecedented degree, makes it international. The President, a senior adviser says, sees foreign heads of state as his “colleagues.” Jotting down notes with a government-issue felt-tip pen on pads of blue paper for regular calls, special yellow pads for classified discussions, Bush conducts his own personal diplomacy.

Bush takes this approach most strongly with China. He feels “he knows and has dealt with most of the old men” running the Chinese government and has particular insight into how best to deal with them, one close aide says.

But outside experts question the depth of Bush’s Chinese experience. Bush served in Beijing, as head of the U.S. Liaison Office, for only 14 months, during a time when Chinese leaders rationed access by Western envoys and when U.S. policy toward the country was kept in the hands of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Bush had no particular expertise in Chinese culture or knowledge of the language, these critics argue, and his exposure to Chinese realities was limited. “He is a perfect example of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ ” says a former senior U.S. official with extensive experience in China. “He’s bought the Chinese leadership’s point of view--that the Chinese need ‘stability’ and that they can’t afford political freedoms because there would be chaos.”

Nonetheless, Bush’s perception of his expertise is what drives U.S. policy. As a result, the Oval Office makes virtually every decision involving U.S. relations with the People’s Republic. Bush defends his policies against the charge that he is sacrificing the cause of human rights to curry favor with China’s leaders; he says that the best way to advance human rights in China is to influence the government from a position of friendship, not antagonism.

The nation’s foreign policy must have a “moral dimension” and be true to “American ideals,” Bush said in a recent speech at Yale, his alma mater. But “many times that means trying to chart a moral course through a world of lesser evils. And that’s the real world. Not black and white. Very few moral absolutes. Enormous potential for error and embarrassment.”

America cannot refuse to deal with other countries simply because they are not pure enough, Bush said. “Understand that you often will confront moral ambiguity,” he advised the graduates in terms that appeared to be a guide to his own thinking. “There will come times when you will have difficulty distinguishing between good guys and bad guys.”

That theme has recurred in the most important of Bush’s personal relationships--his bond to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Bush began his presidency suspicious of Gorbachev’s intentions. “When the Administration came to office, Gorbachev had done some interesting, flashy, but not necessarily fundamental things,” recalls Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Council Soviet policy director. Bush and his aides were skeptical that Gorbachev was sincere, and on one memorable occasion, press secretary Marlin Fitzwater referred to the Soviet leader as a “drugstore cowboy” peddling phony nostrums.

But during the first several months of his Administration, Bush grew increasingly impatient with the image that he was only reacting to Soviet initiatives and that Gorbachev set the pace. The President began prodding his staff for initiatives that he could take. At a NATO summit in May, 1989, he unveiled a major troop-cut proposal for Europe. Two months later, he decided to push for a U.S.-Soviet summit.

He reached that decision, as usual, informally and secretly. On a trip to Eastern Europe in July, Bush surveyed the massive changes that had occurred in Poland and Hungary. Both Polish communist chief Wojciech Jaruzelski and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa urged Bush to meet with Gorbachev. A few days later, in Paris, where he was attending the annual economic conference of the major industrial nations, Bush sat on the veranda of the U.S. ambassador’s home. The time had come, he told Baker and Scowcroft, to begin working on a summit.

Keeping the idea under wraps, Bush told neither Defense Secretary Dick Cheney nor CIA chief William Webster of his plans. And as late as mid-September, at a news conference, Bush suggested that he was not yet ready to talk about summits. “I feel under no rush on that subject,” he said.

In fact, at that very moment the summit was preoccupying the White House. And the eventual meeting, in December, 1989, on the Mediterranean island of Malta, was the start of a personal relationship that would bear fruit six months later.

During their June, 1990, summit in Washington, after U.S. officials had rejected numerous Soviet pleas to relax American policy and grant new trade privileges to help the moribund Soviet economy, Bush invited Gorbachev to Camp David, the presidential retreat, for a day of relaxation and talk. At the end of the day, in the darkness over Maryland’s suburbs, as he and the troubled Soviet president sat knee-to-knee in the helicopter carrying them back to Washington, Bush decided to make a change, his aides say. Gorbachev was a leader he could work with, and the Soviet needed help. Soon after the helicopter settled down on the White House South Lawn, Bush passed word to his staff: The trade agreement would proceed.

As a result of his talks with Gorbachev, Bush “has come to trust him,” says one aide. “He’s come to the conclusion that he really doesn’t want to do anything to harm him.” And that “personal relationship has served Gorbachev better than anything,” says another senior White House official. “It’s one of the strongest things Gorbachev has going for him now.”

Personal connections alone, Bush believes, can’t shape a government’s positions, but, he adds, “if you have some contacts, it facilitates your policy.” And the President, an aide says, relishes the ability to “quickly get down to brass tacks on a really difficult issue. He thinks of himself as the guy who cuts the Gordian knot.”

Bush’s rapport with European leaders, for example, allowed the United States and its allies to accommodate the massive changes brought on by the collapse of Eastern European communism, events such as the unification of Germany, which many outside observers had predicted would tear apart the NATO alliance.

The Administration has moved to protect itself against one of the obvious pitfalls of the personal approach: maintaining the relationship when your friends die, retire or fall from grace. Just before Boris N. Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation, for instance, White House aides passed the word that he would be invited to meet Bush within a week.

But Bush’s brand of diplomacy poses other dangers that are harder to avoid.

During the aftermath of the Gulf War, Bush had resisted involving U.S. troops in any mission to support Kurds in their rebellion against Baghdad, even when television pictures showed hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees.

But when he began getting calls from Turkish President Turgut Ozal, who was desperate to get the refugees out of his country, Bush rapidly changed his mind. Ozal was a fellow insider, a member of the group, someone with whom Bush had exchanged 27 telephone calls during the first seven months of the Gulf crisis. Bush could not refuse his request.

The President ordered an immediate airlift. When that proved woefully inadequate, he approved truck convoys. And when relief officials reported that trucks would not suffice, Bush directed the Army to build refugee camps within Iraqi territory.

Two months later, in a mission largely unforeseen when the airlift began, U.S. troops were occupying substantial parts of northern Iraq. Bush’s aides concede that they cannot chart the long-term consequences.

BUSH’S ADMINISTRATION can be likened to a car with a tremendously powerful engine with gears that are only intermittently engaged. What keeps the gears disengaged on many issues is Bush’s ideology--the credo of what political analyst Nelson Polsby has described as an “American Tory.”

Faced with a crisis, such as a war, Bush is firm, decisive and focused. But on everything else, he is content to wait for problems to come to him. Some might look at America’s cities, with their tens of thousands of homeless people, decaying hospitals and failing schools, and declare that a crisis exists at home. But Bush feels no such urgency. Believing that innovations, particularly unconventional ones, are as likely to worsen problems as solve them, he embraces the skeptical Tory creed: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

Bush shuns any sort of ambitious schemes or over-arching solutions--whether liberal or conservative. Instead, he emphasizes solving discrete problems, one at a time.

Unlike Reagan, who was hostile to government, Bush is merely skeptical of it. He does not scorn the poor and their problems, as many of Reagan’s circle appeared to do. He simply questions whether there is much he can do that would reduce their plight.

Rather than pursue a grand vision, Bush, like Dwight D. Eisenhower--whom Bush has cited as a role model--seems to seek tranquillity. “I’ve tried to calm things down and work with Congress,” Bush said early in his term when asked at a news conference to explain his high poll ratings. He has surrounded himself with like-minded people who also have spent careers as politicians and government officials. Bush’s men--no women are in his inner circle, although many fill high-ranking Administration jobs--lack the Reaganites’ ideological fervor for dismantling the government programs they inherited. But they share the boss’ skepticism about setting up programs of their own, and no one in the inner circle cares to propose unconventional solutions to problems.

In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the most influential aide is probably Scowcroft. The retired Air Force general is the chief foreign-policy strategist for a President whose instincts are those of a gut-level tactician. “Stability” is his favored goal, “prudent caution” his favored means.

Sununu, by contrast, built a much more confrontational reputation--at least before the controversy over his travels threatened his status at the top of the White House staff hierarchy. If Scowcroft has become Bush’s foreign-policy alter ego, Sununu is the President’s domestic-policy doppelganger--his malevolent double--the man whose job is to kick shins so that Bush can stick to shaking hands.

In a speech to conservative activists last November, Sununu suggested that he would be content if Congress merely convened, passed its routine appropriations bills, then adjourned. Everything else on the Administration’s legislative agenda already had been passed, he said. When someone on the fringe of Bush’s circle, such as Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, urges more dramatic policies, Sununu, with the help of Budget Director Richard G. Darman, has had little trouble fobbing the ideas off to endless study committees.

Bush is seldom pushed--by his inner circle, by Congress or by voters--to expand his concerns. After the sweepingly active presidencies of Johnson and Nixon destroyed themselves and left the nation in shambles, Americans--although we like to see vigor in our chief executives--have had little stomach for presidents offering bold crusades.

Whatever pressure Bush may have felt to grapple with domestic troubles largely dissipated in the war’s wake. Success over Iraq has boosted Bush’s popularity ratings to historic levels. And the victory has reinforced Bush’s self-confidence in all matters.

“I hope I don’t get egotistical enough to mark it up as kind of a notch on the gun barrel--as something that’s great for George Bush,” the President said when asked how the war has affected him. “I don’t look at it that way at all.” But, he acknowledged, “I have a certain (self-) confidence that perhaps has been enhanced.”

Unexpectedly, the change can be seen in his tears.

Early in his presidency, Bush dropped several touching lines from a speech memorializing sailors who died in an explosion aboard the USS Iowa. He feared being seen crying in public, he says. No longer. In recent weeks--at a Southern Baptist convention and at a memorial ceremony for soldiers of the Gulf War--Bush cried openly. “I don’t worry about it as much. I think people understand. I’m 67,” he says, “and I think, ‘Hey, this is it, warts and all.’ ”

IF FRENETIC TELEPHONE calls symbolize Bush’s foreign policy, a silent phone could symbolize his domestic approach.

Bush has called world leaders of every sort, including some who have been hostile to the United States in the past. At home, though, while he stays in touch with many governors, particularly Republicans, and keeps up contacts with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, he has never called one of the mayors of the nation’s three largest cities, according to spokesmen for David Dinkins of New York, Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Richard Daley of Chicago, all Democrats.

In 1988, Bush’s campaign avoided most major cities, with their large concentrations of Democrats, sticking to the Republican suburbs. Even now, cities “are just not on the road map,” says Dinkins’ press secretary, Lee Jones.

On domestic policy, Bush made his views clear in a recent speech at the University of Michigan, where, a generation ago, Johnson unveiled plans for his Great Society.

“We don’t need another ‘Great Society’ with huge and ambitious programs,” Bush said. “We need a ‘Good Society’ . . . The Good Society does not demand agonizing sacrifice. It requires something within everyone’s reach: common decency.”

“An effective government,” he added, “must know its limitations.”

One limitation Bush imposes on his Administration is to wait for consensus on an issue before proposing a program. By awaiting consensus, he restricts the number of issues he tackles. He has studiously avoided major proposals on such matters as the nation’s health-care crisis, on gun control and welfare reform precisely because no consensus exists on any course of action.

Bush often has substituted the illusion of action for reality. During the first year of his term, for example, the President trumpeted his anti-drug campaign. But many of his announced goals were minimal. He pushed for reducing cocaine use by 10% in two years, but even before he was elected, changing social attitudes had sent consumption of the drug plummeting, particularly among middle-class users. Far more intractable were the intertwined problems of inner-city drug use and poverty--and Bush’s program had few ideas for handling them.

Meanwhile, as public interest in the drug issue faded, so, too, did Bush’s emphasis.

Similarly, in May, 1989, a few weeks after a gunman bearing an AK-47 rifle devastated an elementary-school playground in Stockton, Bush responded to the national cries for controlling gun sales with a speech at a national Peace Officers Memorial Day ceremony on the steps of the Capitol.

“The notorious AK-47 comes with a magazine that pumps off 30 explosive bullets without reloading. That is why,” he told the police officers and families standing in the rain in front of him, “we stand on the steps here in front of the Capitol and ask its support for legislation prohibiting the sale or transfer of these insidious gun magazines of more than 15 rounds.”

As soon as public pressure on the issue died down, however, Bush bowed to opposition from the National Rifle Assn. and its congressional supporters and abandoned his proposal. Although Bush went along with a ban on the importation of certain automatic rifles, his Administration killed proposals to prohibit the domestic manufacture of virtually identical weapons.

Those sorts of actions have opened Bush to the charge of political cynicism. Nowhere has the charge been made more vehemently than on the volatile issue of race.

On the first anniversary of the 1988 election, members of the White House press corps crowded into a briefing room for the 28th press conference of the President’s term. When a reporter asked about the negative nature of the campaign that had ended one year earlier, Bush responded bluntly.

“I don’t have to stand here and defend the campaign of 1988--I’d be perfectly prepared to do it--but I was elected,” he said.

Asked about that remark recently, Bush launched into a lengthy and heated defense of his approach toward race--both as candidate and President.

“Willie Horton was about a failed furlough policy,” Bush said, referring to the most notorious campaign issue of 1988--Massachusett Gov. Michael Dukakis’ granting of a furlough to a black man, sentenced to life in prison for murder, who then fled to Maryland, where he raped a white woman.

“It had nothing to do with race,” Bush insisted. “We never used a picture of a black guy in the advertisements--ever. And yet it has been picked up as the epitome of negative campaigning.

“The American people understand,” he insisted, “but the critics didn’t understand, and they still don’t. And they still try to wrap it around my skull even now in the civil-rights debate. And I refuse to accept the blame for that.”

Few charges anger Bush as much as the suggestion that he has sought to exploit race for political purposes. Judging by his words, Bush believes that he is pure. He has helped black causes for decades, he often says proudly. He led the fund-raising drive for the Yale chapter of the United Negro College Fund as far back as 1948.

But the son of a moderate New England senator and heir to an upper-class northeastern Republican tradition of social tolerance, Bush is also the political child of a Southern Republican faction born out of white anger at Democratic support for desegregation. In 1964, when he first ran for office on that party’s ticket--for the Senate against liberal Democrat Ralph Yarborough--Bush’s campaign literature criticized Martin Luther King as a “militant” and denounced Lyndon B. Johnson’s proposed civil-rights act as “detrimental to the concept of states’ rights.”

Two years later, however, Bush, running for Congress, changed positions and said his past statements had been politically necessary and promised “not to appeal to the white backlash.”

Bush joined the majority of House Republicans in voting for the 1968 Fair Housing Act, facing down critics at a hometown meeting in Houston by saying that with black troops fighting in Vietnam, “somehow it seems fundamental that a man should not have the door slammed in his face because he is a Negro or speaks with a Latin American accent.” In his presidential-campaign autobiography, Bush recounts that last episode, not the King and Johnson criticisms.

During the past several months, Bush has played a similar dual role in the debate over a new civil-rights bill.

The bill he repeatedly has asked Congress to enact is strikingly similar to the measure being proposed by congressional Democrats and civil-rights groups. Bush’s bill would give companies sued for job discrimination more defenses than the Democrats’ would. But both bills adopt the same principle--companies could be sued if the percentage of minority group members in their work force failed to match the percentage of minorities in the labor force. Although the practical differences between the bills are small, Bush repeatedly has charged that the Democrats are proposing a “quota bill” and that he is not.

In part, Bush’s ambiguous positions on such issues reflect the compromises of politics.

“George Bush has seen the power of the right in his party, just as Democratic leaders have seen the power of the left,” says Robert S. Strauss, a Democratic power broker whom Bush has chosen to be the next ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Having watched Gerald R. Ford struggle with the ultraconservatives, Bush “knows they can’t destroy you, but they can make life difficult, unpleasant, and he doesn’t want to take them on,” Strauss says. “He wants to give the hard right one teaspoonful as needed, to keep them growling a little but not biting.”

IF CARRIED OUT BY A less-skilled politician, Bush’s habit of compromise--on issues that many Americans see as moral matters--could be devastating.

Bush, however, “is a much better politician than he is given credit for,” says Stuart E. Eizenstat, a domestic-policy adviser in the Carter Administration. “Reagan’s ideological purity . . . afforded a much easier target” for Democrats to attack, Eizenstat says. “Bush, with his rhetoric about helping the impoverished, tends to send the Democrats off stride and makes it much more difficult for him to be attacked politically.”

Bush is also a man who devotes much time and energy to being liked. In an Administration driven more by events than by vision, maintaining popularity often appears to be one of the few clear goals.

George Bush tells this story about himself:

One day during the endless presidential campaign, Bush’s advisers persuaded him, against his better judgment, to toss out the opening pitch at the 1988 All-Star Game in Cincinnati.

“There’s a little Walter Mitty in me, and I’ve always loved sports,” Bush says. On the other hand, “walk out there, and you’re always wondering about getting booed . . . any politician that goes to a ballgame.”

“I go to the All-Star Game,” he says, “saying, ‘This is suicide, man, what are you doing going out here? You know you’re going to get booed.’ ”

But as he waited to go on, picturing headlines the next day--”Bush Booed at Ballgame”--he saw two children, a little blond-haired 8-year-old girl and a big, athletic-looking 11-year-old boy, the two little leaguers who were scheduled to walk onto the field a few minutes ahead of him. Noticing that the children looked nervous, Bush was seized with an inspiration.

“You guys nervous?” he recalls asking. When the two said they were, “I said, ‘Well, why don’t we walk out together?’ “There wasn’t a boo in the house,” Bush recalls. “It worked.”