COLUMN ONE : Quayle Set on Getting Last Laugh : Despite what many consider a negative image, the vice president is bent on vindication. His detractors may find he is not such an easy mark.

It was September of 1989 and Boris N. Yeltsin was coming to town. Not yet Boris the Hero, not yet the man who would stand atop the tanks to save the Second Russian Revolution, he was Boris the Suspect in the eyes of many Bush Administration officials--Boris the suspected demagogue, the suspected primitive, the suspected drunk.

Loud, boisterous, undiplomatic, and, above all, a rival to President Bush’s friend Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Yeltsin was about as welcome in the Oval Office as last year’s cabbage.

Next door, however, in the complex of offices belonging to Vice President Dan Quayle, the attitude was different. Suspicious of Gorbachev from the start, influenced by conservatives who longed to see a powerful anti-communist leader challenge the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Quayle discounted many of the negatives he had heard about Yeltsin. He arranged for a low-key meeting.

“Their bureaucracy was feeding our bureaucracy” negative information on Yeltsin, Quayle recalled in a recent interview. “There are a lot of forces within the bureaucracy here that did not want to rock the boat, and this guy was going to rock the boat.”

Yeltsin “had a constituency in Moscow. He was a very powerful figure there. He had a following.”

Something else drew Quayle to the Russian leader. “The anti-Yeltsin people,” said Quayle, had “tried to knock him down and say he was a lightweight, that he drank too much, that he was really not a person of stature.” For the vice president, the gibes struck a chord. When the two met, the politician from Indiana joked with the politician from Siberia.

“I said: ‘I’ve been reading your press reviews. Have you read mine?’ ” Quayle remembers saying. “And we sort of laughed about it . . . let’s say I’d been there before.”

Indeed. Has ever a politician bounded onto the national stage amid such derision?

Draft dodger. Rich kid. Lightweight. Danno. The monument to insensitivity who described American Samoans as “happy campers,” the frat-house cutup who insisted on buying a pornographic doll during an official visit to Chile. The hapless bumbler who told the United Negro College Fund: “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

And even though many of the accusations against Quayle are untrue or taken out of context, has ever a political reputation so damaged recovered?

Yet Quayle, no less than his soul-mate from Moscow, is a man bent on vindication--and on higher office. Quietly, carefully, in the time-honored, tortoise-like way of many who occupied the vice presidency before him, James Danforth Quayle is positioning himself to run for President.

And surprising as it may seem, if the Fates one day give him his chance, Quayle’s numberless detractors are likely to discover that he is not quite the easy mark they thought he would be.

Quayle would, of course, have many GOP rivals to contend with. Already some have begun jostling for position. Also, at least some party leaders would probably try to deny him the nomination.

Moreover, if Bush’s current decline in the polls should continue and his hopes for winning a second term unravel, then Quayle’s prospects for 1996 or beyond could fade to nothing.

Undeterred by those possibilities, Quayle is chipping away at his negatives. “I think I know where I started from, and I have resigned myself to a long, upward climb that will take time,” says Quayle. “I’m in no hurry. I think time is on my side.”

Quayle himself steadfastly refuses to comment on presidential ambitions. Others are less reticent. Says one source familiar with Quayle’s thinking: “I don’t think he doubts he could be President.”

Just as Bush did during his years as vice president--and a much-derided Richard M. Nixon before him--Quayle has begun preparing the ground for a possible White House bid by cultivating Republican activists all over the country. He has campaigned across 47 states. He has raised money and political support for GOP candidates at all levels.

And among GOP conservatives, he has found many who dismiss the jokes and gibes directed at him as liberal news media bias. Four years ago, it was precisely that sort of carefully nurtured party support that saved George Bush’s campaign when the conventional wisdom in Washington dismissed him as a hopeless wimp destined to fumble away his party’s nomination. Quayle advisers clearly hope that pattern will repeat itself.

Even some in the opposition party recognize the possibility. When Quayle flew to Chile in 1990 to represent the United States at the inauguration of the new civilian president, Patricio Aylwin, he took along a former colleague on the Senate Labor Committee, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)

During the 1988 presidential campaign, Kennedy had spoken out in defense of Quayle, saying media coverage of Bush’s running mate had “not been a fair characterization.” Now, on the plane south, Kennedy presented Quayle with a gift--a red, white and blue New England Patriots football jersey with the name Quayle on the back and the number 96 on the front.

“Does ’96 have a ring to it?” Kennedy scribbled on the shirt as he presented it.

President Quayle? President Dan Quayle. Roll the words around in your mind. But do not laugh. George Bush. Gerald R. Ford. Richard M. Nixon. Lyndon B. Johnson. Harry S. Truman. Five of the past 10 vice presidents have become President.

President Quayle?

A Different Reality

If it were Quayle’s turn, what would the country get?

For pundits and insiders, journalists and jokesters, “the line” on Dan Quayle has become an article of faith: an empty-headed, inexperienced, lightweight politician plucked out of obscurity by George Bush in a moment of foolish whim. Where the presidency requires a man, Quayle is a boy. Where it requires a steady hand, he offers a pretty face.

But the eight years of Quayle in the Senate and 2 1/2 in the vice presidency record a different reality.

In an Administration that has put most of its energy overseas, Quayle has been a key player on whatever domestic policy George Bush has. He has surrounded himself with an energetic, intelligent staff filled with young conservative activists determined to have an impact.

Bush has been ideologically pragmatic, happy to dress up his Yankee skepticism in a chimerical conservatism when necessary, but pragmatic above all.

Quayle is something very different.

From his days as a young Republican in the House of Representatives, to his eight years as a senator and then to his tenure as vice president, Quayle has left the indelible impression of a politician with strong conservative beliefs, though he too prefers to avoid self-immolation.

A former Senate aide, for example, recalls her astonishment at discovering one day that Quayle had won majority support for a controversial piece of education legislation by quietly cutting a deal with Connecticut’s Christopher J. Dodd, one of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats. Another recalls Quayle’s grumbling about “purists” in the Ronald Reagan White House who complicated his drive to get job training legislation through Congress in 1982.

“It may seem like something of a contradiction in terms,” said Kay James, a former National Right to Life executive turned Administration official, but Quayle and the people around him are “pragmatic ideologues.”

Quayle’s chief of staff, William Kristol, the son of prominent neoconservative writer Irving Kristol, served as a top aide to Education Secretary William J. Bennett during the Reagan years and has been a leading proponent of activist, conservative domestic policy ideas. In contrast to the White House, where most senior aides are longtime Bush supporters, many others on Quayle’s staff spent the 1987-88 campaign season working for candidates Jack Kemp and Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont IV, both known for their openness to ideas that were unflinchingly conservative but also unorthodox, sometimes even politically risky.

In the foreign policy realm, Quayle pays heed to two conservative figures from the Reagan Administration--former assistant secretary of defense Richard N. Perle and Kenneth L. Adelman, the former head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Even as a young senator, Quayle would invite them to his office to chew over long-range national security issues. That practice has continued to this day.

Within his staff, the top foreign policy job is held by Karl Jackson, who earlier this year moved over from the White House, where he was the National Security Council’s chief Asia-policy expert, known for his hard-line views.

Quayle’s staff has developed a reputation for aggressiveness, at times drawing criticism, even from Bush. “Sometimes I think Dan has people in there who do not understand the role of the vice president. They aren’t there to make policy,” Bush once grumbled to a longtime friend.

But despite occasional frictions, Quayle and his aides have had a clear influence. That influence invariably has pushed Administration policy to the right.

On economics, he has lined up with Kemp, now secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher in the Administration faction that has pushed for more activist conservative policies and greater confrontation with congressional Democrats over such issues as tax cuts.

On foreign policy, he staked out a position as an Administration hawk--a skeptic about Gorbachev and an enthusiast for “Star Wars,” the missile defense system. While he carefully stays within the bounds of Bush policy, as he grows more familiar with foreign issues Quayle has begun subtly pushing an agenda of his own. It is an agenda less focused on Bush’s mantra of international “stability” and more on promoting “American values,” both in opposing the world’s remaining communist regimes and in promoting democracy elsewhere around the globe.

Should Quayle become President, many of his denigrators might find they preferred the empty head they thought they were getting to the resilient, determined, deeply conservative and highly partisan Republican politician the record shows him to be.

Quayle remains a mediocre public speaker--although no worse than Bush. Nor is anyone ever likely to call him an intellectual or a philosophical thinker. He is not reflective, original or given to creative synthesis in his thought.

Contrary to the jokes, however, he is not stupid. Despite early gaffes, Quayle has handled his official vice presidential duties smoothly. On foreign assignments and in domestic policy debates, he has proved to be a quick study. Though he likes face-to-face briefings more than extensive reading, he masters the details of complex policy issues easily.

One-on-one, or in small groups such as the occasional dinners for Washington policy intellectuals that he and his wife, Marilyn, host at the vice presidential residence, Quayle displays a growing self-confidence.

John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a liberal critic of Administration policies on space and defense issues, attended one such gathering. “He was not nearly the empty head I had been led to expect,” Pike recalled. In a lengthy discussion with a group of policy experts, “he held his own.”

Another outside expert who recently briefed Quayle on foreign policy recalled that “if anything, I would say he seemed a little cocky. The style was sort of jock-like, as though he were a member of a really cool fraternity and we weren’t.”

None of that has yet had a major impact on the polls or the image that the public at large--as well as many political insiders--have of Quayle, an image that was frozen during the 1988 campaign.

The day after Quayle’s first national exposure, pumping his arms in wild enthusiasm as he stood next to Bush on a campaign platform in New Orleans, the vice presidential nominee presented an appearance that Washington Post columnist Meg Greenfield captured in a fatefully memorable phrase. Writing about Quayle’s first, stumbling press conference and his attempt to explain his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, Greenfield recounted that the look on Quayle’s face “was startled, uncomprehending, apprehensive, a look that someone once likened to that of a deer caught in the glare of the headlights.”

The phrase has stuck to Quayle like napalm, burning mercilessly at his image and reputation. Three and a half years later, the look continues to return when Quayle faces difficult moments, particularly when he faces questions from reporters--a visible reminder of the lasting imprint of the 1988 campaign.

After the campaign experience, says Marilyn Quayle, “I don’t think either of us will ever fully trust any member of the media again to be fair.”

Before Quayle would launch a presidential bid, “we’ll definitely talk it out for a long time,” she adds. “We’ve had a taste of the downside as well as the good.”

Yet the evidence of two years all points toward a man growing increasingly confident of his ability to play the game after all and moving with unexpected shrewdness to assert himself--in affairs both domestic and foreign.

Instruments of Power

On a warm midsummer day earlier this year, the vice president surveyed a group of officials from four federal regulatory agencies sitting around the polished dark-wood conference table in his ornate office overlooking the White House. They had gathered to discuss with Quayle a proposed new policy on “wetlands”--the ecologically fragile and important swamps, marshes, river bottoms and flood plains that environmental experts say must be protected from pollution, commercial development and other threats.

Quayle gestured toward a large Army Corps of Engineers map of the United States. On the multicolored display, a huge red swath cut across Quayle’s home state, designating much of northern Indiana as actual or potential wetlands--”hydric soil” in the jargon of hydrologists. Farmers’ fields. Suburban back yards. City parks. The heart of the Midwest. Wetlands?

“Someone explain that to me,” Quayle demanded. “All of northern Indiana is shown as hydric soil. Now someone explain that to me because I know for a fact that a lot of that area is prime farmland.”

Much more than most vice presidents, Quayle has played a substantial role in the shaping of domestic policy. And the clearest, most visible example of his influence--and of his ability to convert seemingly empty assignments into instruments of power--has come on the sensitive issue of wetlands preservation.

Beyond the obvious swamps and marshes, ecologists believe many pieces of land play equally important roles as crucial habitats for vegetation and animals even though they are only periodically inundated, and dry for much of the year.

As the map in Quayle’s office revealed, however, much of the land in the latter category lies in areas already devoted to farming, industry and urban living. The challenge has been to balance protection of wetlands against economic and other needs.

During the 1988 campaign, aides attuned to environmentally conscious voters had hit on a campaign slogan for Bush: “no net loss” of wetlands. Shortly before Bush took office, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a new wetlands manual, defining exactly what areas the government considered worthy of protection. As much as 100 million acres fell under the definition. Not only was much of northern Indiana covered, so too, for example, was half of Vermont, 40% of Maryland’s eastern shore and much of suburban Houston. In all those areas, new development would require close scrutiny.

Almost immediately, farmers, land developers and small business owners--core Republican constituencies--began to scream in protest.

Conservatives in the White House saw the new wetlands rules as an attempt by government bureaucrats to take advantage of Bush’s pledge and to push their own agenda. Other officials, however, argued that Bush, already under fire for waffling on environmental pledges on global warming and clean air, could not afford to back away from a clear campaign promise on wetlands.

The result, for a time, was a policy paralysis within the Administration. Quayle, by contrast, harbored few doubts.

“He’s a deregulator, a ‘give business a chance’ believer in the corporate world,” says Tom Korologos, a longtime Washington lobbyist and occasional golfing partner of the vice president.

In an interview, Quayle described his view this way: “I sort of start at a presumption that the government should not be involved, and you have to make an argument why it should be involved. There is a role--but a limited role--for government.”

On his frequent travels around the country, Quayle had been hearing complaints about the proposed new wetlands rules over and over from Republicans at party fund-raising events. In the South and West, in particular, the argument Quayle kept hearing was one of property rights: How can the federal government tell me what I can do with my land?

To a politician carefully attuned to the conservative grass roots, the wetlands issue presented a clear opportunity to make a policy change that would appeal to his constituency.

And the way Quayle went about it reflects not only his aggressively conservative role in policy-making but also his ingenuity in creating instruments of power despite the inherent powerlessness of his own office.

In mid-spring, at one of his regular Oval Office morning meetings with Bush, Quayle proposed that the wetlands issue be turned over to a little-known entity called the Council on Competitiveness.

Made up of the vice president, the White House chief of staff, Budget Director Richard G. Darman, the secretary of the Treasury, the secretary of commerce and the attorney general, along with the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the competitiveness council is staffed by Quayle’s aides.

The council, under a different name, was invented during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Then, it was headed by Bush, who employed it from time to time to advance deregulatory arguments. But Quayle, with his greater interest in domestic programs, has used the council far more extensively. Along with the National Space Council, which Quayle also heads, it has provided him with invaluable opportunities to talk to, and assist, key business leaders, a crucial constituency for an aspiring Republican politician.

In fighting regulations, the council’s chief weapon is its power, together with that of the Office of Management and Budget, to place almost any new regulation on indefinite hold. Over the last year, Quayle and the council have played key roles in limiting the reach of new Clean Air Act regulations that business groups oppose, a move that has drawn sharp protests from environmentalists and many members of Congress. The council also killed a series of EPA rules designed to force the owners of municipal incinerators to recycle more--and burn less--and slowed down implementation of a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that reduced the amount of formaldehyde to which workers can be exposed.

But no issue has attracted as much controversy as the wetlands program. From May through July, Quayle and his staff met repeatedly with EPA chief William K. Reilly.

Eventually, using his power to delay EPA’s rules, Quayle was able to force a major revision.

Under the new definitions, millions of acres that had been slated for restrictions on development--perhaps as much as 60 million acres of the original 100 million, critics say--will now be open. Moreover, the process under which permits are granted will be accelerated.

The new definitions have stirred more controversy, with the Administration’s final position unresolved.

But Quayle welcomes the criticism of his role. Each attack boosts his stock with Republican conservatives and business interests.

His critics, he said at a recent speech, “are those who would strangle the free market with red tape, who would regulate our businesses to death, and who would replace them with a new class of bureaucrats and central planners.”

His Global View

Under the arch of a whitewashed watchtower, just a few feet away from the painted line that demarks what may now be the tensest border in the world, Dan Quayle stared into the eyes of the enemy as American troops snapped pictures of North Korean troops snapping pictures of the American vice president.

Panmunjom. For a man who had never been to Korea--who had, in fact, seldom traveled outside the United States before becoming vice president--the visit to the Demilitarized Zone in late September, 1989, was a galvanizing experience.

He went deep underground to inspect an infiltration tunnel that North Korean forces had dug years ago. He hurried off by helicopter and donned a camouflage suit and war paint to visit GIs perched in a firebase on the edge of the border. He made a last-minute visit to the frontier itself.

The race across the DMZ left him elated. Korea, he told one soldier, “puts everything into perspective.”

Gorbachev may preach “new thinking,” but “it’s quite obvious that perestroika and glasnost have not arrived” in the Korean peninsula, he said. Even then, he warned, Gorbachev was increasing his support for the outlaw regime of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung. The trip, he said, has “reinforced my views” that Soviet “rethinking” must be watched with wary eyes.

There are few audiences Quayle likes better than assemblages of American soldiers. From Korea to the Philippines to Saudi Arabia, from an aircraft carrier off the shores of Italy to military bases scattered across the United States, he has gripped and grinned and chatted and smiled his way past tens of thousands of troops over the last 34 months.

And the troops respond in kind, welcoming his message of patriotic support and never mentioning, either to him or to reporters, Quayle’s absence from Vietnam--a conflict that consumed the nation before many of today’s enlisted men were old enough to have their first toy guns.

Eighteen months after his remarks at Warrior Base in Korea, Quayle spoke to a different group of troops. Unlike the American soldiers in Korea, these soldiers left much to be desired. Brand-new desert fatigues and shiny boots did little to hide paunches, flab and slouching posture.

These were the first 263 new members of the army of Kuwait to graduate from a special eight-day training academy at New Jersey’s Ft. Dix. They were just hours away from boarding the aircraft, next door at McGuire Air Force Base, that would carry them home to the Middle East.

First, however, a lecture from the visiting American:

“Where Saddam Hussein has made a mockery of human rights,” Quayle told them, “you must be the champions of human rights and freedom.

“To discourage future Saddams, we need to stand up against the human rights violators, whoever and wherever they are. That’s where you come in, as leaders of a liberated Kuwait. You will have a key role to play in creating a new Middle East. It must and it will be a Middle East that is free.”

The message was one the young Kuwaitis--or any Kuwaitis, for that matter--might not have expected from an American official. The Bush Administration, intent on building support for its crusade against Saddam, had been uneasy about reminding the regime of Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah of its own past failings and future responsibilities.

The two speeches, to Americans in Korea and to Kuwaitis in New Jersey, illustrate the two main themes of Quayle’s involvement in foreign policy: an abiding suspicion of the communist world, even as it dwindles, and an emphasis on promoting democracy and human rights abroad, even at the cost of sometimes posing difficult questions to American allies.

Particularly on foreign policy, Quayle is not afraid to state his beliefs in terms of moral absolutes.

On Gorbachev, for example: The Soviet leader still says he is a Leninist, and “Leninism, as I understand it, gains power through terrorism and through the infringement of human rights, and therefore, I just think it’s the antithesis of the democratic values we espouse.”

Similarly, a year ago, when the Administration was trying to agree on a coherent justification for its willingness to fight Saddam, Secretary of State James A. Baker III reached for the ultimate pragmatist’s answer. The conflict, he said, is about “jobs.”

Quayle, by contrast, reached for a moral argument.

“I believe that every reasonable effort must be made to resolve this crisis peacefully. I also think that there must be limits to our patience,” he said in a speech at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

“Consider, for example, the fate of the people of Kuwait. With every day that passes, their plight grows more desperate. Being patient with Iraq allows Saddam Hussein to prolong their agony. Is this a moral course of action?” he demanded.

“Or consider the fate of American military personnel in Saudi Arabia. The longer we refrain from action against Iraq, the more time Saddam Hussein has to tighten his grip on Kuwait. . . . Does patience today risk greater American casualties tomorrow? And if so, is this a moral course of action?”

Quayle’s desire to promote democracy, human rights and the free market abroad set him against others, both conservative and liberal, who argue that with the decline of the Soviet Union, the time has come to pull out of American commitments overseas.

Indeed, friends say he has grumbled in private that if he were President he would be less ready to do business with China, in the wake of the 1989 Tian An Men Square massacre, than Bush has been.

None of this is to say that, as President, Quayle would become a second Jimmy Carter in his use of human rights as a touchstone of foreign policy. Though Quayle’s ideological impulses seem to run deeper than Bush’s, they too are tempered by pragmatism.

And Quayle’s inexperience in foreign matters leaves many questions, for his views are still forming. Unlike Bush, says one senior Administration official who knows Quayle well, the vice president “doesn’t think he knows all the answers.”

Quayle is still learning, the official said, and his mix of views makes it difficult to predict exactly where he would come down on a future issue. One of the international leaders he admires, for example, is Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, whose government has treated dissidents with a heavy hand. “I do disagree with him on some of the human rights issues,” Quayle said in a television interview. But, he was quick to point out, “he has brought Singapore along to economic progress.”

Carefully Playing Role

It was 7:15 a.m., June 26, 1990. In his room on the top floor of the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Century City, where he was preparing for a day of GOP fund raising, Quayle picked up a ringing telephone and heard the voice of his chief of staff, William Kristol. Back in Washington, Kristol said, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater had just released a statement in which Bush endorsed the need for “tax revenue increases” as part of a budget deal.

Quayle, Kristol later told friends, was stunned.

Bush’s budget negotiators--Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and Darman--seemed to have tossed away their ace before the game had really begun. And the President had abandoned the central pledge of his campaign--”read my lips: no new taxes.” Increasing taxes, Quayle deeply believed, was bad policy.

Before breakfast was over, however, Quayle was meeting with reporters and dutifully supporting the new Administration line. The statement, he insisted to a Times reporter, “should not be viewed as a change of policy” at all. “This is a deficit reduction summit, not a tax increase summit,” he declared.

As George Bush did before him, Dan Quayle has carefully played the role of loyal vice president, never publicly allowing daylight to appear between his position and that of the President.

“The office is not an office where you create a persona that is necessarily your own,” he said in an early interview with The Times. “You shouldn’t try to say, ‘Well, now let’s see, here is the vice president’s ideas. Here is the vice president’s agenda. Here is the vice president’s strategy.’ ”

But unlike Bush as vice president, Quayle, in fact, has developed a visible agenda of his own. And in pursuing that agenda, the contrast between his approach and that of Bush puts the Quayle style in sharp relief.

Part of the difference is a matter of age. No matter how much time he spends with Bush and such top presidential advisers as Baker and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, Dan Quayle is of a different generation.

“Things he read, people he had dinner with, were very different from George Bush” when the two were in their formative stages, says a Quayle aide.

In the foreign realm, “Quayle came of age at a time of moral debate over foreign policy. Bush came of age with a more conventional view of foreign policy,” the aide said.

Similarly, on domestic affairs, Quayle is an unhesitating conservative. Where the President was raised the son of a patrician New England senator, Quayle grew up the son of a small-town conservative newspaper publisher, spending much of the 1950s and early 1960s in Scottsdale, Ariz., where his family was close to Sen. Barry Goldwater.

“His time in the West had a bigger influence on him than people realize,” says Marilyn Quayle. Scottsdale was a small desert town at the time, dominated by people who ardently believed that “the less involvement the government has in your life, the better,” she adds. “That’s why people went to places like that.”

Given that background, it is not surprising that now, as an adult, Quayle holds a deep admiration of two other exemplars of conservative individualism, Reagan and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher.

What is easy to overlook, and what could lead his present critics and future rivals to underestimate Quayle’s political potential, is that both Reagan and Thatcher were more than conservative true-believers. They were also intensely practical politicians, quite prepared to abandon ideological purity without a blush if the exigencies demanded it.

Thus Quayle--unlike such other ideologically charged Republicans as Kemp--has demonstrated a modest but undeniable ability to “work the system” and achieve results. The urge to “fix it”--carefully suppressed in Bush--is rampant in Quayle’s energetic can-do manner.

And, ultimately, friends say, as he begins to contemplate his political future, it will be that pragmatic side that will shape any future run for the Presidency.

“Dan Quayle is not Don Quixote,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, Reagan’s last chief of staff and an occasional Quayle adviser. “He does not believe in tilting at windmills. He believes in getting things done.”

VICE PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE 1947: Born in Indianapolis on Feb. 4, to James C. Quayle and Corinne Pulliam Quayle. 1969: Graduated with a B.S. in political science from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. * Entered the Indiana National Guard in May, serving occasional weekends through 1975. Wrote press releases for the quarterly Indiana National Guardsman newspaper. 1971: Joined investigative staff of Consumer Protection Division of Indiana attorney general’s office. * Became an administrative assistant to Indiana Gov. Edgar Whitcomb. 1972: Married Marilyn Tucker on Nov. 18. The couple had three children: Tucker Danforth 17, Benjamin Eugene 15, and Mary Corinne 12. 1973: Named director of the Inheritance Tax Division of the Indiana Department of Revenue. 1974: Graduates from night school at University of Indiana Law School and passes Indiana bar in July. * Joins the family business as an associated publisher and general manager of the Huntington Ind. Herald-Press. * Opens law practice, Quayle & Quayle, with his wife. 1976: Wins upset victory in Indiana’s fourth congressional district, unseating eight-term Democratic incumbent J. Edward Roush. 1978: Reelected by the largest margin in the district’s history. 1980: Elected senator, defeating three-time Democratic incumbent Birch E. Bayh. 1982: Co-sponsors the Job Training and Partnership Act with Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. 1986: Reelected senator with 61% of the vote, the largest margin to that date in a statewide vote. 1988: Elected Vice President. Source: Current Biography Yearbook, 1989

HOW THE PUBLIC VIEWS QUAYLE

Americans are generally divided in their impression of Dan Quayle: Very favorable: 9% Somewhat favorable: 40% Somewhat unfavorable: 25% Very unfavorable: 19% Don’t know: 7% Source: Los Angeles Times Poll, May, 1991

Many approve of the job he’s doing as vice president : Approve: 54% Disapprove: 27% Don’t know: 19% Source: Gallup Poll, May, 1991

But many doubt that he is qualified to be President. Qualified to be President: 35% Not qualified: 52% Don’t know: 13% Source: Los Angeles Times Poll, May, 1991

If Bush were to withdraw, Quayle would not be the favorite for the 1992 GOP nomination: James A. Baker III: 18% Jack Kemp: 16% Dick Cheney: 13% Dan Quayle: 10% Phil Gramm: 2% Pete Wilson: 1% Someone else: 8% Don’t know: 32% Source: Gallup Poll of registered Republicans, August, 1991