Skinner Builds His Career on Friendship and Finesse

It is hardly a coincidence, Samuel K. Skinner’s friends say, that his favorite Chinese restaurant is the one frequented by George Bush.

The savvy new White House chief of staff has shown a knack for making the right friends at the right time throughout his life.

First he hitched his wagon to the rising star of James R. Thompson, who would become a four-term governor of Illinois. Then he jumped to Washington as secretary of transportation and began cementing a personal bond with President Bush.

Intense and shrewd, the former federal prosecutor may be no less hard-headed than his predecessor, John H. Sununu. But where the former New Hampshire governor was imperious, Skinner is a Chicago pol under the skin.

And his instinct for schmoozing could make him a very different kind of chief of staff--one capable of finessing the politically dangerous frictions with Congress and others that Sununu often sparked. Those qualities, many Republicans said they believe, could be invaluable to a President whose once-secure grip on reelection has suddenly been shaken.

So adept at building personal relationships is Skinner that he once invited his new friend Dan Quayle to the Indianapolis 500 by calling the vice president and rumbling, “Vroom! Vroom!” into the telephone. Moreover, he and his wife, Honey, went out of their way to befriend Bush’s daughter, Dorothy, when she moved alone to Washington.

And when Skinner drops by the White House, he brings chocolate chip cookies. In his office, he displays a photograph of himself with Bush, sharing a gooey bite.

“It seems at every stage he has reached out and developed a more significant relationship,” said Gayle Franzen, a close friend for more than 20 years. After three years of cultivating the Bushes, he says of Skinner: “They know Sam, they like him, and they like his job.”

Skinner, added Clark Burrus, chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority, “clearly minds every step on the way up.”

To Skinner’s few detractors, his assisted climb from IBM salesman to U.S. attorney to Cabinet member and now White House chief of staff suggests that he may be more skilled at being a protege than at being a leader with important responsibilities of his own.

But his manner has won him a wide network of allies, and the 53-year-old Skinner clearly brings to the White House both Washington polish and street-politics acumen.

“Sam is just a different kind of person,” said Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), who has dealt with Skinner extensively on transportation matters. “He doesn’t berate you, he doesn’t talk down to you. He’s tough as nails, but he does it in a gentlemanly manner.”

“Make no mistake about it,” said Elaine Chao, his former deputy and now the head of the Peace Corps, “Sam Skinner is a self-made man.”

As a little-known incoming transportation secretary in 1989, he quickly made his public mark as the Administration’s point man in ending the Eastern Airlines strike, and Bush turned to him to coordinate the federal response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, a no-win assignment that he managed to discharge without drawing significant fire from environmentalists.

He later was dispatched by Bush to deal with the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

And restoring a sense of esprit within his department has won him acclaim as one of the Cabinet’s most accomplished members.

Yet because he has always been part of politics but has never run for office, some longtime associates said that Skinner may be at his best in the back room. In dealings with Thompson and with Bush during three Illinois primaries, longtime associates said, Skinner’s strength has been his ability to offer succinct advice.

“Sam has always been able to recognize that there are other people who are superstars beyond himself,” said Franzen, who succeeded Skinner as chairman of Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority.

As Bush’s Illinois campaign director in 1988, Skinner helped orchestrate a caravan that rolled along hundreds of miles of highway in a grass-roots blitz by bus credited with locking up the state for Bush in a hotly contested primary election.

As country music stars performed along the way, it was Skinner who sat at Bush’s side, campaign aides said, helping him to maintain his focus on a take-it-to-the-people message that helped defeat Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in that race.

“When a lot of other people were excited, Sam was absolutely unflappable,” one Republican involved in that campaign said. “He is awfully good at giving very hard-headed and very clear advice.”

In that effort, as throughout his career, Skinner’s success depended in large part on his ties to Thompson, for whom he first worked as an assistant when Thompson was a corruption-busting U.S. attorney in Chicago.

Skinner succeeded Thompson as U.S. attorney in 1974 but his stint was cut short when Democrat Jimmy Carter became President in 1977. Skinner entered private law practice, but Thompson soon made him head of the Regional Transportation Authority and kept him near the center of the most powerful circle in Illinois Republican politics.

To be sure, Skinner is anything but a shrinking violet. And some Republicans worry that he may have developed too great a taste for the glamorous side of public life. When the Senate took up a major transportation bill last summer, senators were irked to learn that Skinner was nowhere in sight.

Instead, the golf-loving Cabinet secretary was flying back from the Paris Air Show to attend the U.S. Open in Minnesota.

That taste for high-profile air travel has come under attack. According to government records disclosed by CBS last June, Skinner has flown government jets at taxpayers’ expense for more than 200 hours over the last two years, with almost one-fourth of the flying time intended solely to maintain his proficiency as a pilot.

The practice meant that Skinner often flew in the cockpit of seven-seat FAA jets for routine government business instead of flying more inexpensively aboard commercial craft. White House guidelines drafted after Sununu was found to have used military planes for private business had imposed strict restrictions on the use of government planes.

But Skinner, a private pilot since 1977, insisted that the paid-for flying time was permissible under a Transportation Department program that encourages policy-makers to maintain their flying skills, and press attention soon shifted to other issues.

But it is what Skinner has done off the public stage that has been more important in his climb--and provides a better clue to how he will handle his new job.

Though he barely knew Quayle before coming to Washington, Skinner has become “his best friend in the Cabinet.” And Skinner and his second wife, 34-year-old Mary (Honey) Jacobs, befriended Bush’s daughter, who was house-hunting in Washington after a divorce of her own.

He also began to drop by frequently at the White House, glad-handing key staff members and bringing chocolate chip cookies to Cabinet meetings and to Bush.

And if Skinner began to frequent the Peking Gourmet Inn in suburban Washington, widely known as a Bush favorite, he also threw an annual Christmas party at the Georgetown branch of Morton’s, the venerable Chicago steakhouse.

What Franzen called “a cultivated relationship” with the Bush family has paid dividends in invitations to Kennebunkport and to private White House dinners.

His colleagues point out that Skinner’s political finesse has never been limited to the White House. On Capitol Hill, Rep. Mineta noted his one and only dealing with Skinner’s predecessor came when he tried to introduce himself to the chief of staff. “Mr. Sununu,” the congressman began. “Governor,” Sununu bluntly corrected.

But for congressmen, too, Skinner knows well enough to bring along cookies. “They’re delicious,” Mineta said. “I think the White House can use the down-to-Earth astuteness that he brings.”