Top State Dept. Diplomat Waits in Wings : Foreign policy: Well-liked and experienced, Eagleburger is set to take over if Baker joins the Bush reelection campaign.

If Secretary of State James A. Baker III leaves his job to run President Bush’s reelection campaign as expected, he will leave considerable unfinished business behind: peace negotiations in the Middle East and the reconstruction of a newly democratic Russia.

“We’re going to be on automatic pilot,” a State Department official complained. “We’re basically dog-paddling already, because of the (presidential) campaign.”

But the transition will be made easier by the fact that the man waiting in the wings is one of the country’s most experienced and best-liked diplomats, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger.

Once a top aide to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Eagleburger is a charming, blunt-speaking, wisecracking veteran of almost 30 years in the Foreign Service who can be relied on to manage the Administration’s foreign policy with no surprises--and who, equally important, is popular among both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Even in the middle of an election campaign, Democrats raised no objections to Bush’s reported plan to leave Eagleburger in charge of the State Department until Election Day as “acting secretary.”

“Larry won’t have any real problems up here,” said an aide to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.).

Eagleburger has been the point man in defending the Administration’s pre-Persian Gulf War policy of seeking friendship with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, an unenviable assignment in the best of times.

“It was worth trying,” he has insisted to a series of congressional committees, while acknowledging that the policy turned out to be a failure.

But his reservoir of goodwill in Congress is so deep that one committee chairman decided not to call Eagleburger as a witness in further hearings on the issue--because “he likes him too much,” an aide said.

“Eagleburger is part of the professional elite of American diplomacy,” noted Terry L. Deibel, a professor at the Pentagon’s National War College. “It will be a very comfortable fit, because he’s worked with all these guys for so long.”

In any case, officials noted, Bush’s decision to leave Eagleburger in charge would be designed not to launch any new diplomatic initiatives, but to protect the Administration from unpleasant surprises during the election campaign.

“The two issues that are visible at the moment, Iraq and Yugoslavia, are both losers,” said one official. “They’re issues you don’t want popping up like ugly warts in the middle of a campaign.”

A key issue still facing Bush and Baker is how many top aides Baker would take from the State Department to the White House--and what the effect would be on his own foreign policy projects.

“Obviously, he will be sorely tempted to bring them all on board,” one White House official said. And a longtime Baker associate suggested that the secretary of state would need his own team in the White House to jump-start the flagging Bush campaign operation. “He hasn’t got time to play around,” he said.

But other officials noted that Baker’s closest aides have been key to the success of his diplomatic efforts and that stripping the State Department of its top talent could leave the Administration vulnerable to criticism.

“Are they going to put ‘actings’ in all over the place?” the Senate aide asked. “In that case, the Democrats genuinely do have an issue.”

Democratic candidate Bill Clinton opened that assault already on Wednesday, saying that Baker’s involvement in the campaign would “show where the priorities of this Administration are; not on pursuing a decent foreign policy for a post-Cold War era, but on winning an election.”

Officials said that they expect Margaret Tutwiler, Baker’s spokeswoman and closest political aide, to join him at the White House. “She’s his alter ego,” one GOP operative said.

In addition, some officials said that they expect Baker to invite Undersecretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, a talented all-around policy expert, to take a position on the White House staff. But Zoellick has been one of the architects of the Administration’s drive to help Russia carry out economic reform and his departure could hamper that effort.

A third top aide, Dennis B. Ross, has been a key figure in keeping Arab-Israeli peace talks on track--and the betting among Administration officials was that the negotiations would keep him at the State Department.

If Ross moved to the campaign, one official cracked, “There goes the Middle East”--a line Bush and Baker would not want to hear from Clinton.

Another senior GOP official noted that Baker might turn for help to officials outside the State Department with whom he worked during the Ronald Reagan Administration, when Baker was, successively, White House chief of staff and secretary of the Treasury. The most frequently named was Jim Cicconi, a Washington lawyer now serving as issues director for the Bush campaign.

Eagleburger did not return reporters’ telephone calls on Wednesday, and aides said he would not comment on any reports of who will be running the State Department until after Bush makes an official announcement.