NEWS ANALYSIS : Talbott’s Skills Seen Key to Foreign Policy Successes : Diplomacy: He will help refurbish entire State Dept. operation, and articulate Administration’s story to public.

WASHINGTON — From the time he was in prep school, Strobe Talbott concentrated his formidable intellect on one main topic: Russia. Now, with his appointment as deputy secretary of state, he must broaden that focus to encompass the whole world.

The fate of U.S. foreign policy for the next few years may be riding on the skill with which Talbott handles that transition. Seldom has an Administration counted so much on the impact of a second echelon official.

With the President’s foreign policy under attack for perceived missteps in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Haiti, Secretary of State Warren Christopher set out to find a deputy who combined a broad knowledge of foreign affairs with an ability to articulate the Administration’s story to the public. Christopher has made it clear that he expects Talbott to play a more important role than is traditional for the department’s No. 2 official.

State Department officials say that Christopher wants Talbott to help refurbish the Clinton Administration’s entire foreign policy operation.

“Strobe has the capacity to organize a group of talented individuals, both in the foreign service and from outside the foreign service, to get them working hard together and to reach solutions,” Christopher said Tuesday after announcing the appointment at a press conference in Los Angeles.

Christopher, who recently complained that Washington was a “cruel city” where an unforgiving media magnify every error in judgment, said Tuesday that Talbott knows how to play by the capital’s brutal rules.

“He knows more than simply the workings of American foreign policy,” Christopher said. “He knows how Washington works as well.”

Without question, Talbott, a former journalist with less than a year of government service on his resume, will be able to explain Administration policy to the public with the sort of smooth television presentation that Christopher never mastered. But nobody knows yet whether he will be able to amass quickly the level of expertise about the rest of the world that he has gained about Russia through 30 years of study.

Talbott, 47, was obliged to widen his interests some when he served for five years in the 1980s as Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. But, according to a fellow journalist who considers himself a friend, even as bureau chief Talbott “went his own way and followed his own interests, which tend to be very specific and narrowly focused” on policy toward what was then the Soviet Union. In 1989, Talbott was named the magazine’s editor at large, a post which gave him additional freedom to do his own thing.

A student of the Russian language at Hotchkiss prep school in Connecticut and of Russian literature at Yale and Oxford, Talbott first gained prominence in 1970 when, as a 24-year-old fresh from graduate school, he translated and edited the memoirs of former Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, a work still considered one of the most important books of the Cold War. As a journalist, he has written five books on U.S.-Soviet policy and arms control.

With President Clinton, his Oxford roommate, in the White House, Talbott served this year as ambassador at large with responsibility for all of the republics of the former Soviet Union.

In announcing the new job, Christopher said Talbott will continue to have special responsibility for U.S. policy toward Russia and the other former Soviet republics.

In addition, in the deputy post, Talbott will share with Christopher broad responsibility for all of the nation’s foreign affairs. In practice, the deputy usually handles issues that the secretary wants to avoid. But Christopher has said that he is looking for something of an alter ego, someone who can stand in for him on just about any subject.

The duality of the job prompted Brent Scowcroft, White House national security adviser in the George Bush Administration, to ask whether Talbott will have the time or energy to perform all the tasks.

“The fundamental job of the deputy secretary of state in ordinary times is to run the department and deal with all the issues that the secretary doesn’t want to deal with,” Scowcroft said. “I don’t think you can do both. That’s too much, to do Russia the way he was doing and then be the deputy.”

Some of Talbott’s fellow Russia experts said they were pleased that he had retained the Russia portfolio even if that meant he had to slight some of the duties of his new deputy post.

“Russia policy is a full-time job,” said Stephen R. Sestanovich, director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The toughest part of his (new) job will be resisting pressures to be a global deputy secretary instead of focusing on Russia, which still needs dawn to dusk attention.

“The deputy secretary’s job is a stinking job,” he added. “You have to take care of all the leftovers and trivialities that the secretary doesn’t want.”

There is no doubt that in the past, Sestanovich’s description applied more often than not. But State Department officials say Christopher wants Talbott to cast a much longer shadow than is usual for the post.

Previous deputy secretaries of state have concentrated on department management, leaving policy to the secretary. No one really expects Talbott and Christopher to split up the work that way.

According to a journalist who knows him well, Talbott “is an intellectual, not an organizer and not a very good manager.”

“He is a one man band, a solitary operator,” said a Capitol Hill staffer who specializes in foreign policy. “That is a fairly substantial rap in a job that ought to cover a big management load.”

In his post as the Administration’s chief Russia strategist, Talbott collected both admirers and detractors. His critics accuse him of linking U.S. policy too closely to the fortunes of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. But his supporters say that there are few attractive alternatives to a Yeltsin-centered policy.

“He has been persistent and very much in charge, which hasn’t been the case in other aspects of (Clinton Administration) foreign policy,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official.

But Peter Reddaway, a Russia expert at George Washington University in Washington, said the success of ultranationalists in the recent Russian election show that the Administration has engaged in “too much wishful thinking” in its Russia policy.

“The Administration has talked itself into believing its own propaganda that things are going well on the road to democracy and the free market,” Reddaway said.