The Republicans Bush's Brain Trust

JAMES A. BAKER III

With Baker's resignation as Treasury Secretary on Aug. 5, George Bush finally has a peer in charge of his election effort. Baker can quell the jostling that left one communications director out of a job, several other aides squabbling, and Bush trailing in the polls. Baker's arrival as campaign chairman means that Campaign Manager Lee Atwater moves over, if not down. Richard Darman, Baker's trusted adviser at the White House and Treasury, gains ever more influence. Pollster Robert Teeter stays put, as does Chief of Staff Craig Fuller.

Baker, whose competence and political judgment are nearly flawless, is one Reagan appointee to emerge with his reputation intact, if not enhanced. He might have been touted as a presidential candidate himself if he had not been so close to the Vice President. Bush is the friend Baker turned to after his first wife died, the one he goes fishing with, the godfather to one of his children. Baker, 58, managed Bush's 1980 presidential campaign; he is the person most involved in Bush's vice-presidential choice.

LEE ATWATER

He likes to brag that he was the only white guy in Percy Sledge's backup band, but this nonpreppie protege of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond devised the strategy that knocked out Bush's opposition by Super Tuesday. Atwater, 37, is the type of tactical genius who can live without a friend but not without an enemy, and he is often blamed as the source when negative information about the opposition comes out. In a 1980 congressional campaign, Atwater planted the story that the Democratic candidate had been treated for depression. His candidate won.

CRAIG FULLER

An intern to Governor Ronald Reagan as a college sophomore, Fuller was brought to the White House in 1981 by Edwin Meese. For the past four years, Fuller, 37, has been running the West Wing for Bush as his chief of staff. He knows, or does not know, as much about trading arms for hostages as the Vice President. As cautious and bland as Atwater is aggressive and colorful, Fuller will make Air Force Two run on time and handle the minute-to-minute airborne decisions. Allied with Teeter, Fuller last May coolly forced out Communications Director and longtime Bush Associate Peter Teeley.

ROBERT TEETER

Bush's chief pollster, veteran of six presidential campaigns, he helped bring Gerald Ford from 30 points behind in 1976 to within a couple of points of Jimmy Carter. Low-key and relatively untouched by Potomoc fever, he has never moved from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Washington. Teeter's influence on strategy may wane as the aggressive Darman moves in on issues and as Roger Ailes mushrooms all over the place. Still, Bush entrusted Teeter, 49, with paring down the list of vice-presidential possibilities and screening the survivors. Teeter also supervised Bush's acceptance speech.

RICHARD DARMON

Without even leaving Shearson Lehman for the seedy McPherson Square campaign headquarters, the abrasive, brainy Darman, 45, will play a key role in the campaign. Already Baker consults with his former aide on every major decision; he has been included in closed-door strategy sessions for two months. The nondoctrinaire Darman rose from minor White House paper shuffler to assistant to the President and then No. 2 at Treasury despite his association with known liberals like Boston Brahmin Elliot Richardson (both resigned during Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre).

FRED MALEK

When his duties as convention manager end, Malek, 50, will take over party fund raising, advertising and get-out-the-vote operations as deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee (pushing Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf upstairs). It will be a political rehabilitation of sorts. Malek, who worked for H.R. Haldeman, was censured by the Senate Watergate Committee for using federal resources to get Nixon re-elected and for ordering the FBI to conduct an investigation of former CBS Correspondent and Nixon Critic Daniel Schorr.

SHEILA TATE

Handling press for Bush must seem like a piece of cake to Nancy Reagan's former press secretary. Tate had to cope with such public relations nightmares as the "tiny little gun" the First Lady kept in her nightstand, the lavish redecoration of the White House and the $209,508 bill for new china. She performed an image transplant by getting the designer-obsessed First Lady to sing Second Hand Rose at the 1982 Gridiron dinner and to embark on her "Just Say No" antidrug campaign. Tate, 46, is the first woman to pierce Bush's all- male inner circle.