Mr. Consensus

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Most evenings between 8 and 10, George Bush excuses himself from the company of friends and family in order to be alone. As he has done for years, he retreats to a private study, now on the second floor of the White House, to read and write cards and thank-you notes to friends, political allies and even perfect strangers. This ever growing list of correspondents has served Bush well in difficult times, and may soon do so again. Last week the President added a new name to his address book: that of Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The two men are hardly likely to become pen pals. But as the U.S. Government once again searched for a way to free American hostages held in the Middle East, Bush's communications with Rafsanjani have moved from cautious feelers through intermediaries to more direct, leader-to-leader messages. Working closely with his top foreign policy advisers, the President personally authored several of the diplomatic notes sent to Iran through Swiss embassy channels.

As his Administration explored this latest opening to Iran, Bush was at pains to steer clear of the mistakes that toppled Jimmy Carter's presidency and badly tarnished Ronald Reagan's. While pointedly refusing to offer any quid pro quo, he stepped carefully back from Reagan's stated policy of never negotiating with terrorists. If the hostages come home, Bush hinted, he might consider releasing Iranian assets -- principally undelivered weapons paid for in advance -- that have been frozen by the U.S. since 1979. "Goodwill begets goodwill," he said, quoting his own Inaugural Address.

George Bush's handling of the hostage crisis illustrates some of the main characteristics of his decision-making style:

-- He is a cautious, reactive President, whose first concern in a crisis is to avoid mistakes.

-- Bush cares deeply about a handful of core values -- family, loyalty, service to country -- but regards almost everything else as negotiable.

-- He searches out advice and prefers to choose among alternatives rather than devise his own solutions. "Have Half," his childhood nickname, suits him: he still likes to split the difference.

-- When persuasive leadership is required, Bush instinctively reaches not for a TV camera but for a telephone, working his will among fellow heads of state and Washington insiders rather than through Reagan-like appeals to public opinion.

-- Guided by an inner clock that sometimes frustrates his aides, Bush decides at his own speed and rarely looks back in doubt later.

After seven months as President, Bush has emerged as a much more complex Commander in Chief than expected, a hybrid of presidential personalities served and observed. Bush possesses Lyndon Johnson's penchant for secrecy, without retributive sense of justice. He has Richard Nixon's feel for foreign policy, but so far lacks his mentor's grip on grand strategy. He shares Jimmy Carter's fascination with the fine details of government, but understands better which pieces are most important. Bush says he learned from Reagan the importance of stubborn principle in politics, but he sees more clearly than Reagan the sweet reason of expedient compromise.

Bush's cautious, calibrated style has made for largely surefooted policy. Despite a sluggish first four months, the President has launched initiatives on difficult issues -- savings and loans, clean air, arms control -- that he might have ducked. He has kept a Democratic Congress off balance and has mollified the conservative wing of his own party. If he has hit no grand slams, neither has he committed any egregious errors. "I'm reasonably pleased where, at the end of six months, things are," Bush told TIME. "I'm not relaxed about it. I'm not in an everything's fine mode at all. But in terms of how the decisions are made, I'm very pleased with the way our team is operating."

His inherent prudence is now alloyed with what close friends and aides say is a noticeably more sober demeanor. The presidency has made Bush more circumspect than the sometimes loopy, arm-flapping creature of the campaign trail. He assumed a grim visage throughout the first week of the hostage crisis, despite efforts by aides to play down the preoccupation with Lebanon. Says an old friend: "The boyish enthusiasm is still there, but he's more careful, more one day at a time." Bush himself acknowledges as much: "Have I learned a lot? Sure. Do I think I'm maybe a little wiser from the way things are here? Yeah. Do I still have a lot to learn? Certainly."

Even when Bush gambles, he does so only after carefully researching the odds. His boldest move so far was his unexpected proposal at the May 29-30 NATO summit in Brussels to slash U.S. and Soviet conventional-force levels in Europe. Last winter and spring Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was beguiling European public opinion with frequent disarmament offers while the President stood pat, waiting for his aides' review of American foreign policy. NATO allies were growing impatient, and Bush's popularity in some polls was inching downward. By early May, despite his public denials of concern, the President was feeling anxious. "I need something," he told his aides. "I want to do something."

Early in the Administration, Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft mulled ways to bring Soviet troop levels in Europe into rough parity with NATO's. At one point they even contemplated a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe. But the national security bureaucracy "absolutely hated it," said a White House official. "The idea just sank like a stone."

Unlike Reagan, Bush does not like to flout his own bureaucracy. But now he had reason for boldness: Gorbachev had ponied up deep cuts in Soviet conventional forces in Europe at a May 11 meeting with Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow. "That was really the green light," said an official. "If we didn't move then, we were going to go to the NATO summit without anything." In a May 15 Oval Office meeting, Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, chief of staff John Sununu, Joint Chiefs Chairman William Crowe and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney gathered to discuss ways to make a proposal with "punch." Scowcroft suggested that Bush propose deep reductions in U.S. and Soviet ground forces and combat aircraft in Europe. The President liked Scowcroft's idea but wanted to make sure the Pentagon was on board. "I just don't want to do anything militarily dumb," he said repeatedly.

Moving quickly, Crowe and Cheney formed a small task force to study the ! force cuts in time for a May 19 visit to Kennebunkport, Me. That session was followed by a Monday-afternoon meeting in the Oval Office. There, Crowe told Bush the military could accept a 20% reduction in manpower and a 15% cut in aircraft without significantly weakening NATO's plans for fighting a European war. Baker argued that 25% would sound more dramatic. The President listened closely and asked a lot of questions. Finally, he settled on the lower, safer number. "O.K., I think we can go to 20%," he said. Turning to Cheney, he double-checked. "Now, is 20% all right? You can live with that?" Cheney nodded. "O.K., that's consensus," Bush said. "Let's go."

Bush generally feels more at home with foreign policy than with domestic issues. Little wonder: in serving as U.N. Ambassador, American envoy to China, CIA director and funeral-hopping Vice President, he amassed a detailed personal knowledge of world leaders. Like Nixon, Bush has a habit of adding intimate footnotes when intelligence briefers provide him with thumbnail biographies of figures making news overseas. "That guy isn't like that at all," he told an analyst who was profiling a foreign politician. "He goes back a long way with some of these cats," a senior official recounted. Two weeks ago, in a remarkable display of Rolodex diplomacy, Bush telephoned Kings Hussein of Jordan, Hassan of Morocco, Fahd of Saudi Arabia; Prime Ministers Turgut Ozal of Turkey and Margaret Thatcher of Britain; Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany; Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria; as well as the Pope -- anyone who might have a direct or indirect line to Iran or the Iranian-backed terrorists who were threatening to kill hostage Joseph Cicippio.

On domestic matters, however, Bush relies on a highly structured decision- making process that even has a name. Known to government-school types as multiple advocacy, it is designed to refine options and allow the President to hear his top advisers argue them out. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, Roger Porter, wrote a book extolling the virtues of the system after watching it work in the Ford Administration. Though multiple advocacy is time consuming and difficult to manage, Bush has peopled his Cabinet with the sort of collegial generalists necessary for success. The President apparently sees little irony in the fact that he campaigned against Michael Dukakis' "Harvard boutique" of advisers but now has erected a system staffed by his share of Kennedy School alumni: "I've known pretty well how I want to reach decisions -- get good, strong, experienced people, encourage them to express their views openly, encourage them not to hold back."

The recent clean-air proposal was a textbook case of multiple advocacy. With Bush's campaign promise to reduce acid rain and toxic waste as guidance, Porter assembled five Administration officials: Energy Secretary James Watkins, EPA Administrator William Reilly, Assistant EPA Administrator William Rosenberg, Associate Budget Director Robert Grady and White House Counsel Boyden Gray. They met 16 times during the spring, and on other occasions with lawmakers, industry officials and environmentalists. Gradually they fashioned a package they thought all parties could support.

The plan was presented to Cabinet officers whose departments would be affected. This second group narrowed down the options. The Cabinet postponed one meeting with Bush after the EPA's Reilly, in a move supported by Boyden Gray, argued for an idealistic plan that would have required half the cars in the nation's 20 largest cities to be powered by alternative fuels by the year 2000. Budget Director Richard Darman and Economic Adviser Michael Boskin worked for weeks to come up with the scaled-down version that eventually went to the President. Bush never saw the EPA's 50% proposal.

To help Bush think through an issue, White House aides stage debates, which they call "scheduled train wrecks." Aides once invited opposing sides to lobby the President separately, but quickly realized that Bush prefers -- and benefits from -- live skirmishes. Bush asks questions during the back and forth, takes copious notes on White House pads and often asks lower-level officials for their views. "He doesn't want filters," said a participant. "He actually wants to sit there at the table and listen to Darman fight with Reilly." Darman argued in one meeting that the clean-air proposals were too expensive for the health and safety benefits gained. "For the same amount of money," the Budget Director said, "we can buy everyone in America rubber- soled shoes, because the chance of being killed by toxic gases is about the same as being killed by lightning." Bush is proud of these bouts and prefers them to the staged-managed sessions held for Reagan. "I've been to Cabinet meetings when ((they have)) been a show-and-tell," Bush said. "We don't do ours that way."

After the Cabinet sessions, Bush repairs to the Oval Office and widens his net. He often invites Darman or Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady along to go over this point or that; sometimes he turns it into a working lunch. Bush is soon on the telephone shopping the options around to his "sources" on Capitol Hill: Senator Robert Dole on political matters, Ohio Congressman Willis Gradison on health care and economic matters, Tennessee Republican Don Sundquist on tax questions. Following the May Cabinet debates over which countries to name as unfair traders under the new "Super 301" section of the 1988 trade bill, Bush's consultations with key lawmakers stiffened his resolve to name Japan, India and Brazil. Telephoning "gets me more knowledge," the President explained. ". . . I try to keep in mind what's doable from a political standpoint."

It can also bail him out of trouble. Last March, William Bennett, the new director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, temporarily banned imported assault weapons. Bush, a life member of the National Rifle Association, kept his distance in public. Opinion polls backed Bennett's move, but gun owners did not. N.R.A. lobbyists complained bitterly and even withheld a pivotal endorsement of Dan Heath, a Republican congressional candidate from Indiana, just a week before the March 28 special election. Heath lost the race by 1,778 votes.

Hours before Bennett issued his ban, Bush tracked down Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fuelner by car phone and asked the conservative for help. In a confidential memo to the President three days later, Fuelner suggested that Bush could "retain the support of your gun-owning constituency" by changing the subject: propose the building of more prisons, hiring more prosecutors and enforcing existing laws. Bush sent the ideas to his staff, and when the Administration released its crime package two months later, the initiative followed Fuelner's recommendations down the line.

While Bush, like most people, makes up his mind gradually, his strategy is to wait until the last minute to tip his hand. Bush holds his cards so closely that his top advisers often do not know what he is thinking. By playing coy, aides say, the President hopes to prevent leaks, keep special interests and congressional coalitions from forming in opposition, and give his eventual decrees a thrust that White House announcements often lack.

In the case of clean air, Sununu carried the final options to Bush at Camp David to review each one and note the President's preference. "Nobody knew which boxes he was going to check that weekend," said a person involved. "Not Reilly, not Sununu, not anybody. Bush never showed his hand."

Sometimes Bush delays just to keep everyone guessing. In early July he postponed a final decision on a pay raise for Government executives until two hours before the planned announcement. That morning, he thumbed through a decision memo prepared by Gray and Darman. The memo barely camouflaged their impatience: pressing for the pay hike, Gray and Darman wrote, "We would like to confirm what we believe to have been your decision." They recommended raising the salaries of some 200 high-ranking federal employees to $150,000.

In a surprise move, Bush balked at the suggestion. In felt-tip pen, he scribbled instructions to pay the officials up to $124,400 instead. Aides scrambled to rewrite stacks of printed fact sheets as the announcement neared.

Once Bush finally decides, his aides seem to fall in line rather than make their complaints public. After all the trouble the President has taken to hear them out, Bush's Cabinet and staff, unlike Reagan's, feel obliged to support him even if they disagree. "You haven't heard much carping about this or that," says Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, "because we do all our yelling ahead of time." Aides also know Bush is almost never willing to reconsider. "Once he's decided," says Peter Teeley, Bush's former press secretary, "you'd better have some bombshell of a reason why he shouldn't do it."

Bush seems to know his limitations as a decision maker, and has attracted advisers who can compensate for his shortcomings. White House aides say the President is adept at reducing policy questions to their essentials. But Bush rarely redefines an issue or proposes a novel solution. Instead, he relies heavily on counselors like Baker, Darman and Scowcroft, who, as a staffer put it, "see Door No. 3 when everyone else sees only Doors Nos. 1 and 2." Just before Bush decided to extend restrictions on imported steel, Roger Porter called on the President in the Oval Office and said, "I think I've got this figured out." Replied Bush: "I certainly hope so."

When he sees no easy way out, Bush often just splits the difference, an inclination that frequently angers conservatives. Bush has repeatedly opted for this route as President. He decided to build both the MX and mobile ! Midgetman missiles, when either might suffice. He backed a boost in the minimum wage to $4.25 an hour, 30 cents less than Democrats and labor unions wanted. Bush supported a wage increase during the 1988 campaign, but after his Inauguration, White House economic advisers opposed it as inflationary. "He had to deliver on a promise," said a top official. "The easiest thing he could do was pick a number. So he did."

Bush also displays a sense of fairness that one adviser described as "an almost procedural due process." In February he reopened the complicated question of whether the U.S. should provide sensitive technology to Japan for that country's FSX aircraft after learning that the Reagan White House had ignored Commerce Department doubts about the deal. During Cabinet meetings, when political considerations are paramount, Bush often asks, half-seriously, "What should we do in case we just want to do the right thing?"

But Bush certainly is not innocent of political calculation. In Cabinet meetings, he is often the first to shoot down ideas that won't fly in Congress, as he did when aides suggested buying Democratic support of a capital-gains tax cut with a White House retreat from the campaign pledge not to raise other taxes. "We'll get clobbered for that," Bush said. When pressed on a political question, he has a playful stock reply: "If you're so damned smart, how come you aren't President of the United States?"

Bush can be defensive about admitting political considerations, as in his June decision -- largely unassisted by aides -- to propose a constitutional amendment against flag burning. "I've been accused of draping myself in the flag for a political reason," he told TIME in an unprompted aside. "That's not why I proposed a constitutional amendment. And now I'm reading that people aren't interested in that ((issue)) anymore. Well, my ((internal)) clock tells me that's wrong, and I don't need ((Republican pollster)) Bob Teeter to show me a poll to make me convinced it's wrong." Although Bush insists that he does not steer his policies by the polls, he loves to use survey data to silence skeptics. After he permanently banned imported assault weapons, for example, he privately brandished poll results showing support for his position in the home states of some of his congressional critics.

Bush may have less to fear from critics than from his sly habit of promising big things but providing few dollars for the tasks. He has called himself "the education President" but budgeted little more for schools than did Reagan. His proposals to cut violent crime by doubling federal prison cells sounded commendable, but even top aides acknowledge that the construction program will have almost no effect on the problem. This bait-and-switch game is considered clever in Washington but not in many other places. Democrats are sure to seize on the rhetoric-reality gap in next year's congressional elections.

For now Bush seems genuinely to enjoy being President. He works as hard at the job as Carter did, yet wears the office as lightly as Reagan. He takes unusual pleasure in secretly arranging small parties for staff and Cabinet officers in the Rose Garden, in his horseshoe pit or around the White House pool. After a twelve-hour workday last April that began in San Jose and ended in Los Angeles, Bush had completed his scheduled events but, in a typical burst of spontaneity, summoned four Chinook helicopters to ferry him, his staff and reporters to a baseball game in Anaheim.

Most evenings, though, Bush retires to his note writing, thanking friends and advisers for help or requesting more information on a particular topic. He carries this correspondence to work the next morning, having already scanned six newspapers* in bed, while sipping coffee and watching the television news shows with Barbara.

Bush is often in the Oval Office before 7 a.m., talking with intelligence briefers and later with Scowcroft. He meets with Sununu for an hour each morning, quickly working through a notebook of "action items." These can range from learning the results of a new statewide poll in Kentucky to approving a compromise position on the savings-and-loan legislation.

Later, between greeting dozens of visitors, Bush will peruse articles, mail and briefing papers on a variety of subjects. He prefers that "backgrounders" not exceed five pages, but he often asks for details that demand twice as much space. He seems to edit almost everything presented to him; he made several revisions in the fact sheet and speech announcing his crime package, saying, "Here, this reflects my decision better than the other way." At 4:30, Sununu returns with "the p.m. agenda," a second notebook full of items for Bush's O.K.

Underlying this process is a lack of ideological conviction that has helped Bush cut deals on policy matters like the Nicaraguan contras, clean air and the savings-and-loan crisis that have stalemated the capital for years. Bush's "ideology," as it is, can be summed up in a few words: hard work, family, country, public service, loyalty. These priorities have allowed Bush to change his views on many controversial subjects -- abortion, gun control, "voodoo economics" -- during his 25-year political career. They explain why he stuck by John Tower, his choice to run the Pentagon, long after others had abandoned him. "George Bush is very loyal to people," says a close adviser, "more than to ideas."

Bush doesn't directly deny this. "I think there's an ideological underpinning to what we as an Administration are trying to do," he told TIME. "But I think I would give much more credit to able advisers, in that I don't sit down and tell those who are wrestling with the S & L problems, 'Do it this way.' They're telling me, and that's why they are in their jobs."

This problem-solving approach to government has proved effective in the short run; long term it could signal a leadership vacuum. In a study of presidential decision making, Porter notes that the White House, no matter how it is organized, rarely anticipates problems well. Within the Administration, there is some concern that Bush is often tied to his In box, dealing with crises and other immediate matters. A senior adviser admits that Bush's long service in the Federal Government has left him overdependent on the Congress and the bureaucracy to set his agenda: "He is a prisoner as well as a product of that experience."

Roger Ailes, Bush's campaign media adviser, exhorted the President before his NATO trip to show the American people that "you can knock one out of the ball park every now and then." Bush did just that in Brussels, but the former Yale first baseman was always valued more for his defensive play and team spirit than for his batting. To help nudge the Administration from its reactive mode, Sununu, Darman, Bennett, Vice President Dan Quayle and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp have begun meeting for breakfast every few weeks in the White House mess in what has become known informally as the "forward strategy group."

Several members of this gathering played a key role last month in urging Bush to support a U.S. mission to Mars as a way to restore vision to his Administration. (After he did so, the President complained that he was criticized for earmarking too little money for the program.) "We've got this competence thing knocked," said an Administration official. "Now we have to figure out how we're going to leave our mark on the country."

But if Bush does not anticipate every problem, it may not matter. Most Presidents ultimately are measured not as visionaries but by how well they perform under fire. So far, Bush has responded ably to his few minor crises, mostly by staying calm and remaining steady. Moreover, after eight years of the Reagan revolution, Bush's modest pragmatism seems more welcome than unwavering single-mindedness.

While Bush has not addressed the nation's festering social problems and has all but ignored the federal budget deficit, American voters seem to reckon that at least he will do them no harm. Most polls put Bush's approval ratings at around 65%, typical for this point in a President's first year. One can at least make out a cogent political strategy in his performance to date: his broad proposals on clean air, education, ethics in government, crime and child care may promise more than they deliver, but they have co-opted the Democrats' best talking points. Tougher tests lie ahead.

Bush seems both impatient and amused by examination of his motives and methods. One day after talking to TIME about his decision-making style, the President posed for a gag photo showing him rubbing his hands over a crystal ball, with smiling aides hovering nearby. Says Bush: "Hey, listen, right now things are going pretty good, but tomorrow it will be another kind of ball game. So just keep doing your best. Back to my mother -- do your best. Do your best."

That sounds like a nascent -- and ironic -- re-election slogan. Last year Dukakis declared that the contest for the White House was about "competence, not ideology." Bush won the election by campaigning on "values." After seven months as President, however, Bush seems to be betting that what he accomplishes will matter more than who he is or what he stands for. As Reagan fades from the public's mind, a clearer portrait of Bush is emerging, and his problem-solving style and relentlessly cautious decision making suggest that he is already positioning himself to run on the Dukakis slogan in 1992.

FOOTNOTE: *The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News and New York Post.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington