Letting George Do It

...Eisenhower was apparently the first Chief Executive to try to give his Vice President heavy responsibilities...

...As head of the Atlanta task force, for instance, he overcame objections by the Administration's hard-line conservatives to Federal intrusion in local affairs and lined up $1 5 million for the police overtime run up during the investigation of the killings of children there The Vice President also discomfited Republican ideologues with his handling of Reagan's regulatory relief task force He oversaw a review of more than 250 "midnight regulations" proposed during the transition period by the outgoing Carter Administration, and when the 60-day review period was finished, only 36 of those regulations had been killed or indefinitely postponed...

...Andrew Mollison is the While House correspondent for the Cox Newspapers...

...Constitutionally, as Charles G. Dawes pointed out (in a passage Nixon quoted in Six Crises), "A vice president has only two functions: to sit and listen to Senators give speeches, and to check the morning's newspapers as to the President's health...

...It's a good point, because I don't want to get bogged down in tremendous numbers of specific assignments," Bush replied "But the crisis-management thing is not a day-to-day operation ' Then, in a rambling explanation that would be grimly ironic the next Monday, headded "I don't know how many times everybody across departmental lines met in the situation room in crisis situations last year or over the last 10 years, but it's not something that I can see as anything other than a really kind of standing in, in that situation room, for the President...

...After flying hurriedly back from an aborted March 30 road trip in Texas, Bush did of course end up "standing in" for Reagan in the situation room, and sitting in for him at numerous top-level meetings But the door to the Oval Office was left open, so all could see that Bush was in his own West Wing office and not at Reagan's desk Similarly, while being interviewed by Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, Bush took pains to avoid the slightest implication that the work he was doing in Reagan's absence made him acting President...

...John Adams, the first holder of the office, described it as "the most insignificant that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived...

...participation in the economic summit in Ottawa next July...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt once went three years without inviting John Garner to a single meeting...

...Bush is no Reagan His arms windmill during speeches and he is a trifle too hot for TV He guides, rather than inspires, his staff He prefers jogging a methodical three miles every day (or its equivalent on a stationary machine in bad weather), to relaxing on an aimless horse trail ride And he is fascinated by the minutiae of government Unexciting traits, perhaps, confirming his reputation as the Texas preppie Yet they have proved useful in the days following the gunfire on March 30...

...Harry Truman deemed the position he held under FDR "about as useful as a cow's fifth teat...

...During his frequent trips out of town the President had Nixon chair Cabinet and National...

...The next President who seriously attempted to delegate power to his Vice President was Jimmy Carter Yet, given the spokes-on-the-wheel management concept Carter experimented with, it was almost inevitable that Walter Monday's involvement, like Nixon's, would not go beyond staff matters major adviser, salesman and ceremonial representative...

...The week before he was wounded, the President had finessed a power struggle between Haig and National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen by giving Bush responsibility for "crisis management...

...In these circumstances, no one present was surprised by a question put to Bush at a press conference a week before the shooting Instead of the old gibe about ho w he managed to fill up his day, he was asked whether he thought he was spreading himself too thin between his line and staff duties...

...At the time, Bush was already running Reagan's task forces on regulatory relief and the Atlanta child killings, and coordinating preparations for U.S...

...He also kept up with the routine command duties that had earlier grown out of an unusual decision by Reagan to give him line, as well as advisory, responsibilities...

...Filling in at the White House was the fifth managerial task for Bush, who directs a personal staff of 65 and an even larger number of people on loan from various departments...

...The power of decision has remained with President Reagan I didn't have any major solitary decisions to make," Bush insisted "I made decisions on what I'm going to do with my time, on how to project my role, not decisions in terms of should we make a new move on this type of bill or should we send this signal up on spending cuts It's different from making Presidential decisions or surrogate Presidential decisions ". BUSH UNDERSTANDABLY Seems more self-confident now than he did last summer when Reagan, having crushed him in the primaries, chose him as a running mate only after former President Gerald Ford bowed out During last fall's campaign he often appeared defensive, responding to probing questions with heated answers rather than simply brushing them aside He frequently started speeches to Republican audiences by acknowledging that many probably would have preferred Reagan at the lectern...

...Bush was obviously pleased in the early weeks of the new Republican Administration when Reagan had him sit in on meeting after meeting while the Cabinet thrashed out the details of the President's economic recovery plan He was performing, as he had hoped, the role of across-the-board adviser that his predecessor had excelled at He was even happier when, in addition, line responsibilities were delegated to him by Reagan at the urging of Chief of Staff James Baker, Counselor Edwin Meese and Vice Chief of Staff Michael Deaver...

...Although Bush continued to sleep in the official Vice President's residence now provided on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, he came to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue daily to substitute for the President at meetings after Reagan's hospitalization for a bullet wound in the chest...

...Washington-USA LETTING DOIT BY ANDREW MOLLISON Washington Two days after President Reagan returned from the hospital, a White House answering machine responded on the second ring with the following message "This is the While House press office The information was recorded at 10 05 am, Monday April 13 The President has no appointments on his schedule for lo-day This morning (he Vice President had a National Security briefing and a meeting with members of the White House staff He will have a noon luncheon with the Secretary of Commerce and a 3 o' clock meeting with trade association executives in the East Room At approximately 1 o'clock today the Vice President will place a call to the astronauts on the space shuttle, Columbia There will be pool coverage of the phone call in the West Wing office ". George Bush is certainly the first Vice President of the United States whose daily schedule has been given out by the White House in order to reassure the public that the government is in good hands Consider what happened when Dwight D Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in office His Vice President, Richard M Nixon, moved from his house in suburban Spring Valley, Maryland, to the home of Attorney General William Rogers, to hide from the press and politicians who expected or hoped that he might try to engineer a takeover of the government Bush was spared such suspicions, partly because of the clumsy and ill-informed efforts of Secretary of State Alexander M Haig Jr to reassure the world within hours of Reagan's shooting that the government was in his good hands...

...But when the re-election year of 1956 rolled around, Eisenhower tried to convince Nrxon to gam " broad administrative experience" by serving the next four years as Secretary of Defense Nixon rejected Ike's sound warning that no Vice President m this century had been elected directly to the Oval Office, a rejection Nixon recalled ruefully after his loss in 1960 to John F Kennedy...

...Bush's job as U S coordinator for the upcoming Ottawa summit will be to insure that Reagan's briefing material is shorter, punchier and in hand early enough to be absorbed-thus avoiding the kind of embarrassment occasioned by the huge, unassimilable package that Haig's State Department gave the President three days before he met with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau last March 10 It is telling that this sensitive task was delegated to the new Vice President...

...Security Council meetings, met with him three times a week and sent him to many funerals, parties and ceremonies as a substitute...

...Such activity for the number two man is exceptional...

...Appalled by the fact that Truman had for known about the atomic bomb when he became President upon FDR's death, Eisenhower told Nixon shortly after r he Inauguration in 1953, "I don't want a figurehead on my team...

...In fact, some skepticism about Bush may persist from the pre-election period On the day Reagan was shot, Bush was far away in Texas partly because the President was scheduled to meet in the White House with David Rockefeller and his Asian and European regional co-chairs of the Trilateral Commission, the international study group that some electioneering Reaganites accused of manipulating Bush...

...More relevant than such lingering feelings, though, is the contrast between the two new men in the White House Bush is as different from Reagan as Mondale was from Carter, but in reverse Now it is the President who seems to be relaxed, witty and ideologically consistent, while it is Bush who plugs earnestly through bureaucratic and managerial details, often reaching unpredictably pragmatic results...