More Worldly Than Wise

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While Ronald Reagan was strolling through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev in May, George Bush was at his summer home in Kennebunkport, Me. Asked his reaction, the Vice President was cautious, skeptical -- not at all the gosh- golly cheerleader he is so often depicted to be. "The cold war isn't over," he warned. Bush's praise for the President's summiteering was so faint that his chief of staff, Craig Fuller, felt obliged to take Bush aside and ask if he realized that his dour comments would clash noticeably with White House jubilation. "I know," Bush replied. "That's okay."

Reagan is at heart a romantic; Bush is not. The President has gone from a simplistic view of the "Evil Empire" to fantasies of a nuclear-free world. Bush wants to nudge perceptions of the Soviets back to a more pragmatic middle ground. Now that he has begun to spell out his own plans for diplomacy and defense, as he did in carefully wrought speeches in Chicago and Corpus Christi, Texas, last week, Bush is not only opening a crack of daylight between himself and Reagan, he is re-emerging as a paragon of what for much of the past decade was thought to be an endangered if not extinct species in the Grand Old Party -- a moderate Republican.

The differences between the President and his would-be successor are matters of sensibility rather than substance, but they nonetheless signal that come January the Reagan Revolution could give way to the Bush Restoration, a return to power for the foreign-policy establishment. Brent Scowcroft, who served as Gerald Ford's National Security Adviser, calls Bush a "Rockefeller Republican." Scowcroft intends the label as high praise, but Republican conservatives have held it against Bush for years that he seemed to be from the same mold as Nelson Rockefeller, the champion of moderate Republicanism in the '60s.

Reagan envisions the Strategic Defense Initiative as an impregnable, invulnerable shield that will end forever the specter of nuclear war but that will also do away with nuclear deterrence. Bush is more realistic: he thinks the feasibility of SDI has yet to be proved. He favors research but not early deployment. In his Chicago speech, Bush carefully stopped short of prejudging whether a full-scale SDI would make sense. While vowing not to leave America "defenseless" against ballistic missiles, he stressed less grandiose possibilities than a full-scale SDI, such as using its benefits to counter the threat of shorter-range ballistic weapons.

Bush, a former CIA director, supports Reagan's policy of using covert action and military aid to assist anti-Communist rebels. But while Reagan ennobled -- and romanticized -- the policy by calling its recipients "freedom fighters," his more prosaic Vice President talks about the problems of waging "low-intensity conflict." Bush wants to continue funding the Nicaraguan contras, but, says Kim Holmes of the conservative Heritage Foundation, "I don't think he would ever have called them the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers." If Reagan's beau ideal of the swashbuckling American good guy is Oliver North, Bush seems to prefer Chester Crocker. He admires the low- key Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs for his seven-year quest (as yet unfulfilled) of a settlement in Angola and Namibia.