Toughie, Smoothy, Striver, Spy: BOB GATES

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He was working at the White House back when George Bush was CIA director, and the two didn't meet then. But Gates astutely courted Bush once he became Vice President, arranging briefings for Bush before he attended funerals of foreign leaders. When Gates was appointed deputy CIA director in 1986, he asked Bush to swear him in. After Gates moved to the Bush White House in 1989, he, unlike previous Deputy National Security Advisers, was invited to attend almost all the meetings Scowcroft holds with Bush, including each morning's round of intelligence and national-security briefings.

Gates has long expressed deep skepticism toward Soviet reform efforts. "The reformers," Gates said in a speech this month, "must overcome not just 70 years of Communist history, but a thousand years of Russian history, a history that has never known government other than autocracy." For such public pessimism, Gates was slapped down first by Secretary of State George Shultz, then by his successor, James Baker. And on Gates' first trip to the Soviet Union, with Baker in 1989, Gorbachev bluntly expressed the hope that Moscow- Washington detente would "put Mr. Gates out of a job."

Sometimes Gates seems pleasantly bumfuzzled by recent turns in the relationship between the superpowers. Last August, for example, his son Brad, then 10, was struggling to comprehend what he was hearing from his cold- warrior father. "Let me get this straight, Dad," Brad said. "The Russians are on our side in this one?" Gates smiled and nodded. Brad replied simply, "Wow!"

Like Bush, Gates rises early: about 5 a.m. He runs three miles, showers, shellacs his white-gray hair and hops into the back of a black government sedan that waits outside his home in suburban Virginia. The driver hands over a packet of intelligence reports and diplomatic cables that moved overnight, and Gates scans these and the newspapers on his way to the White House. He usually eats lunch at his desk. He seldom gets home before 9 p.m.

He takes son Brad and teenage daughter Eleanor to Orioles baseball games, and they indulge his attraction to carnival rides. During a trip to Germany when he was deputy CIA director, Gates detoured to a local fairground, security detail in tow, and rode a roller coaster called the Triple Loop. A man of plain tastes and middlebrow origins, Gates likes to torment elitists at the CIA and the State Department, whom he derides as "guys with last names for first names." He tells corny jokes and Russian jokes. And he is relentlessly practical in a way that sometimes amuses his friends. While driving down Constitution Avenue in a convertible, for example, Gates was caught in a rainstorm but couldn't get the top up. Unfazed, he unfurled his umbrella and kept driving.

His White House office, like Gates, is compact and strategically located. Little larger than a broom closet, it flanks the West Wing entrance just across the lobby from the Oval Office. It is stuffed with color-coded folders marked SECRET, photos of Gates' family on backpacking trips, a Dictaphone, a big secure telephone and a regular White House phone console that often erupts with a steady, insistent ring. "Yes, sir," Gates answers. "Yes, Mr. President . . . I'll get right on it, sir."