Scowcroft: Able General

Brent Scowcroft, 50, used to snatch a few hours' sleep in Henry Kissinger's White House office during his frequent dusk-to-dawn stints keeping watch over international crises. Having been named to replace Kissinger as head of the National Security Council, Scowcroft will now be able to work there in the daytime too. A slightly built, balding scholar, Scowcroft may well be the ablest member of Ford's White House staff. Now an Air Force lieutenant general, he will resign his commission when he takes over his new job. He became Kissinger's NSC deputy in 1973 shortly after his predecessor, General Alexander Haig, was named Army Vice Chief of Staff. Since then Scowcroft has labored up to 16 hours a day in a cluttered cubicle adjoining Kissinger's spacious West Wing office. One of his first duties each day was normally to give the President a 15-min. briefing at 7:40 a.m. on the latest intelligence about political and military activities abroad.

Although some critics, including a number of top military men, dismiss him as "a good paper shuffler" and as Kissinger's errand boy within the White House, Scowcroft is hardly an automaton. He is an intellectual soldier with a superb background in international relations. A West Point graduate, Scowcroft won a master's degree and a Ph.D. in his specialty at Columbia University, also studied at Lafayette, Georgetown's School of Languages and Linguistics, the Armed Forces Staff College and the National War College. Fluent in Russian and Serbian, Scowcroft taught Russian history at West Point during the '50s and later served as assistant air attache at the American embassy in Belgrade. Scowcroft and his wife Marian now live with their daughter Karen, 17, in Bethesda, Md.

A former White House colleague humorously describes Scowcroft as having "a terrible weakness--he's a professional staff man who has devoted his life to picking up debris. He is trained to serve totally and unswervingly the person to whom he is assigned." Although his loyalty now focuses on Ford, it is difficult' to imagine Scowcroft suddenly challenging Kissinger's foreign policy after having worked so closely with him for 2 1/2 years. The sudden emergence from obscurity may be distasteful to the unassuming Scowcroft, who, as Kissinger's deputy, never even granted an on-the-record interview to newsmen. In his new job he will probably have to overcome that reticence.

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