Pursuing The Real George Bush

By MICHAEL DUFFY

If Americans have learned anything about George Bush in his l4 months as President, it is that he is more complex and calculating than expected. He is open and accessible but also secretive and, at times, deceptive. He is a voracious reader of opinion polls, yet would prefer that his face not appear on the nightly news. He seems to be a warm and genuine father but is ill at ease in any bout with self-analysis.

These apparent contradictions are often difficult for the press to reconcile. The problem is most acute for television, since Bush is almost impossible to capture in the standard evening-news format. To get around this perplexity, the networks have lately adopted more unconventional approaches to Bush and his White House. Earlier this season, ABC's Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer did an hour-long interview with Bush and his popular wife Barbara on PrimeTime Live. Last week NBC's Tom Brokaw accompanied Bush through a "typical" day for a special titled A Day in the Life of the White House. The show illustrated just how vain is the hope that a President can be understood merely by being followed around.

It was hardly a typical presidential day. As is usual in such "behind-the- scenes" portraits, everything seen by viewers was shown for a reason. And although a White House official maintained that the schedule was "totally coincidental," it was actually loaded with celebrities and photogenic occasions. Among those Bush met with: the asthma poster child, a group of Shuttlenauts in sleek blue jump suits, the Super Bowl-champion San Francisco 49ers football team and a contingent of uniformed and bemedaled veterans of the Panama invasion.

NBC made it appear that Bush spends so much time greeting luminaries and other visitors that he has little time to mull over the great problems of the day. Here the White House erred badly by overdirecting: rather than making it possible for Brokaw and his crews to tape what Bush does best -- chew the fat with advisers for hours on end -- the White House allowed the cameras to record only the first three or four minutes of each meeting. These brief segments produced conversations that seemed stilted and staged.

Eclipsed by all these trivial pursuits was one of the peculiar and charming aspects of this presidency: Bush's relentless spontaneity. Bush is known for picking up the phone and calling foreign leaders, old friends in Texas, lowly bureaucrats in obscure agencies, to find out more about problems and policies. He likes to wander down to the office of his National Security Affairs adviser Brent Scowcroft to discuss the latest developments overseas. Sometimes, without a word to his wife, he'll invite visitors to lunch or dinner or even a sleep-over in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Absent too was any hint of the extent to which Bush loves to root around in the details of his job. (He denies this trait vehemently, thinking it Carteresque.) He reads the papers each morning in bed, clipping and underlining things that catch his eye, and later sends copies to aides for follow-up. On the show, Bush's eyes may have seemed to glaze over when Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter presented him with a copy of the new farm bill, but the President is more able than most politicians to argue the finer points of crop subsidies. There was a brief glimpse of Bush hunt-and- pecking on an electric typewriter, but the script failed to make clear that he comes to work most mornings with an armful of thank-you notes, typed up the night before in his private study in the White House's second-floor residence -- the by-product of a 30-year habit of working in small strokes.

+ So completely choreographed was the "typical" schedule that NBC nearly missed the one spontaneous event of the day. Daughter-in-law Margaret Bush unexpectedly dropped by the Oval Office to show off her newly adopted son Charles. A quick-witted aide hurried an NBC crew in to capture what turned out to be the special's most affecting scene.

Ultimately, the problem with any would-be intimate White House portrait isn't the presence of cameras. It's the forbidding landscape itself. This has been noted by Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter who also gave Bush many of his best lines (notably "a kinder, gentler nation"). In her recently published memoir What I Saw at the Revolution, Noonan says the White House often seems, even to insiders, to be bright and grand, all majestic spit and polish. But behind the scenes, it is "intrigue and betrayal" and hardball politics.

Conveying that elusive reality in documentaries or news footage -- or in written dispatches, for that matter -- is often impossible. As press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said on Brokaw's special, the press sees only about 10% of what really goes on in the White House. Fitzwater's remark was the most candid line in the show. In view of television's continued reliance on pictures to tell the White House story, it was also the most cautionary.