Big Bad John Sununu

By DAN GOODGAME

The winds lay calm on the Caribbean that evening, but 30,000 feet up in a White House jet the President's chief of staff was stirring a political storm. Returning to Washington from the inauguration of Costa Rica's new leader, John Sununu wandered to the rear of the Boeing 707 to schmooze with the traveling press. But first he shed his suit jacket, his title and his name. At his insistence, Sununu was now a "senior White House official."

The conversation quickly turned to the hottest topic of the week: Could Sununu reconcile President Bush's campaign pledge of "no new taxes" with his invitation for congressional leaders to join him in budget talks with "no preconditions"? Sununu shook his head impatiently. "We're allowing the Democrats to bring their good arguments for taxes to the table," he said. "And it is our prerogative to say no. And I emphasize the no."

How, then, asked a reporter, could Bush be sincere about no preconditions? Were there any circumstances, another inquired, under which he would trade new taxes for cuts in federal spending? "You've got a one-track mind on a trivial question," Sununu snapped, his voice rising. "Small minds ask small questions."

It says a great deal about John Sununu's reputation for rudeness that, when the "small minds" quote appeared on the front page of the Washington Post the next morning, half the town knew immediately which "senior official" was talking. The Democrats whom Bush was trying to lure into budget talks accused the Administration of negotiating in bad faith. But Sununu had accomplished his goal: reassuring the Republican faithful and the voters that Bush remains staunchly opposed to any broad new taxes. When the President subsequently dissociated himself from Sununu's remarks in a chat with House Speaker Tom Foley, the strategy was complete. Bush was able to posture as Mr. Fiscal Responsibility, willing to entertain any proposal, including higher taxes, to help balance the budget.

This good-cop, bad-cop routine has become a staple of the Bush White House. No one plays the heavy better than Sununu, and no one takes more heat on Bush's behalf. That is why Bush picked Sununu as his right-hand man, and why he prizes him.

When he named Sununu his chief of staff shortly after the 1988 election, Bush handed the ultimate insider's job to a bumptious outsider with a chip on , his shoulder: a double-hyphenated Lebanese- and Greek-American, born in Havana with a funny name. Bush pointedly ignored the protests of such close advisers as Secretary of State James Baker, leading the Washington establishment to conclude that he had "done another Quayle." Sununu was obviously brilliant: a three-term Governor of New Hampshire and former engineering professor with an IQ estimated at 180. He had been an invaluable political asset, rescuing Bush's faltering campaign by masterminding a victory in the New Hampshire primary. But he lacked any experience in the clannish world of Washington and was so relentlessly abrasive that one wag dubbed him "Morton Downey Jr. with a Ph.D." The smart money gave him at most a year in the job.

That was 16 months ago. Today Bush is surfing along at 60%-plus public- approval ratings, and much of the credit falls to Sununu. His White House displays almost none of the backbiting and leaking that roiled the Reagan Administration. He adroitly appeases fellow right-wing Republicans who have never much trusted Bush. On the other flank, Sununu exuberantly baits environmentalists and others into blaming him, rather than the President, when the Administration backslides from Bush's gauzy promises. Though he possesses no more "vision" than Bush does, Sununu has substituted a quiet and canny strategy to attain the President's paramount goal: re-election in 1992.

In fact, Sununu has emerged as Bush's most inspired choice for any senior post. Amid the bland Washington-retread Wasps with whom Bush has peopled much of his Cabinet and staff, Sununu adds both spice and balance. His brisk certainty and willingness to take bold stands complement his risk-averse boss.

The two play off each other like a wrestling tag team on late-night cable: Gentleman George and Snarlin' Sununu; the King of Kind and Gentle and his Dark Prince. Bush may call himself the Environmental President and the Education President, but he has Sununu to make sure that this rhetoric stays relatively cheap.

Their slap-and-stroke routine extends to Oval Office meetings, where Bush is unfailingly gracious, whether with earnest junior staffers or craven special pleaders. It is Sununu's role to wring useful information out of unctuous presentations and rebut one-sided arguments, and he delights in it. Bush clearly relishes the edge and the rigor that Sununu provides. "He has made a lot of friends for our Administration," Bush says, "on the basis of competence, sheer competence."

But as the President knows, Sununu has also made plenty of enemies through sheer insolence. He slammed down the phone during a foreign policy argument with Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma. He shouted obscenities at Senate Republican leader Bob Dole's press secretary over a routine news release. He berated House Republican leader Bob Michel for not supporting the President with sufficient enthusiasm, moving Michel to note that "sometimes we have to remind Governor Sununu that this is not the New Hampshire legislature." Democratic Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado says what many Washington insiders feel: Sununu "thinks he's the only smart guy in town. He shows little respect for anyone else's intelligence or point of view."

Nor is Sununu above using double-dealing and deception to achieve the President's goals. In March he told Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden that Bush would veto the clean-air bill the Senate was debating if it included an expensive amendment. Meanwhile, he privately told Idaho Republican Steve Symms just the opposite. Symms had favored the amendment because he hoped it would trigger a veto of the bill, which Symms opposed as too tough on polluting industries. Sununu led Symms to believe the amendment would only make things worse because Bush was inclined to sign the clean-air bill with or without it. Both Senators voted against the amendment, and it was dropped from the bill -- precisely what the President wanted.

Sununu does not think like Bush or any other let's-make-a-deal politician. He was trained as an engineer and a debater, and it shows. The engineer in him enormously enjoys the substantive questions of governance: What kind of pollution control is cost-effective? Which jet fighter technologies should we share with Japan? To such questions, Sununu brings voracious curiosity, a keen analytical gift and near total recall. Budget Director Richard Darman, Sununu's only intellectual peer in the Bush inner circle, points out that "Sununu is trained in fluid dynamics and has a good sense of the dynamics of a problem," unlike lesser minds, who "see the world in static terms."

But years before he studied engineering, Sununu was whipping older boys in high school debate tournaments. Then as now, he could argue either side of a question with equal gusto. Unlike lawyers, debaters never seek friendly, out- of-court settlements: their goal is to intellectually destroy the opponent. Sununu wields his prodigious memory like a sword, inundating his adversary with data. And he resorts early and often to ad hominem bullying. Observes a senior White House official: "There is something in Sununu's personality where he cannot stay in his seat if someone says or does something that he thinks is foolish. He feels obliged to immediately expose the person as a fool."

Sununu often discounts the intelligence of those who do not debate as ferociously as he. For all his brusque misjudgment of individuals, however, Sununu shows astute insight into groups. He cleverly divines which arguments will be most persuasive to which audiences. And though he is deeply conservative on social issues like abortion, Sununu is supple and ambitious enough to accommodate the raging moderation of George Bush.

In a city of strange bedfellows, Bush and Sununu make one of the oddest couples ever: ideologically, temperamentally, even physically. A common sight around the White House is the 6-ft. 2-in. Bush, his lanky frame impeccably clad in an $800 suit, trailed by what an admirer calls "this fat little pirate," 5 ft. 9 in., 190 lbs., his wavy hair tousled, sweating, with tie loosened, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, pants sagging beneath his paunch and shirttail sneaking out in the back.

The contrast extends to the hours they prefer, even their table manners. Bush bounds eagerly out of bed at 5:30 a.m., and always has. Sununu is a night owl who, when studying engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would organize a marathon bridge game or keep fraternity brothers awake while thwokking a lacrosse ball off his wall, then handle his homework in an hour or so before class. Bush is so exquisitely considerate that at meals, without breaking conversation, he will shift his water glass to give the waiter more room as he arrives with the soup. When Sununu receives guests in his White House office, he will pour himself a cup of coffee (he drinks only decaf, which everyone agrees is a good thing) and grab a handful of M&M's without offering anything to anyone else.

For pop psychologists who believe that politicians play out their inner conflicts in public, Sununu is a study in narcissism. The world revolves around him. He's O.K.; you're probably not O.K. He is smarter than you are, and he wants you to know it. Ask Sununu to name an influential teacher or a prize student, and none comes immediately to mind. He looms larger in others' lives than they do in his.

Unlike Bush, who keeps a Rolodex of his 6,000 closest "friends," Sununu reserves his warmth for a handful of close friends and his family. Once, after a Bush political dinner in Miami that ended well past midnight, a reporter saw Sununu heading out to spend three hours, round trip, on I-95, just for a brief visit with his parents, now retired in Gulf Stream, Fla.

Sununu jealously reserves most weekends for his wife Nancy, a fund raiser for the Republican Governors Association, and their children at their four- bedroom home in Oakton, Va., 17 miles northwest of the White House. Asked his greatest accomplishment, Sununu replies without hesitation, "Eight great kids." An avid softball player, he enjoys taking swings in the batting cages with the two youngest sons, Chris, 15, and Peter, 10, who still live at home. Sununu plays third base much the way he plays chief of staff: setting up almost in the batter's face to cut off the bunt and daring him to get one past.

For a time, Sununu wrote stories and poems for children. Concord lawyer Ned Helms recalls that when his wife fell ill, Sununu gave her a book of poems that he said he enjoyed, by Sylvia Plath. A voracious speed reader, Sununu keeps about three books going at a time: from a biography of Richard Nixon to a thriller by Tom Clancy to a tome called The Theory of Numbers, which his executive assistant, Ed Rogers, dryly describes as "recreational mathematics." During spare moments on Air Force One, he plays with Game Boy, a hand-held Nintendo video game.

Sununu's humor runs toward practical jokes (dressing Budget Director Darman in a gorilla suit for Bush's birthday), physical gags (suddenly flopping like a high jumper over the back of his office couch) and, of course, sarcasm. After the White House lost a major struggle on Capitol Hill, Sununu arrived at his morning senior staff session to find his chief lobbyist, Fred McClure, perusing the newspapers. "What are you reading, Fred?" Sununu rasped. "The help-wanted ads?"

In February, after cocaine lords threatened to shoot down the President's plane as it flew to a summit meeting with South American leaders in Colombia, reporters pressed for more details about security arrangements. Sununu deadpanned, "We're gonna paint the press plane to look like Air Force One, and we're gonna send it in ahead of the President." The following month, when Bush learned that critics of his AIDS policy might try to disrupt a speech he was to deliver, he peevishly told his aides, "Well, then I just won't give the speech." Sununu raised his eyebrows and said, "This, from the man who braved the drug lords of Cartagena?" Bush laughed -- and gave the speech.

Sununu's most common expression is not a scowl but a pixieish, if somewhat smug, little smile. Even his characteristic fits of trash-can-kicking fury pass quickly. Still, most White House officials have learned not to take bad news to Sununu before getting a "weather report" of his mood from his deputy, Andy Card.

Sununu, like Bush, grew up in the shadow of a highly successful father in a comfortable home in a leafy bedroom community, attended private boarding school and displayed nary a flicker of rebellion. The crucial difference is that Bush was heir to both material and social comfort, while Sununu was always an outsider.

He was born in 1939 in Havana, where his father briefly distributed foreign films and other imported products. His father, whose parents were Lebanese, grew up in Boston. His mother hailed from El Salvador, though her parents were Lebanese and Greek. When Sununu was an infant, his family migrated to the tony neighborhood of Forest Hills, N.Y. Their home was filled with letters from relatives in half a dozen countries as well as books and conversations in several languages. Thanks to his mother, childhood trips to Europe and college studies, Sununu is fluent in Spanish, speaks decent French and reads German. But all his life he has been teased about his name. Even Bush once joked that he picked Sununu because his surname rhymed with "deep doo-doo." In Arabic, sununu means sparrow, and appears often in poetry and songs.

Almost as soon as he entered Catholic parochial school, little Johnny was spotted as something special. He was athletic, outgoing and excelled at his studies. He won a full scholarship to La Salle Military Academy, a boarding school on eastern Long Island. There Sununu rose to lieutenant colonel and commanded the other cadets. On graduation day, he won so many awards that the headmaster, rather than call him from his seat again and again, simply handed him a silver bowl and had him stand onstage to collect his loot. Though Sununu insists that he displayed no interest in politics until 1969, his fellow seniors in 1957 voted him Class Politician, as well as Outstanding Senior Student, Outstanding Orator, Most Energetic and Most Likely to Succeed.

Sununu went to M.I.T., where he earned a doctorate and founded an engineering firm. He met a young woman named Nancy Hayes, a tall, fair-haired, Irish American from Boston College. She found him smart and funny and "very sure for his age of where he was going." They married at age 20.

After graduation, Sununu taught engineering at Tufts University. At 27, he was a professor running his own consulting firm on the side. In 1969 he moved his family just across the state line, to Salem, N.H., in search of lower taxes and "a better life-style for my family." There he began his political career, winning a spot on the local planning board, then a seat as a state representative. He ran unsuccessfully for a number of higher offices, including state and U.S. Senator, before finally winning the governorship in 1982. That victory came at the trough of the Reagan recession. Sununu prevailed by promising to balance the state budget without broad-based new taxes. New Hampshire is one of the few states with no state personal-income or sales tax.

As the nation's economy recovered, New Hampshire's boomed by attracting vacationers and high-tech companies. Never a Reaganite, antigovernment conservative, Sununu presided over an expansion in state revenues and expenditures. He brought computerized management to inefficient state agencies, increased spending on mental-health programs, expanded prisons and set aside more land for parks. Then as now, Sununu took a generally dim view of environmental activists, as he championed the unpopular Seabrook nuclear power plant. But after careful study, he promoted curbs on the air pollutants that cause acid rain.

He also emerged as a prominent spokesman for Arab Americans, a role that prompted suspicion from pro-Israel groups. Those doubts grew in 1986 when Sununu refused to sign a proclamation denouncing the U.N. resolution that equated Zionism with racism. He has since met with many supporters of Israel and convinced them that he means no harm to their cause. At the same time, in speeches to Arab-American groups, he has spoken forcefully of the "spleen" and "frustration" he feels over anti-Arab prejudice.

Sununu cemented his relationship with Bush during the darkest moment of the 1988 campaign. Bush had just been clobbered by Bob Dole in the Iowa caucuses. And his lead in the polls was evaporating only a week before the primary in New Hampshire, where Sununu was running the Bush campaign. A friend who stopped by to cheer up Sununu found him staring out the window in the Governor's office. "I just heard the news from Iowa," said the friend, "and thought you might like to talk about it." Sununu turned from the window with a wolfish grin and replied, "Yeah, isn't it great?" Then, seeing his visitor's puzzlement, he explained that the Iowa defeat had left Bush desperate for a win. "Don't you see," he confided, "how much good I'm going to be able to do for the next President of the United States?"

Sununu delivered on his boast. He persuaded Bush to become at once more folksy among voters and more slashingly negative toward his opponents -- particularly in TV ads that attacked Dole as a closet taxer. The shift in tactics propelled Bush to victory in New Hampshire and dramatically revived his campaign.

The one Washington job besides chief of staff that interested Sununu was Vice President. Bush asked him to submit disclosure forms as a potential running mate, and some of his supporters were so encouraged that they brought BUSH-SUNUNU placards to the Republican Convention at the New Orleans Superdome. Bush's selection of Dan Quayle badly disappointed Sununu, who pretended to return a pair of expensive suits, folded up, to a haberdasher friend in Manchester. He explained, only half jokingly, that "they didn't get me the nomination, so I want my money back."

As his chief of staff, says a presidential adviser outside the government, Bush wanted someone "who would not get along too well with the Congress, too well with the press, too well with the staff." That conviction hardened as Bush watched, with deepening wariness, the performance of his close friend Jim Baker as Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. Baker expertly ingratiated himself with lawmakers, journalists and others, often at the expense of Reagan. He distanced himself from unpopular decisions and took credit for those that worked out well. The pattern, Bush felt, carried over from the Reagan White House to the 1988 campaign.

Sununu, on the other hand, is a natural lightning rod. He is not only willing to take heat for the President but "loves to take heat -- and gives as good as he gets," says New Hampshire G.O.P. Senator Warren Rudman, a Sununu friend. As Bush's bad cop on environmental issues, Sununu drew the fire of the Sierra Club and other activist groups, which denounced him for consistently siding with corporate polluters. They scarcely mentioned Bush, even though Sununu was only carrying out the President's policies. Such loyalty is prized by all chief executives, but especially by George Bush. Moreover, Sununu's unorthodox political calculations have often been vindicated, most impressively when he has stood against the consensus of more seasoned Bush advisers.

Example: the Senate in late January sought to override Bush's veto of a bill that would have allowed Chinese students who feared persecution in their homeland in the wake of last year's Tiananmen massacre to remain in the U.S. The bill had passed the Senate overwhelmingly, and most of his advisers recommended that Bush not invest his prestige in an uphill battle to uphold his veto. Sununu strongly disagreed. He persuaded Bush to put a full-court press on every Republican Senator, promising to protect the students by Executive Order without offending the prickly Chinese leadership. What was at stake, Sununu stressed, was the President's ability to conduct foreign policy without congressional meddling. The argument worked and the veto stuck.

Example: on the eve of the Nicaraguan election in February, "everyone here hoped the resistance would win, but only Sununu really believed it and said so," recalls Robert Gates, the deputy national security adviser. When intelligence experts predicted victory for the Sandinista government, Sununu argued that they must be missing something: Nicaraguans had to be fed up with their crashing economy, even though under such a repressive regime they would be afraid to tell pollsters the truth. During Bush's morning intelligence update on the Friday before the election, a CIA briefer again predicted a Sandinista victory, and Sununu puckishly bet him an ice-cream sundae that he was wrong. On the following Monday morning, the CIA man had to pay up.

Sununu is consolidating his role as the Administration's de facto chief political officer. Last week, after Jim Wray, director of the White House political office, took a new job at the Republican National Committee, Sununu put his executive assistant, Ed Rogers, in charge. From the beginning, Sununu has served as a key political liaison to right-wing Republicans. He assiduously solicits their views and appoints their candidates to key second- level posts in the Administration: for example, placing staunch opponents of abortion at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Sununu is quietly shaping a handful of issues on which Bush can run for re- election. On one front -- clean air, child care, education reform, help for & the disabled -- Sununu and Bush are stealing popular issues that traditionally belong to the Democrats. On another the White House is preparing "wedge" issues to sharply distinguish Republicans from Democrats. These include opposition to broad new taxes, support for a constitutional ban on flag burning, and aggressive brandishment of the presidential veto to hold down government spending. Mindful that voters are more inclined to trust Republicans than Democrats on law-and-order issues, Sununu has pushed to define the drug issue to his party's advantage. In his view, curbing drug abuse is more a matter of hiring cops and building prisons than of education and treatment. The latter, says a senior Republican, are things "any fool Democrat can do."

It is a sound political strategy. But the question remains whether Sununu will be around to see it implemented. Those who know him best say there is no limit to his abilities or political ambitions. When a well-wisher at Sununu's inauguration as Governor remarked to his mother that she must be very proud, she replied, "Oh, Governor is nice, but President -- now that would really be something."

For his part, Sununu says he wishes only "to serve George Bush as long as he wants me" -- for eight years, he hopes. That would be a feat never accomplished since the advent of the modern chief of staff. Yet for Sununu to survive two full terms, he might have to temper the fire-eating act that wins him Bush's respect and trust, which are in turn the source of his power. As a senior White House official observes, "Although there appears to be mortal combat in Washington, most people here treat one another with extraordinary respect. There is a lot of continuity, and people have to live and work together for a long time. So the Sununu approach would be better for a short- timer than a longtimer."

The early defeat Bush and Sununu suffered in the Senate over the nomination of John Tower as Defense Secretary is an object lesson in the perils of arrogance. Tower was for years a power in Washington as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee -- but like Sununu, he made enemies he did not need to make, including fellow Senators. And, though it took a while, Tower got his payback when his colleagues denied him his crowning glory at the Pentagon.

A Lebanese proverb holds that "one kisses the hand that one cannot yet bite." John Sununu doesn't work that way. The rest of Washington does.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington