To the Manner Made

What kind of prescription is this for political success? Director of the CIA when that agency's prestige had never been lower. Ambassador to the U.N. when that body, for the first time, refused to heed U.S. pleas that Taiwan be allowed to remain a member. Chairman of the Republican National Committee when the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Two-time loser as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. A drab, colorless speaker and humble, almost faceless, campaigner.

Yet despite that background--and, indeed, in some measure because of it--George Herbert Walker Bush, 55, has emerged from relative obscurity to challenge Ronald Reagan, the heavy early favorite for the Republican nomination for President. Bush's astonishing start is due partly to the dramatic shifts in public mood triggered by the crises in Iran and Afghanistan. As many Americans seem eager to rally behind the President, Republicans seeking an alternative have turned more receptively toward a man with Bush's broad experience in foreign affairs, including his service as head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Peking. To have headed the CIA, championing its cause when so many critics were clobbering it, is now an unanticipated political plus. Finally, Bush, too, has changed, shedding his New England-bred modesty and campaigning with the zest of a man willing to boast of his past and proclaim his future: "I can feel it in my bones. I'm going to be President."

Bush admits his new buoyancy is partly a deliberate tactic. "I used to think I should keep quiet and others would blow my horn," he explains with a wry grin. "But they didn't. So I will." Now Bush rarely misses a chance to tick off highlights of his career. One of the war's youngest pilots, winning his Navy wings at 18. Shot down over the Pacific and four hours adrift at sea before being rescued by a submarine crew. Three air medals and the DFC. Phi Beta Kappa at Yale. Creator of an independent off shore oil drilling firm in Texas. A millionaire at 41. Twice elected to Congress from Houston. Nor does he shun name-dropping. "The last time I saw Mao," he will inject into an answer about world affairs, or "I've been to the Khyber Pass . . ."

Bush has hired a speech tutor to zip up his delivery. He conveys genuine passion as he warms to some favorite themes. "I never got caught up in the immorality of our role in Viet Nam," he declares. "We were not immoral in our purpose." His right hand chops the air. "I'm sick and tired of apologizing for the United States." Instead of fudging, he frankly admits his lack of knowledge about some questions. "I have a good intellect," he will say. "But there is a hell of a lot I don't know. And I know I don't know it. That's the difference between me and Jimmy Carter."

Bush joshes reporters about their habit of tagging him an "elitist" or a "patrician." ("Patrician," he will say. "What does that mean? I'll have to look it up.") He claims he is wearing fewer button-down shirts just "so you fellows won't think I'm elitist." Son of Prescott Bush, a wealthy Wall Street banker and ten-year Senator from Connecticut, the candidate likes beer (Miller High-Life), country music (especially Dolly Parton and Crystal Gayle), prefers speedboating to sailing (he owns a $15,000 50-knot ocean racer), and is a baseball nut. Yet he clings to some of his Andover preppy phrases: "Fantastic," "super," "gee whiz."

But as the public gets to know a more ebullient and informal George Bush, an old question lingers. Yes, the doubters say, he's likable, decent, a fine family man (five children and a wife of 35 years, Barbara, who campaigns effectively for him, claiming to be "just a nice 54-year-old white-haired lady"). He's all that, but is he tough enough to be President?

TIME correspondents last week quizzed many of Bush's former colleagues and found only a few who retained any reservations about either his personal strength or intellectual depth. He was respected in Congress as a man who did his homework. While conservative on economic matters, he was liberal on civil rights. One top U.N. official recalls Bush as being "a loyal, devoted man with a lot of style--an honorable straightforward sort of chap."

Clearly, the most difficult of all of Bush's posts was to be personally selected by Nixon as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973; he then had to preside over the party as the President slipped into the Watergate disaster. Some critics still feel that Bush defended Nixon too long. But within the party, colleagues claim Bush stoutly rejected many White House overtures to plead Nixon's case, quite properly distanced the G.O.P. from Watergate, and skillfully walked a thin line. Recalls one Nixon aide who was untarnished by Watergate: "Bush was loyal, but he didn't say everything the White House wanted him to. He wasn't a toady. He held the party together."

The lifting of morale was Bush's greatest accomplishment in 1976 at the CIA, which had been virtually immobilized by revelations that it had tried to kill leaders abroad and snooped on U.S. citizens at home. Before skeptical congressional committees, Bush argued earnestly and successfully that the CIA needed more agents overseas and could not rely solely on satellite spying. He argued that the CIA should retain the right to conduct covert operations. Says a onetime director of the agency: "He gave a great deal of hope and revival of dignity to people who were feeling low." Bush was so admired at CIA that a score of former colleagues are now supporting his campaign. But is he tough? Insists a former director of operations at CIA: "He's tough as nails when he makes a decision. He'll stand by it, come hell or high water."

Used by Presidents Nixon and Ford as something of a short-term utility man, Bush has not really been tested in a longer job where his true leadership strengths or weaknesses might emerge. In a sense, the current campaign ordeal is that kind of test. So far, George Bush is doing fine.

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