No Longer Underestimated

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

One is a plodding bureaucrat whose soft drone is regularly drowned out by the assertive tones of his rivals. Another is a different kind of Milquetoast, one who talks tough but is steering American policy away from stern anti-Sovietism back toward wishy-washy detente. A third is no Milquetoast at all, but a policymaker who has so thoroughly won the trust of his chief that he speaks with an authority exceeded only by that of President Reagan.

All three are the same person, George Shultz, as seen at various times by different people. But the first view, fashionable for a long time after Shultz became Secretary of State in July 1982, has faded as Shultz has continued to prevail over the more voluble personalities who once seemed to have more influence. The second opinion, though it still thunders through Washington, has failed to convince anyone except the right-wingers who voice it regularly; it has fallen on notably deaf ears at the White House. And so more and more people who once belittled him as hopelessly bland or philosophically out of step are now accepting the third image of Shultz. One by one, his more assertive rivals find themselves relegated to the sidelines while Shultz's views are heard on an increasing number of issues. Few in Washington doubt the description of Shultz's prominence voiced by Donald Regan, an old friend now in command of the White House staff: "The foreign policy that Shultz is enunciating is President Reagan's foreign policy."

The key to Shultz's staying power seems to be his ability to divine Reagan's true wishes on a given issue. Says Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "I'm not certain who convinces whom. As you listen to Shultz, he makes you believe the President convinces him." The key to his clout, however, is more subtle: he has transformed Reagan's strong yet less-focused instincts into policies and actions. It is a skill that he learned on the job. When he was summoned to Foggy Bottom, he did not know Reagan well. But he began meeting privately with the President to shape a Middle East peace plan, and the two hit it off so well that their sessions became a kind of institution.

Today Shultz sees Reagan alone several times a week, for up to an hour at a stretch, frequently without any agenda. The Secretary sounds out Reagan on all manner of foreign questions and mulls over a variety of policy options, "thinking out loud with the President," as one Shultz aide puts it. Shultz's own self-effacing description, in an interview with TIME last week: "I try to give him my best advice and recommendations . . . but the President gives the leadership, and we try to work together on it. I will claim only to have been involved." Only once has Shultz publicly questioned a Reagan decision--involving not foreign policy but lie-detector tests for Administration officials--and then it was the President who bowed to Shultz's insistence that he would quit if he ever had to take one.

As Shultz's rapport with the President has grown, his rivals for foreign policy primacy have been retired one by one from the inner circle. U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Clark, a California crony of Reagan's who was National Security Adviser and supposedly the strong man of foreign policy when Shultz took office, have left the Government. Clark's successor, Robert McFarlane, took a front-and-center role in articulating policy for a while before Reagan's November summit meeting with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but soon afterward he too resigned.

That leaves Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, another intimate of Reagan's from California days. Weinberger's energy has been drained by a rearguard action against deep cuts in the military budget, and to his considerable displeasure, he was not invited to the Geneva summit. But he is still a formidable adversary whose professional disagreements with Shultz have been sharpened by personal strains. Perhaps 90% of the foreign policy disputes that appear in the newspapers are arguments between Shultz and Weinberger. A colleague of both has lost count of the number of meetings with Reagan at which Shultz has declared: "As always, Mr. President, I disagree with the Secretary of Defense . . ."

Their most public disagreement concerns terrorism. For more than two years now, Shultz has favored retaliatory, even pre-emptive, strikes against terrorists--even if their complicity in specific incidents cannot be conclusively proved and even if some innocent people might be killed. Associates say his advocacy is driven by both policy conviction and personal agony. A Marine officer in World War II, Shultz was devastated by the October 1983 suicide bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 U.S. servicemen.

Reagan has increasingly adopted Shultz's rhetoric on terrorism, but he has thus far abided by the severe restrictions that Weinberger has imposed governing retaliation: basically, that only those terrorists responsible for a , particular incident be pinpointed, isolated and punished. Though Shultz describes it as routine, last week's order to the Navy to begin flight operations north of Libya, a nation often accused by the White House of inspiring and aiding terrorists, looks like a preparation to take bolder actions.

Despite Weinberger's hard-line opposition, Shultz has been more successful in encouraging Reagan to resume negotiations with the Soviet Union on a variety of issues, most notably arms control. It is this very success, however, that has subjected Shultz to attack from those on the far right. They accuse him of sins ranging from insufficient zeal for U.S. aid to anti-Marxist rebels in Angola to appointing too many nonideological diplomats to policy posts. But their fundamental complaint is that Shultz believes in negotiation, not confrontation, with the Soviets. David Funderburk, a protege of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms who served 3 1/2 years as Ambassador to Rumania, calls Shultz's policy "concession, compromise, conciliation and capitulation."

A more valid charge against Shultz is that he is no grand strategist. He acts like the foreman of a crew of diplomatic construction workers rather than a statesman pursuing an overall design. The Secretary is a devoted incrementalist. He cannot and does not claim any major breakthroughs, but says that during his tenure the U.S. has developed a consistency in its handling of relations with the Soviets, eased tensions with European allies and seen more democratic governments take root in Central America. Progress, he believes, can be made only by a kind of patient chipping away at encrusted differences rather than by bold strokes. Shultz's own metaphor is of a gardener planting seeds, and though once thought likely to retire at the end of Reagan's first term, he now apparently intends to stay around to nurture those seeds into bloom. He told TIME: "It's an extraordinarily interesting and stimulating job."

Shultz's success in shaping policy is much greater than his prowess in articulating it publicly. Lately he has permitted himself some public flashes of the temper he shows in private, pounding a table angrily in December when a Yugoslav official offered some excuses for terrorism. But for the most part his public utterances are studiedly bland and numbingly repetitious. In Shultzspeak, the invariable progress report on any problem is that "we're working at it." Even his wife Helena has complained, "George, you sound so dull."

< His cautious, step-by-step approach does not make for inspiring oratory. But it has helped earn him the trust of his President. And maybe, just maybe, it really is the only way to make diplomatic progress.

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/Washington