George Bush's Point Man

By Sam Allis/Washington

Author Alex Haley and his friend Lamar Alexander booked passage together in 1988 on a cargo ship from California to Australia, aiming to write books away from the distractions of their Tennessee home base. Every evening the pair would emerge from a day of writing in their cabins to watch the "green flash," which can sometimes be seen just before the sun disappears below the horizon. "He'd talk, and I'd listen," Haley recalls. "Lamar talked night after night about the desperate need to improve American education. It was in his marrow. He felt impotent to do the things that needed to be done."

Alexander is frustrated no longer. He is now the point man for George Bush's educational goals, including the idea of school Choice, and he is using his soft-spoken salesmanship to market them to Congress and the American public. The role is the most challenging yet for the man named by Bush as Secretary of Education last December, whose mild and courteous demeanor masks a high-octane ambition. His goal is to transform the Department of Education, which Ronald Reagan once pledged to abolish, from a backwater operation in the shadow of the Air and Space Museum into one of Washington's leading domestic agencies.

* Alexander, 51, brings a degree of political acumen to his job that was never seen under predecessors Lauro Cavazos and William Bennett. He learned from masters, serving first as an aide to Tennessee Senator Howard Baker and then in the Nixon White House before emerging in his own right as a two-term Republican Governor (1979-87). This background gives him a big advantage when he travels to Capitol Hill, as he often does, to lobby for his program. He understands compromise. "I can work with a guy like that," says William Ford, the crusty House education committee chairman.

But behind the agreeable exterior is a flinty vision of American public education and its various ills that is sweeping in its condemnation. "The problem is the system," he says flatly. Alexander refers to the Supreme Court as "an obstacle" blocking the use of tax dollars for religious schools. He is wound tighter than he looks. His celebrated affability sometimes cracks when challenged -- when he is asked, for example, why his younger son William attends a Washington private school rather than a school in the public system. "I chose it because I like it," he snaps.

The boyish-looking, sandy-haired native of the small east Tennessee town of Maryville forgets nothing. "If he ever met you, he'll remember you," says Haley. Alexander is an inveterate notetaker, scribbling reminders about all sorts of ideas and activities on clipboard pads or handy scraps of paper. On his sea voyage -- where he was writing Six Months Off, a memoir of stepping out of his professional life -- Alexander made a list of things to be accomplished each day and crossed them off each evening. "If he has a fault, it is that he is not much at having a whole helluva lot of fun," says Haley.

The sense of discipline comes from his mother Florence, a no-nonsense woman who ran a nursery school in her backyard, and his late father Andrew, who served briefly as an elementary school principal. Lamar began piano lessons at four and studied diligently through his freshman year at Vanderbilt. Today he can deftly play Chopin or pound out rocket-top country piano, as he did in Bourbon Street watering holes while clerking for Federal Judge John Minor Wisdom after his 1965 graduation from New York University law school.

As Governor, he pushed through a 10-point program to improve public education in Tennessee (including classroom computers and merit pay for teachers) and a 1 cents-on-the-dollar sales tax to pay for it. Bush liked what he saw and sought Alexander's counsel periodically on education matters. The two get along well, and Alexander's wife Honey is a friend of Barbara Bush's from Texas. This background leads to speculation that his brand of progressive Republicanism and his Southern political base would make him an attractive alternative to Dan Quayle as a vice-presidential candidate in 1992.

But not everyone is enamored of Alexander's record as an education Governor. "He brought education to the forefront as a topic at everyone's kitchen table," concedes Relzie Payton, president of the Tennessee Education Association, the state teachers' union. But Alexander was also a tireless self-promoter, she argues, whose follow-through was less impressive than his goals. Alexander's educational efforts in Tennessee have met with mixed success, and, Payton adds, "Choice was mentioned, if at all, in passing while he was Governor."

So far, the new Education Secretary has received high marks for his energy and the caliber of his appointments. Directly under him as Deputy Secretary is David Kearns, 61, former chairman of Xerox Corp. Kearns will be, in Alexander's words, "my chief operating officer" and will spearhead a drive to raise $150 million from business for innovative schooling ideas.

Another interesting selection is Diane Ravitch, the incisive conservative thinker and education historian from Columbia University who has defended pluralism on college campuses against the assault of censorious "political correctness." Ravitch is in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and also serves as counselor to Alexander.

No one has ever accused Lamar Alexander of lacking confidence, either in his ideas or in himself. "Five years from now, Choice will not be an issue," he serenely predicts. Instead, he insists, it will be the foundation for a transformed system of education that has long been his political and personal dream. Whether that is confidence or evidence of a quietly unbending temperament is something only he can prove.