Traveling Salesman

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

He was supposed to be the domestic President, pushing aside foreign affairs to concentrate on righting the U.S. economy. So how come Bill Clinton scored better with foreign heads of government at last week's summit in Tokyo than with the barons of Congress or the public at home?

Well, partly because he prepared assiduously, phoning at least three fellow summiteers from Air Force One before landing in Tokyo and sitting in on so many late-night briefings that he pushed himself to the edge of exhaustion. (Or past it; British Prime Minister John Major cut short a one-on-one meeting at 11 p.m. Wednesday because Clinton was too tired to focus.) Partly because Clinton gave both government chiefs and the Japanese public a glimpse of the campaigner the U.S. has not seen since last November. At the opening summit session Wednesday, he worked the room like a campaign kaffeeklatsch, stopping to chat briefly with each of the other leaders before taking his chair. Though he talked tough at times, he set the tone at that first meeting with a sentence that sounded more Japanese than Clintonian: "In hard times we shouldn't react like porcupines. We should open up like sunflowers." He also appealed directly to the Japanese public in a speech at Waseda University. One point: Japanese consumers are hurt by the country's trade restrictions because they pay outrageous prices for imports.

Clinton focused his agenda as he has not often done at home. Agreements to expand trade and to extend more generous aid to Russia, he told his subordinates, took precedence over everything else. He harped on the subject of employment, going so far as to call for a "jobs summit" at the meeting. Expanding trade, he insisted, was one way out of the stagnant employment that bedevils all members of the G-7 (for Group of Seven nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S.).

The President got crucial help from his host. Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's career may well be almost over; the Japanese nickname for him now is "dead body." But if his Liberal Democratic Party is to continue its 38- year rule past next Sunday's parliamentary elections, it must convince voters that it is synonymous with stability, and that involves maintaining good relations with Japan's foreign partners. Miyazawa thus could not allow the summit to fail.

Consequently, it was Miyazawa who made the key concession that led to the summit's greatest achievement. When Miyazawa overruled his Finance Ministry to announce that Japan would eliminate tariffs on "brown" liquors such as whiskey and Cognac, all the pieces fell into place. The seven signed off on the greatest tariff reductions ever achieved through international agreement. In addition to those on some liquors, tariffs will be wiped out on pharmaceuticals, construction equipment, medical equipment, steel and beer. ("Does this mean I get a better price for Molson's back in Washington?" Clinton joked to an aide. Probably not; U.S. tariffs on the Canadian Molson's and other foreign beers are little more than half a cent a bottle.) Tariffs will be reduced 33% to as much as 50% on many other goods, including wood, paper and scientific equipment. The agreement will go into effect only if it is later incorporated into a pact among all 111 members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that would also provide for free trade in services and especially the hotly contested area of farm products.

An important though ambiguous U.S.-Japanese agreement emerged unexpectedly after the formal summit ended and Clinton was about to leave Tokyo. The Americans had sought a "framework" agreement to guide future negotiations aimed at reducing Japan's enormous surpluses in trade with the U.S. (nearly $50 billion a year currently). But negotiators argued through two nights, indulging in such hairsplitting quarrels over wording that at one point Clinton exclaimed, "You mean I flew all the way across the Pacific to negotiate this?" Miyazawa ordered his bargainers not to let Clinton go away empty-handed, and they complied -- though only after arguing so fiercely among themselves that two Japanese officials got into a fistfight in the Okura Hotel at 3 a.m. Saturday.

Negotiations continued until 8:30, as, according to U.S. bargainers, the Japanese started "backsliding" on some concessions. Clinton was so worried about how the Japanese would present the pact that he insisted on seeing a text of Miyazawa's prepared remarks before joining in a press conference to break the news. He got a text -- in Japanese; with no time to prepare a written translation, interpreter Jim Zumwalt had to read one aloud.

The decision sounded like an agreement to agree. In fact the agreement had teeth: the publicly stated threat of U.S. retaliation against Japanese exports if Japan does not fulfill its commitments to open its markets to U.S. products and services. The Japanese pledged "to achieve a highly significant decrease" in the trade surplus and to negotiate "sets of objective criteria" for gauging progress. That, said Clinton, should lead to more Japanese buying of American goods and services -- autos and parts, computers, telecommunications equipment, insurance and financial services.

The Japanese were somewhat relieved at having, for the moment at least, substituted muddy language for the precise targets the Americans had achieved in the earlier semiconductor agreement, which last year resulted in Tokyo's allowing U.S. computer chips to gain a 20% share of the market in Japan. The Americans were pleased that the agreement recognized a U.S. right to retaliate if the agreement is not fulfilled, and stressed that the pact called for twice-a-year reviews of progress, at which they hope to hold Japanese feet to the fire.

On aid to Russia, Clinton partly made up for an earlier blunder. In April he had proposed a $4 billion package, provoking howls from allies who had not been consulted. This time he prepared carefully; aid to Russia was the subject of the calls he placed while still winging across the Pacific. One of his main points: Russian President Boris Yeltsin must not be made to look like a beggar when he joined the talks Friday. The G-7 agreed on a $3 billion package that Yeltsin seemed highly pleased with.

Clinton scored on atmospherics as well as substance. Although none of his fellow summiteers can be certain of staying in office through 1996, as he can -- some might not make it through the end of this year -- the U.S. President took care to question them solicitously about what they were doing to resolve problems that also beset the U.S., such as immigration, health care and crime. "I think they were unprepared for his range of knowledge," said a U.S. aide. Hillary Rodham Clinton confined herself to the kind of summit-spouse events -- visits to candy factories, Kabuki theaters, tea ceremonies, even a garbage incinerator -- that she skips in the U.S. While she remained a model of independence and influence to Japanese feminists, Mrs. Clinton's demeanor convinced others that she is not the aggressive, meddlesome woman they had read about. Crowds followed her in movie-star admiration.

In ironic counterpoint to all this success, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and National Economic Council director Robert Rubin were on the phone to Washington late every night and before dawn most mornings, seeking to round up support for restoring in House-Senate conference the tax incentives for investment that the Senate had stripped from Clinton's budget bill. They did not get very far. The conference has yet to meet, but when it does, it must somehow replace $20 billion in revenues sliced out of the budget in the Senate, restore enough spending cuts to keep House liberals in line, and yet achieve the deficit reductions Clinton demands. There is no certainty it will.

Clinton aides hope the Tokyo successes will help reverse his slump in Washington. Said counselor David Gergen: "If the President goes home with some substantive accomplishments under his belt, that helps him at home. It changes the atmosphere." Perhaps. But so far Clinton is in a position unlike most baseball teams, especially championship ones: winning on the road, but not yet at home.

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo and Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame with Clinton