Bush, Reagan Work on Easy Transition

Suspicions were running high during the transition between the Carter and Reagan administrations in 1980, recalls Susan J. Irving, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School who served as staff director of Jimmy Carter's Council of Economic Advisers.

Irving, who stayed on in her position for one month into Reagan's first term, recalls that top Reagan aides would not even leave telephone messages with Carter administration secretaries who had not yet been replaced.

Eight years later, however, Ronald Reagan and George Bush are going out of their way to make the transition between their two Republican administrations proceed as smoothly as possible. But that does not mean George Bush has it easy until he assumes office on January 20, 1989. The president-elect, with the help of his transition staff, must make thousands of political appointments and many policy decisions that will set the tenor of his administration.

Some members of the Reagan administration appointed in recent months with Bush's approval are expected to stay on in the Bush administration. President-elect Bush announced Tuesday that his friend Nicholas Brady will remain as Treasury Secretary. It is also believed that Richard L. Thornburgh, the former Pennsylvania governor now on leave as director of the K-Schoo's Institute of Politics (IOP), will remain the Attorney General.

"We are always reminded that a president is president until January 20," says the K-School's Carl M. Brauer, who last year published a book studying presidential transitions since Dwight D. Eisenhower took over from Harry Truman in 1952. "Authority does not shift until then, but power shifts at the election or before the election in this case. Reagan has handed over some of his major appointments. Bush has called the shots in the cabinet."

Reagan last week also ordered all of his appointees to submit their resignations. Thousands of people who want to replace them are sending in resumes, pulling strings, and calling in favors to get their jobs. Office-seekers and their advocates are also using the press to circulate their names among political circles.

Within the Bush team, too, there is much infighting going on. Among other fights, conservatives are battling moderates for the influential position of White House Chief of Staff.

Still, experts say, the transition will not be nearly as chaotic as it would have been had the Democrats captured the White House.

"There is going to be much more of a transition along the lines of when [Lyndon] Johnson took over from President Kennedy," says David Runkel who covered the Reagan transition in 1980 for the Philadelphia Bulletin and is now IOP deputy director. "A Dukakis victory would mean a massive change in government, but under Bush, many people in the present administration will stay on."

Bush's transition will also be different, according to Brauer, because as the only sitting vice president to be promoted since Martin Van Buren in 1836, he must build his own image after being in the shadow of a popular president for eight years.

For the national press, the presidential transition poses a difficult problem. Reporters must try to cover a flood of information reflecting major changes in government in a short period of time.

K-School press experts say that the reporters who cover the transition are usually the same reporters who covered the winning candidate's campaign.

"Coverage [during a transition] is always superficial," says Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein-Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former correspondent for CBS and NBC. "It does not focus sufficiently on the issues that are involved or the issues that face the upcoming administration."

Coverage on newspaper editorial pages also comes up short, according to Martin A. Linsky, a former editorial writer for the Boston Globe who now teaches at the K-School. Editorial writers, he says, fail to try to influence policy decisions during the transition.

"It is a pretty squishy time between the election and the innauguration," Linsky says. "There is a honeymoon period during the transition in which the press gives the president-elect a chance to set his own agenda."

But Linsky says that the intense coverage by the press does have an impact on the transition in at least one way. Transition officials, he says, try to announce appointment before the press discovers them on its own.

"If you work for the transition, you want to frame the information," Linsky says. "If you take a long time, the press gets to it first and they frame it they way they want to. There is a struggle over the communication process and how people understand things."

"There is always an attempt by politicans to manipulate the media to their own benefit," Runkel says. "Some people run for appointments by having their names floated in the press."

Inevitably, though, the ambitions of some will be thwarted. It can only be hoped that Bush does not suffer the same fate as one of his predecessors, James A. Garfield. He was shot by a disappointed office-seeker soon after his inauguration in 1881.