Bush on the brink.

THE SALMON-AND-GOLD balllroom of the Vista International Hotel in Manhattan was decked Out in seasonal splendor. A menorah and a Christmas tree flanked the lectern. Three young women in red capes, and dresses, called "Santa's Friends," sang "Winter Wonderland," "We Need a Little Christmas," and other carols of the modern age. Three men dressed as toy soldiers-white faces, red lips-stood rigidly beside them. Two Santas With BUSH FOR PRESIDENT buttons on their caps worked tables of Bush men and women from nearby Wall Street, passing out bumper-stickers. "Ladies and gentlemen," a voice announced, "the Vice President of the United States of America." The crowd rose, the toy soldiers snapped a smart salute, and George Bush appeared, bringing good tidings of great joy which would be to all Republicans.

But first he greeted the Republicans individually. A memory stirred. For four or five months in the summer and fall of 1982, I wrote speeches for Vice President Bush part time, a stint from which I learned almost nothing: nothing but this. The one trip I took with him, on Air Force Two, he seemed to spend a phenomenal amount of time writing notes and letters. It was as if he knew every Republican in America personally. How many did he know at the Vista International? The first table he approached, everyone rose. He gestured, please sit. Of course they didn't. By the second table he gave up the effort to be deferential. At 63, the appearance of youth is finally leaving him. His hair is not so much greying as lightening all over; lines remain on his face when the deep, open grin ends. All the time he shook hands, his left hand stayed in his pants pocket; sometimes both hands, after emerging for a gesture, would retire there. He did 16 tables, ate a little, then did the other thirty-four.

At a thousand dollars a head and ten heads per table, Bush was netting a tidy sum. He had also come to augment and display his collection of state Republican and Conservative Party supporters. One of these, Representative Guy Molinari of Staten Island, introduced him, after skipping through the resume, as a man of integrity, intelligence, ethical behavior, and "unbending loyalty."

Eight years ago, I wrote of Bush's speechmaking that he "drops pauses in awkward places, like a moving man leaving a piano on the stairs." He's better, but he'll never make the rude sea grow civil at his song. He begins by recalling the time Roger Mudd asked Teddy Kennedy why he wanted to be President. "And maybe he didn't give his best answer. Well, it isn't an easy question." Former Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes, he remembered, once took out his wallet and explained, "'What people really wanna know is who's putting money in, who's taking it out.' I know why I want to be President economically." The first priority is to hold the line on taxes. "Revenues are up when tax rates are down." This is Bush's bride of seven years, Mrs. Supply Side, formerly Miss Voodoo. He also ticks off the line-item veto, and his one original economic proposal, a lower capital-gains tax. From 1978 to 1986, the capital-gains rate sank from 49 per cent to 20 per cent. The Tax Reform Act, as part of its leveling crusade, boosted it back up to 28 per cent. Bush wants it scaled down to 15 per cent.

His second topic was education. Bush has said on numerous occasions that he wants to be remembered as an "education President." He came out last summer with another new idealet: savings bonds whose income would be tax-free if applied to college tuition. He said at the Vista that "education is the best antidote to poverty," and that present proportions of spending-7 per cent federal, 93 per cent state and local-represented th "right mix."

Last and greatest came peace. Not, you understand, allwe-are-saying-is-give-peace-a-chance peace, but Republican peace: Peace through Experience, and Strength. Now the record rolled out like a juggernaut. "I take some shots on my resume. This is the first line of workI've been in where experience is a detriment. I've been to 76 foreign countries as Vice President-not all for funerals either. Jim Baker says, 'You know Bush, his motto is, You die, he'll fly.' "But seriously, folks. Bush recalled the first time he met Gorbachev, at Chernenko's funeral (important point: before the Summit; this man, the subtext reads, knows people before they're famous), then flashed forward to December in Washington. Gorbachev, Bush thinks, with all the world, is a New Thing. "The minute you meet the man, you can see it, the wink, the humor, the gregariousness." Bush took credit for the famous sidewalk fleshpressing. He had told Gorbachev, as they rode along the capital's streets, that it was a shame he couldn't get out and about. "Two blocks later, he said, Stop. I think he said, Stop. Whatever he said, they stopped." There was laughter; Bush injected a note of sternness. "I'll trust him more when 200,000 Jews and Christians come out of the Soviet Union; when 106,000 Soviet troops come out of Afghanistan, and 30,000 Cuban troops come out of Angola; when he stops spending a billion dollars a year in Nicaragua." But he trusts him enough for the INF treaty. "I don't think we should stick our heads in the sand. . . . I would like to be the President-[stern again] realistically, with eyes wide open, keeping America strong-[peace again] but be the President to build on this ray of hope that's beginning to shine." The sound of a thousand bands clapping.

Later in the week, he flew up to New Hampshire, appearing, in Dover, at the Millyard, a woolly-mammoth carcass left over from the Industrial Revolution. Under a clear sunset sky with a streak of cloud like smoke in a jewel, a hundred spectators and a high-school band shivered waiting for him. I marveled that the lips of the trumpeters didn't stick to the mouthpieces. "We are proud," his introducer here said, "of your example as a solid family man." This was the week of Donna Rice's boyfriend. "Good moral values are still important in New Hampshire."

It was too cold for Bush to do more than touch on education and the INF treaty: "A step closer to peace on earth, good will toward men." The Biblical allusion gave him a peg to deal with two hecklers. (Heckling what? Their voices imploded in the freezing air.) "In a spirit of good will . . . I want to say to this wonderful couple here, I've been to Poland where you can't do it." It was on Bush's Eastern European trip last fall that he made the crack about importing Soviet mechanics to Detroit that caused such hoots. It was also before and during this trip that his negotiations with the Polish government-dangling IMF credits in return for a softer line, threatening nothing if crackdowns continued-elicited the praise of Zbigniew Brzezinski for their "unusual skill." "I think it's a good thing" people can heckle here, he said, pounding the lectern. The cold crowd whooped.

THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL Motorcade took him to a "function facility" on Route 125 near Plaistow. Bush's introducer here was an important local politician, Governor John Sununu. Sununu looks like the science nerd in a kid-exploitation flick about high school. No matter, he had learned his lines. Bush could "deal with what is clearly a brand new generation in the Soviet Union."

Bush, wearing aviator glasses (fair enough, he was an aviator), hit two new themes. Did the INF treaty portend cuts in defense spending? "It means no such thing at all." America had to keep its guard up; one way of doing that was SDI-a "humane program. . . . Wouldn't it be nice to put weapons at risk rather than people?" Bush was the last of the Republican candidates to take the SDI pledge of advocate Gregory Fossedal, to come out for deployment. "It's down the road in its entirety," Bush said in Plaistow, and called fo "vigorous research."

The second new theme was the environment, a New Hampshire perennial. He told of seeing plastic cups while "fishin' for blues off Bidderford Light. And I said, HeyTheodore Roosevelt was a Republican, and he said, after defense, the most important thing" one generation can leave the next is clean nature.

He ended with an expanded answer to Roger Mudd's question, though, interestingly, he recast it as a matter of his qualifications rather than his desires. The first two that came to mind were life experiences. His business careerBush started as a clerk in a family friend's oil company and ended as the bead of a firm that pioneered offshore drilling-taught him about meeting a payroll. "Republicans believe in the private sector. Why not have someone who's rolled up his sleeves" in it? "Some tell me," he went on, in a Nixonian trope, "not to say" that he had been Director of Central Intelligence. But "I wear it as a badge of honor." Applause.

More important than experiences, he said, is "what makes me tick." To probe his ticker he used his Polish trip, where "three incidents came together for me," two depressing, one inspiring. First was meeting General Jaruzelski. The second was a trip to Auschwitz. Auschwitz has become such a totem that it is virtually impossible to tell, from statements about it, whether any visitor has had an authentic reaction. Here Bush's very awkwardness helped him. "You see pathetic bins of little shoes . . ." Finally, he recalled visiting the church of the martyred Father Popieluszko. "He was smitten down, 37, 38, whatever he was. Why? Because he was worshipping God." Bush had driven to the church with Lech Walesa, and the Polish government, for spite, had removed the Polish flag from the car's right fender. "But it didn't matter, because we had the stars and stripes on the other fender." At the church, they met Father Popieluszko's mother, who "could not believe any country would stand up for human rights. I'm thinking to myself, It's the United States that can do this, because we are the most decent, the most generous, the most fair nation on the face of the earth. I want to be the President, strengthened by that experience, and by many others. And with your help . . ."

Applause; exit. As analysis, it didn't amount to much. As revelation, it was not uninteresting.

BY NOW, the outlines of the life are widely familiar. Born in Milton, Massachusetts, raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. Andover. Youngest pilot (18) in the Naval Air Service. Hit coming in for a bombing run over the Bonin Islands, but went on to hit his target. The turret gunner and the radioman died; Bush paddled for two hours in a life-raft away from the Japanese-held shore until he was picked up by a submarine. Yale: Phi Beta Kappa, Skull and Bones, captain of the baseball team. "I am convinced the reason you are not getting more hits," the head groundskeeper wrote him, "is that you do not take a real cut at the ball." Bush worked at it, and got his average up to .264. (Mario Cuomo's average the year he played minor-league pro ball: .244.) Texas, oil, politics. He lost two Senate races, solidly in 1964, narrowly in 1970, and won two House races in the intervening years. Then came the hit parade: ambassador to the United Nations; chairman of the Republican National Committee; head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Peking; Director of Central Intelligence. 1980, politics again: up in Iowa, down in New Hampshire, up for good in Detroit and on election day.

The most important part of the blur we call a presidential candidate's biography is, in Bush's case, where he came from. It is the source of his strengths, and his weaknesses. One of his weaknesses is that his strengths hobble him.

"Bush," declared the Manchester Union Leader in an editorial last October, "is a spoon-fed rich kid wet-nursed to success." As a character sketch, this was plain wrong. As sociology, it was not quite right.

People assume that, because he was born in New England, Bush was some second cousin of George Apley. Both his parents' roots, however, were in the Midwest. His father came from Columbus; his mother's father, from St. Louis. They both had money; they had both worked for it.

The elder Bushes raised George from early on in the habits of doing the same. These were demanding. Newsweek has recorded that the report card of the Greenwich Country Day School carried a line, "Claims no more than his fair share of attention." "How'd we do in 'Claims no more'?" was always the first question Bush's father asked. In his campaign biography, Looking Forward, Bush describes a recent bit of advice from his mother. "'You're talking about yourself too much, George,' she told me after reading a news report covering one of my campaign speeches. I pointed out that as a candidate, I was expected to tell voters something about my qualifications. She thought about that a moment . . . 'Well, I understand that,' she said, 'but try to restrain yourself.' "If this was spoon-feeding, what are knives?

Bush's upbringing suited him to the jobs he undertook. That row of slots in the Seventies looks good on the resume, but none of those jobs was smooth sailing. Bush struggled to keep Taiwan in the UN as Washington was cozying up to the Mainland, and to keep the GOP afloat at the time of Watergate. ("People come up to my mother," he observed of his RNC job, "and say, 'Isn't it too bad about George,' like I had died.") "There'll be some substantive work from time to time," Henry Kissinger warned him before he went to Peking, "but for the most part you'll be bored beyond belief." He came to the CIA at the height of the mid-Seventies spook-bashing.

His background also suits him politically, at least in the context of the Republican Party. In 1968, Norman Mailer attended the Miami convention and found himself, perhaps for the first time in his life, in a roomful of Republicans. The experience filled him with "a sad sorrowful respect" for "the muted tragedy of the WASP." WASPs were tragic because they "were here to serve, and serve they had, in public functions and public charities . . . served on opera committees, and served in long hours of duty at the piano, served as the sentinel in concert halls and the pews on the aisle in church, at the desk in schools, had served for culture, served for finance, served for salvation, served for America . . ." The revery concluded with a thought: "Nelson Rockefeller is out of his mind if he thinks he can take the nomination away from Richard Nixon." Meaning: Who, in a party of service, had put in more time than Nixon?

Who, twenty years later, has practiced the piano longer than Bush?

HOW WELL IS he suited to winning an election, or governing the country afterward?

The one concrete oint that threatens Bush the candidate is Iran-Contra. Bob Dole, at least, thinks so. "When your strength is foreign policy," Dole said last summer, "you could ask questions." Bush knew the Administration was selling missiles to Iran, even as the terrorism task force he headed declared that the government would "make no concessions to terrorists." On the Central American side, Bush's national security advisor, Donald Gregg, had eight meetings with Felix Rodriguez, a former CIA agent working in El Salvador, during the mid Eighties. The left-wing press, which harps on the matter, alleges