COLUMN ONE : President’s Alter Ego to the Rescue : Few modern presidents have relied as heavily on someone as George Bush has on James Baker. The bond is like that between brothers. As secretary of state, Baker seemed effectively prime minister.

WASHINGTON — When George Bush’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination was faltering in 1980, his campaign manager, James A. Baker III, called a press conference and--without Bush’s consent--announced that the candidate would soon withdraw.

Although Bush was not quite prepared to quit the campaign at that moment, Baker effectively forced his boss out of the race. After Baker’s press conference, Bush had no choice but to accept the inevitable. He promptly withdrew.

Years later, Baker took credit for securing the 1980 vice presidential nomination for Bush by pressuring him to withdraw from the presidential race. If Bush had not quit when he did before the California primary, Baker reasoned, GOP nominee Ronald Reagan would not have chosen Bush as his running mate.

As that tale of unusual chutzpah vividly demonstrates, Baker is far from the ordinary Washington political operative. With a reputation for true political savvy, a resume of policy achievements and an unusually close relationship with the President, Baker was the obvious person to be chosen by Bush at this moment to lead his presidential reelection campaign.

For many years, Baker, who will step down as secretary of state on Aug. 23 to become White House chief of staff, has been Bush’s alter ego. Beginning in 1970 when Bush ran for the Senate, Baker has always been deeply involved in Bush’s political campaigns and has served twice previously as the presidential campaign manager, always holding as much sway over the decision-making as the candidate himself.

And as secretary of state for the last four years, Baker has been the equivalent of prime minister. On matters of policy as well as politics, White House insiders say, the President frequently has deferred to the judgment of his old friend “Jimmy.”

Few modern presidents have relied so heavily on a single appointee. And few have had as genuine a personal friendship with their top political adviser--a relationship that many observers have likened to the bond between brothers.

“There’s a special chemistry between them,” said Ken M. Duberstein, former White House chief of staff who has observed Bush and Baker together many times. “Sometimes, one is the older brother and one is the younger brother. Sometimes, they play the opposite roles.”

Likewise, House Budget Committee Chairman Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), who has witnessed the Bush-Baker alliance in budget negotiations with members of Congress, also views the relationship as a fraternal one. But as Panetta sees it, even though Baker is the younger of the two, he more often plays the role of older brother. “Baker gives him direction,” Panetta said.

Duberstein added: “Jim is willing to tell his old friend, the President, ‘You are wrong. You need to go in another direction.’ That is why George Bush respects him so much.”

Historians say the Baker-Bush relationship is unusual, but not unique. Most modern presidents have relied on professionals--not friends--to run their administrations.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had Sherman Adams. Richard M. Nixon had H. R. (Bob) Haldeman. Jimmy Carter had Hamilton Jordan. But while Nixon employed friends such as Robert Finch and William P. Rogers and Lyndon B. Johnson included Clark Clifford in his inner circle, neither of them depended upon a single confidant such as Baker.

Clearly, Bush’s bond with Baker more closely resembles the ties between President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy.

In fact, there are so many similarities between Baker and Bush that they could easily be brothers.

Like Bush, who is 68, Baker, 62, was born into a wealthy, influential family and attended the finest schools. His great-grandfather helped found the Houston law firm of Baker & Botts, the second-oldest firm west of the Mississippi River. He attended the Hill School in Philadelphia, where he was captain of the tennis team, and then went to Princeton, where he joined the college’s most prestigious eating club.

Even now, there is a prep school-style chumminess and competitiveness in the way Bush and Baker relate to each other. Stephen Hess, political scientist at the Brookings Institution, noted the pair adhere to the “old fashioned style of male bonding” as portrayed in John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace.”

When they are together, close observers say, Bush and Baker communicate in a shorthand banter that tends to exclude other people in the room. Bush sometimes needles Baker about eclipsing him in the international arena. Baker gently chides Bush for letting him do all the work. There is almost no pretense between them and little recognition that one is leader of the Free World. Jokes--often slightly off-color--are a staple of the give and take.

Not surprisingly, the Bush-Baker alliance began as a social relationship--a tennis partnership in Houston in the early 1950s that successfully combined Baker’s strong forehand with a good Bush backhand. It was not until Baker’s first wife died of cancer at the age of 38 in 1970, that he consented to join Bush in politics, apparently to help cope with his grief.

Since then, Baker, who remarried in 1973, has always been there to serve as Bush’s loyal second. And while his efforts have sometimes eclipsed those of the boss, he has strongly resisted speculation that he himself wishes to be President someday.

Even during periods of his political career when he was not working directly for Bush, the bond between them remained strong. Bush is credited with helping Baker get most of the jobs that moved him up the political ladder--assistant secretary of commerce in the Nixon Administration, delegate-counter for President Gerald R. Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign, manager for Reagan’s 1980 campaign, White House chief of staff under Reagan and Treasury secretary in the second Reagan Administration.

Baker’s history of Bush-inspired appointments and promotions appears to have created in him a strong sense of loyalty and obligation, as well as a clear-eyed understanding that his own political fortunes rise and fall with those of the President. Obviously, that is what persuaded him, despite his strong personal misgivings, to leave Cabinet posts he enjoyed to run Bush’s campaigns in 1988 and to rejoin the White House staff this year.

Just as he has relied on his friendship with Bush to climb the ladder of success, Baker tames his political adversaries by forming alliances with them too. Visitors to his immaculate, well-ordered office are often disarmed by his impish sense of humor and personal directness. Political meetings and press interviews routinely begin with a good-natured joke.

By forming mutual bonds with Democratic leaders and foreign diplomats, Baker has succeeded in building a reputation as a master negotiator for the Bush Administration.

But policy built on personal relations has its limitations. In negotiations with the former Soviet Union, critics say, Baker developed such a strong identification with Mikhail S. Gorbachev that he was slow to recognize that Gorbachev’s days were numbered.

When it comes to formulating policy, both Baker and Bush are more tacticians than strategists. Baker has even admitted that he lacks “the vision thing,” as Bush once termed it. And because neither the President nor his top adviser is credited with having that quality, the Administration sometimes appears to lack direction.

“Boldness without Vision” is the phrase that Time magazine used to sum up Baker’s record as secretary of state--a judgment shared by critics of the Administration as well as many high-ranking career diplomats at the State Department.

Still, for all of their shared attributes, Baker clearly is a more instinctive politician than his boss. As the story of Bush’s withdrawal from the 1980 presidential race proves, Baker seems to be able to smell a political disaster in the making and to steer clear of it.

Yet Baker’s detractors charge that he has been known to use his sensitive political early-warning system to divorce himself from failures of the Bush Administration, leaving the President to take the blame.

It was no coincidence, according to State Department officials who declined to be identified, that Baker, who usually travels with Bush when the President goes overseas, did not accompany him on a politically disastrous trip to Japan last January. That was the trip in which Bush, overcome with the flu, vomited on the Japanese prime minister during an official dinner.

In part, Baker’s ability to steer a course around these political disasters is based on a good personal relationship with members of the press. Political analysts in Washington continue to marvel at the way Baker avoided being identified in the press with the negative campaign waged by Bush in 1988, even though he was chairman of the campaign.

Unlike most natural politicians, Baker was not drawn to politics at an early age. When he first met Bush, he was living the quiet life of a socially prominent corporate lawyer in Houston and practicing with the firm of Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Jones.

Although Baker grew up with a father he has described as authoritarian and who demanded achievement, he showed no unusual ability to excel before entering politics. He was a better-than-average student, but impressed his fellow students as more of a party boy than a scholar. He failed by one point to finish in the top 10% of his class at the University of Texas.

Yet even though politics ultimately proved to be his strength, Baker seems to have retained some of the disdain for politics that he learned from his upper-crust relatives. Since he first came to Washington, he has struggled to be recognized more for his policy achievements than for his political acumen.

In 1988, when Bush asked him to resign as Treasury secretary to take over the reigns of his foundering campaign for President, Baker let it be known that he was disappointed to be valued more for his political skill than his policy achievements. Again this year, when Bush began pressuring Baker to step down as secretary of state, his aides confided that Baker felt the move would diminish his record of statesmanship.

Baker first established his national reputation as Reagan’s first chief of staff. Although Baker technically shared power in that job with two longtime Reagan aides, Edwin Meese III and Michael K. Deaver, he was frequently described in the press as the “first among equals.” In fact, he was the only member of the trio to emerge unscathed from the bitter, internecine war among them.

As chief of staff, Baker shepherded Reagan’s 1981 tax and spending cuts through Congress and played a leading role in negotiating a 1983 agreement that preserved the long-term health of the Social Security system.

But Baker yearned for a high-profile Cabinet job and he eventually engineered an unusual job swap with Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan in 1985. At Treasury, he helped to persuade Congress to enact a sweeping overhaul of the tax code, negotiated a free trade agreement with Canada and struck accords with the major industrial countries that helped to improve America’s competitive position by bringing down the dollar.

Bush was trailing Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in the polls in August, 1988, when Baker agreed to leave Treasury to head Bush’s presidential campaign. After helping Bush achieve a stunning, comeback victory, he had earned the top Cabinet spot: secretary of state.

His desire to be secretary of state was seen by his acquaintances at the time as an outgrowth of his ambition, not as the result of any genuine interest in diplomacy. Yet Baker proved himself to be a excellent diplomat as he negotiated an arms treaty with the Soviets, built an allied coalition in advance of the Persian Gulf War and encouraged the reunification of Germany.

Baker’s shortcomings were clearly apparent at the State Department, however.

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), a leading member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said that Baker proved to be “a pretty cautious guy with a high sense of expediency, devoid of vision of where he wanted the world to go.” Inside the State Department, Baker was criticized for talking only to his top aides and failing to consult with the high-ranking career diplomats who work there.

Baker’s steady climb up the government ladder has frequently led to speculation that he will someday make a bid for the presidency himself. But those who know him best are skeptical that he will ever seek elective office. Baker, they say, has bad memories of losing his only bid for elective office when he ran for attorney general of Texas in 1978.

Despite his passion for politics, Baker--unlike Bush--has always seemed happy to remain slightly above the fray.