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Bush's cautious, calibrated style has made for largely surefooted policy. Despite a sluggish first four months, the President has launched initiatives on difficult issues -- savings and loans, clean air, arms control -- that he might have ducked. He has kept a Democratic Congress off balance and has mollified the conservative wing of his own party. If he has hit no grand slams, neither has he committed any egregious errors. "I'm reasonably pleased where, at the end of six months, things are," Bush told TIME. "I'm not relaxed about it. I'm not in an everything's fine mode at all. But in terms of how the decisions are made, I'm very pleased with the way our team is operating."
His inherent prudence is now alloyed with what close friends and aides say is a noticeably more sober demeanor. The presidency has made Bush more circumspect than the sometimes loopy, arm-flapping creature of the campaign trail. He assumed a grim visage throughout the first week of the hostage crisis, despite efforts by aides to play down the preoccupation with Lebanon. Says an old friend: "The boyish enthusiasm is still there, but he's more careful, more one day at a time." Bush himself acknowledges as much: "Have I learned a lot? Sure. Do I think I'm maybe a little wiser from the way things are here? Yeah. Do I still have a lot to learn? Certainly."
Even when Bush gambles, he does so only after carefully researching the odds. His boldest move so far was his unexpected proposal at the May 29-30 NATO summit in Brussels to slash U.S. and Soviet conventional-force levels in Europe. Last winter and spring Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was beguiling European public opinion with frequent disarmament offers while the President stood pat, waiting for his aides' review of American foreign policy. NATO allies were growing impatient, and Bush's popularity in some polls was inching downward. By early May, despite his public denials of concern, the President was feeling anxious. "I need something," he told his aides. "I want to do something."
Early in the Administration, Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft mulled ways to bring Soviet troop levels in Europe into rough parity with NATO's. At one point they even contemplated a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe. But the national security bureaucracy "absolutely hated it," said a White House official. "The idea just sank like a stone."
Unlike Reagan, Bush does not like to flout his own bureaucracy. But now he had reason for boldness: Gorbachev had ponied up deep cuts in Soviet conventional forces in Europe at a May 11 meeting with Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow. "That was really the green light," said an official. "If we didn't move then, we were going to go to the NATO summit without anything." In a May 15 Oval Office meeting, Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, chief of staff John Sununu, Joint Chiefs Chairman William Crowe and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney gathered to discuss ways to make a proposal with "punch." Scowcroft suggested that Bush propose deep reductions in U.S. and Soviet ground forces and combat aircraft in Europe. The President liked Scowcroft's idea but wanted to make sure the Pentagon was on board. "I just don't want to do anything militarily dumb," he said repeatedly.