Thursday, April 5, 2001

By Ron Hutcheson, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — President Bush has said little in public about the spy plane standoff with China, but aides say he is taking a hands-on approach to an impasse that threatens to become the first foreign policy crisis of his presidency.

For example, the president insisted on personally interviewing the Army general who met Tuesday with the 24 detained crew members. White House officials said Bush has pressed for national security staff briefings and has been in touch frequently with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Powell has been prominent in public, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon all but invisible as part of an effort to show Chinese officials that Bush wants diplomacy to resolve the risky impasse.

The president is widely presumed to be consulting his father, ambassador to China in the mid-1970s, but White House spokesman Ari Fleischer refused Wednesday to confirm their contact.

"The president has asked me to keep any conversations he has with his father privileged, private," Fleischer said.

As tensions simmered Wednesday, Bush devoted most of the morning to briefings on the latest developments and options. The standoff was a big topic at the president’s regular weekly meeting with Rumsfeld.

"This is a very sensitive time in our conversations with the Chinese," Fleischer said. "There are times in international relations where the less said is the most productive."

Bush was relaxing at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, when the U.S. EP-3E surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet at about 8:15 p.m. EST Saturday. He was notified shortly afterward, said Bush adviser Karen Hughes.

From the start, the president and his advisers concluded that the best strategy was to avoid any action that might further strain relations. Their fear was that an angry response from the United States would only force Chinese leaders to take a harder line.

"What you want to do in a situation like this is say things that help reach the right conclusion, not provoke people into steps you don’t want them to take," Hughes said. "We’re trying to give them time to come to the right conclusion without allowing this to drag on."

Hughes said Bush’s first and primary focus has been on the status of the aircraft’s crew. Before his trip to Wilmington, Del., for a campaign-style event Tuesday, the president instructed his staff to add a high-level national security aide to his travel entourage so he could be updated frequently while on the road.

Steve Hadley, a top aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, got the assignment. Bush pressed Hadley for briefings wrapped around the president’s visit to a Boys and Girls Club youth center.

A short time later, when Bush got word that Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock had met with the crew, he said he wanted to talk to Sealock. His call went through before the surprised general had a chance to talk to Pentagon superiors about his visit with the crew.

"The first U.S. official to debrief the general was the president of the United States," Hughes said. "He wanted to hear firsthand how he assessed the status of the crew."

Thus far, Bush’s low-key approach seems to be earning high grades from experts.

"One of the major reasons it hasn’t become a crisis has been the behavior of the Bush administration," said Steven Goldstein, a China expert at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. "They seem to be doing this right in terms of the diplomacy — working quietly."

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