White House Adapts to the Stress of War : Coping: President Bush turns some of his attention to the home front as he continues to run Operation Desert Storm.

On Monday, the Boy Scouts called on President Bush. On Tuesday, the President ate lunch with Vice President Dan Quayle. On Wednesday, Bush flew to New York to speak to the Economic Club about the federal budget and banking reform. And throughout the White House, aides who worry about such things are beginning to give some thought to 1992 and the presidential campaign.

Has life in the Executive Mansion returned to normal?

To be sure, no one could spend much time around the President and overlook the fact that something is amiss. The signs are readily apparent: In Bush’s tired, heavily wrinkled eyelids and the pronounced hollows in his cheeks. In the heavy flow of updates from the crisis-monitoring Situation Room. In the puff of pancake makeup smeared on Bush’s face, to liven up his visage when he delivered his State of the Union Address last week.

But reminders that the nation is at war--and that the tensions from any conflict are brought inside the heavy iron gates of the White House and deposited on the President’s doorstep--are simply not as omnipresent today as they have been in previous crises.

For several years, a series of Norman Rockwell watercolors portraying the whirlwind around President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II has decorated a corridor near the Oval Office. There, in one scene, is the President’s gas mask, hanging on a coat tree, a silent, stark reminder of life in the White House during another war era.

Grenada, Lebanon, Panama: A sudden rush of crisis meetings. Limousines coming and going.

Now, the procession of sedate, dark Chryslers and Cadillacs carrying senior government officials--a sure sign that a new crisis is bubbling just below the surface and is about to be sprung on the nation--is barely a trickle. The National Security Council has stopped holding urgent meetings each day.

“There are no guys with stars on their shoulders running in and out with charts and maps and graphs,” White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said.

What it all means is this: On the road to sell his domestic program or moving through some of the less-than-earthshaking chores of the presidency, George Bush and those around him are adapting to the task of running a country at war--although the specter of a grim new phase of ground combat looms large.

One Bush aide, finally finding time to enjoy a relaxed lunch beyond the confines of the White House mess, said the pace “is not what it was during the first three or four days” of the war last month.

Or, to put it on a more personal level, Fitzwater said, “people now go home at night with the expectation that they’ll get a night’s sleep.”

Bush, for one, claims he is getting a solid night’s rest--contrary to reports from someone who should know. First Lady Barbara Bush was quoted recently as saying the President’s sleep was being interrupted.

“He’s been tired because he’s been up at night. This is war,” she said.

Another suggested reason for presidential sleeplessness was the steady thump-thump-thump of anti-war protesters who have taken up residence in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue. They are pounding on drums, punctuating the days and nights with a dirge-like rhythm--although from behind the closed doors and windows at the White House they can barely be heard.

“Look, my wife--normally, I stick by everything she says, but I’m sleeping very well,” the President said at a news conference Tuesday. “The drums have ceased, oddly enough.”

Well, not exactly. They were there Tuesday, and indeed, moments after Bush said they had gone, the volume was kicked up.

Meanwhile, “if it weren’t for the war, there wouldn’t be much going on in this city,” one senior White House official said. This time of year is invariably quiet in Washington as new domestic programs are prepared for unveiling. In coming weeks, details of the domestic programs--energy policies, highway proposals, a civil rights bill--are likely to be fleshed out.

But because “it’s a time when a lot of work is done behind the scenes,” another White House official said, Bush has had few public demands on his schedule and was able to devote himself in January almost entirely to the Persian Gulf without having to push other matters aside.

Now, with Operation Desert Storm in its fourth week and with other issues pressing in on his schedule, Bush is said by Fitzwater to be spending about 50% of his time on the war, down from 80% during the first two weeks.

“There was absolutely no sense of paralysis on the part of the President or his Cabinet, that they are so riveted on the war that they are not attending other issues,” said Gov. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), who, along with other members of the National Governors’ Assn., met with Bush and a number of Cabinet members Monday.

On some mornings, the President picks up the telephone as soon as he awakens at about 5:30 a.m. and will call the Situation Room for an overnight update. More often, however, he peruses a summary of war action prepared for him during the night and dropped off at the White House usher’s office.

Throughout the day, Bush receives additional reports as news arrives from the Gulf. And, according to Fitzwater, the President watches the televised daily news briefings--one at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the other at the Pentagon.

“The first week was basically a lost week--high anxiety over the fate of the forces, extreme tension over loss of troops, loss of airplanes, over how (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein would respond, people up all night long two or three nights in a row,” Fitzwater said.

“The second week, the Israeli Scud situation preoccupied us. Every night we’d go to bed wondering when we’d have to get up. Would the Scuds kill someone? Would Israel retaliate? The President was initiating a lot of calls--a high-intensity week.”

In the third week, he said, “things started evening out. Air supremacy gave us a degree of confidence about concluding the war without major reversals.

“He had been pretty tense the first two weeks,” Fitzwater said of the President. “The loss of individual life does weigh on him.”

But the more buoyant side to the President returned last Friday.

For his first trip out of Washington since the war began, Bush visited three military posts that day in North Carolina and Georgia. He got such a lift from the cheering reception given him by families of troops deployed in the Gulf that, he said at Ft. Stewart, Ga., the last stop, “I’m going home to see Barbara with my morale sky-high.”

He even joked with reporters the other day while he took advantage of mild February weather to leave the White House grounds and go jogging with Millie and Ranger, his energetic spaniels.

Still, said Fitzwater, who typically visits with Bush several times a day, “the frivolity, the teasing that is typical of his personality, has diminished. The cloud is always there. It’s an overlay on top of everything you do.”