REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : This Vacation, President Is Unwinding at a Slower Pace

KENNEBUNKPORT, Me. —  On the surface, little has changed.

Here’s the President of the United States, chatting away on the first tee of the Cape Arundel Golf Club. And here he is on his speedboat, Fidelity, slamming the blue hull against the cold waves of the Atlantic. And here he is on the tennis court, competitive as always. And here he is again, back on the golf course.

And yet, as he begins his 66th summer in Kennebunkport, his third here as President, the frenzy is gone or at least hidden beneath the surface--as though the respite that he is supposed to get from Washington by spending four weeks in Maine for the first time actually has also meant a respite from the dashing about that has so often marked his shorter visits here and left observers wondering: Can George Bush ever really relax?

Listen to the President of the United States on his first full day of vacation last week, discussing his plans with reporters: “I’ll play a good deal of golf, good deal of tennis, good deal of horseshoes, good deal of fishing, good deal of running and some reading. Have to throw that in for the intellectuals out there.”

Indeed, he has been doing all that, but--occasionally still showing the fatigue that he says stems from treatment for an overactive thyroid gland--the demonic drive has been missing.

Take, for example, the pace of the golf game:

One morning last month, the President raced through the 18-hole course in less than 90 minutes--aided by the fact that he was playing with only one other golfer rather than in a foursome, the tee-off time was 6:10 a.m., when the course was empty, and a phalanx of Secret Service agents preceded him down the fairways. This past week, he was completing the course in a much more leisurely fashion: a relative snail’s pace of nearly three hours.

Something else has changed too: The President’s fishing fortunes.

Bush arrived in Kennebunkport last Tuesday afternoon and the next morning he was out on the water bright and early.

“We caught three fish before 8:42,” he said to reporters during one of his customary chitchats on the golf course. That’s a far cry from his experience here two years ago, when day after day he failed to catch anything and the Portland Press Herald each day chortled over the President’s misfortunes--a losing streak that he was unable to break until just before he returned to Washington in September.

Still, some things never seem to change. For one, the President of the United States still seems to be arranging his life, on vacation at least, according to the cycles of the moon. He makes time for his golf game based on the tides because high tide makes it easier to take his boat away from its dock near his house. Thus, low tide is best for golf. And indeed, low tide Monday was at 7:31 a.m.--while the President was in the middle of his golf game.

For another, Bush utterly disregards the weather. On a perfectly miserable Saturday, when an easterly wind drove a cold rain across the golf course, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said in a written statement: “The President’s plans for the rest of the day remain unclear. However, the rain implies that a good, healthy golf match may be on the horizon.”

Fitzwater knows his man. Bush played 18 holes, and then, as the sun finally came out over the drenched course, the President headed out for an additional nine. Indeed, when his match was tied after 27 holes, he played a sudden death 28th hole, inviting two reporters to join the foursome.

The President’s visit to Kennebunkport last August was dogged by the unfolding drama in the Persian Gulf. Each day was marked by the uncertainty of the early moments of the crisis, when the first U.S. troops sent to Saudi Arabia remained vulnerable to Iraqi attack--and by constant interruptions from aides bearing news from the diplomatic front. Nevertheless, Bush pressed ahead with his recreational activities with a grim determination.

This year, his determination remains undimmed: His vacation, he has said, “will not be denied”--not by Saddam Hussein, not by pesky Democrats whose heightened criticism seemed to irk him before he left Washington last week, not by daily questions about the hostages still in captivity in Lebanon.

The President is planning to remain in Kennebunkport, with an occasional half-day side-trip, until the day after Labor Day. If he holds to that schedule, from July 4 through Labor Day he will have spent 15 days in Washington, including weekends at Camp David, Md.

Why spend four weeks on vacation?

“It does sound like a long time,” he said. “But I’ll be doing some work. I maintain I’m not going to fake it. You know, we’ve been pretty busy, traveling a lot. . . . It’s not as though you’re not doing something, but I don’t want to pretend I’m working.”

As for his health and the heart problem that signaled the onset of Graves’ disease in early May, the President said, in typical shorthand Bushspeak:

“Very good. Health is good. . . . No, I really do. I feel good. And it’s totally back. I take some medicine--it’s to balance this thyroid thing. It’s nothing to do with the heart, which has been decreed perfectly well. Just to remind, it was the thyroid that got out of whack and caused the heart to run too fast.

“But all that really is history. And I do feel good. Once in a while at night I get tired,” he said, adding that he found two back-to-back trips to Europe last month tiring, “but so did everybody else.”

In Kennebunkport, Bush serves on the vestry of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, the small stone church a few hundred yards down Ocean Avenue from his home on Walkers Point.

And so, when the church’s leaders met for their annual vestry meeting Saturday morning, the President of the United States showed up, spending roughly 90 minutes in the home of the Rt. Rev. John M. Allin Sr., located next door to the church.

On Sunday, as he was about to leave his home for church, he realized that two of his grandsons, Jeb Bush and Sam LeBlond, were missing from the contingent. Using a microphone attached to a loudspeaker on his armored limousine, Bush took the matter in hand.

“Jebby and Sam. Jebby and Sam,” the amplified presidential voice called out across the compound. “Report for church duty. Come on, you guys. Where are you? Stop hiding.”

There was no sign of the two as the motorcade departed, but they were later spotted inside the church, doing collection duty with other children.

One of the rules of White House life is that staff members, no matter how senior, must never forget that they serve the President. In other words, never make the boss look bad.

Among Bush’s few visitors has been a White House staff member who has been accused in recent months of ignoring that important rule: Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

When last seen in newspaper stories and on television, Sununu was fending off criticism for his use of Air Force jets to travel from Washington to Boston, New York and Colorado, among other destinations, to attend political fund-raisers, to go skiing and to visit his dentist.

Sununu made a private cameo appearance last week at the Bush compound here, Fitzwater said, adding: “And he drove.”