BARBARA BUSH HER FRESHMAN YEAR

THE FIRST LADY, POPULAR & PLAIN SPEAKING

Some things she just plain hates:

The term First Lady.

Comparisons of her popularity with George's.

Self-analysis.

Media scrutiny of her health.

Some things she clearly loves:

Being the wife of the president.

George's popularity.

Talking about her dog and her grandkids.

Sharing the White House with the world.

Beneficiary, like her husband, of life's luckier rolls of the dice, Barbara Bush is who she is and couldn't be happier about it. If the White House was a hardship post for some who lived there, it is not one for her.

"I really think if you can be depressed in this job then, boy, you're really going to be depressed in real life," she says with that flair she has for plain speaking.

Unchanged by her year in the fishbowl, she is also unscathed. Her approval rating is among the highest of any president's wife at the end of the first year and higher still than her husband's. It is a bittersweet compliment that slightly embarrasses her.

"I don't make any decisions that are important," she said in an interview last week with The Washington Post and seven other news organizations.

But her popularity goes well beyond anything like decision making and comes as no surprise to George Bush, having the time of his own life being the president. A few days before the 1988 election, he predicted Americans would fall in love with his wife. As his not-so-secret weapon on the campaign trail, she had captivated audiences with her down-to-earth manner, indifference to glamour, and pride in family.

Today, at 64, she pays more attention to her appearance, has her hair styled regularly and buys designer clothes that have landed her on at least one best-dressed list. She still knows no strangers, talks a blue streak about her family and seems unable to do any wrong.

"Not since the 1950s has there been a First Lady who so perfectly fitted our traditional ideas of how a First Lady should be," says Barbara Kellerman, dean of graduate studies at Fairleigh Dickinson University and veteran observer of presidential families. "Mrs. Bush is really a throwback -- in the good, not the pejorative, sense of the word -- to a time when what a First Lady did, how she looked and the activities in which she engaged seemed very clear to all of us, when there was some consensus of what was appropriate."

Kellerman believes that "the combination of how Barbara Bush behaves and looks, and the evocation of a Yankee past when WASPs ruled the world and the decorum of how we spoke seemed to define what makes America great, were not only considerable coming after Nancy Reagan but coming at a time when the world was marked by rapid change.

"Barbara Bush seems to represent stability and tradition," says Kellerman, who calls her a "humanizer" in the sense that Betty Ford as First Lady and Lillian Carter as First Mom bridged the gap between the president and the people.

"Humanizers" have an "air of wit or color about them," Kellerman wrote in her 1981 book, "All the President's Kin," covering the Kennedys through the Carters. "They are fun. They are idiosyncratic. They are apolitical. They bestow upon the president some of their own lively grace, and at their best they amuse as well as reassure."

Barbara Bush is all of those things, characteristically putting her own imprimatur on them. She is fun to talk to, spilling out opinions, tidbits and glimpses of the Bushes' private life. She's traveled abroad with the president on four occasions and once on her own. In England, when she kissed Denis Thatcher's hand, she drew praise and a little criticism for her playful gesture.

She has written to Raisa Gorbachev about the Gorbachevs' visit here next June, but she doesn't want anybody writing her with suggestions for what they might show the visitors. "Please write the president," she says.

From her we know the Bushes diet unsuccessfully, watch five television screens at once, read seven newspapers and walk the dog. She's received more than 75,000 pieces of mail since she moved into 1600 a year ago and coauthored a book with her dog due out later this year. She paints a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Every Couple.

"I say, 'I'm going to go walk Millie one last walk,' and you know, if {the president's} not reading in bed or on the phone or busy, he'll say, 'Well, I'd love to go too.' " She changes her shoes but not her clothes. "You don't think I'd go change my clothes to go walk the dog?" she asks.

Not infrequently the Bushes talk to tourists outside the South Lawn fence who are "flabbergasted. And everybody has a camera." They say things like "great about Noriega" and "100 percent behind you." From the Queen's Bedroom window she sometimes watches other tourists and has noticed that the Americans stop outside the fence along Pennsylvania Avenue to take pictures of the White House then have to back into the street to get everything in. The Japanese are "much smarter," she says, because they take their pictures from Lafayette Square.

And the homeless camped in the park?

"You don't see them very much, dearie," she says. In fact, she has visited shelters and soup kitchens, encouraging volunteers to follow suit. Her one-woman crusade to let Salvation Army bell ringers be bell ringers during the holidays worked -- they were allowed back into some Washington area shopping malls.

Homeless advocate Mitch Snyder says just her concern goes a long way in drawing attention to the problem. "I would much rather have her than him as president," says Snyder. "She's a very sensitive lady. I think any time the First Lady is involved in something that focuses on the issue, such as the Salvation Army, it has impact."

The Bushes don't miss much, on television or in print -- either serious or frivolous -- though she says she never saw the Esquire spread of Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater making his pseudo-centerfold debut. It wouldn't have bothered her -- "I've got got four sons and a husband who run around in running shorts all the time" -- but if it had, she would have told George Bush she thought it "pretty corny."

She scoffs at Bush's idea of dieting, which she describes as drinking a "Lendl," a high-protein concoction named after the champion tennis star Ivan Lendl, preceded by chips and dips. She tells how the two of them gave up alcohol and desserts as this year's New Year's resolution until after the first scheduled state dinner. But then the dinner was canceled -- "which was very disappointing," presumably for two reasons.

Then there is Barbara Bush, the First Lady. "I don't feel the First Lady ever," she says.

Like other First Ladies, she clings to her privacy, considering it a right. Yet she agrees the public right to know is also a right. "Unless it has to do with national security, or unless it's personal -- I mean, there are some things that just really are very personal."

Those who know her well say she is determined not to let George Bush down and to set an example for others, despite the frustrations she feels about her thyroid disorder, known as Graves' disease.

She says its side effects of double vision and irritated and swollen eyes will "self-correct" in time and that the option of surgery is not one she is currently considering. She feels fortunate that her condition was diagnosed immediately. Otherwise, she says, "If you haven't taken medication and precautions, as we have done, you may damage your eyes."

Though she denies being secretive -- "I'm like an open-faced sandwich" -- it clearly annoys that her health is in the public domain. "Life is full of small adversities, and this is not a large adversity. If I had hives, do you think that would bother the president? No, I don't really think so. This is not a big deal," she says, though she admits that if she had cancer she "probably" would be willing to alert the media.

She admits she has argued on more than one occasion with Anna Perez, her press secretary, on what the media should be told. While some East Wing press secretaries might have welcomed a boss with a ready-made favorable image, Perez, pitted against a demanding White House press corps her first year on the job, may have felt at times as if she was learning to walk with her feet in the fire.

Barbara Bush says "one of my joys in life is needling Anna" whom she fires "about 20 times a day. ... And Anna says, 'Thank you, I'll leave.' "

Apolitical in the sense that "what I stand for is the private sector getting involved and I leave the government to my husband and other people who are elected to office," she refuses to be lured into taking sides -- even when the issue is literacy, her leading cause.

"I don't get into anything in front of the Congress," she said last week of the proposed National Literacy Act, legislation calling for a VISTA Literacy Corps and help for neighborhood libraries doubling as literacy tutoring centers.

Despite that disclaimer, Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), one of the bill's sponsors with whom she has been associated on literacy matters since 1981, is optimistic that she will be a secret lobbyist for the bill inside the White House.

"She is more willing to go on her convictions than her husband," said Simon. "But she will not do anything that will hurt him politically. I can't blame her if the president doesn't go for the bill."

A self-described "fan" of Simon's, she nonetheless expects she'll campaign against him when Rep. Lynn Martin (R-Ill.) seeks to unseat him in the Senate this year. The fact that Martin was among a delegation of GOP women in Congress lobbying Bush to change his abortion position doesn't make Barbara Bush uncomfortable, she says.

Nor will she admit to being uncomfortable with the president's position against abortion. Though he says he is against it except in cases of rape, incest or when the mother's life is in danger, he vetoed legislation last fall that would have made federal funds available through Medicaid to poor women in those circumstances.

"I know that it's motivated by deep soul-searching and he believes that," Mrs. Bush says.

The signals she has sent on abortion also have been confusing.

"I don't know what her position is," says Faye Wattleton, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "There is a rumor that she supports pro-choice as a national policy. But to date we have had no tangible evidence. She has made it clear she supports her husband regardless of her own view."

Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, sees Mrs. Bush's impact on the abortion question as one of example more than action.

"She's why politicians should trust women to make decisions for themselves. She's thoughtful, caring, concerned and compassionate not only about children's lives and the quality of family but about the role of women in the society and the world at large."

Spokesmen for the National Right to Life Committee were not available for comment.

She has also shown a concern for the victims of AIDS, and Mervyn Silverman, a physician and president of the five-year-old privately funded American Foundation for AIDS Research, says the visibility of her involvement alone is important.

"Holding an infected baby isn't such a major thing, but the image it creates is, since so far this administration hasn't done much in regards to AIDS issues," he says of the administration's reduced budget request to cope with the disease.

Mrs. Bush, when asked about the impression some people have that she is a liberal on social issues, says: "I am ... I don't mean that as knocking the Republican Party, because I think of the Republican Party as liberal on social issues."

Claiming she took no "static" on calling herself a liberal "except from Anna, of course," she says the label fits her on "people things."

"Now, you may not look at it as that way, or you may not look at me that way, but I think of us both as caring enormously about people and looking -- it's very hard, you know, easy when you're one civilian, but when you're the president of the United States, you have to look at all the people -- and you have to look at the big picture like what will help people most.

"And then you have to look at education and Social Security. And I think that's why George is throwing his body over what would be very easy in many cases to say, 'Take from the Social Security system.' But I think that's why he's doing that, because he's caring about the future."

If she was saying that she and the president are both liberals because they care about people, was she also saying conservatives don't care about people?

"No, I'm not saying that the Republican Party is -- and I don't mean that conservatives don't care -- that is not at all what I'm trying to say. But if you -- what I should say is, labels are for cans and let it go," she says.

"But the truth is I think conservatives, too, are liberal when it comes to people issues, but it's fiscal responsibility; it's looking at the world in the future, not just today, because you have to -- you pay along the way, that's all I'm saying."

Author Kellerman says Mrs. Bush will neither advance nor hinder the women's movement. "She simply reminds even modern women what the virtues of family are. Some women may regard that as a setback, but the real point of the women's movement is to give women a choice."

And some in the movement would seem to agree.

"Barbara Bush's traditional approach to life is not harmful," says Patricia Ireland, vice president-executive of the National Organization for Women. "It is a reality that many women are burning out now in the workplace. Maybe her emphasis, her idea that it is a physically impossible task to do it all, is the reality. Women can't have it all and women have to deal with that as the century draws to a close."

Whether she's taken the steam out of the women's movement remains to be seen.

"Certainly for a lot of women across the country, she's a relief," says Sharon Rodine, president of the Women's National Political Caucus. "She's so comfortable about herself that she doesn't feel the need to fit a role set by society. What she's saying is, 'This is who I am and I like myself.' For women, it says that you have the power to decide who you are and want to be."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.