"He staked out his own position and showed that he's his own man and he does his own thing," said one official of a pro-Israel organization who attended the conference. "It was a call to the Jewish community where he said, 'Do not visit the sins of the father on the son.' That's how I took it, anyway, and that's how many members of the audience took it. It was a very, very pro-Israel speech."

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Maybe it needed to be. While many AIPAC members saw Ronald Reagan as one of the nation's most pro-Israel presidents, the Governor's father is seen by many of those same AIPAC members as one of history's worst presidents for U.S.-Israel relations.

Thus Bush quoted Reagan in his remarks to the AIPAC, while his father went unmentioned.

Additionally, the man who introduced Bush -- "Bubba" Mitchell, a Mobile, Ala., resident and past chairperson of AIPAC's board -- did reference the younger Bush's foreign policy advisers as familiar faces, ones seen as pro-Israel, such as Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz, "arguably the most supportive secretary of state in the history of the state of Israel," according to Mitchell.

Other advisers to Gov. Bush cited by Mitchell include Richard Perle, Reagan's assistant secretary of defense for international security policy; Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's undersecretary of defense for policy and dean of the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University; Ambassador Richard Armitage, Reagan's assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs; and Dr. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Council director of Soviet and East European Affairs. All are regarded as supportive of Israel.

But Bubba didn't mention the slew of Gov. Bush's foreign policy advisers -- nicknamed the "Vulcans" -- who were around President Bush quite a bit during his confrontations with AIPAC. These include both Stephen Hadley, President Bush's assistant secretary of defense for international security policy and Robert B. Zoellick, who served President Bush as both undersecretary of state and deputy White House chief of staff. There was no mention of Richard Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institute, who served from 1989 to 1992 as a special assistant to President Bush and was the Bush administration's senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council; or Robert Blackwill, special assistant to President Bush for European and Soviet affairs, who in September 1992 credited the "extraordinarily intense and adroit negotiating and diplomatic efforts of the United States of America, President Bush and Secretary of State Baker." Regardless of the ones Mitchell chose to point out to the AIPAC audience, Gov. Bush's advisers are at least as Bushie as they are Reaganite.

But Bush and Mitchell are doing everything they can to emphasize the more Reaganite side of the governor's foreign policy team. "George Bush Jr. is not using his father's advisers; that's what I find interesting," said an official of the pro-Israel organization. "He's using Reagan administration advisers."

Mitchell underscored the fact that Bush is not his father during his introduction of the governor, outlining the various pro-Israel positions the younger Bush has adopted. Bush reiterated those positions several weeks ago in a 2 1/2 hour meeting with a number of AIPAC board members who flew to Austin "at Gov. Bush's request to visit with him and discuss issues of importance to Israel and the Jewish community," Mitchell said to the crowd.

The official noted that Mitchell's efforts to reassure the crowd about Bush were understandable. "There's definitely a concern there," he said. "The relationship between the U.S. and Israel under George Bush Sr. was not a good one, it was very unhealthy. I think George Bush Jr. understood that he was dealing with a community that has a lot of questions and a lot of suspicions. But he went a very long way toward allaying those fears with his speech."

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