THE MALTA SUMMIT : Bush’s Personal Diplomacy Faces Tough Test at Summit : Foreign Policy: Despite some successes, experts see pitfalls in the President’s one-to-one style.

VALLETTA, Malta —  Last week, as preparations for the superpower summit here came to a peak, President Bush sat down and dashed off a handwritten note to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev outlining his hope for a new kind of U.S.-Soviet relationship.

The note was personal and even eloquent, a Bush aide said. But many of the Administration officials charged with managing U.S.-Soviet relations didn’t even know the message existed until long after it arrived in Moscow. Some haven’t seen the text to this day.

The episode typifies both the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of George Bush’s unusually personal approach to diplomacy. To a degree that astonishes even some of his own aides, the President believes deeply in the usefulness of direct, one-to-one contact with other leaders, from Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to the prime minister of tiny Luxembourg.

In keeping with that conviction, the personal note was a step toward one of Bush’s major goals for this weekend’s summit: to establish the same kind of informal relationship with Gorbachev that he feels he has with other leaders.

Dangers Lurk

“The President’s desire all along was, No. 1 . . . to get together (with Gorbachev) to be able to have the kind of extended conversation that allows them to get to know each other in a much more personal way,” a senior official said. “He is someone who believes very much in the virtue and importance of personal diplomacy.”

But some diplomatic veterans warn that Bush’s approach also carries serious dangers. “I’ve always trembled when a President picks up the phone to talk to his counterparts,” said David Newsome, a former U.S. ambassador who heads Georgetown University’s Institute of Diplomacy. “The idea of solving difficult international issues through personal rapport is a very risky one.” If nothing else, he noted, it makes it harder to keep the U.S. government’s vast foreign policy apparatus in tune with what’s going on at the top--as in the case of Bush’s impromptu note to Gorbachev.

In addition, as the Ronald Reagan Administration learned at the 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, presidents who rely too much on personal diplomacy can sometimes create as much misunderstanding as accord.

And there is at least one more drawback to personal diplomacy, a White House aide noted after a flurry of presidential chats with Latin American leaders: When Bush calls a foreign chief to ask a favor, it creates a precedent that can sometimes boomerang.

“The downside,” the aide said ruefully, “is that sometimes they call back.”

Bush has long prided himself on his ability to establish personal rapport with foreign leaders. As U.S. ambassador at the United Nations during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, he built a wide network of diplomatic friends, including many from countries that were traditionally U.S. adversaries. As envoy to China, he sought friendships with that country’s leaders.

And as vice president under Reagan, he played a little-noted role in forging “back-channel” contacts with such foreign leaders as India’s Rajiv Gandhi and Algeria’s Chadli Benjedid.

Now, as President, Bush has reveled in the role of chief diplomat of the land, spending hours on the telephone with princes, prime ministers and presidents around the globe. He has chatted frequently with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, gone fishing with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and played tennis with Argentina’s President Carlos Saul Menem. (Bush won.)

Success in Europe

Bush has been especially successful, aides say, in cementing ties with European leaders in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, especially West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl--an important task as NATO tries to respond to upheaval in the Soviet Bloc. In preparation for the summit, the White House announced solemnly, Bush talked by telephone or in person with the leaders of all 15 NATO allies, including the surprised prime ministers of Iceland and Luxembourg.

Even more notably, Bush has managed to achieve a measure of rapport with France’s sometimes prickly president, Francois Mitterrand. Bush was the host for Mitterrand and his wife for a weekend at his vacation home in Maine last spring, indulged the Frenchman’s passion for woodland walks, and--more important--included him in early discussions of a U.S. proposal to cut American and Soviet troop levels in Europe.

The two presidents have coordinated their moves ever since and have scheduled a Dec. 16 meeting on the French Caribbean island of St. Martin to review Western policy after the Malta summit.

But the one major leader Bush has not dealt much with directly is Gorbachev. Several aides said that the President has long wanted to try his hand at personal diplomacy with the Kremlin leader but was urged by his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to wait until the Administration had in place the framework of a policy toward the Soviet Union.

In July, however, after reformist leaders in both Poland and Hungary urged Bush to talk directly with Gorbachev, the President wrote one of his famous notes to Moscow, suggesting an informal summit. Countless cables and two more handwritten messages later, the two men meet today aboard the Soviet cruiser Slava--”to put our feet up and talk,” as Bush put it last month.

Aides said Bush has been encouraged to believe that a direct relationship with Gorbachev can be useful because the major U.S.-Soviet talks held during his Administration so far, between Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, have been unusually frank and successful.

“All the conversations between Shevardnadze and Baker have taken on a very detailed, personal character,” one senior official said. “It’s one thing (for Bush) to be briefed on those; it’s another to have your own direct experience with Gorbachev.”

But then, scholars and other outside experts warn, all modern presidents have believed that personal rapport with their Soviet counterparts might be a key to managing world affairs--with generally disappointing results. “I always believed that as long as I could take someone into a room with me, I could make him my friend,” Lyndon B. Johnson once said. “That included anybody, even Nikita Khrushchev.”

“Presidents are highly confident of their own powers of persuasion,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, who attended summit meetings while serving as an arms control adviser to Reagan. “And usually, they’re right, because it was their powers of persuasion that made them successful as politicians.

“But Soviet leaders are just not as susceptible to persuasion as (U.S.) domestic players are,” he said.

Indeed, Bush has already found some limits to the powers of charm. Last June, after Chinese troops killed hundreds--perhaps thousands--of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, the President picked up the telephone and tried to call Deng whom he had often described as an old friend. Deng refused to take the call.

Diplomats say Bush’s telephonitis has delighted some foreign leaders but rattled others, who are uncomfortable with being called out of the blue by the President of the United States. “Some (foreign officials) ask us, ‘Why does he keep doing this?’ ” one State Department official said.

Chance for Mistakes

Eventually, Bush’s informal style could produce problems with substance, experts warn.

“It’s a good thing for two leaders to size each other up,” said Adelman, who recently published a book on the Reagan-Gorbachev summits. “. . . But dealing at that level also magnifies the chances of serious misunderstandings, in arms control and other issues.”

At the 1986 Reykjavik summit, for example, Reagan agreed with Gorbachev to work toward the elimination of all U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons--to the consternation of the President’s own aides, who understood that the United States was far from ready for any such sweeping step.

Telephone diplomacy can be equally dangerous.

Bush has attempted to keep a precise record of his telephone dealings with other leaders by taking careful notes on a yellow pad, aides said. But there is still a potential for confusion.

“A president on the telephone is performing without a safety net,” Newsome of the Georgetown Institute, said. “He doesn’t have others around him to pick up the nuances of what the other side is saying.”