The Selling of The Defense Buildup

When the lights are dimmed at the White House family theater on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the screen flashes with secret aerial photographs depicting the Soviet military buildup. John Hughes, an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who once briefed President Kennedy on the Cuban missile crisis, narrates pictures of the latest Soviet defense expansion.

In the audience for this twice-weekly production are members of Congress, seeing what could be called "the selling of the defense budget, 1983."

Confronted by growing public skepticism about the size of President Reagan's proposed defense buildup and a Congress poised to scale it back, the White House has launched a counteroffensive that is a mixture of public relations blitz and rescue mission for Reagan's larger national security goals.

The immediate purpose is to put Reagan in a stronger bargaining position for the inevitable negotiating with Congress in the next few weeks over the defense budget.

In the long run, the White House goal is to restore flagging public support for the Reagan rearmament.

Neither goal has been accomplished, and the larger public opinion problem may take months and years of effort, administration officials said.

"The tide is still out, and it hasn't turned yet," one White House official said last week. "Will it? We don't know. The president is totally committed to this, and we're going to do the best we can. We don't know where it will end up."

Still, in an administration that often has had difficulty speaking with one voice on defense spending, the latest White House effort has achieved at least a small victory. Internal disputes about defense outlays have been muted, and a "professional operation," as one official put it, has been put together to carry Reagan's message. "We really didn't have one before," the official said.

The operation was organized by William Greener, a Pentagon and White House spokesman in the administration of President Gerald R. Ford, recently brought in as a consultant to the White House.

Another consultant, Bill Rhatican, a Synfuels Corp. executive taking a leave of absence, begins work at the White House this week to put the plan in motion.

Greener urged Reagan to speak out in a broader context than just defense outlays. "I didn't build the program for the Pentagon budget," he said. "I built it for national security."

Beyond the defense budget, that umbrella covers administration policy in El Salvador, the future of the MX missile, the battle over a nuclear freeze resolution in Congress and arms control negotiations with the Soviets in Geneva. All of them pose troublesome policy and public relations problems for Reagan.