Although President Bush’s new chief of staff, Samuel Skinner, does not have a public record on issues of Jewish concern, he is known to have had good relations with the Jewish community in Illinois, where he had practiced law.
As expected, Bush named his 53-year-old secretary of transportation Thursday to replace John Sununu. Skinner is a close friend and a frequent golf partner of the president’s.
While the chief of staff deals mainly with domestic issues, he also has a great deal to say on who sees the president.
Unlike Sununu, who was openly pro-Arab, Skinner does not have a public record on Israel. But he visited Israel in August 1990, partly to study the security system at Ben-Gurion Airport.
Skinner served 10 years in the office of the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, where he was known as the “hammer” for his tough courtroom style, principally against crooked politicians.
Skinner, who supported Bush for president in his unsuccessful 1980 campaign and then managed Bush’s successful Illinois primary campaign in 1988, was rewarded with a Cabinet post at the start of the Bush administration. He has been considered one of Bush’s most successful appointments.
Unlike the conservative Sununu, Skinner is considered a moderate Republican.
Bush made the announcement at a White House news conference in which he also named the four top aides for his 1992 re-election campaign. However, he is not expected to officially declare his candidacy until January.
The four are Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who will be general chairman; Republican pollster Robert Teeter, as chairman and chief political strategist; businessman and longtime Republican operative Fred Malek, as compaign manager; and Charles Black, another longtime GOP operative, as senior adviser.
Malek had to leave Bush’s 1988 campaign after it was revealed that, while working in the Nixon White House, he had carried out an order to determine how many Jews were involved in compiling economic statistics in the Labor Department.
Since then, Malek has made a special effort to cement his relations with the Jewish community and has appeared at Jewish organizational events.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
