Quayle Seen Gaining From Trips : Diplomacy: Journeys to Latin America and Europe are expected to polish his image, benefiting the President as well.

WASHINGTON — “I view this as very, very important diplomacy,” President Bush said recently as he unveiled a new mission for Vice President Dan Quayle.

The words Bush used to heighten the diplomatic standing of a series of three trips Quayle is to make to Central and South America over the next two months apply equally to the political importance of the trips for Quayle--and perhaps for Bush himself.

Details of the journeys are likely to be announced today. Another high-visibility excursion, to Western Europe and possibly to Eastern Europe, is expected to follow in the late winter or early spring.

And the prospect of a trip to Western Europe and the presidential announcement a week ago linking his upcoming travel in this hemisphere to the sensitive mission of patching up U.S. ties to Latin America in the wake of the Panama invasion represent a potential turn of fortune for Quayle.

During his first year in the vice presidency, Quayle was relegated to a series of low-key and low-visibility journeys that lacked diplomatic urgency. He made two trips to Central America and two others to Asia in a period of eight months.

As a result, while White House insiders portray Quayle as deeply involved in some of Bush’s key decisions, his overseas assignments have given him relatively little opportunity to burnish his public image.

“Everybody regards this as an important trip,” said a senior White House official, reflecting the view that the three trips, combined, represent a major role for Quayle.

“It shows he has the savvy, the understanding, the stature to sit down with leaders of other countries--in Latin America in this case--and be able to carry the United States’ message. He can clearly make the point that ‘the President looks at me as an extension of himself, as his emissary,’ ” said Thomas C. Griscom, who served as director of communications in President Ronald Reagan’s White House.

There is little question that Quayle needs that sort of boost, and, indeed, that any improvement in the vice president’s stature will assist the President who chose him.

“I think he is still trying very hard to shake the image of a lightweight and a non-serious person that was the legacy of the campaign, and he welcomes the opportunity to show he has a role to play,” said Frank J. Gaffney, a Pentagon official in the Reagan Administration who has been active in espousing conservative approaches to national security issues.

Indeed, when Quayle took office after the bruising 1988 presidential campaign, there was a feeling that the vice president had nowhere to go but up.

But, “at the end of the first year, he has found that everything doesn’t look up. He has gone down in the polls,” said Stephen W. Hess, a White House aide during the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration and now a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution.

A CBS News-New York Times poll last January, when Quayle took office, found that 19% of those surveyed gave him a favorable rating and 23% rated him unfavorably. By last November, his favorable rating had declined to 14% and his unfavorable rating was nearly steady at 22%; 24% were undecided about him, and 38% said they were not well enough aware of him to have formed an opinion, an increase from 31%.

Similarly, a Los Angeles Times Poll found his favorable rating dropping from 31% to 24% from April to September, and his unfavorable rating falling only slightly, from 29% to 27%, in the same period.

Thirty-two years ago, another young vice president found himself in need of a boost in public standing. His vehicle was a journey to Latin America.

In 1958, Richard M. Nixon, foundering as Eisenhower’s vice president, embarked on an 18-day trip to South America. In Venezuela, riots broke out, his motorcade was stoned, and crowds spat on his limousine. The incident became one of the “six crises” he addressed in a political autobiography.

One month after the trip, Nixon wrote, “the Gallup Poll showed me leading Adlai Stevenson for the first time, and running neck-and-neck against John F. Kennedy,” his eventual opponent and the victor in the 1960 presidential race.

“It was the high point of my political popularity up to that time,” Nixon wrote of the period immediately following the trip.

Similarly, during the 1986 presidential campaign, then-Vice President Bush used his own experience on overseas diplomatic missions to contrast himself with his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

To be sure, there is no suggestion that Quayle’s travel schedule has been drawn up primarily for political purposes.

In the wake of the invasion of Panama on Dec. 20--and the successful effort to chase former Panamanian leader Manuel A. Noriega into the arms of the U.S. judicial system, where he faces trial on drug-trafficking charges--the Bush Administration feels it must convince Latin American leaders that the display of military might did not represent a wave of the future in which the smaller countries of the hemisphere would have to toe the line or face invasion.

Enter Dan Quayle--a politician in need of “something dramatic,” said Hess.

With his poll standing down--although his advisers maintain that newer figures will give him a boost as a result of the key role he played in the Administration’s monitoring of the coup attempt in the Philippines last month--”you have to go even more for the uppercut,” Hess said. “It may be that something like this will reverse the process.”