She Reads Bush’s Lips--and Nose, Ears. . .

SILVER SPRING, Md. —  While President Bush talks about “a kinder, gentler nation,” Laura Rosetree says everything about his face--from his straight eyelids to his narrow nose and thin-lipped smile--suggests that Bush isn’t very keen on kindness.

And about those lips. Bush says “read my lips” about not raising taxes, but what are his lips really saying?

“What they suggest is that Bush controls his speech very carefully,” says Rosetree, a self-proclaimed expert in analyzing faces to learn what they reveal about personality.

“He doesn’t say whatever he’s really feeling or thinking,” she said. “If you literally read his lips, they are proclaiming, ‘I’m not ever going to get sentimental on you. I’m not going to be a bleeding heart.’ ”

Rosetree, 41, is a former self-development teacher who became interested in “reading” faces in New York in 1976, when she met an elderly Chinese practitioner of an ancient method known as siang mien.

After a decade of research, she says, she developed her own psychic road map of the human face, which she describes in a 285-page book titled “I Can Read Your Face.”

She claims that every facial feature from eyebrows to chin dimples can betray how people think, behave and handle life’s challenges. While most psychologists would scoff at such a claim, Rosetree says she has been hired by several businesses to train salespeople and real estate agents how to read the faces of prospective customers.

Sitting in her sunny apartment in this Washington suburb, Rosetree studied a close-up photo of Bush and a videotape of a Nov. 7 news conference for clues to his personality.

Her conclusion: Bush is a hard-nosed pragmatist and skeptic, a die-hard ideologue, a shrewd negotiator and skilled conciliator, an intellectual who revels in the realm of ideas, a decision-maker who respects facts, disdains feelings and isn’t afraid of criticism.

“He’s not a people person, he’s more of an idea person,” Rosetree says. Even the small inner circle of Bush’s ear suggests that he “listens for facts and objective information rather than feelings, emotions or spiritual aspects,” she says.

“Kindness is not a major trait of George Bush’s, judging by his face,” Rosetree said. “He has other strengths, but kindness is not one of those. There are at least 10 facial traits that indicate kindness, and Bush doesn’t have a single one.”

When Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met at the Malta summit, she said, they may have differed on some East-West issues but “they have noses in common”--long and straight, with tips pointing down.

Rosetree said that means Bush and the Soviet leader both tackle problems logically, they’re good at long-term strategy and they have a strong sense of self-interest. But she says they are strikingly different in the shape of their eyelids.

Bush’s lower eyelids are straight, meaning he’s naturally wary of new people, while Gorbachev’s are curved, meaning he probably is “the open-hearted one of the two,” Rosetree says.

To set the record straight, she says, Bush is a macho man--it’s right there in the semicircular knob on his prominent, square-jawed chin.

“That semicircle relates to being very proud of his masculinity, the macho aspect, forcefulness, and being very sensitive to appearing weak in front of other people,” she said.

“The wimp image in the presidential campaign must have bothered him excruciatingly,” she added.

“His straight chin shows that he makes his major life decisions based on principles and ideology, not on compassion or other people’s feelings. This is not the chin of a Santa Claus, it’s the chin of a crusader.”

Further, she says, the way Bush’s ears lie flat against his head indicates that he is a strong conformist, a stickler for “correct” behavior and intolerant of kooks.