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Hedrick Smith is chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times. By Hedrick Smith The emergency room, George Washington University Hospital: A team of doctors is bent over President Reagan in a curtained partition when Presidential aides Edwin Meese 3d and James A. Baker 3d arrive. It is only 15 minutes after the assassination attempt and Michael K. Deaver, a third key Reagan aide, who came directly to the hospital with the President, is comforting Nancy Reagan in between hurried calls to the White House.

Baker and Meese, taking charge in the emergency, have already put in motion a string of crisis actions. They have set up the White House Situation Room, alerted the Cabinet, designated Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. as ''the contact point'' for the Cabinet, and have had Vice President Bush called to return from a Texas trip. Once told the President had been shot, they decided to move their own command post to the hospital. They must confer with doctors to make the crucial decision on whether the President is so incapacitated that they will have to prepare for the Cabinet to transfer power to Bush.

The emergency room is milling with people - medical staff, Secret Service agents, a couple of police officers and a handful of Mr. Reagan's innermost circle. The military aide who carries the President's black briefcase of nuclear codes in the event of attack is only a few feet away from the huddle of doctors. Voices are tense, hushed, businesslike.

One hospital clerk, seeking information on the patient, asks his name. ''R-E-A-G-A-N.'' answers Deaver, spelling it out. ''Are you kidding?'' asks the astonished clerk. ''No, I'm not kidding,'' Deaver replies flatly. Dr. Joseph M. Giordano, head of the hospital's trauma team, and Dr. Benjamin L. Aaron, surgeon, give the White House group their assessment.

After a few initial dangerous moments when Mr. Reagan first arrived in the hospital, they say, things do not look alarming. The President's vital signs are good and he is conscious. They must operate quickly to remove the bullet in his lung and to check against any possible damage to his heart, though they detect none so far.

''Is his life in danger?'' one of the President's men asks. ''No,'' a doctor replies. ''He is not in mortal danger.'' ''Will it be a long operation?'' ''Not prolonged,'' Aaron estimates. ''A couple of hours.'' With that vital medical assessment, Meese and Baker head for their command post in a small office next to the operating room, hurriedly equipped with secure White House telephone lines. Meese calls the Situation Room to ask about the world situation and whether any critical decisions will have to be made in the next couple of hours. In effect, he is asking about any Soviet move toward Poland or some other crisis. Told there are none, he and Baker confer. They decide there is no need to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would transfer power to Bush, even temporarily, and they pass that word to the Cabinet.

As they talk in the hall, Mr. Reagan is wheeled by for surgery, an oxygen mask clamped on his face. He winks at his aides, cheering them and Mrs. Reagan. Now Meese, Baker and Deaver wait with the President's wife. After the operation, they swing into action again. Meese heads out to meet Bush on his arrival from Texas, Baker goes back to the White House to check on developments there, and Deaver keeps close to the President and Mrs. Reagan. Throughout the evening, the three keep tabs on virtually every major move taken by the Government.

In the morning, they are on hand, as usual, for their start-of-the day gathering with the President in his hospital room. ''Boy, Mike, we sure screwed up the schedule,'' Mr. Reagan jokes to Deaver. The swift-moving events at George Washington University Hospital were merely the most dramatic example of the influence and authority of President Reagan's troika - Meese, Baker and Deaver. In the first months of the Reagan Administration, the headlines, the limelight and the cover stories have focused on the President, Secretary of State Haig and David Stockman, the Administration's budget director. But behind the scenes, Meese, Baker and Deaver have been the nerve center of the new Administration, orchestrating the Reagan Presidency, guiding the new Cabinet and the entire Reagan entourage, screening all key appointments, subtly influencing politics and policies, helping the President set the tone in the vital formative weeks of his stewardship and then enabling Vice President Bush to carry on business as usual when the President was gunned down.

More rapidly than any other Chief Executive since John F. Kennedy and perhaps since Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan has put the imprint of his personality and philosophy on the Presidency. He has catapulted the nation and the Congress onto a new political path, promulgating a new national agenda, putting into practice the political conservativism that he has preached for nearly two decades.

The basic themes and philosophical moorings of the new Administration are Mr. Reagan's. But the President's image of leadership, control and competence, his execution of policy, and his prospects for political success all hinge heavily on the judgment, effectiveness and political skills of the men whom other White House officials have come to call ''the Big Three.'' Two of the Big Three are Californians who have held important jobs with Mr. Reagan since 1967, but the third, Baker, is a transplanted Texan and a relative newcomer to the Regan camp. The troika's importance began to evolve even before the November election, and the power it rapidly accumulated after the inauguration was first publicly displayed during last month's showdown with Alexander Haig. The White House Oval Office: It is several hours after Haig has confronted the President and his inner circle with public objections to their plans to put Vice President Bush in charge of the Administration's crisis-management committee. They are meeting in late afternoon. The President himself is fairly calm. But Baker, Meese and Deaver are exasperated with Haig for having ''gone public'' with an internal disagreement. Inundated by press inquiries, the troika have now brought the issue to the President, seeing a need for urgent action.

The seeds of this power struggle were sown in the very first hours of the Reagan Presidency. While still in formal inaugural attire, Haig approached Meese and Baker with a memo that they read as a bureaucratic manifesto giving him sovereignty over a huge foreignpolicy domain that would even cut into the authority of domestic Cabinet officers. Baker was stunned. ''Have you ever seen such a power play?'' he remarked to associates incredulously. ''Haig wants everything beyond the water's edge.'' Meese, intent on keeping balance in the Cabinet by not letting one Cabinet member take advantage of others, shared Baker's instinct: Haig had to be checked. The Haig plan was watered down, leaving him pre-eminent but not granting him any monopoly. Still, frictions festered. White House officials felt that ''Haig is constantly nit-picking on these turf issues.''

Now, to Baker and Meese, Haig's public grousing is inexcusable. Meese is irritated because he himself devised the plan to put Bush in charge of crisis management rather than Richard V. Allen, the President's national security aide, out of consideration for Haig's sensibilities. He is not convinced that Haig should direct crisis management, but he wants to avoid the feuding that existed in the Carter era between Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser.

Mr. Reagan talks with his aides for about 15 minutes. Meese lays out the rationale for the Bush assignment, to which the President previously gave general assent. Baker, alarmed by the exposure of a rift within the Administration, urges Mr. Reagan to act at once. ''Before this thing goes further, it's got to be nipped in the bud,'' he says. Deaver, too, is unhappy with Haig's performance. So is Mr. Reagan - though, as one aide says later, ''He has a much longer fuse and is more tolerant of this sort of thing than the rest of us.'' The President agrees with them and calls Haig to disclose the Bush appointment. His three chief aides remain present.

No one in the White House anticipates this will push Haig to the brink of resignation. Mr. Reagan, seeking to cushion Haig's disappointment, attempts to minimize Bush's crisis responsibilities but Haig is nevertheless shocked when given press accounts of the White House announcement reporting that Bush will get into ''foward planning'' for emergencies. The White House has miscalculated how wounded Haig will feel at news accounts showing him slapped down so swiftly. The next morning, Deaver engages in a peace-making effort to help keep Haig aboard. What amazed political Washington was that Haig, as an experienced infighter and former White House chief of staff, underestimated the power of the President's inner circle and its ability to prevail on a test of strength even with the first-ranking member of the Cabinet. Later, members of the White House circle demonstrated their capacity to rescue Haig when he got in trouble the day the President was shot with his flat assertion: ''I am in control,'' and misquoted the Constitution on his place in the national line of succession. With a new controversy building, Meese and Baker went on television the next morning praising Haig, to bolster his sagging prestige and to present a show of unity for the Administration in its hour of trial.

The Meese-Baker-Deaver combination fits Ronald Reagan's concept of the Presidency and his style of leadership just as surely as Sherman Adams suited Dwight Eisenhower. With his chairman-of-the-board approach, Mr. Reagan delegates substantial power to subordinates and deliberately holds himself aloof from a lot of decisions that used to absorb Jimmy Carter. And he seems comfortable with the dispersal of power beneath him.

The Reagan troika implemented a strategy for dominating political debate during the Administration's critical first 100 days by focusing attention on the President's ''supply side'' tax and budget cuts for the economy. On Capitol Hill, the Big Three threw the Democrats on the defensive and mounted an elaborate courtship of foes as well as friends in Congress. Gamely, though with only modest success, they have sought to minimize the distractions of foreign affairs.

They have honored Mr. Reagan's desire to make the Cabinet a forum for policy making without White House domination. Quite consciously, they have let others like Haig and Stockman act as the Administration's front men, leading the charge and taking the political heat to spare the President while he has established a reservoir of good will.

President Reagan has been unorthodox in organization as well as policy. Where most Presidents pick one or two key deputies, his innovation has been to carve up the main White House responsibilities three ways, risking infighting but establishing no one as deputy President. ''An industrial engineer will tell you never to put three people in one office - put two or four, but never three, because two will gang up against the other one,'' says E. Pendleton James, an old friend of Meese and now the chief White House personnel officer. ''This arrangement defies that rule of thumb and yet it works. It comes down to personalities, not tables of organization.''

Mr. Reagan was also unorthodox -and surprisingly flexible - in picking Baker, formerly the top strategist of his two main Republican rivals - Gerald Ford and George Bush - to head the White House staff. Most Reaganites assumed Meese would get that job. He had been Mr. Reagan's chief of staff for nearly six years in Sacramento, chief of staff of the Reagan campaign, and director of the Reagan transition.

Yet over the years, especially in the campaign homestretch, other close Reagan aides who speak highly of Meese's intelligence and knack for handling issues complained that he was not well-enough organized or decisive enough to run the White House crisply. Sometimes, they said, he overloaded himself, became a bottleneck. Some said, perhaps unfairly, that ''if a problem gets in Ed's briefcase, it never sees the light of day again.''

Evidently, Mr. Reagan and his wife, Nancy, also sensed a problem, because Mr. Reagan began seeking options from trusted associates in the closing weeks of the campaign. In mid-October, at his rented retreat in the hunt country of Middleburg, Va., he mentioned his concerns to Deaver and asked for his suggestions. Deaver is said to have urged that Meese's talents be used in a policy role and suggested that Mr. Reagan pick someone else as chief of staff, someone with managerial drive and efficiency, with Washington experience and with keen political judgment.

When Mr. Reagan asked if he had anyone in mind, Deaver proposed Jim Baker. He thought so highly of Baker as a political strategist and manager that he had tried to recruit him in 1979 for the Reagan campaign. Later, the Reagans heard another vigorous endorsement of Baker from Stuart K. Spencer, the widely respected California political consultant who ran Mr. Reagan's first gubernatorial campaign and was active during the homestretch of the Presidential race.

By then, Baker had risen rapidly within the inner core of Mr. Reagan's campaign organization, winning credit as the most vigorous advocate of the candidate's highly successful debate with Jimmy Carter. The Reagans had come to know him as he managed Mr. Reagan's preparations for the debate and traveled with them in the campaign plane. By several accounts, Nancy Reagan, whose influence is considerable in these matters, liked Baker and had confidence in him.

Mr. Reagan waited until election day to disclose his decision over a tuna-fish-salad lunch with Meese and Deaver at his home in Pacific Palisades. He said he wanted to free Meese from the day-to-day management of the White House to let him act as the President's right hand in developing policy. He said he wanted Baker as chief of staff.

Initially, Meese seemed uncomfortable with the arrangement and was probably hurt that Mr. Reagan was not putting him clearly in overall charge. Others, recalling the earlier Meese-Deaver power struggles with John P. Sears 3d, who was fired in February as campaign manager, thought Meese may also have been wary of giving another outsider such a powerful post. Meese himself, who is very close to the vest about his feelings, denies any disappointment.

Not until the next day, however, did he convey his assent to Mr. Reagan, asking at the same time for an unprecedented mandate as the President's policy coordinator for the Cabinet, with Cabinet rank and with both the Domestic Policy and National Security Council staffs working under him. Later, when Meese showed another colleague a memo on his job concept, the colleague chided him: ''Ed, you've stolen the whole Government.''

Meese now describes the arrangement more modestly. ''What we have is a team operation taking things that no one man has been able to handle well in the past, at least not since Sherman Adams,'' he said. According to Baker, the charter they jointly drafted ''gives Ed responsibility for the Cabinet and the policy stuff and me the responsibility for making sure the train runs on time'' - that is, running the White House operation, including Congressional relations, the press office, speech writers, political office, the appointments process, relations with governors, mayors, state legislatures and various public groups.

Deaver came aboard, in the raw lingo of the Reagan campaign, to handle ''the body'' - that is, to take on all the nebulous but vital functions that affect the President and his family personally: his schedule, visitors, movements, moods and needs.

The White House organizational chart now reflects that division of labor, but the actual relationships are more fluid and the duties more overlapping. By title, for example, Deaver is deputy chief of staff, but the three treat each other very much as coequals. Together, they deal with sub-Cabinet appointments (technically Baker's domain) and policy problems (technically Meese's), and they jointly work out the President's priorities and their own.

''The line between policy formulation and coordination and policy implementation is fuzzy,'' observed Richard S. Williamson, a senior Presidential aide. ''The Meese operation takes the lead in saying here are the options and staffing them out. But at an early stage, the Baker side gets involved on feasibility: Can you get it through Congress? How will the press and public react?''

Another high official remarked, ''Baker has as much influence on policy as Meese, and Deaver can, too, if he wants it.'' The Big Three go to great lengths to keep in touch and in harness. They begin the day at 7:30 A.M. over a bacon-and-eggs breakfast served by Filipino stewards in Baker's office, wind up the day together around 6 P.M., and participate jointly in several other meetings during the day, to make sure their work and thinking dovetail.

The troika try to reinforce one another by sharing the onus for tough decisions. Meese, for example, told Mr. Reagan's conservative friends in the ''kitchen cabinet'' in March that they had to give up offices in the Executive Office Building, while Baker decided that other Reagan loyalists would have to disband the Coalition for a New Beginning, an effort to raise money from corporations.

''A lot of this is just plain old serendipity - people falling into the right place at the right time,'' says Pen James. ''You have three people who are mature enough not to be awed by power or ambitious for more. Each one is sufficiently happy with his life and the area he's focusing on that he doesn't feel any animosity, jealousy or infringement. They complement each other. Baker brings order and discipline and a sense of priorities. Meese brings policy and decision making. Deaver brings a special understanding and instinct about the Reagans and adds an ease to the whole thing.''

Mr. Reagan's own clear sense of direction on economic policy has helped insure harmony. But foreign policy has become a problem area. It represents the one major gap in the troika's combined experience. And, lately, each member has noticeably edged into this arena, to the irritation of Secretary Haig and the State Department. ''They'd better get their act together,'' complained one senior State official. ''Sometimes we have all three of them coming at us and that gets to be too much of a good thing.''

The White House Cabinet Room, Feb. 3: President Reagan sits down with the Cabinet, and David Stockman, his relentless budgetary whiz kid, is bent on eliminating one of the Carter Administration's pet programs of urban-development grants. A delegation of mayors has made a strong pitch this morning to the President to save the urban grants, but Stockman takes a hard line. It is a Democratic program, he says, and though it was designed to use Federal money to attract private investment into cities, Stockman contends that businesses would have made those investments anyway. Housing and Urban Development wants to save the urban plan. The President interjects that the mayors have just said good things about it. But Stockman is on the offensive and the budget-cutting tide is running strong. To other Cabinet members, it looks as though the grants are dead - until Ed Meese speaks up.

''In this budget process, we said we were going to listen to people, and we've got to do that,'' Meese says, picking up Mr. Reagan's cue. ''The mayors were in this morning and they're in favor of this program.'' He recommends setting the issue aside to let Stockman and Samuel R. Pierce Jr., Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, work something out.

Actually, it is Meese who works out a compromise. He combines two urban programs, taking Stockman's spending ceiling for them both and preserving the grants under a new Republican label. ''Stockman got his budget cuts,'' observes one White House aide, ''Pierce gets his program ... and Meese bridged the gap. He's the synthesizer, the honest broker for the President.'' Ed Meese is a congenial, affable man with a pleasant, neighborhood butcher's jowly face, blue eyes, short-cropped sandy hair, and an easy, confident manner. He likes gray-flannel slacks, blue blazers and ''Adam Smith'' conservative ties and is fond of the subdued hues and intricate detail of wildlife paintings and old ship models.

His ample, 49-year-old, stocky Germanic frame (''Height - just under six feet; weight - too much, just over 190,'' he says) fills a high-backed armchair in the sunny corner office of the White House, and his airy chortles -''Heh, heh, heh'' - sprinkle his conversation.

At staff meetings, he draws laughter with wry little quips. When he accompanied the Reagans on their first tour of the White House after the election, Hugh Carter, the cousin of the former President, showed them the First Family's bomb shelter in the basement. After an awkward moment of silence, Meese asked puckishly, ''Does it work?''

Although Meese was trained as a lawyer (University of California Law School, Berkeley, 1958, after receiving his B.A. from Yale) and has become known for his capacity to absorb and master diverse public-policy issues, his real passion is law enforcement. He joined Mr. Reagan's California staff in 1967 as a legal-affairs adviser after being Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County. He played an important role in helping Mr. Reagan, as Governor, keep order on the California University campuses; he is steeped in the issues of criminal justice, and he is fascinated by patrol cars and police paraphernalia. One of Meese's hobbies is collecting models of patrol cars and pigs (as symbols of police) from all over the world.

It was Meese who devised a network of six Cabinet councils with membership clustered by subject matter. The President likes to use them in developing policy options, and Meese shepherds their work. To the Cabinet generally, he is the second most influential figure in the Administration. He is the linchpin, the nexus between the White House and the Cabinet. For the newcomers, he has been the principal tutor in Mr. Reagan's style.

''The way Reagan operates, you've got a lot of running room for Ed,'' said one associate. Meese insists, nonetheless, that he is not making policy, only implementing Mr. Reagan's decisions. ''I'm not an assistant President like Sherman Adams,'' he says. ''It's that I know Ronald Reagan and where he wants to go.''

Although the President leads Cabinet meetings, Meese often steps in to move the agenda along or to bring rambling discussion to a head and, lawyerlike, to synthesize the arguments, serve up options A, B and C for Mr. Reagan's benefit, and spell out the consequences. ''Ed is very bright and well ordered,'' observes Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis. ''He has a unique ability to summarize issues and give everyone a hearing.''

By temperament and conviction, Meese is the quintessential staff man. He is cautious, a conciliator by nature, one who judiciously refrains from taking sides in a policy debate and instinctively seeks to touch all bases. '' 'Let's round-table it' - that's one of Ed's favorite expressions,'' says a colleague. ''Meese has a weighted vote but he doesn't use it,'' added an economist who sat through a year of meetings on economic policy. ''If Meese were really a deputy President, you'd see more of his imprint on the economic package.''

Cabinet members praise Meese for his fairness. ''Frankly, unless you knew in advance where he stood on an issue, you'd never know by the way he presents it in a Cabinet meeting, '' says Secretary Donovan. ''He doesn't tilt the scales. He's like a Kissinger on domestic policy, except he's not a policy advocate. If he becomes one, he'll lose his effectiveness.''

Those who have watched Meese with Mr. Reagan over the years describe Meese as deferential and disinclined to confront his boss with bad news. ''Meese has a comforting style and manner,'' said one Reagan associate. ''He's able to listen and then summarize well. But it's more than that. He can present all that to Reagan in a very comforting style. That's his most valuable asset with Reagan, his ease of dealing with him.'' The Oval Office: The sun glistens off the morning frost on the South Lawn while the President huddles with Meese, Baker and Deaver. What is nagging him is whether to reduce the maximum income-tax rates over the next three years. The President is being told by Stockman, Meese, Deaver and Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan that it makes sense, economically, because it would shift large funds from tax shelters into job-producing investments.

But Baker, the key political strategist, opposes the idea. ''Mr. President, if you do this, you're going to ruin the chances for your economic package,'' he warns. ''They're going to tear you apart, politically. They're going to say this is a package for the rich. I think it's a mistake.''

Taking more soundings later, President Reagan finds that some of his outside economic advisers favor the idea; others see political problems. But Baker is the most tenacious opponent.

''The President was torn,'' says one intimate. ''Down deep, he really wanted to go for that cut because he thought it was the tonic the economy needed. But he didn't want to jeopardize the overall package - and he listened to Baker's political advice.'' Baker cuts a very different figure from Ed Meese. Baker is slender, tall, athletic, and looks younger than his 50 years. Where Meese communicates unflappable competence, Baker conveys energy and vigor, his hand chopping forcefully on the arm of a chair to make a point. Where Meese enjoys indoor hobbies, Baker is an outdoorsman who likes hunting, fishing and tennis. As a hunter, he is steeled in patience and known as a crack shot.

After practicing law for years, Baker entered politics late in life - in 1970 -and ''caught the bug.'' In addition to running two Presidential campaigns, he has served as Under Secretary of Commerce under President Ford, and ran unsuccessfully for Attorney General of Texas in 1978.

In the Reagan White House, Baker is very conscious of being ''the new boy on the block,'' a Texan among an inner circle of Californians, a member of the Houston legal aristocracy educated at the Hill School in Pennsylvania and Princeton before he studied law at the University of Texas, and a former Democrat with links to the moderate Establishment wing of the Republican Party. He has moved quietly, though with force, inside the Administration, keeping a fairly low public profile. He has accumulated power and influence, organizationally, behind the scenes.

By gathering a staff of experienced Washington hands, Baker has helped Mr. Reagan avoid the pitfalls of the Carter White House. He tapped Max L. Friedersdorf, a former Ford aide, to head Congressional liaison; James S. Brady, a former budget-office official and a spokesman for John B. Connally's unsuccessful Presidential campaign, as press secretary; Elizabeth H. Dole, a former member of the Federal Trade Commission and wife of the influential Kansas Senator Robert Dole, to head public liaison; David R. Gergen, a former Nixon White House aide, as staff director, and Rich Williamson, a former campaign lieutenant for Representative Philip M. Crane of Illinois, for intergovernmental relations.

Initially, some conservative loyalists were upset that a Bush man had been picked as White House chief of staff. They felt Reaganites were being deprived of the spoils of victory. ''In the White House, you could see people from the other campaigns - the Bush campaign, Connally campaign, Dole campaign, Crane campaign - but where were the Reaganites?'' groused one disgruntled Reagan organizer.

Some conservatives were willing to forgive Baker after he took the surprising initiative of bringing Lyn Nofziger, one of Mr. Reagan's staunchest right-wing California lieutenants, into the White House as political director. Working with Nofziger, as well as with Deaver and Meese, Baker helped get several dozen Reagan loyalists named to good sub-Cabinet jobs.

''I wasn't doing it so much to mollify conservatives as to make sure we didn't forget the people who got us where we are,'' Baker later explained. ''I'm a political animal in many respects. We were getting criticized by political people - many of them strong conservatives - and justifiably, for not taking politics into consideration in appointments. I felt we should rectify that.''

Nonetheless, conservatives are still distrustful. ''Most conservatives recognize Baker as a fact of life, but they wish somebody else had gotten that job,'' says Richard A. Viguerie, the right-wing direct-mail organizer. ''His social agenda isn't ours. He's for moderates or people who are left-of-center. You have the feeling that the hierarchy of the Administration is being run by people who do not have heartfelt conservative convictions.''

Baker is a sparkplug. He went to Meese on Dec. 12 to suggest putting David Stockman in charge of a budget group to produce Mr. Reagan's massive budget cuts. Drawing on work done by Gergen and Richard Wirthlin, Mr. Reagan's pollster, in drafting a 100-days strategy, Baker took the lead in focusing the Administration's political priorities on economic policy. He has limited additional legislative proposals and vetoed plans of Cabinet secretaries to testify on potentially distracting issues.

''Baker's very good at keeping our eye on the ball,'' Deaver remarked, though the State Department's ballyhoo about El Salvador got out of hand and frustrated the Baker strategy.

For all his newness to the inner Reagan circle, Baker has developed a reputation for speaking his mind forthrightly. He is cool and courteous, but candid. Some describe him as more direct with the President than Meese, but say that Mr. Reagan seems to appreciate Baker's frankness. ''Baker cuts through the chaff and gets to the heart of the matter,'' asserted Deputy Secretary of State William P. Clark, a close friend of Mr. Reagan from California. ''Anyone who knows Reagan knows he would need a guy like Baker.'' The White House: It is the Friday before the President is to make his first official foreign trip - to Canada. The normally easygoing Deaver is nervous. As Ronald Reagan's personal adjutant for most of the past 14 years, Deaver has developed a sixth sense about the President's moods, a better sense than all the others about whom he should see, how he should handle certain occasions, about what will get him into top form. Deaver is upset that the briefing materials and the policy papers are so late and bulky that he fears the Canadian trip will not go well unless the White House pulls things together quickly, so he calls an emergency meeting of White House and State Department officials. At the meeting, Deaver is at the President's right hand, raising policy questions, interrupting highlevel briefers for fuller explanations. He prods the President himself to be sure that Mr. Reagan feels at home with the intricacies of new issues. Deaver, in short, is acting as an alter ego.

''If I see a problem for the President,'' Deaver says, ''I try to jump in and get things going and then I get out of the way and let the lawyers argue. ... Someone has to jump in and put out the fire.'' Deaver is the wild card in the White House troika. In the hallway near the press office hangs a photograph of the President and his ''Big Three'' coming out of a meeting that illustrates Mr. Reagan's special closeness with Deaver. In the foreground on one side of the photo are Meese and Baker, strolling into the camera. On the other side, a couple of steps back and very close together are Mr. Reagan and Deaver, elbows touching as Deaver's face breaks into a smile that suggests he has just shared some private joke with the President. Deaver has a constant stream of jokes and stories for Mr. Reagan, who loves to wisecrack and tell stories himself.

If sheer proximity were power, Deaver would be the most powerful of all the President's associates. His office is adjacent to the Oval Office. He is the only aide who regularly sees the President in private and gets summoned to his family quarters in a pinch, as he was the night when Secretary Haig was on the brink of resignation. It is to Deaver, for example, that Mr. Reagan will confide that, the night before his Feb. 18 address to Congress, he woke up about 3 o'clock in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. It is to Deaver that Mrs. Reagan, something of a perfectionist, will call in the morning, fretting that the overnight reading file was too heavy and kept the President up past midnight. Better than all the others, Deaver has learned how to relax Mrs. Reagan and to read the President's moods, spotting the jaw working or reading the silence that signals Mr. Reagan's inner tension.

''He gets quiet when he's tight,'' explains Deaver. Deaver, now 42, first went to work for Mr. Reagan in 1967 as a staff aide. Aside from interludes of running a Los Angeles publicrelations firm that did business for Mr. Reagan, he has been a ''Reagan aide'' virtually ever since, He and his wife, Carolyn, met when both worked in Mr. Reagan's California office and have been treated like family.

In the 1976 campaign, Deaver saved Mr. Reagan from choking to death on a peanut while riding on the campaign plane. ''The Governor was clutching his throat and his face was red,'' recalls Nancy Reynolds, a former press aide to Mr. Reagan. ''In a few seconds, his face went darker and the rest of us froze. Mike was up out of his seat in an instant. He stepped over me, pushed Nancy Reagan out of the way, swung the Governor around and began doing the Heimlich method. Mike jerked him once and nothing happened. And he did it again, and this peanut popped out.''

To Nancy Reynolds, Ronald Reagan and Deaver are like father and son, sharing moods and jokes, finishing each other's sentences, moving through life on the same wavelength. After one newspaper story mentioned her father-and-son line, Deaver and his wife arrived late for a White House concert and Reagan kiddingly called out to Deaver as they entered, ''You can come over here, son, and sit by me.''

To the Reagans, and to his colleagues, Mike Deaver is old shoe. He has the button-down, Ivy League wardrobe of a junior I.B.M. executive, which he once was; the sympathetic sensitivity of an Episcopal priest, which he once trained to become. He has Mr. Reagan's own amiable manner, plus a relentless, irreverent wit. Beneath his high, balding forehead, his fluid, expressive face roves through many moods, blue eyes absorbing and gauging his listeners, small mouth often curled in a wry smile. Yet for all his gregariousness, Deaver loves to while away hours alone playing the piano in an empty house or pruning bushes in his garden.

But the easygoing Deaver is no pushover. He has dressed down Baker's staff for overloading Mr. Reagan with homework and shifted old political friends out of attractive jobs. He has poked fun at everyone, the President included, so that power does not go to their heads. ''He's a wry, hard kidder,'' said one colleague.

People know that Mr. Reagan trusts Deaver's instincts about people and often about how to handle events or tough situations. They use Deaver for trial balloons to check out the President's likely reaction to their pet projects. Several Presidential advisers confess that if they have bad news to convey to Mr. Reagan, they want Deaver to be their messenger. Nothing has enhanced the power of the troika in the eyes of political Washington more surely than the White House showdown with Secretary of State Haig over the extent of his authority in foreign policy, and the way they stage-managed the interim stewardship of Vice President Bush.

While the Haig encounter will undoubtedly cause others in the Administration to be cautious about challenging the Big Three, they ran the risk of triggering private dissent over their toughness. Privately, some Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials do complain about the slowness of White House clearances, the staff's intrusiveness into their domain, or the difficulty of getting to Ed Meese, for example, because he is tied up in meetings and has made himself the clearing point for so many diverse issues.

But so far, those are relatively minor complaints. The Reagan White House now benefits from comparisons with the Carter White House. Baker's political skill and organizational competence are favorably set off against Hamilton Jordan's early inaccessibility and inexperience in Washington. Dave Stockman's drive and expertise are paired off against the political cost of Bert Lance to Jimmy Carter. Max Friedersdorf's skillful stroking of Congress is ranked far ahead of Frank Moore's awkward beginnings as Congressional liaison. Ed Meese has given Mr. Reagan a handle with his Cabinet, though not yet the ranging substantive know-how of Stuart Eizenstat.

Yet for all the power the troika have accumulated in these first months, President Reagan is still the boss. Though the President's workday was drastically shortened during his convalescence, his approval has been sought on key decisions. The Big Three and others cite many instances during these first months of his Administration in which Mr. Reagan has overridden all his advisers. In Cabinet meetings, for example, participants emphasize that with all the latitude given to Meese, Reagan runs the show. The President has let Meese develop the structure for the Cabinet councils and for the foreign-policy setup, but made sure he was comfortable with it personally. He has set the framework within which the troika operate.

President Reagan's certain sense of direction on domestic policy has made it easier for his staff to operate and has drastically reduced the field for friction among the staff. So far, the troika have held together very well. They have let no one divide them. But so far they have not been severely tested. Really tough and divisive policy disputes have not yet arisen to strain their cohesiveness or their relative power.

''The real tests, the real tensions, the real reshuffling hasn't happened yet