WASHINGTON — President Bush’s nomination of his father’s second director of central intelligence to replace Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is being interpreted by hawks here as a signal of the end of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy doctrine and of a new willingness to negotiate with America’s enemies.

Robert Gates, whose career in the CIA and National Security Council spanned 27 years, in 2004 co-chaired a task force on Iran for the Council on Foreign Relations. The group recommended that America engage directly with Iran and warn Israel not to take military action against Iran’s nuclear reactors.

Today he is a member of the Iraq Study Group, a 10-person commission chaired by a former secretary of state, James Baker. That panel is likely to recommend, as The New York Sun reported first on October 12, that Mr. Bush abandon the goal of making Iraq a stable democracy and that the White House reach out to Syria and Iran in order to stop the bleeding in Baghdad.

Yesterday, Mr. Bush said Mr. Gates would bring “a fresh perspective and new ideas” to the Pentagon. He also pointed to Mr. Gates’s experience as deputy director of the CIA in helping implement President Reagan’s plans to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and his experience on the National Security Council during the first Iraq war.

Hawks in Washington, however, fear that the nominee’s new perspective could mean a softer line on Iran. The July 2004 report of the Council on Foreign Relations task force that Mr. Gates co-chaired, for example, cautions that “the use of military force would be extremely problematic, given the dispersal of Iran’s program at sites throughout the country and their proximity to urban centers. Since Washington would be blamed for any unilateral Israeli military strike, the United States should make it quite clear to Israel that U.S. interests would be adversely affected by such a move.”

Yesterday the president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official under President Reagan, called the nomination of Mr. Gates “the beginning of the Baker regency.”

“The president I think is surrendering to the seduction that has been evident now for some time of supplanting hard-headed bona fide realism with so-called realists of the Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41 stripe. I suspect the current policies that stem from this will compound our present difficulties, not alleviate them,” he said.

Mr. Gates, who is the president of Texas A & M University, was described yesterday by his former colleagues in the intelligence community as an intelligent and able bureaucrat and analyst.

A former president of the RAND Corporation who also was chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Henry Rowen, said yesterday, “I found him a very straightforward, intelligent man working to get as good work that could be done, done. Also later on, when he was the president’s deputy national security adviser, I found him doing the kind of thing that that job calls for, to be sure to be an honest broker.” Mr. Rowen however made one caveat in his praise of Mr. Gates. He said that when he chaired a committee to examine the CIA’s assessments of the Soviet Union, at the behest of Mr. Gates who was then the CIA deputy director for intelligence, he found the agency’s assessment of a booming Soviet economy to be inflated and incorrect.

“We kind of were not enormously impressed by that. I would say on that subject, generally on the Soviet Union, he is not an economist, so there is no particular reason to expect him to have deep insights. It wasn’t bad, it was pretty good, it was defective on the assessment of the economy,” he said.

In his 1996 memoir, “From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War,” which was published by Simon & Schuster, Mr. Gates thanks Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and Richard Armitage in the acknowledgements. The author expresses disappointment that both Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bradlee voted against confirming him as director of central intelligence. The book is mostly an account of the Cold War, which Mr. Gates called “a glorious crusade” against “a truly evil empire.”

In the book, Mr. Gates praises both hawks and doves, saying, “If presidents had listened only to the hawks, U.S. belligerence and aggressiveness would have been so overwhelming that the Soviets would have been afraid to undertake changes in their system, to let down their guard at all. The danger of direct conflict would have been much higher. If the president had listened only to the doves, not only would the Soviets have seen many opportunities to gain strategic military advantage and new influence in the Third World; there would have been significantly less pressure on them to change.”

The book’s major surprise was its assessment of President Carter. “Carter’s record in dealing with the Soviet Union,” the book says, “was far more complex and successful than commonly believed at the time or since. Indeed, he was the most consistently — if often unintentionally — truculent President in relations with the Soviets since HarryTruman … If people had known what he was doing secretly to take on the Soviets, perceptions likely would have been different.”

Although the decision to replace Mr. Rumsfeld with Mr. Gates has been seen as a defeat for Vice President Cheney, Mr. Gates’s book carries a blurb from Mr. Cheney that calls the text “the definitive account of the end of the Cold War,” and says of Mr. Gates, “No one has a broader understanding of these historic events.”

Mr. Gates also is no stranger to other figures in the current administration. In 1989, he helped create a top secret task force inside the first Bush White House that planned for the collapse of the Soviet Union. To head it, he chose a National Security Council staff member named Condoleezza Rice.

President Reagan was forced in 1987 to withdraw Mr. Gates’ nomination as director of central intelligence after a Democratic Senate raised questions about his knowledge of the CIA’s efforts to aid the Nicaraguan contras. Some Democrats voted against him in his 1991 nomination fight over charges that he manipulated intelligence estimates, a likely theme for the next Congress if it investigates pre-Iraq war intelligence.

Mr. Bush had said last week that Mr. Rumsfeld would stay on. Yesterday Mr. Bush explained his decision by saying, “I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign,” and explaining further, “I hadn’t had a chance to visit with Bob Gates yet, and I hadn’t had my final conversation with Don Rumsfeld yet at that point.”

Mr. Bush said the decision was unrelated to the outcome of Tuesday’s election. “Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee,” the president said.