Indianapolis ? Among the colleagues of both parties gathered here for the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Assn. (NGA), there is near-universal praise for President Bush’s selection of Utah Gov. Michael O. Leavitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Leavitt is very much in the tradition of fellow Republicans such as Tommy Thompson and John Engler and Democrats such as Roy Romer and Jim Hunt, who put aside partisanship as leaders of the NGA and found common ground on which governors of widely diverse backgrounds and views could work together.

The Bush administration has made a hash of environmental policy, but if anyone can revive the healthy but badly eroded tradition of bipartisan support for protection of God’s natural gifts to this nation, Mike Leavitt has as good credentials as could be found.

For him to succeed, the White House and the Office of Management and Budget staff and those people charged with cultivating (and collecting campaign funds from) Bush’s constituencies in the oil and gas, mining, forestry and agriculture industries — to say nothing of the president and vice president themselves — will have to give Leavitt more freedom of action than Christine Todd Whitman enjoyed during her tenure at EPA.

And the environmental organizations, some of which reflexively condemned Leavitt, will have to give him a chance to establish his bona fides. Rather than fight his confirmation, they should use his Senate hearings as an opportunity to engage him in dialogue and see what both sides can learn.

I should confess that I am an unabashed Leavitt fan. For a decade, I have looked forward to interviewing him at these summer meetings of the NGA and to seeing him occasionally on his visits to Washington. He is one of the rare politicians from whom you always learn something new, because he is out front of most public officials in identifying and thinking through emerging policy problems.

Years ago, he recognized the potential of the Internet as a retail outlet and the implications of e-commerce for Main Street merchants and for states that are dependent on sales taxes for much of their revenue. He brought that issue to the NGA and to Congress and has kept it on the agenda.

More recently, he began working through the implications for state and local government — and individual freedom — of the federal government’s expansion of basic police powers in the interests of homeland security. Having him in the Cabinet to raise these issues with Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft will be an additional benefit of his coming to Washington.

Others can comment far better on the specifics of Leavitt’s environmental record in Utah. What I can vouch for is that he consistently takes the long view of the needs of his state and nation and is almost invariably creative and constructive in reaching out for consensus — as he did with Oregon’s Democratic former governor, John Kitzhaber, in forming a regional environmental compact, and as he did in forging a multistate agreement to clean the air over the Grand Canyon.

And he has guts. When some of the political ideologues on the White House staff tried to break up the NGA last winter because Republicans could not dictate its agenda, Leavitt quietly organized resistance, reminding his GOP colleagues that without a bipartisan organization like NGA, welfare reform and other measures they value never could have become law.

He will be a welcome addition to the administration — and one who could well serve the country in a larger role in future years.

• American journalism lost one of its best last week with the death at 90 of Robert J. Donovan, late of the still-missed New York Herald Tribune and of the Los Angeles Times. Bob Donovan’s achievements went beyond his list of scoops and his best-seller books. When Otis Chandler decided he wanted to make the Los Angeles Times as good a newspaper as it was prosperous, he asked Bob Donovan to take over its Washington news bureau, and Bob made it what it remains today — one of the finest in the city.

Bob gave the lie to the notion that you have to be a hard-nosed SOB to succeed in Washington journalism. He was a sweet-natured gentleman. And he was also a great actor. Prematurely white-haired, he would approach an official and, with imploring gestures, say that his paper had just ordered up a story on such and such a subject and he was in desperate need of help. Thinking “the poor old fellow” might otherwise be fired, the official would spill his guts — and Donovan, who usually had all but one or two crucial aspects of the story well in hand before he went into his act — would go back to his typewriter and file a story the rest of us would be scrambling all the next day to duplicate. I never met a better reporter — or a nicer man.