NIXON IN EUROPE: RENEWING OLD ACQUAINTANCES

He seems like a man who is selling a new approach to ideas. He is reserved and modest, but forceful at the same time. But if he were a used-car dealer, I would certainly buy one from him.

--Fiat Chairman Giovanni Agnelli

THAT verdict of Italy's chief automaker, which followed a talk with Richard Nixon, may not have been very diplomatic. Nonetheless, it reflected the general--and generally relieved--impression of political leaders, businessmen and other prominent Europeans who sat down with the U.S. President during his eight-day tour. While Nixon was occasionally greeted by protesting demonstrators, there were many gratifying moments of spontaneity and warmth. Outside Claridge's hotel in London, when Nixon ventured a U.S.-campaign-style foray of handshaking, Mrs. Violet Reeve exclaimed: "Eee! You've got luvverly warm hands!" "That," replied Nixon, "is because I've got a lovely warm car." At a Berlin electrical factory, his audience took up a cry that turned around the "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" chant of anti-U.S. students. "Ha, ho, hey!" they called. "Nixon is O.K.!" Nixon loved it, and jumped back onto the podium to reply: "Ha, ho, hey! Berliners are O.K.!"

For the most part, though, the trip--as intended--was low-key and at times downright dull. Just as, it was noted, only a dish of spaghetti excites a Roman, it takes a good deal to turn the attention of other Europeans from their coq au vin, fish and chips or sauerbraten to any display of public fervor. It was therefore predictable that Richard Nixon's earnest pilgrimage stirred less excitement last week than the triumphant passages of his more glamorous predecessors, Eisenhower and Kennedy --or even than the European hegira early last month of Astronaut Frank Borman, fresh from orbiting the moon.

Underwhelmed. If Nixon remained an ill-defined figure to the mass of Europeans, he nonetheless registered impressively with their heads of government. In eight days of confrontations with them, he was assured and well-informed, displaying modesty and a hard intelligence, common sense and a very uncommon determination. There were no grand new visions or invocations of ancient splendor. Nixon's was an understated performance, and it was successful exactly for that reason. He went to listen to Europe's leaders, and there is no more popular conversationalist than a good listener.

"Richard Nixon is underwhelming Europe, and the Europeans seem rather grateful," reported TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey, who accompanied the President on his tour. "In a curious way, his strength was that he was so much himself. He was plainly not quite relaxed in the midst of ceremony, even the modest amount included in this trip. If there was not charm, there was simplicity. If there was not sophistication, there was common sense and decency. He created no jealousies, taxed no one's ingenuity. He was a little clumsy but sincere, a little uncertain but determined. At the end, some uneasiness crept into the atmosphere; with Charles de Gaulle, he seemed not fully confident of himself."

Through Brussels, London, Bonn, Berlin, Rome and Paris, several themes recurred in Nixon's private dialogues at the top. There was his emphasis on the U.S. commitment to the defense of Europe through the NATO alliance, his pledge to consult the Europeans faithfully on questions of common concern, and his insistence that the West must reach a new understanding with the Soviet Union in many areas beyond the immediate topic of arms control. Despite these weighty issues of state, Nixon managed at each stop to depart from his minutely organized routine to plunge into crowds and press the flesh in characteristic American political style.

There was only one major gaffe in an otherwise flawlessly executed tour. The White House released the text of an effusive arrival statement of praise for Charles de Gaulle, which was bannered in advance by the French press. In the event, however, Nixon delivered only a watered-down edition of the speech. The overblown first version seemed to negate Nixon's carefully cultivated neutrality in intra-European affairs; by awkwardly retracting it, he ran the opposite risk of offending De Gaulle and the French. He saved the situation somewhat by praising De Gaulle warmly in a subsequent toast.

Late to Bed. The dispute between France and Britain over the future of NATO and the Common Market clouded all the President's efforts to renew communications with Europe. The war in Viet Nam also was very much on his mind. Even as he took off from Washington's Andrews Air Force Base, he was being informed of fresh Communist attacks and U.S. uncertainty over how the new offensive would affect the still desultory Paris peace talks (see THE WORLD).

The first leg of the 10,500-mile journey ended at Brussels International Airport, where Nixon became the first U.S. President to visit Belgium since Woodrow Wilson arrived triumphantly in 1919 after negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. The President was met by Belgium's young King Baudouin, who led him down a 200-yd. red carpet to review a guard of honor. Nixon greeted NATO Secretary-General Manlio Brosio among the potted palms and pink azaleas of the royal tent, and then, with the King at his side, drove to the Palais Royale de Bruxelles.

But Mr. President... The President calls NATO "the blue chip in our foreign policy," and the hastily built new headquarters of the alliance on the edge of Brussels was his first stop next morning. Close behind him were Secretary of State William Rogers and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Though protocol places Kissinger (TIME cover, Feb. 14) well down the ladder, he was virtually inseparable from the President. Kissinger has long been disturbed by U.S. inattention to Europe, and he was Nixon's key consultant throughout the tour. To the 15 ambassadors from NATO's member nations, Nixon proposed that after 20 years the alliance "must replace the unity of a common fear with the community of a shared purpose." He noted that the U.S. has already begun preliminary planning for a Soviet Summit. "In due course and with proper preparation," he said, "the U.S. shall enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union on a wide range of issues."

Restating the aims of his trip, Nixon declared: "I have come for work, not for ceremony; to inquire, not to insist; to consult, not to convince; to listen and learn, and to begin what I hope will be a continuing interchange of ideas and insights." He was warmly received, notably when he admitted: "I know there have been rumblings of discontent in Europe--a feeling that too often the United States talked at its partners instead of with them, or merely informed them of decisions after they were made, instead of consulting with them before deciding." Nixon bent over backward to make the point, so much so that an Italian official protested: "But Mr. President, we want to hear what you have to say, too."

From Brussels, Nixon went on to London, where he drove with Prime Minister Harold Wilson past small cheering crowds in roadside villages to Chequers, in Buckinghamshire, for dinner before returning to his suite at Claridge's. Though Nixon and Wilson had met before, this was their first get-together as President and Prime Minister, and the two got on very well. They are similar in many ways: both are rather homely in looks and style, solid and well-disciplined men, who attain and exercise power by organization and tenacity rather than brilliance or charisma. "The personal chemistry is working," said one participant in the Nixon-Wilson meetings. Nixon pleased his British hosts with several references to the historic "special relationship" between the two countries. The British like to hear that the U.S. still believes there is such a thing, though they are hesitant to mention it themselves.

Nixon turned tourist in Westminster Abbey, asking the height of the ceiling and pausing before the U.S. Medal of Honor awarded to Britain's Unknown Warrior. There was a brief moment of embarrassment when the Union Jack on his limousine turned out to be upside down.

In eleven hours of discussions, characterized by what a British spokesman called "plain dealing," Nixon and Wilson reviewed the problems facing the two nations--with special attention to the necessity of avoiding further challenges to the dollar and the pound. During his visit, Nixon also met with Conservative Leader Edward Heath and Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, received former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who is an old friend from the Eisenhower days, and sat with groups of businessmen, labor and youth leaders, educators and editors. The British are tough judges, but they were taken with their visitor. Said one official who talked with him: "His syntax was secure. That's a rather new experience with recent American Presidents. His sentences have a beginning, a middle and an end."

Waving Tulips. The next stop was Bonn, where Nixon arrived on a raw morning in a mushy mixture of rain and snow. With their Florida tans, he and Kissinger looked like two coffee beans beside the pallid Germans. A British newsman wondered aloud: "Do you suppose he uses some kind of special makeup?" The President warmed up his audience by recalling his first visit to a "leveled and broken" Germany 22 years ago, and spoke of the remarkable changes--"the miracle of German recovery among them"--since that time. Nixon and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger conferred intensively during the day. Kiesinger, whose relations with Lyndon Johnson were never warm, emerged convinced that his coalition regime will work well with the Nixon Administration. Twice Nixon told the Germans that his mother-in-law was born in their country. (Some enthusiastic Germans recalled that Nixon's own mother, Hannah Milhous, was of German descent.) In Bonn, a matronly woman placed what she called a "dove of peace" in Nixon's hand. The pigeon rested there for a long moment, then soared aloft.

Nixon's biggest success in Germany was the highly visible gesture of solidarity with beleaguered West Berlin. Nixon flew there with Kiesinger to meet a heartfelt greeting from the Berliners. At one point, by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a group of radical students threw eggs, carpet tacks, snowballs and paint-filled bags at Nixon's limousine while they chanted anti-American slogans. But only a few blocks later the crowd was so wildly enthusiastic that Nixon pulled both Mayor Klaus Schiitz and the more sedate Chancellor up onto the trunk of his Cadillac, waving a limp bouquet of tulips at the cheering Berliners. In an echo of John Kennedy, the last U.S. President to visit Berlin, Nixon declared: "All the people of the world who want freedom are truly Berliners." As he left Berlin, he collapsed into his seat on Air Force One with an exhausted "Whew!"

He entered the Italian capital in President Giuseppe Saragat's elegant black Lancia, driving past grazing sheep and the ruins of an aqueduct along the Appian Way, the Roman road of triumphant emperors and vanquished prisoners two millenniums ago. Escorted by a bevy of police motorcycles, the car looked like a whale surrounded by a school of tropical fish, and its passage snarled traffic as Romans returned to work after their afternoon pisolino (nap). The crowds were friendly as Nixon passed. Later, in half a dozen squares, left-wing students, angry at the closing of Rome University two weeks ago, took the occasion to get into a full-scale dustup. They fought with helmeted police, smashed windows and set fire to overturned autos. There were 199 arrests, and 85 policemen and 34 demonstrators were injured in the melees; one student fell to his death from a fourth-floor window. Nixon, closeted with Saragat at the Quirinale, never saw the protest demonstrations. As he emplaned for Paris, Premier Mariano Rumor--whose newly formed government is still shaky--grabbed both his hands in his own and held on as though he had just found a fast friend.

His Own and France. Before Nixon even arrived in France, Paris-Presse was on the streets with the originally planned text of his effusive message of greeting to De Gaulle. In huge type, the paper printed this excerpt: "Few leaders of the modern world think so broadly as you, Mr. President. Few have so well understood the great historical sweeps of the past. Few have thought so clearly about the future. Few have so considered the interplay of forces that shape events, the motivations of men and nations." It was an extraordinary paean to the Frenchman who has so stubbornly obstructed every European and American effort toward political, economic and military solidarity--and one that might have caused deep offense to many of the other statesmen to whom Nixon had been talking all week.

By the time he uttered them, Nixon's words had been toned down--though they were still markedly deferential. The sentences released in advance were omitted. Instead, Nixon said: "I am delighted to have the opportunity to know your views and to hear your opinions not only concerning the relations between our two countries but even more so about the great problems which divide the world." He said that he shared "the feeling expressed by Benjamin Franklin many years ago when he said: 'Every man has two countries, France and his own.' Vive la France!" De Gaulle was almost as expansive. "In the past 200 years, during which everything has happened, nothing has ever been able to make our country cease to feel the friend of yours," he insisted. "Vive les Etats Unis d'Amerique!"

Nixon's conversations with De Gaulle, at the Elysee Palace and at Louis XIV's Grand Trianon in Versailles, went as smoothly as either nation could expect. One indication that the venerable general was in a benign mood came during the glittering dinner party at the Elysee. Impressed that De Gaulle always speaks without notes, Nixon Speechwriter Bill Safire asked the French President how he did it. "I write it out in longhand and then memorize it," De Gaulle replied. "I tear the page out and throw it away and it is in my mind." Pointing to Nixon, De Gaulle asked Safire: "What about him?" Safire answered: "It is statesmen like you who will put us speechwriters out of business." De Gaulle laughed heartily.

Style and Substance. Nixon expected no sudden breakthroughs from his voyage of exploration. The benefits of his European odyssey are more subtle than that. His patent concern for European views reflects a quieter, more thoughtful American role in the world. It could considerably improve the tone of international dialogue, injecting a new calm and reasonableness that might produce substantive achievement in lessened tensions and new understanding. On the evidence of his trip, the President has laid a sound foundation for the "new era of negotiation" he often speaks of. Especially, he has eased European edginess over U.S.-Soviet conversations, reassuring the alliance partners that their interests will be heeded and respected.

Most of all, his hosts responded to the attention that Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, neglected to give them during his five years in office. While Nixon had previously met almost every leader he conferred with, the alchemy of the presidency had already transformed their relationships. His travels gave European leaders the opportunity to gauge both the style and substance of Nixon's presidency. Without exception, they were reassured.

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