NIXON'S FIRST QUARTER

Richard Nixon completes his first hundred days in office next week. Hugh Sidey, TIME'S Washington Bureau chief and former White House correspondent, gives his assessment of the President's performance thus far.

IN a hundred days Franklin Roosevelt led a foundering society back to self-confidence, and no President since 1933 has been allowed to forget it. John Kennedy complained shortly before assuming power: "I'm sick of hearing about a hundred days. I'm not Roosevelt, and these aren't the '30s." But the legend persisted. Lyndon Johnson, in fact, encouraged comparisons, and with pockets stuffed full of legislative box scores he could show by certain singular mathematics a better record than that of his old mentor, F.D.R.

Richard Nixon is silent. There are no compilations in his coat pocket because there has been no significant legislation. Nixon does not even have a slogan for his Administration. There is barely the beginning of a program. He has not yet brought peace, slowed inflation, cleansed the air and water, warded off piracy or uplifted the ghettos.

In the White House, they quickly slide over the hundred days odium. Aides refer instead to the year's "first quarter," as if the Administration were a corporation. The first quarter of this new business was logically concerned with organization and getting acquainted (Nixon's visits to Government agencies, his trip to Europe, his televised news conferences). All this Nixon has accomplished with decency if not grace, with competence if not brilliance. In a world and nation grown weary of a looming Uncle Sam and a volcanic Johnson, the new pace is comforting to many.

Besides the pause, Nixon has brought a promise, and it may be enough for now. The old measuring rods of bills passed and billions appropriated cannot be used to calculate leadership in a time of spiritual rather than economic depression. His orderly and modest manner has won respect. Louis Harris finds that 61% of the public credit Nixon with "inspiring confidence personally in the White House." L.B.J.'s last reading was 33%. Nixon has not, as Communications Director Herb Klein claimed last week, "calmed the waters of America," but the President has set a new tone in much of the country, a vital ingredient if Nixon is ever to focus and release national energies.

He is in a sense the "unheroic" President that Eugene McCarthy urged last fall. Nixon has not heaped promise on promise. He has instead pledged himself to consolidate and manage. He has walked through his role austerely, a man alone much of the time, not posturing or parading, but embracing the "normalcy" of those middle-class Americans who voted for him. His priorities read neatly--Viet Nam, inflation and crime. Billy Graham's spirituality pervades, the humor is genteel, and the thoughts drape sensibly, like Pat Nixon's wardrobe. The effect in Oklahoma and Colorado and Iowa, if not in the ghettos, is to stimulate faith. Nixon's memorized facts of national life are delivered with an easy candor over television. He is the family lawyer or the local banker, not necessarily inspiring, but welcome in a time of uncertainty.

He will not be a legislative President but an executive President, exploring those areas where he is sovereign and has to contend least with a Congress controlled by Democrats. A long time ago, he sat in his Wall Street lawyer's office, cramped and yearning, and he said a President should worry first about war and peace. He has not changed, despite the necessities of domestic political dialogue.

Nixon has not said so, but it is plain that he does not believe in the Viet Nam war and that he wants to get out just as quickly as possible. His reaction to the Communists' spring offensive was to wait it out calmly. Washington meanwhile has succeeded in maneuvering the Saigon government into a more tractable position vis a vis the National Liberation Front--a necessary shift if negotiations in Paris are ever to succeed. Despite Nixon's denial last week of firm plans to reduce the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam, no one would be surprised if the Administration takes that option in the near future.

Nor is his dedication to Safeguard, the anti-ballistic missile system, altogether certain. The Administration has given itself plenty of time and maneuver room on this project. From down deep come the hints that if the Russians will sit and trade a little in arms-limitation talks, Nixon might just scrap the whole thing.

He is a man who reflects the nation that made him--mobile geographically and intellectually, sensitive to the prevailing momentum. To some he is still a man in search of an idea. To others he represents an open-mindedness not hobbled by the intellectual arrogance of those in the previous Administrations who led the U.S. into the Viet Nam war, but is instead flexible enough to seek out the right course and attempt to follow it. The doubt, of course, is whether he can perceive the right. He said last fall he would be a fresh wind in Washington, and he has not been quite that. He said he would drop the surtax. He has not been able to. He promised peace, and the war goes on.

In his second priority, the battle of inflation, he has acted with the surety of the company attorney. The budget will be cut. He has learned not to talk about the hardships of his early life publicly now, but in private he occasionally is carried back to those days when the Yorba Linda Nixons did not have money for a balanced diet, and he is then in a very real way attuned to the spiraling food prices in modest America.

Maybe there isn't much on paper besides ideas, but in ideas, ultimately, lies the power of any presidency. And therein is the promise. He wants to try to manage the changes in this country, rather than react to them, and so he would like to spend more time and money on those underprivileged children in their first five years, to funnel some of the federal tax funds back to the statehouses and the city halls. Yet large questions remain. Can Nixon move vigorously from the planning and organization phase to action? Has he been too slow in addressing social needs? Will his credit in the country run out before accomplishments come in? The answers he provides in the coming months are his next big test.

Nixon loves the presidency. They all do, despite their protests and the myths of burdens and miseries ("I'm going to give this damned job to Nixon," stormed Kennedy one night. He never did.). He likes the protection and the power, and he glories now in the appurtenances like Air Force One, which can whisk him half a world away in half a day and keep him in the comfortable presidential cocoon. So far so good, but the work is just beginning. This week he will announce his programs on tax reform and possibly on crime control, and a lot of people won't like either. Lyndon Johnson with all his troubles insisted to the bitter end that nobody in this torn land really wanted to see his President do badly. That is still profoundly true, and it is Nixon's greatest strength and hope.

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