"I Did Not Want the Hot Words of TV"

And Other Presidential Reflections in a Crisis Week

RICHARD NIXON did not watch television once during the Middle East crisis. He scanned the morning newspapers, but he did not dwell on them. Lingering too long in the headlines, he feared, would raise his blood pressure. "There is an old Quaker saying," he said: " The most important quality in a crisis is peace at the center.' "

For those eight days the center was the White House warren, where he roamed in the cool and very calm corridors from his hideaway in the Executive Office Building to his small study, to the Oval Office, into the Rose Garden, to the staff quarters, on over to the mansion. But the outside world was let in only in controlled doses. He had the reports and memos of his men on the crisis itself. He relied on his own special news summary. "I did not want the hot words of television. Anyone watching television would have thought that war was declared eight times. Just so the man here doesn't think that."

In 20 months of stewardship, the President has grown some deeper crevices around his eyes and his hair is a shade more silver. Those who watched Nixon during this time found him calm and confident, still with that element of cunning that has always been part of him.

Nixon ordered that neither his time nor his mind was to be cluttered with the details of how many ships should go where. "It is very important to take the long view," he cautioned. "That has to be conveyed to everybody. I am not going to get bogged down in details. Look down the road. I want to pound that into the whole bureaucracy."

In the aftermath he credited his strategy with cautious success. It was a crisis, but not, perhaps, as great as reckoned earlier. It was like others before it. It will not be the last of its kind. "Russia is going to continue to probe."

Nixon stands face-to-face with his old adversary again. In a way it is somewhat of a comfort to grapple with naked power, to hear the names of men he has known for more than a decade. He has laid all the pieces of this crisis out around him for deeper study. The Soviet cooperation in the later stages he rated better than their actions in previous times of tension. But their initial violations of the cease-fire is another matter. The issue will come up again, the President believes. "It will not be overlooked," he told one of his visitors.

U.S. foreign policy, the President reflected, has long been "provincial rather than global. They talk about neoisolationism. That's not new. We've always been isolationist. The role we have is not a role we would have preferred. The Marshall Plan and other acts of help were reactions to problems rather than calculated moves in a master plan of world dominance like those devised in other generations by Germany and France. The Peace Corps touched the heartstrings of America." But more than idealism is needed. The U.S. must make certain that other nations have the chance to develop as they wish, "whether it be left, right or center."

He sees the world as five key areas--the U.S., a Western Europe grouped around Germany, the Soviet Union, Red China, Japan. "Whether we have a world war will depend on how we go about developing the programs and the leadership now to defuse the problems of these nations." Nixon is troubled about the situation of Japan and West Germany, both denied nuclear weapons and thus a major role in their own defense. "What do you say to them? That we won't help? If we don't, it is inevitable that they will have to make arrangements with someone else."

The President hopes to improve relations with China. A dialogue, essential if Peking is ever to assume a normal world role, has begun. "Maybe that role won't be possible for five years, maybe not even ten years. But in 20 years it had better be, or the world is in mortal danger. If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don't, I want my children to."

There remains the problem of the Soviet Union, "the big one--currently." When dealing with Russia, "it doesn't serve the cause to say that if only we get to know each other better our differences will disappear. Great nations are going to have different views." The President is keenly conscious of differing political and economic systems, but the fundamental difference he sees is that while the U.S. seeks peace, the U.S.S.R. seeks dominion.

When Nixon talked of these gigantic gulfs between the two powers, he did not grow excited and angry as he did years ago: It is a fact of his life now. His job, as he sees it, is to convince the Soviet Union that it can still have its goals but must compete for them in the peaceful ways of commerce, ideas, even diplomacy. Bringing this about is not a matter of verbal persuasives, however; American power must be used to make it impossible for Soviet expansionism to succeed other than in peaceful contention.

In the uncluttered minutes Nixon looked out the windows of his office down the south lawn. In some ways it is unchanged since Thomas Jefferson, but beyond those serene acres almost everything has changed. Nixon sometimes brooded out loud about the United Nations and NATO and the other institutions that now must be replaced or altered to fit reality. Reading history, he has been impressed by the fact that "we are always ending wars but never winning the peace." His fervent hope was "to do now what we didn't do then. I would rather be known not for the fact that I ended a war but for the fact that I won a lasting peace."

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