And Now, Why Not a Domestic Summit?

WITH no word of what he is up to, the President disappears into the woods of Camp David for a week. No television cameras pursue him into the wilderness; the press is barred. There are, for once, no leaks. Henry Kissinger gives no briefings. If you can believe it, he does not even know what is going on: it is, essentially, none of his business.

Just when anticipation is keenest (Has the President fallen gravely ill? Has Brezhnev delivered a nuclear ultimatum? Has Agnew staged a coup d'etat?), Nixon emerges with a fistful of notes and a gleam in his eye. To an astonished public, he announces a bold, new, precedent-shattering program that will give the nation the "lift of a driving dream" he has talked about, even though much of it amounts to an ideological reversal of his past positions. Drawing on the best advice of a wide range of Americans--including, for openers, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader, Cesar Chavez and George Wallace, Saul Alinsky and Pat Moynihan--he holds a domestic summit worthy of his foreign ones.

A fantastic scenario, of course. The troubles facing Nixon in the U.S. are more agonizing and challenging than those overseas. They cannot be solved merely by negotiating with various leaders of American power groups. Yet the haunting hope arises that somehow, in some way, the President might attack the problems at home with the imagination and courage of his historic voyages to Peking and Moscow. In short, that there could be an American summit--literally or figuratively.

Well, why not? For one thing it does not seem to be Nixon's nature to offer bold leadership at home. He is too cautious, too prudent, too indebted to the interests that are satisfied with things as they are. Nixon's closest domestic advisers are forever searching for political openings that they can exploit; to some of them, the care and feeding of the nation are almost incidental. There is no White House counselor on U.S. matters with the intelligence and skill of Kissinger, a phenomenon seldom seen in U.S. Government. The President needs half a dozen domestic Kissingers.

Bad Meals. Besides, as Nixon said before he came to office, he believes that the country is best able to run itself without excessive executive interference. He would rather try to run the world--an easier proposition. In foreign policy, he can deal, as a lawyer, with facts and concepts and a few powerful leaders. The masses of people are once removed, over the horizon, a mere statistic. He can go up to his Lincoln Sitting Room, map out a policy and announce it as fact by executive order; only formal treaties must be ratified by Congress.

In domestic affairs, there is no isolation from pressures and conflict. Each move must be calibrated for re-election potential. Congress must be consulted. Nixon does not enjoy drinking with Wilbur Mills. He does not enjoy shaking hands with hordes and eating bad meals at Grand Rapids Republican rallies. He does it, but only just. He has not gone to the marketplace in Birmingham the way he has in Moscow. He has not seriously surveyed the suburbs of St. Louis, the Harlem ghetto, the abandoned farms of southern Iowa. He has never fully used the President's "bully pulpit" for moral leadership, and he has rarely moved the American people in the way that, from all reports, he moved many Russians when he delivered his farewell speech in Moscow. Is he ill at ease with U.S. audiences? Or does his somewhat artificial rhetoric sound better in Russian?

At home, in addition to all the intractable ailments of a postindustrial society--inflation, recession, pollution, alienation--he is confronted with peculiarly American conditions. These include the incredible ethnic diversity, with each group clamoring more loudly than ever for its rightful share in America; the racial conflict that now burdens every social transaction; the brutal decay of the great cities that divides the nation into the poor and black on the one hand and the affluent and white on the other. No people expect more than Americans. The President must somehow maintain the nation's freedoms and right to dissent without at the same time allowing the country to fall into anarchy.

It is too much for one man. It requires immense ingenuity, fresh approaches and a break with past patterns that are probably unreasonable to expect from Richard Nixon, or for that matter, any President.

And yet. . .

Who, friend or foe, would have suspected that in his first term the onetime anti-Communist zealot would travel on a mission of peace and good will to both Peking and Moscow? Or that he could do it with a minimal domestic opposition from the guardians of the old cold war varieties? So, against all odds, the hope persists that he could still make a fresh, dramatic start at home, transcending his limited political constituency, indeed transcending himself, and thus eventually laying claim to being a great President.

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