The Mood of the Capital

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

Some oldtimers say that it hasn't been this way since World War II, when shadowy figures moved up and down the Washington avenues, when Presidents and Vice Presidents and generals and diplomats rolled up their collars and scurried off into the night for secret meetings, carrying confidential proposals.

Maybe the Bay of Pigs was another such time, or the Cuban missile crisis. But then all of these episodes dealt with the national security and military moves.

Now, instead, we have a political crisis that has produced something of the same mood, something of the same kind of clandestine ballet. Baltimore Prosecutor George Beall sneaks over to Washington to confer. Agnew has a late-afternoon meeting with Nixon. There is the offer of a deal by Agnew to his own Government's Justice Department. Cox flits in and out of meetings with Wright & Co.

If the White House had hired Madison Avenue counsel to devise a script to humiliate Agnew and raise rumors that he might not be wanted any more, they couldn't have done it better. First, give a "No comment" to rumors of resignation.

Then take that back but refuse to express total confidence. Then go back to "No comment." If it was not ineptitude, it was totally diabolical.

Up in Port Chester, N.Y., old John Connally met with the Republican liberal fat cats out in Westchester, listening to Art Buchwald do a commentary on the King-Riggs tennis match. They too seemed to be waiting, licking their chops.

Hill committees have begun studies of how to deal with a vice-presidential vacancy and nomination. Former Agnew associates are roaring publicly against the White House.

For a moment it doesn't seem like the United States of America, defender of the free world and strongest nation in the history of civilization. It becomes plain that Nixon can't go to Europe this fall as he wanted to. There are any number of reasons, but surely among them is the fact that his Government might come apart when he was gone. We have become something of a banana republic, with a weekly upheaval expected, anticipated and maybe even scheduled.

After a couple of weeks of renewed ceremonial prominence, it dawns on a lot of people that Richard Nixon is really not back to being President. Maybe he can't be. Maybe he is thinking and husbanding his energy for some new maneuver. But where is the President? Where is a clear voice, a firm decision on anything? Elliot Richardson is the steward of the big moral questions on Agnew and Watergate. Melvin Laird is promoting and pushing all the new contacts with the Congress, all the new laundry lists of legislation. And Henry Kissinger is the force in foreign policy, newly confirmed and already letting it be known he will go to work on the Arab-Israeli question. What we have now is not a presidency but a regency.

There is the feeling that events are crowding around the White House threshold and they will soon have to tumble out. The optimism of a few days ago that maybe Nixon had turned the corner and was starting out of his slump seems swept away now. There is Agnew looming large and the Watergate hearings resuming this week. There is the sense that maybe Nixon has not reached the end of his slide after all, that he is being swept along once again by events that cannot be foreseen or managed. There is Archie Cox and the vast court apparatus poised to spring. Who can calculate what Hunt or Liddy or Mitchell or Martha or Dean or Ehrlichman or Haldeman may say or do?

There are hints that people are far from being as turned off on Watergate as some suggest (although some must be), that they are beginning to realize more than ever the full dimensions of its profound and sinister threat to our system.

Richard Nixon's new crisis--and ours--may be growing again.

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