More Summits? Think Mailgram

It is time for the curtain to fall on the era of unrestrained summitry.

Let the applause swell for past dramas: Ike before worshipful masses in Seoul; Kennedy firm-jawed at the Berlin Wall; L.B.J. staring down Aleksei Kosygin at Glassboro; Nixon clinking glasses in the Great Hall with Chou Enlai, then eating Wheaties in the Kremlin; Ford grinning beneath his fur hat in the snows of Vladivostok with Leonid Brezhnev. Worthy acts. But the world changes.

While summitry was a necessity at times in the postwar decades, its ease and electronic entertainment value have turned it into a sport of sorts that claims too much of a President's time and energy. This thought must have occurred to Jerry Ford about halfway down the sheer steps from a pagoda towering over Peking's Summer Palace, which was the breathtaking extravagance of the Ching dynasty's Dowager Empress Ci xi; she diverted $50 million worth of silver earmarked for her navy to rebuild the paradise. Ford pondered the steep descent, and his mind wandered back home to the Rockies. "This would be a good ski slope--there's a nice turn down there," he mused. He would have been better off in Vail. What he accomplished in Peking could have been done by Mailgram.

This summit was no disaster. It is just a question of a President's priorities. Other things are more important.

Confronting world leaders far away used to be exotic. Suddenly it is commonplace. The stars of television used to travel to report news. Now they seek out backdrops like the spired Kremlin or the Great Wall for travelogues.

Summitry has fed on itself. The idea of not having some kind of foreign spectacular at least every now and then makes a President nervous. And each summit must somehow top the last, the

Peter Principle to absurdity. Thus the mere invitation to a far capital becomes the message, the hours spent in conference with old adversaries more the measure of success than what was said. Nobody has yet been told what Chairman Mao Tse-tung said to Ford, but we all have been bludgeoned with the fact that the meeting lasted an hour and 50 minutes, the longest audience Mao has granted this year.

In their eagerness, American Presidents have gone far beyond simple politeness. They have adapted to repressive environments, the very thing they speak against back home. In Peking, the Americans were more secretive than the Chinese. Mao has become God not only to his gray ranks but also in a way to the State Department, a grave distortion in a world where the Chinese need us more than we need them. When Betty Ford said that Mao had lighted up on seeing Daughter Susan, an American reporter laughed, "There's life in the old boy yet." Officials of the U.S. mission in Peking clapped their hands over their mouths in horror at such irreverence.

Henry Kissinger, the Sol Hurok of modern summitry, is part of the problem --not by design but out of his skillful pursuit of his place in history.

If the Peking summit proved anything as it played out against a backdrop of grim regimentation and indoctrination that would be comic opera if not taken so seriously, it was that Presidents might make a little more headway both at home and abroad by being a little cooler. Which means that American Presidents should not only restrain their impulses to hold summit meetings, but when the times come, should insist that the other fellows learn about a few American traditions, like standing free and open for 200 years with some good laughs along the way.

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