Hail to the

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

White House politics isn't what it used to be. It has been captured by bookkeepers. It has the excitement of an accountants' convention.

This is the inevitable aftermath of Watergate, the heightened sense of political morality and all those new campaign regulations. But now and then there is a lament for the good old days, when nobody could tell the difference between Government and politics and nobody much cared. Then a man like Larry O'Brien, Special Assistant to the President of the U.S., went behind his oak door in the White House, rolled up his sleeves, got out his charts, lighted up his Marlboro and called up the country's resident professor of practical political theology, Richard Joseph Daley, mayor of Chicago. O'Brien might spend most of the day on such calls--maybe even most of the week or the month. Nobody worried that he was on the public payroll or that taxpayers footed the exorbitant phone bill. What a game it was until Richard Nixon ruined it all.

Gerald Ford has changed the White House language of politics. We now have what the White House terms "governing" and "electioneering"--each quite separate, at least in theory. Under governing come signing and vetoing bills, explaining programs, seeking public support for policy. There is no way to say this is not political too, but there is no way to deny it is governing. Under electioneering come wooing delegates, setting up campaign organizations, raising money.

Rogers C.B. Morton, brought into the White House as a "political" aide in the old sense of the word, will live in both worlds for the simple reason that somebody has to. So that he may conform to the new codes of rectitude, bookkeepers are now devising formulas to divide up his time, his travel, his words, his work between the payrolls of the Ford Campaign Committee and the White House.

Elaborate books have now been devised to assign the cost of the seats on Air Force One on the basis of what each staffer does on each trip the President takes.

Originally there were even plans to charge for half seats, but the Ford staff decided that when in doubt let the election committee pay, not the public.

By formula, when candidate Ford went to New Hampshire on a campaign trip last weekend, his press secretary Ron Nessen became a split personality, his traveling expenses listed under electioneering. AT&T, which furnishes the press phone car for the President, discovered Nessen's new definition and threw him out of the car because the corporation's executives feared this service would be counted as an illegal political contribution. Ma Bell is touchy about such things these days.

Ford, who campaigned in the south of New Hampshire, wanted to ski in the north. But only by helicopter could he have cut travel time enough to get in a run or two. At $830 per hour, which would have had to go on the electioneering tab, the desire was squelched. Phone records can get Presidents into trouble. When Richard Cheney, Ford's chief of staff, was on Face the Nation the other Sunday, some California enthusiast sent an election contribution to the White House. Cheney adhered religiously to the new guide book. The money was not delivered to the committee, but was mailed directly back to the contributor with instructions as to how he might send it back to Washington to the committee's address.

Last Wednesday evening Ford and his key campaign men sat in the Oval Office planning speeches, selecting film clips and listening to radio blurbs as the candidate smiled with enthusiasm or frowned with displeasure. This material was put together by crews hired by the Campaign Committee. But when those pictures of Gerald Ford meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin show up in TV ads, there will be no way known to man to separate candidate from President. We can have fun arguing about it though.

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