Grafting Job: Old Body, New Head

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY/HUGH SIDEY Grafting Job: Old Body, New Head

On occasion these days the Washington observer gets the feeling that the past eight years were just a dream.

There last week was Mike Disalle, the former Democratic Governor of Ohio, Truman's price stabilizer, Kennedy pol and Johnson friend, looking as if he had not moved from his cushion in Sans Souci. He savored both the veal kidneys and the fact that his party would be moving back into the nearby White House.

Across the crowded room from Mike and under the expert eye of Maitre d' Paul Delisle was Zbigniew Brzezinski, comfortably at work on his rockfish and the state of the world, much as he used to be when he was a young L.B J. aide. His hair is a little longer, the lines a little deeper, and he has a new title (presidential assistant for national security affairs), but he had no trouble finding his way to the restaurant or through the menu. He never used to have any doubt about what ought to be done to the world, and has none today.

The alert people watchers might even have caught sight of Ted Sorensen--lean, cerebral, ascetic--moving mysteriously through the Potomac power basin toward his new headquarters at the Central Intelligence Agency. The former Kennedy intellectual left Washington in 1964--lean, cerebral, ascetic.

Vance, Brown, Harris, Califano, Blumenthal are all names that may still be in type in the dusty galleys up at the Government Printing Office. At least nobody has trouble spelling them.

The Arkansas twang of Dick Moose rattles the phone lines again. Tough, bright, energetic and jovial, Moose worked his special way through State, the White House and the Hill, calling accurate shots on Viet Nam and other world trouble spots. He will be an Under Secretary of State with more power and a mustache, but the same soul. Dick Moose walks through the corridors of Foggy Bottom as if he had never left. In spirit he never did.

In the outer offices, where the secretaries and receptionists reign, there also are flashes of dej`a vu. The warm and graceful figure of Mary Frances Sweeney suddenly materialized in the fifth-floor hall of the Carter transition office. She used to be administrative assistant to the late Democratic Party chairman John Bailey, a fixture in the New Frontier and Great Society. Mrs. Sweeney is now helping to restart the Democratic engine. And Evelyn Irons, who went to the White House with Joe Califano in 1965 and worked for James Schlesinger through the Republican years, will journey back to her old White House haunts as secretary to the new energy czar.

All of these people and more will form the body of the new Administration. With amazing speed their network of communication and management has been reconstituted. Surveying this scene, one might be led to believe that the Government of eight years ago will resume at noon on Jan. 20.

But the governmental body in Washington has no head. Jimmy Carter has remained in Plains, Ga., and for all the marvels of communications, to most of Washington he is a brief bit of film at the end of the afternoon soaps, a quiet figure in blue denim, walking the town streets, hugging his small daughter and comforting his aging mother. His thoughts are edited. His voice is electronic.

Grafting the head of this Administration to its body is going to be one of the most fascinating bits of political surgery of the century. Can the brain of Carter change the condition and function of the middle-aged limbs and trunk of this Government, so conventional and familiar?

Jack Watson, one of Carter's transition directors up from Atlanta, believes so.

The head will rule, he insists. He has watched closely over these past weeks in Plains and on St. Simons as the Carter appointees talked and planned. They grew soft-spoken like Carter in his presence. They mixed their families with business in an easy, warm context. They dressed a little more plainly, shed some of their jealousies. Subtle and small changes, but signals, perhaps, of what is to come.

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