Impressions of Power and Poetry

The Cabinet Room is almost untouched from the days of Richard Nixon, his huge mahogany table--which he tried unsuccessfully to deduct from his income taxes--still the arena of crucial Executive debate. The room is a public forum. There is little that is personal there.

A few steps south and one encounters Nell Yates, a secretary in those premises since the days of Dwight Eisenhower. Warm, efficient, knowing, she belongs there. Jimmy Carter must be just ahead. But the Oval Office, a stride through the curved door, is more a museum than the center of a man's authority. One wonders if Carter is still intimidated by the legend of the office, or if he is determined not to live amid the symbols of Washington status.

The pictures on the oval walls are from Ford's time, most of the furniture too. Carter did resurrect Kennedy's desk, but its top is thinly populated. The Bible on which Carter placed his hand when he took the oath rests on one corner. Harry Truman's THE BUCK STOPS HERE sign stands beside a kicking glass donkey that was a present from Georgia Democrats. Near by is Admiral Rickover's memento: "Oh, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small." They are stage props. The man lives elsewhere, perhaps down the hall, beyond the small office of Personal Assistant Susan Clough, the place where L.B.J. used to slurp low-calorie root beer.

One enters Carter's study. Indeed it is his. It is small--17 ft. by 18 1/2 ft. The vast sweep and power of the presidency are reduced to their simplest forms.

Carter's suit coat is draped over the arm of the couch, the label up: "Hart Schaffner & Marx, A. Cohen & Sons, Americus, Ga." The walls ripple with impressionism. Behind his chair is Childe Hassam's Flag Day, and to his right another Hassam, Old House at Easthampton. Near the door, Niagara Falls plunges silently, a swirl of delicate blues and pinks in an oil by John Twachtman. Fronting the desk is a huge painting of Rosalynn and Amy from the days in the Georgia statehouse, simple, almost ethereal.

The room is modern. A Lanier pocket secretary is at the ready to help Carter sort out his days. The room is old. A replica of a flintlock made for Carter, which he has actually fired, hangs behind his chair. Miss Lillian's photograph is near by, but not as close as a model that shows all of our nuclear missiles. A massive ship's clock of brass thunks out the hours and minutes, but there is also a digital timepiece that silently flashes the fleeting seconds.

In its physical contents, the place does not much surpass the office of the peanut plant in Plains. There is a huge globe at the end of his desk. A couple of weeks after Carter became President, he suddenly began to understand that the world was his. He quietly walked into the Oval Office, picked up the globe and brought it back to the small study. It is rooted there now. On the shelves are some 50 of Carter's favorite books, assembled at his request. The great Americans stand side by side--Jefferson (by Peterson) and Robert E. Lee (by Freeman) and Roosevelt (by Burns). That far-ranging theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has a couple of slots, and then there is Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion). Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative is handy, as are the poems of Dylan Thomas and the intellectual explorations of our times by Daniel Boorstin.

That White House study is Carter's canvas on which he notes his interests and his inspirations. It, too, is impressionistic, a mixture of old and new, of power and poetry, the reflection of a leader not fully formed who is seeing, hearing and feeling the drama in front of him before fixing the outlines of his American vision.

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