The Sweet Fruits of Success

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/ Hug Sidey

If Jimmy Carter looks out over the White House fence these next few days through those weary eyes of his, he may find out that America just loves it when a President succeeds, no matter what party he is from or how his brother behaves in public.

It is a phenomenon as old as the Republic but mercifully just as valid today as 202 years ago. Forget for these hours all the talk about creating a "new image" and also the considerable catalogue of complaints compiled against the 39th President. The bottom line this week on Camp David is that Carter took one big step for peace. If Americans know anything, they know how to read bottom lines. Until now Jimmy Carter's have been running in the red.

A successful summit in the Maryland mountains is not a cure for Carter's leadership problem. But surely it is a kind of achievement at the critical time needed to bring people a little closer to their President, to silence for the moment a lot of petty grievances that grew bigger than they should have THE WHITE HOUSE because of Carter's fumbling. It worked that way for John Kennedy in 1963, when after the Cuban missile crisis he successfully completed the nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union. And even Richard Nixon, never really a man to engender affection, at least won broad respect when he came back from Peking and Moscow in 1972 with solid entries in his ledger.

For Jimmy Carter it may be several new beginnings.

He will have to devote more of his carefully allotted time than ever now to nurturing this fragile infant that he has helped to midwife into robust life. Good. Let the trivia--like foreign pilgrimages, town meetings and water-project vetoes--that have cluttered and complicated his world so far be conveniently forgotten now and then as he goes after a genuine Middle East peace. That issue and the other big one, inflation, are enough to justify his salary for the rest of the year.

He will surely see as never before that it is the President and only the President who can give an Administration, indeed a nation, direction and force. Jimmy Carter by every account was the one who moved Israel and Egypt, who almost without hope held them together when they threatened to fly apart, who abandoned his Sunday-school pieties for the hard realities of geography and people, yet never lost his basic goodness, perhaps his greatest strength.

It could be that this success will light a spark, indeed a fire, in the President. His cool and distant smile of the past months could not hide all the hurt in his eyes from the rising national doubts about his competence. As Americans cheer his Camp David achievement, Jimmy Carter with luck and wisdom could be born again a second time in a way that could lift this nation as well as himself. Men in public service are nourished by justified public acclaim. Carter's time has at last come.

Lyndon Johnson used to say that in government as well as in poker there came a day when you had to shove your whole stack into the center of the table. Carter, with a new canniness and considerable courage, did just that. He used the device of the intimate gathering, the calm and casual approach, the very technique that won him the White House in the first place. He defied tradition and even his own campaign promises by imposing a singular secrecy on the summit proceedings. He has at the very least won the first game, and in the league in which he plays that may be enough to start a winning streak.

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