Ghosts and Pecan Bars

By Hugh Sidey

They relish Chef Ruth Lewis' warm, homemade coffeecake in the mornings.

They nibble at her pecan bars and butter cookies after lunch.

When they go up the banistered staircase to the second-floor library with its old books, dark red walls and white trim, the men in the diplomatic delegations take their coats off and settle elbow to elbow at a small round table. They are mindful that Andrew Jackson and later Abraham Lincoln used to sit in that room and debate American affairs with their hosts.

Egyptian Ambassador Ashraf Ghorbal found that the Blair House aura stimulated his feelings about U.S. history, and one of Lincoln's powerful lines ran through his thoughts: "Let us have faith that right makes might..."

When pauses came in the Blair House Middle East negotiations, some of the delegates leaned back and looked at the wall. A somber visage was there to remind them of what happens when reason fails. There is a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant.

The Blair House negotiations are as remarkable in their way as the Camp David summit that preceded them. Jimmy Carter has turned those negotiations into a very personal affair, re-establishing the kind of neighborhood Government that used to exist around Lafayette Park more than a century ago. "We feel it," said one of the participants. "The President is just at arm's length.

It is assurance of his full partnership."

Carter walked across the street in the autumn sunshine for lunch at Blair House. U.S. Ambassador Roy Atherton excused himself from one session and strolled to the Oval Office to fill in the President. Israel's Dayan and Weizman took the short journey to the White House, inhaling sparkling air and enjoying the fall coloring of the trees along Pennsylvania Avenue. Whether at the White House or Blair House, the coffeepots perked merrily.

Sometimes the talk got tough. Asked to select three for lunch with Carter, Dayan replied, "We want four, and if we don't have four, they can have lunch without me." Four it was. After all, another plate on the table among neighbors is no big deal. Now and then Carter grew weary of the lawyering. Around the hearth in such intimate circumstances, good men, he thought, should quit nitpicking and get down to real meanings. "That's as much as you are going to get," he told the Israelis at one point. "That's clear to us. I just don't see what all the haggling is about."

Blair House has heard just about every kind of talk before, some strong and some gentle. WilHam Tecumseh Sherman, the man who later marched to the sea, was married there in 1850. One day in 1861 at breakfast, Navy Captain David Glasgow Farragut ("Damn the torpedoes--full speed ahead!") was told he was to command the Union attack against New Orleans. And in a front room Robert E. Lee turned down command of the Union armies, a melancholy prelude to many visits by the anguished Lincoln, who used to prowl the area.

While generals and admirals have paraded in and out of the elegant pale yellow structure over the years, Blair House has remained a place of hope. The original house was built in 1824 by an offshoot of the Lovell family of Massachusetts, taken over later for a century by the Blairs, who came out of Kentucky to join Jackson and waxed wealthy from publishing and real estate. But always the national purpose was a central theme in the family life. Indeed, it was Francis Preston Blair Sr. who twice went off for Lincoln on secret missions to Jefferson Davis to urge peace in the Civil War. That spirit still stalks those halls.

The nation's responsibilities are now global. The men at Blair House come from far away. But we seem to be drifting back to personal diplomacy and intimate settings where the powerbrokers can look each other in the eye. Last week Israelis and Egyptians, despite their outside spats, were expected to keep working in Blair House amid the Hepplewhite furniture, the Stuart oils and the busts of Franklin, Jefferson and Washington. The veritable crush of American heritage still seems to have some of the old magic.

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