On the Need to Relax, Stay Home and Meditate

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

It is a sacred rite of democracy to hail each Administration before it takes office for its wisdom, daring and competence, none of which has yet been demonstrated. It is an equal privilege of those who await the future to lament the inevitable shortcomings that will plague the new team in town. We are joyous participants now in this old ritual, traveling the uproad toward Ronald Reagan's Inauguration. The rocky decline will follow soon. But there are some things that Reagan might do to ease a few of the predictable jolts.

For a start, the man in the Oval Office can get trapped by tradition if he allows himself to, and most do. He looks over his shoulder at his predecessor and tries to do him one better. Jerry Ford got up at 5:30 a.m. to exercise his football knees. Next thing we knew Jimmy Carter was out of bed at the same unholy hour, professing he was exercising his mind in predawn solitude. That routine had limited success for both men.

There is absolutely no correlation between long hours of desk drudgery and success in the presidency. It was Lyndon Johnson who instituted the two-days-in-one work routine, claiming prodigious achievements that began at 10 a.m. and ran until 4 p.m., then a two-hour nap, followed by work from 6 p.m. to midnight or so. Secretaries and assorted aides came in two shifts. There is the faint suspicion that if Johnson had throttled back a bit, we would be in less trouble today.

By almost every measure, a President needs more time to think. That, quite clearly, is work of the highest order, and it is best done when the person is rested and his view is uncluttered by turkey growers who have come to present a gobbler, or a high school bell ensemble ringing on the lawn.

Time is a precious commodity in the White House. If Presidents dip into trivia, there is no end to the process. We have been through L.B.J.'s worrying about how Air Force uniform trousers were tailored around the crotch and Jimmy Carter's arranging the tennis schedule for the White House court. Our Presidents could take a lesson from Egypt's Anwar Sadat, who perhaps has had more big ideas than any other statesman of this era. He purposely clears his schedule for long hours of rest, walking and pure solitude. The Egyptian President takes the facts his experts bring to him, relates them to his experience and study before his rise to power, and makes his decisions accordingly.

There is another point to remember. Once a man has arrived in the White House, he has no time to acquire further intellectual capital. His sense of the world is already shaped, he must operate from that base, or have total faith in the advisers around him. Frantic cram courses may actually give a President a false sense of mastery. And, as John Kennedy said, it is nearly impossible for a President to make new friends on whom he can totally rely.

The late Peter Lisagor, who covered the White House for the Chicago Daily News, used to claim that the nature of the Government actually changed when the President acquired a jet. Lisagor saw Presidents substitute themselves for the old system of politics and diplomacy. The spectacle of the White House on the wing was good for the President's international image and domestic political prospects. Pushing aside the foreign service and the political leaders is sometimes necessary and has produced some dazzling results, but it also dumps any failures all over the President himself. There are other problems. Jimmy Carter had his moment of glory when he personally negotiated the Camp David Middle East agreement, but now the parties want regular presidential participation, something that cannot and should not be. Lisagor's rule for constraining excessive presidential travel: "Make 'em fly Allegheny."

The same sobering advice might be given to Cabinet officers. They too have been lured into ego-embellishing travel by their fleet of Air Force JetStars. If Reagan really does intend to give his Cabinet a decisive role in his deliberations and also insists that they set their departments in order, he should keep his Secretaries in town. They can go to dinners or to breakfasts and pray, although there are hazards in these activties too.

Prayer breakfasts and other public moments of celestial meditation are not bad in themselves, it is just that they seem to grow more numerous, louder and longer with every Administration. It is as if each new President must try to establish a better relationship with God than his predecessor did. An old and wry hand in Washington, who has served five Presidents, claims that there is a direct relationship between how much a President prays in public and how devious he is backstage.

That leads to the problem of too much presidential talk. Presidents quite naturally like to hear themselves prattle on. Regular news conferences are important, but Carter may have done considerable damage by his incessant flow of words. Talking at almost every opportunity and most times on the record, Carter too often contradicted himself, and then had to explain what he really meant. Language ultimately was cheapened and meaning diminished. The Carter White House echoed with so much talk that it finally became a bore. Presidential restraint of tongue might restore some credibility to talk and heighten the impact when the right moments come for the Chief Executive of the nation to sound off to the people.

A new President, of course, will have no shortage of advice, but the genius of leadership in this age may lie more in the direction of doing less in special ways, rather than in constantly trying to do more.

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