A Moment of Special Glory

By Hugh Sidey

For a few days, history will take Ronald Reagan by the hand and lead him down the broad avenues of Washington and among the memories of this Republic, at once so great and so worried.

With the morning mists come the legends, the old bugle calls, the tramp of sure feet, voices raised in liberty's arguments. Soon enough Reagan will be down on the battlefield with Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, and his days will be ordered by the cables from Moscow and the Middle East. But, for the moment, he lives in a special glory that is granted to all new Presidents as they wait on Pennsylvania Avenue for the day when they can enter the White House.

Already he and Nancy have been treated to the warm coffeecake and butter cookies of Ruth Lewis, Blair House's chef, who has worked her magic over a decade for Presidents and visiting heads of state. Reagan has sat in the library with the dark red walls where Andrew Jackson took coffee, and he has brushed by the shadowy parlor where Robert E. Lee turned down command of the Union armies in 1861. Abraham Lincoln used to wander across to Blair House during the Civil War, a troubled giant who came for relief from the grim story of war through friends and humor.

Last week the Reagans walked around the corner, up the street by the stately home of Commodore Stephen Decatur, who ordered his house (the first on Lafayette Square) designed by Benjamin Latrobe to be sturdy as his ship, the United States, on which Decatur won fame in the War of 1812. The Reagans were on their way to lunch at a table for two in the paneled dining room of the Hay-Adams Hotel. Maybe they knew it, maybe not, but surely they felt the heritage of two who used to live on the site: Henry Adams, author and descendant of Presidents, and John Hay, a personal secretary to Lincoln and later Secretary of State to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The Reagans nibbled on Dover sole and an omelette where Stuart Symington, 79, the erect and handsome former Senator from Missouri, used to court his first wife, Evelyn Wadsworth, granddaughter of Hay.

We are in America so young in years; yet we suddenly seem old from responsibility. Just 20 years ago, Poet Robert Frost came to town to recite at John Kennedy's Inauguration: "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright/ . . . To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, un-enhanced." Kennedy answered: "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." Ike huddled in his coat, white scarf up around his neck on that day. When the Inaugural was over, the defeated Richard Nixon slipped down the Senate steps of the Capitol front and disappeared into the dark back seat of a limousine, little realizing that he would return in eight years as President. And as Reagan prepared for his Inaugural, Nixon watched from New York, still a power in American Government, his presence felt through people and policies that took root in his time in the White House. The past holds us.

Neither Reagan's exuberance nor the programmed gaiety of Washington could fully mask the bittersweet nature of the passage of power. As the caravan moves on, someone must yield. It has not been an easy time for Jimmy Carter. Transitions are for winners, not losers. Yet, there was the feeling that Carter had been a better President after defeat than before, that his actions in the transition were more graceful and selfless than when he worried so much about political survival. Perhaps Carter, too, heard voices from the past, like that of Muriel Humphrey in her last days as wife of the Vice President. Standing in the White House foyer beside her husband, who had been denied the presidency, she listened to a trumpet fanfare, and with a melancholy twinkle she leaned over and whispered, "Damn."

It is now the Reagans' turn to take command of the present and in their time write the history that will instruct those who follow.

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