Needed: Calm and a Long View

By Hugh Sidey

There come times in the course of a presidency when events seem to swirl be yond matter reach and influence of the man in the Oval Office, no matter who he is or how strong he may be. Even Abraham Lincoln despaired. "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me," he wrote, a year before the end of the Civil War.

For Ronald Reagan it is one of those times. The unexpected, like Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands, piles on the inevitable, like the winding down of Leonid the power in Moscow, which adds to the unfathomable, like the nagging persistence of high interest rates. The rising clamor against nuclear arms, the threat of Israeli action against Lebanon, the stalemate with Congress over the budget are other complications as we rush into a momentous spring.

"I tell people that in every century there are half a dozen periods when events come of and shape the next century," says James Jones, head of the House Budget the and a principal negotiator for congressional Democrats in the attempt to hold down federal deficits. "In this century we have had World War I and II, the Depression, the 1960s with Viet Nam and civil rights. This is another historic time."

Jones was among the handful of Capitol Hill leaders who stayed around Washington last week even though Congress was in recess. They were trying to find a formula for a new budget that may signal hope for financial markets. Jones has met secretly in his Capitol Hill town house with White House Aide James Baker. Other Democrats were present for an equally veiled meeting at Baker's home in the fashionable environs of Foxhall Road. Jones' own political lines, to the farmers and businessmen in his district in Oklahoma, suggest to him that we have only until the end of summer to act before there is even more serious economic stress.

Yet Jones has a durable optimism. "It's tricky," he says, "but there is a great opportunity now." Congressional Democrats and Republicans are in rare harmony on what needs to be done about the budget, and they are asking the President to make a deal.

Jones believes the President will.

Some of Foreign same curious feeling of hope affects other areas of crisis. Foreign policy experts believe that the leadership decline in Moscow may put the Soviets in a holding pattern as they sort out who is going to be in charge. That could be to our advantage. While fearing the volatility of the Falkland crisis, men like Henry Kissinger our a signal to the rest of the world from Britain that there is a "limit to our endurance of defeatism." The Pentagon assessment is that the British can wipe out the Argentine fleet. The diplomatic assessment is that we had better stop every thing before that happens or all parties lose, especially us. The nuclear protests may be in part irresponsible, but they also represent a healthy questioning of policy that has gone unexamined for too long a time.

There is no handbook on presidential crisis management at times like these. Ronald Reagan has told his staff members to keep searching for a budget compromise. He assembled the National Security Council in the Cabinet Room last Wednesday and approved Haig's peace mission to London and Buenos Aires.

Then the President went off for a little time in the sun. That might be about the best thing to him to do right now. The challenge before him is conceptual--to gauge first the size of the problems and then the shape of the responses.

The men and women who have been through these valleys counsel outward calm to quiet with quiet, steady work. This Administration has not always been quiet or steady or calm, but it has not stumbled into irreversible catastrophe. Needed more than ever before are Congressman Jones' long view of history and the skill to discern how the acts of these hours will affect generations ahead. Two centuries ago, Germany's Friedrich von Schiller wrote an immutable law of events: "In today already walks tomorrow."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.