The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

"Hey, Senator," somebody once shouted at Howard Baker, "who do you get to rumple your suits?" The slightly wilted Baker grinned and replied that he handled wrinkles himself. He knew a message of affection when he heard it.

Tommy Griscom, 38, Baker's loyal aide, came in for his share. "Tommy, did somebody press the down button on your elevator shoes?" He was another Tennessee boy who could roll with it, even at 5 ft. 6 in., and with quick wit he traveled through the Washington jungle unscathed. "You know," whispered a former White House staffer last week, "we sometimes joked that Tommy was the most powerful man in the country. He had a President who was disengaged. Baker was not an administrator. Tommy paid attention to the details."

Now Baker and Griscom are both going off from the White House. It seems unfortunate to lose such good men when scandal is rampant in the Federal Government. There is, however, another point to be made. Baker and Griscom came to help Ronald Reagan in his worst time, and they steadied the Administration and nudged it off again in the right direction. There are too many rascals to count right now in Washington, but we too often lose sight of the fact that the city has many more good folk who step up and serve honestly and honorably. Most of these are unheralded.

Take Reagan's Moscow summit, which in all likelihood would have been a flop had it not been for a determined group of writers thumping away in the Old Executive Office Building. They provided the President with speeches that soared around the world, eloquent statements about freedom and democracy and glory of the individual. By the measure of the day, Chief Writer Tony Dolan, 39, along with Josh Gilder, 34, Peter Robinson, 31, Clark Judge, 40, and Mark Klugmann, 28, should have been out riding the bull market or selling their kiss-and-tell memoirs. Instead they were busy burnishing the original Reagan and lifting him up for a dignified finish to his presidency.

Those young men went back to a dusty stack of Reagan's old speeches, all written by the actor-Governor himself decades ago. They revived the themes that have been the hallmark of his career: of looking at people as individuals rather than as masses, of insisting that political power must come from the people up, not the government down. They battled for the right to let Reagan be Reagan behind a great Moscow pulpit. It was mind over protocol.

When the bureaucrats from State and the National Security Council moved in to dampen the rhetoric, Griscom was there. The call to the Soviets to "tear down the Berlin Wall and all barriers between Eastern and Western Europe" stayed in the text. Griscom dispelled the worry that Reagan would offend his hosts by championing the dissidents gathered around him in Moscow. He never noted the alarm that Reagan might walk through Red Square arguing with Mikhail Gorbachev about whether the world was tilting East or West. Rolling debate with a few sharp elbows was as good a test of glasnost as anything.

The Reagan Moscow testament will ring out for years, thanks to those good men. Yes, Griscom is taking his leave, and so is Gilder, who is off to do speeches for George Bush. But that is the way in this Government. Sometimes it does hurt, but often it brings its own special strength. Renewal.

Robert Tuttle, head of White House personnel, says that every day 20 or 30 new resumes land on his doorstep, most of them from exceptionally qualified young people who still want to serve. Only a smattering of these hopefuls will get the taste of power they covet. But with few, if any, exceptions, they will honor their nation.