Refuge in the Rose Garden

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Senator Edward Kennedy is taunting President Carter to come out from the Rose Garden and fight fair and square. He feels that he would benefit from a head-to-head encounter, or be enhanced by having a live President near by to attack. It probably is worth the gamble, but Kennedy could be wrong.

There is a body of political seers who are pressuring Jimmy Carter to join the primary fray so that Kennedy cannot make an issue of Carter's absence. Reporters naturally want a spectacle, and so in the name of the national interest they are calling for the President to debate the great issues of our time and maybe answer why he has not kept many of his promises from last time. On balance, in normal circumstances, it probably would be good for the system if Carter were to contend with Kennedy. But there is a lot that is phony about this kind of confrontation.

To start with, if the world is as badly off as Kennedy claims, Carter should be impeached if he leaves the Oval Office other than to eat and sleep. In truth, he is needed on the job in this crisis situation. A President cannot run this country properly from Air Force One or between bites of congealed cholesterol in

some Maine church basement. The White House, with its ready access to information and people, with its tensions and moods and direct lines to friends and critics, with its tradition and reminders of duty, is needed by any President in critical times.

We still wonder whether John Kennedy would have been so agreeable when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 if he had not been cruising on the yacht Marlin in Cape Cod waters. We also can ask ourselves if today's history might have been different had Carter been in the White House rather than aboard the Delta Queen churning down the Mississippi River when the Government began to get alarmed about the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba. In the Oval Office men seem to pause a second or two longer in their deliberations. If Carter had muted U.S. indignation, then had not had to back down later, would the Soviets have been so bold in Afghanistan? Some authorities think not.

What is it that Ted Kennedy does not know or cannot challenge in the voluminous three-year Carter record? The handling of the hostages in Iran, perhaps, but that is now truly a lesser issue on the political horizon. Carter has compiled this year a 75-page State of the Union report, a 636-page budget, an economic message that runs 329 ghastly pages. Each week Carter talks to hordes of visitors on the record, gives dinner toasts and speeches in the Rose Garden, lets visiting editors interview him. His words and ideas and moods, his presence, flood the wires and air waves. He is all over. Some say Carter talks too much. Nothing is left unsaid, and a lot of times something should be.

But Kennedy wants Carter onstage. We always seem to come back to show business. He wants to bait Carter to see whether he cannot get the President to impale himself fatally on some verbal shaft. Remember Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. Nixon had sweat on his upper lip, and people did not like his looks. Nixon may have lost the 1960 election in a few dismal seconds on the tube. There are a lot of people still around who wonder if that was any way to choose.

By most measures Carter has been correct to stay on the job through this crisis, though he has come close to being too cute about it. He made too many phone calls to Iowa for a Commander in Chief supposed to be pacing the bridge. He still spends too much time stroking political figures in the White House, thus casting doubt on his story of total absorption in crisis. If the future for this nation and the free world is as ominous as the President says it is, he had better be at work designing some dramatic new schemes for the 1980s. So far we have got little more than warmed-up leftovers from the past year. The greater worry remains that Jimmy Carter, the incurable campaigner, will soon dash off with his suit bag over his shoulder in quest of delegates, while Leonid Brezhnev goes on gathering up countries.

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