Presidential Xanadu

American presidential retreats have always expressed something of the personal style of the man in the White House -- Richard Nixon's Key Biscayne and San Clemente, Lyndon Johnson's ranch. In years to come, the presidential style of leisure may be considerably grander. Last week Nixon signed a bill accepting an official new winter hideaway for the Presidents. It is Cereal Heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post's 110-room, $7,000,000 Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach, a kind of Moorish Xanadu built on 17 acres of hard coral between the Atlantic ocean front and Lake Worth.

Mrs. Post, 85, has provided that the place be turned over to the Government at her death, along with a $200,000 per-annum trust fund for upkeep. Mar-A-Lago is a treasure of colonnades and turrets, built of stone from Italy, 36,000 tiles made in 15th century Spain, frescoes copied from the Medici Palace in Florence, silk needlework panels from the Venetian Doge's palace. Suites are done in Louis XVI style or in Spanish or Early American. Outside are a nine-hole golf course and archipelagoes of reflecting pools and fountains.

Mrs. Post's gift was gracious, but it seems designed to make the isolation of the presidency a bit more splendid than it ought to be. Perhaps in the interests of sheer humility a constitutional amendment should require that a President spend at least a few weekends a year in a trailer camp or a slum, or sleeping on a relative's Hide-a-Bed in East Lansing.

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