When the Anemometers Stall

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

One of my esteemed colleagues has called this summer's Washington "Dullsville." NBC's North Carolina-born oracle David Brinkley was stirred by the capital's somnolence to thoughts of 40 years ago, before air conditioning and the telephone overwhelmed the verandas and magnolias. And the New York Times' James Reston, the most distinguished analyst of Washington's hot air, checked his stalled political anemometer and took himself off to Cuba for real Havana cigars.

For the first time in at least a decade, Washington has had a summer of reasonable serenity. But a number of people are not sure that they liked it, which may be one of our national problems. In politics, we have produced a generation of thrill seekers, men and women who thrive on disaster. Most of these people--fortunately for the rest of us--found that living with themselves was a big bore and went foraging in Moscow, Peking, Lisbon and Jerusalem. Those left behind in the steamy streets made more sense.

Washington's most erudite young writer, George Will, pronounced it a "tremendous summer." His two children got the chicken pox, and he explored a whole new field of community relations as the bug spread in his neighborhood. But there probably was no finer hour, he claims, than the August morning when he walked out his front door and declared his lawn "a wilderness area" to be left untouched for the remainder of the season. "My contribution to conservation," he explained.

The motion picture industry's Jack Valenti moved to the tennis courts. He perfected something he called "a top-spin backhand," and not even Jaws gave him the thrill he got from beating Presidential Contenders Birch Bayh and Lloyd Bentsen. It may be an indication of political things to come. One of the world's famous lawyers, Edward Bennett Williams, called the unusual calm "a return to abnormality." His view is that the bizarre has become the norm and such letdowns as we are now experiencing will continue to be the unusual.

Treasury Secretary William Simon took the first vacation he has taken in three years, which may have done more to steady the nation's economic nerves than any official nostrum. He assembled all seven of his children for a rare family reunion, found time to think and decided that the slogan "Stay bored with Ford" had some great merit but second-guessed, "Maybe the President would not think so."

Former Senator J. William Fulbright, now a lawyer about town, has watched the setting for 32 years. He likened the summer of '75 to the days of Ike. "When I came here as a young man," he said, "I used to complain about the inaction. What a fool I was. There was great wisdom in that."

There were some stay-behind residents of the city who thought the calm signaled vast new disturbances to come. One was Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, one of the older hands in governmental business. He found a similarity to the summer of 1939, when the world was on the brink of war and this country was not sure what it wanted to do. Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Corcoran had worked, had not made up his mind about running for a third term, and the rest of the major politicians couldn't do much but wait. Corcoran thought there was even a whiff of 1926, when he first came down from Harvard Law School to clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Calvin Coolidge was presiding over Pennsylvania Avenue. America for the most part was still on the great jag of the 1920s, and it devoted the summer months of that year to fanning itself on the front porch. Sometime along there, old Justice Holmes, who was 85, fixed his wise gaze on his young aide and said, "It's the eye of the hurricane." Sure enough, the fury of the Teapot Dome scandal grew and the rot in the economy became visible. The chaos raised up F.D.R. and launched the Government that in many ways still endures. Corcoran's instincts suggest to him that our society is on the edge of some new changes that may rival those that Roosevelt brought. "Whenever this town loses positive direction," he said, "it means something is struggling to be born in the nation--there is a wind coming." He may be right. But this calm before whatever storm awaits us has had its virtues.

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