Subtle Joys of Being in the Court

In the days of Louis XIV, a summons to the King's court brought the men and women of consequence tumbling out of the boudoirs and the countinghouses and off the battlefields for the required rituals of obeisance and jollity that the Sun King needed for self-assurance. Louis, it was said, worshipped God, and all the others worshipped him.

It is a long journey from Versailles to the White House, but it is worth a thought or two on how power retains its old rewards through centuries and civilizations. Last week the President of the United States summoned his court.

It includes roughly a thousand people who represent the framework of American authority and substance. A goodly bunch of them came jetting out of Dallas, Beverly Hills, Akron and Cedar Springs, Mich., for ceremony and tribute to Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, our new pal in the Middle East.

This presidential court has a loftier purpose than that of Louis XIV. Its entry requirements have more to do with ability than blood. But there is the same gratification that men and women who run things have always got from being with each other, far from the rest of the world that may resent them or cling to them. There is much that is illusory in these moments of soft music, laughter and warm toasts. In the glow of the White House's East Room or at the State Department's Benjamin Franklin Room, with its sweeping view of the Potomac River valley, the world can seem manageable.

Gerald Ford's courtiers are saved from an overly grand view by those same jets that bring them so swiftly. They soon are dumped back into the realities of Detroit and New York. But the memories mingle and linger: supreme of pheasant smitane, Rockefeller, Harriman, Dillon, chestnut mousse, Bob Stack, Nanette Fabray, De La Renta, Alsop, filet of salmon in aspic, Cronkite, Swearingen, Humphrey, Schramsberg blanc de noir, Auchincloss. Watching from the dim corners of the old Decatur House on Lafayette Square, where the ladies went for tea, or inside the stately Anderson House, where Sadat the next day returned the White House favors with a dinner, one could see that a lot of the people had seen each other under similar circumstances not long ago (was it when the Shah visited--or Hirohito?).

Henry Ford II came with 246 others for Henry Kissinger's lunch in his eighth-floor salon. The auto prince smiled and burbled with cheer as he was plucked from his assigned place at one of the lesser tables and put at the head table to fill a vacancy. His handsome wife moved from friend to friend with smiles and short, warm busses.

The chief of Manufacturers Hanover Trust of New York shouldered somberly and authoritatively through these familiar waters. He is Gabriel Hauge, and he bore the message to beware of New York City's default and urged federal help. Hauge was a master of the elbow squeeze, the whispered message--first to Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, then to Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve. It was an intense warning, but applied under the full protocols of the court: ideas contend, men do not.

The Kennedys answered the call, and the Senator and his wife looked on approvingly when Mrs. Sadat gave a 4,500-year-old alabaster vase to the Kennedy Center. Later they came in phalanx--Rose, Eunice, Teddy and Joan--to Anderson House, where Sadat was the host. The aura of well being floated through the house, normally the home of the Society of the Cincinnati, descendants of the officers of George Washington's army.

There may have been a little morning-after fatigue, a mild headache or two.

But those are among the subtle joys of being a member of the court.

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