Oh for Another Stargazing Gardener

THE PRESIDENCY

Thomas Jefferson's 233rd birthday was hailed across the land last Tuesday. At Monticello, University of Virginia students gave him a cheer and a toast at dawn, and on the floor of the House of Representatives three scholars tried to pour a little of his wisdom into the heads of legislators, who were impatiently edging toward the Easter exit. Jerry Ford limousined over to the Jefferson Memorial to lay a wreath and claim some political kinship with the Virginian. And even one cab driver's tribute was recorded augustly by the Washington Post: "Yeah, I guess he was about the best we had."

Jefferson's language, thought and example shaped the American vision, and set those ideals we have been trying to reach ever since. Yet he was a man who eschewed the trappings of power, liked to talk about architecture as much as politics, did not call a prayer breakfast in times of stress and thought being President was less important than authoring the statute of Virginia for religious freedom. His legacy is not a program or an event. It is Jefferson himself.

Jefferson almost begrudged the time he had to spend in Washington to get the Republic going, defined the job of being President as "a splendid misery." He would have rather been at home studying the stars through his telescope, playing the violin and poking in the flower beds. Power and position were duties; they were way stops along the road to the real rewards of life--exploration of the intellectual, spiritual and physical dimensions of this existence.

It is probably a little unfair to hold him up to the men who are panting after the presidency today. But they have asked for it after months of their often unimaginative assaults on our sensibilities. What is striking in the comparative view is that virtually all of the candidates of 1976 have little in their lives beyond the pursuit and possession of power. The requirements of the office and running for it certainly take more of a person's time and energy today than 200 years ago. But the candidates' pursuit has become too singleminded. We get distorted leaders like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both men who measure life's meaning in terms of their election successes.

Before he got in the White House, Gerald Ford's world was largely the House of Representatives and the banquet halls of Republican political rallies. He was gone from home 200 nights a year, which is hardly the Jeffersonian model of family life considered so necessary for a grass-roots society.

The totality of Jimmy Carter's pilgrimage to power is its most remarkable feature. He is a man of many parts, but he has given heart, mind, soul and smile to winning the presidency. He has enlisted wife, children, sister, aunt, mother and sometimes God and Reinhold Niebuhr. There is almost no part of Carter left over for a real laugh. If Scoop Jackson has held a conversation longer than three minutes recently on a subject other than himself and politics, it has not been recorded.

One of the virtues of Ronald Reagan is that every few days he says to hell with campaigning and goes back to his ranch to ride his horses and reminisce about his old movies. (His problems have to do with what he does when he is on the political job.) Hubert Humphrey, by many measures, is at his best when he is in Waverly, Minn., reading and musing about the country's past or trolling for bass in the evening calm. If he could bring himself to announce to the world he loved Waverly so much that he was going to stay there and write and romp with his grandchildren, the clamor for him to be President might be overwhelming. He cannot do that.

Thomas Jefferson, no matter how intense the political battle or how burdensome the presidency, never gave up his other interests. Even while he governed, he thought of improving the plow he had designed, pondered the marvels of ornithology, wrote his ideas about the distillation of sea water and kept up with the new findings in meteorology. The genius of Jefferson's leadership was his insistence on a purpose in life beyond the mere possession and use of power.

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