A Feeling of People Together

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

"How," asked a White House official, "can we bottle it and keep it?"

He was talking about the Bicentennial spirit, its glow lingering all week in the presidential corridors, bubbling up every few hours in the Oval Office itself.

Even after four days of speeches and ceremonies, Gerald Ford was on such an emotional high after the last event on July 5 that he did not want to give up and go back to the White House. Leaving.Monticello where he had spoken at a naturalization rite for 106 new citizens, the President ordered his helicopter pilot to circle back over Thomas Jefferson's mountaintop home. He wanted to look longer.

As the airborne caravan headed up the Potomac Valley, Ford again asked for a change in plans, to hover over Mount Vernon, George Washington's home. His aide, Jack Marsh, a Virginian and amateur historian, urged the President to swoop across the river and study Fort Washington, a stone redoubt built between 1814 and 1824 to protect the capital. As the chopper went on, Ford viewed the steeple of Christ Church where Washington had worshiped, still tall and proud along the parkway. Nearing the White House, Ford turned to his companions. "Did you get the same feeling as I got this weekend?" he asked. He answered his own question. "It was the feeling of people together."

Ford directed his staff to assess what had happened and why. Just a few hours before Queen Elizabeth arrived, Ford penciled into his greeting text: "Something wonderful happened to America this past weekend." When he found out that his staff had made a packet of his six Bicentennial speeches, he asked for a few to give to friends, his pride in his own words reaching a new height.

The White House pols debated just how they might tap this new good will for Ford's political purposes, or at least nurture it through November. Betty Ford, who had worried two years ago that the Bicentennial might be a mess, took her shoes off in her sitting room and declared she was amazed at the joy she encountered. She, too, let a little partisan fervor seep out, wondering in private if people did not understand that her husband had helped things along.

Indeed, there was even a larger debate on whether the self-confidence has been building all along and the Bicentennial simply provided an opportunity to parade it or whether all the fireworks and songs had actually been a catalyst for something new. Washington's resident joy boys, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, who write on political moods, felt vindicated since they have said for years America was never as down as others insisted. "This country listened to Jerry Rubin too long," said Scammon. "We heard from the mass of America on July 4. They have always been this way." And Wallenberg: "All we had to do was to make it O.K. again to say, 'America is a great country.' "

Almost everybody agreed that the old problems will be back with us. But almost everybody also agreed that they will be approached with a little more confidence. The presidential candidates, quick to sense a mood, have already climbed on the theme. Over at Foggy Bottom Secretary of State Henry Kissinger took a minute off to relish the impact that the Bicentennial doings would have on foreign capitals, a message that might be equal to a few billion defense dollars. "It was," said Kissinger, "a testimony to the vitality of this country. It makes the argument about who is pessimistic and who is optimistic absurd."

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