A Little Experience Is ... Useful

Almost every new President, fresh from political triumph or flushed with the vibrancy of vast power, thinks foreign policy is easy. He is flattered by other heads of state, puffed up by admiring aides. Deflation inevitably follows. The important thing is not that mistakes are made. They always are. The meaningful point is whether the President learns from them, and how fast he learns. That is the question today about Jimmy Carter. He has had his first seminar with the Soviet Union. More will follow.

"... His predecessors all had indelible lessons. Harry Truman, recalls Clark Clifford, his principal aide, spent his first year believing that Uncle Joe Stalin might be a lot like other tough politicians whom Truman had known. He waited for the Russians to act fairly and responsibly (as viewed from the U.S.) in the postwar world. Then one day Harry decided he had waited long enough. He climbed into his limousine and went to the Hill and declared the Truman Doctrine to help the weak nations resist the Communists.

John Kennedy used to believe that what he had learned at his father's breakfast table made him an expert in international affairs. The memories of his graduate course during the first nine months of 1961 have, unfortunately, grown too dim in Washington. The Russians sent a man into space before we did and began to test the monster nuclear weapons that nobody thought they had. Our planes in the Berlin air corridor were buzzed; the autobahns were blocked. Insurgents consumed large chunks of Laos. The Bay of Pigs adventure was a disaster. Nikita Khrushchev pounded the table at the Vienna summit. The East Germans put up the Berlin Wall.

By the fall of that year Kennedy was

ready to be President. His contempt for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed so bitterly at the time of the Bay of Pigs, evolved into the realization that sometimes they knew better than he did. "I did not know enough to ask the right questions," he admitted. One night at dinner Kennedy confessed to friends that Khrushchev turned out to be different from any person he had ever met or imagined. J.F.K.'s experience up to then had suggested that Khrushchev would share his fear of a nuclear exchange and pledge himself to do almost anything to avoid it. When he tried the idea on the Soviet boss, Khrushchev was untouched. Kennedy was shaken --but the stars in his eyes were gone.

It is true that there are times when experience can be misread and misused to prevent needed change. Back in the mid-1960s, Lyndon Johnson used to ponder the idea of asking the Red Chinese to talk with him. "I figure that the only way we can ever resolve our problems is if we sit down somewhere together," he mused. "But my diplomats tell me we can't do it now." Richard Nixon chose to ignore that same diplomatic advice. He went to China.

Indeed, there are knowledgeable men around Washington who say the best presidential practitioners in foreign policy were Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Ike learned power commanding the Allied forces in Europe. Nixon studied the world and its leaders during his 16 years of global wanderings as the Vice President and a lawyer.

Carter and Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, may find new techniques for doing diplomatic business with the rest of the world, but there is, as yet, no evidence that ignorance is a help. Carter is in several ways the least experienced modern President in world affairs to occupy the Oval Office.

Adlai Stevenson once described experience this way: "A knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love --the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see." Jimmy Carter will have full opportunity to accumulate the necessary sights and sounds, victories and failures.

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