Into the Wild Blue Yonder

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

The wings of Air Force One, glistening in their new coat of Glass Wax, have swooped through the skies of Eastern Europe and ancient Persia. Jimmy Carter's Georgia gang have dined aloft on steak and eggs, chewed Doublemint, and sent home their first dispatches from their airborne odyssey.

Rosalynn has handed out her 200 Polish-Pride coloring books to the kids of Warsaw and some jazz tapes to the city's hep older citizens. The Shah of Iran has been given his matched set of porcelain plates with splendid Winslow Homer paintings on them. There are books on Audubon and Thoreau yet to be distributed along the President's route; the Steuben prism that focuses its light on a golden eagle will be presented to King Khalid, an avid falconer, in Saudi Arabia.

Presidential trips are not the novelties they used to be, but they remain a particularly American spectacle. There are movement and excitement, new sights and sounds, the grace of the plane that carries the President. It is in its way a descendant of the Conestoga wagons and the elegant sailing clippers. There is, too, the open fascination with different people and customs that the touring Americans always bring along, a lasting heritage from immigrant ancestors.

Franklin Roosevelt was the first President to take to the air and dramatically expand a President's reach, flying in 1943 to Casablanca in a Boeing Clipper to meet Churchill and De Gaulle. Harry Truman sped to Wake Island to parley with General Douglas MacArthur in a Douglas DC-6 called the Independence. Ike was hailed throughout the world in the Columbine, a slope-nosed Lockheed Constellation. All made momentous trips, heightened by the marvel of American aviation that shrank the world dramatically with each new President.

Where power goes, there goes history. The meeting between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 may have precipitated the Cuban missile crisis because the Soviet leader thought he faced a callow kid. Lyndon Johnson used his jet like seven-league boots, striding over the world with low-calorie root beer and Texas steaks in the galley, gathering Prime Ministers around him as he worried about Viet Nam, presiding above the clouds from his automatic chair that went up and down at the touch of a button. There may never be another presidential moment like the Monday night in Peking when Richard Nixon and Premier Chou En-lai toasted each other in the Great Hall and the People's Liberation Army Band No. 1 played Turkey in the Straw and Home on the Range. Jerry Ford added his chapter in Vladivostok, spending the night with Leonid Brezhnev to conclude details of a nuclear-arms-limitation agreement.

Nothing so heady is planned for Carter this trip. But Yankees abroad are always worth watching for the sheer pleasure of it. Kennedy soothed his aching back in Napoleon's gold bathtub while awed aides from Nebraska and Massachusetts watched. L.B.J. brought his exercise bicycle along, bolted it to the floor of Air Force One, and pumped away in his sweat suit at 37,000 feet over Asia in 1967. As he pedaled, he gave an interview to reporters on the glories of the first presidential circumnavigation of the globe. It was on this trip that he delivered a bust of himself to a startled Pope Paul VI in the Vatican on Christmas Eve.

In the Kremlin in 1972, Nixon ate Wheaties and smoked a pipe (Americans had not known he indulged). On another journey, Nixon sat with Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito on an old bunk bed in the marshal's restored birthplace in Kumrovec, swapping hard-time stories. When Jerry Ford had a fur hat clamped on his head by Brezhnev on the frozen plain near Vladivostok, he grinned, then immediately walked over to reporters and asked if they had heard the score of the big game back home: Michigan was playing Ohio State.

So a man from Plains will add his lore to this travelogue, filled with moments that have changed the world, footnoted with the sublime and the ridiculous but rarely dull or meaningless. The sport of Presidents has gained another enthusiast.

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