Portrait of a Man Grown Larger

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

President Carter now has the body and face of a far younger man. His running has boiled off even the traces of fat, made his stomach almost concave. His muscles and bones have adjusted to the new physical challenge. The corners show. His face seems square from his jaw to his haircut, which has exposed his ears more and flattened the top. More angles. The stringiness so apparent when he first began jogging has disappeared. He is coiled physical vitality behind the desk in the Oval Office or sitting in an overstuffed chair in the family quarters.

Carter is a rather small man.

He weighs 151 Ibs., stands 5 ft. 9 1/2 in. Plain, muted suits and ties enhance his slenderness. Yet when he talks these days he seems bigger. His principal concern is world peace. His thoughts must embrace the entire globe. For three years he used to rush back from every excursion into Big Power and drop out with town meetings and backyard picnics. He cannot do that today. Events are on the march, and either he plays the central role or no one does. Soviet intentions must be redefined, free-world interests stated, and American power positioned to provide political unity and hold territory. It is not the sort of thing most Presidents like to do. It is dangerous work. Harry Truman, it is said, would just as soon have ducked U.S. involvement in the Greek-Turkish crisis of 1947. He concluded he could not, and the Truman Doctrine was born. It was perhaps his finest hour.

The question: Is this new Carter big enough inside to understand the enormousness of the challenge the U.S. faces and reach beyond anything he has imagined before to establish a principle for free-world survival?

There are some good signs. Carter reads the hot-line messages from Leonid Brezhnev with knitted brows. Question marks. He handles the few pages as if they were radioactive. They could be. He says each critical word as if destiny were buried in its syllables. That could be too. He talks about power and the possibility of war as he used to talk Government reorganization and revenue sharing. His mind probes beyond the merely visible. If the Soviet moves in Afghanistan are unopposed, that confirms to the men in the Politburo that they can invade the soft spots of the free world with impunity. If that attitude survives these months, then cataclysm lies ahead. Carter must move on instinct, something he has avoided for three years.

He reads the old documents, like the account of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He worries on the phone with France's President Giscard d'Estaing, and he probes cautiously on a call to India's newly elected and infuriating Indira Gandhi. The President's international phoning is now done with the same casualness he uses for Iowa's caucus votes. His list includes Pakistan's Zia, Germany's Schmidt, Egypt's Sadat, Britain's Thatcher. He still writes Brezhnev regular personal letters.

Carter's mind has never had to embrace so much. One second it is on China and the next on the U.N., then on the Third World and again on the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf, from there to the Islamic conference in Pakistan and back to U.S. military capability. The breadth and difficulty of these unsolved equations of power are Churchillian.

Upstairs in the mansion, in the west sitting hall, he can occasionally be glimpsed in the morning light beneath his favorite painting, a still life by William Michael Harnett in 1888. It shows a table with books, a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a pipe and spilled ashes, a brass candlestick. It is a scene that is left by a man in thought. One senses some resonance between Carter and the painting. The time of Carter's contemplation of this strained world is about over. What has been read and thought must now be brought to life.

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