Huck Finn and the Nitpickers

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

It may have been Jimmy Carter's best-yet State of the Union ceremony. More people. More applause. Critical issues. Good speech. But something was missing. Oldtimers remember those nights awash with affection for and trust in Eisenhower, supercharged with Kennedy's joy and youth, permeated with the sense of power from Johnson and Nixon. Then the galleries were electric. Members stood their floor roared, stamped, pounded and laughed. They stood on their seats and waved like kids, infused with vigor and confidence.

Last week, when one looked down at the faces of Congress, the Cabinet, the court and the diplomatic corps, the young seemed old and the old were merely older. Is this America at middle age, or is it America simply weary or indifferent or unbelieving?

There crisis in our national life a singular feeling that the current crisis is all unreal and nothing much is genuinely changing for better or, for that matter, worse, and when the principal actors finish their speeches and when we get through at interminable presidential election, we will all be right back at worrying about what the kids are going to do next summer and how to meet the mortgage payments.

Carter still seems a little like Huck Finn in the White House, not all that certain about the work he is doing. There remains in this nation, and certainly there was in the Congress the other night, the sense that danger is not really danger, that the threat to us is not after all a real threat, that the war we talk about is not really going to be a war. This may be the ultimate corruption caused by the television tube, which brings us the daily alarms but can also be snapped off, or the channel can be changed to the comfortable skirmishes of the Bird and Magic Johnson. Another prime-time show with Jimmy, Rosalynn, Chip and Amy and a cast of hundreds.

Maybe it is that way when true danger at last manifests itself. Free people are often the last to admit and believe that catastrophe can strike. And then when they do believe trouble is on them, they do not want to talk about their fears until they have to.

Reality is hard to quantify in these times. A young (39) conservative Senator from New Hampshire, Gordon Humphrey, found like many of his fellow ideologues that the Carter address was appallingly weak. Liberals like Ted Kennedy were skeptical of the idea of reconstituting the draft in peacetime. Across the House floor there seemed to be chunks and pieces of a national mosaic but nothing holding them together. New Jersey's Millicent Fenwick was most animated when Carter mentioned women's rights. Republicans stirred themselves only slightly above polite applause when Carter promised to continue his vain efforts to balance the budget. Each had his or her interest by which to measure the message, but few seemed to bury their special sensitivities for something we used to call the national interest. That was always a vague and imperfect cry for unity, but it brought a hoarse admission of oneness.

This could have been a convention of nitpickers. Whoever in the White House had the the of distributing advance texts in the hall should be reassigned to the Bureau of Standards. Collectively, chins were down, eyes diverted. Minds raced ahead text Carter's words, language changes were noted, mistakes in text pointed out to neighbors, pages were turned as if by the cast of a high school rehearsal.

Outside, an evening of cold beauty also seemed to diminish the inside warning. A Monument moon rode high, and the city from the Washington Monument to the Capitol dome was proudly luminescent. With luck it will stay that way. But we seem to be pushing it too far.

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