"To See the Stars Again"

By Hugh Sidey

Jimmy Carter and his closest advisers gathered last Wednesday morning to take a look at the nation two months into spring. The man-made disaster in Miami was first on the agenda, a human tragedy that already had claimed much of the President's energy. Then they turned to nature's outburst on Mount St. Helens and realized, as Science Adviser Frank Press had said, "it was a scientific event of historic proportions." Something stirred inside Carter. He decided to fly west to show his concern for the people of Washington State, their cities and farms. He also was drawn by the continuing romance between Presidents and this remarkable land.

Next morning in his Huey helicopter, hovering over the volcanic aftermath, Carter was even more awed than he thought he would be. "The world has to see this," he said. "The power of nature."

Most Presidents have sensed the land's rhythms in one way or another.

Thomas Jefferson was just about as intrigued by the unexplored vastness between him and the Pacific Ocean as he was by forming a government for the new republic. When he came to the White House the way west was fixed in his imagination. He called the area "terra incognita" and finally sent Lewis and Clark to take a look. Jefferson understood that its hugeness, its richness, was to be the basis of American greatness. It still is, and that is the same force that touched Carter.

In the early years, taming and exploiting the natural wealth was the task. As we have crowded the country and used up its gifts, the problems are those of preservation and protection.

Still, the scent of the land is strong in the White House.

Teddy Roosevelt could feel the primal forces. He was drawn west as a young man, captivated, as Edmund Morris writes, by "the sheer immensity of America ... For the rest of his life 'big' was to be one of his favorite words." His lonely confrontation with the West was to shape his ideas of power and leadership in the presidency.

Franklin Roosevelt possessed a gentleman farmer's scholarly and poetic approach to land and growing things. He studied conservation, raised

Christmas trees. When yellow grit from Nebraska sifted through the White House doors during the Dust Bowl years, F.D.R. became an avid student of the causes of the drought and possible defenses against the blowing topsoil. Lyndon Johnson used to tell how he won Roosevelt's approval for a dam on the lower Colorado River by enticing the President with pictures of various other dams, a subject dear to Roosevelt's heart.

One of the events of Hubert Humphrey's life that drew him toward politics and Washington occurred in 1936 when some Department of Agriculture experts showed up at Doland, S. Dak., to plant scraggly pine trees that were to be part of a shelter belt from Canada to the Gulf, designed to slow down the remorseless prairie wind. As Hubert used to recall, the trees quickly died in the 100DEG heat but the act showed "that somebody back there cared."

Floods and hurricanes have been the concerns of all Presidents. But most of them also needed some tranquil moments with nature. Johnson would abruptly stamp his feet on the White House drive, look glumly at the gray Washington skies and fly off to his Texas ranch, declaring "I've got to see the stars again." Down there he would walk beside his small river, the Pedernales, and explain, "To a rancher, running water is the prettiest sound God ever made."

Just a few weeks before he was killed, John Kennedy saw the Grand Tetons for the first time. He stood and watched the light fade on the spectacular peaks, remarking to those around him how profoundly he was moved by such grandeur, so different from his home on Cape Cod.

Historian Dumas Malone has been worried in recent years that the farther Americans remove themselves from the land, both its beautiful and brutal overtures, the less able we will be to survive our modern challenges. Perhaps Mount St. Helens was reminding us.

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