Losing Your Amateur Status

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

There was a time when politicians, having done their best or worst for the nation, went back home to the relative obscurity of their estates, law offices and front porches. Their subsequent public utterances were geared mainly to memoirs and the judgments of history. For the most part they discreetly left their successors to their own stumbles and triumphs.

In recent years, many of the principals of has-been Governments have taken up residence on the edge of events. Sustained by lobbying, lecture fees and foundation grants, they hurl some derision, no little doubt and--always-- advice into the midst of the newcomers on active duty. The spectacle of has-beens in the shadows yearning for a return to power (Republican Henry Kissinger as well as Democrat Walter Mondale) may be our vague answer to parliamentary government. This kind of criticism and comment has the benefit of sharpening debate and the debit of heightening confusion.

As Ronald Reagan enters his sixth month in power, the has-beens have helped put Washington in a mild dither. For one thing, there are more of them around than ever before: three vigorous former Presidents, two former Vice Presidents, six former First Ladies, scores of former Cabinet officers and literally hundreds of their lesser aides and consultants. Some, like Jimmy Carter, have been discreetly silent. Nonetheless, the has-beens form an army of sorts that marches through the hearing rooms. the banquet halls and the panel shows. leaving its public assessments of Reagan and its private disagreements with what he is doing.

For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski was in Europe last week burnishing the dismal foreign policy record of Jimmy Carter, for whom Brzezinski was National Security Adviser, and suggesting that Reagan's venture into international management so far was amateurish. The Reaganites, complained former Ambassador to Moscow Malcolm Toon not long ago, "have no foreign policy at all." His was the bluntest of many voices on that issue.

Former Vice President Mondale. now practicing law with the well-connected Washington firm of Winston & Strawn, has been on the move hustling money for his 1984 campaign and expressing the quite novel theory that Reagan had misread the American mood. From the halls of academe, Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an unreconstructed Kennedyite, endorsed the view that Reagan's budget cutting is a "dangerous course."

Much of this kind of criticism can be discounted because it is so blatantly partisan. Yet there have also been rumbles from those who wish Reagan well, like Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker on human rights. Right now Washington still admires the President as a man but is beginning to worry about his policy (or lack of it) and is even entertaining a few doubts about how far his magnetism can take the country. A few weeks ago, it was accepted that Reagan's charm was a formidable weapon. It still is, but in the singular chemistry of Washington, there is concern that too much charm without more substance can create doubt.

That subtle shift in mood in the capital mostly involves foreign policy. There comes a time in any Administration--if it is going to succeed--when all the lever-pulling and the button-mashing and the exhortation must produce a feeling of real movement and direction. The sense in the capital is that at last week's press conference, Reagan lost his amateur status. He should have known more than he did about the state of the world and U.S. intentions. Nostalgia and old movie stories have served well, and will do their bit again. But now there are bills to be put on the books, decisions to be made about defense and diplomacy.

Some thoughtful declarations from the White House are needed to take Reagan and his country from honeymoon to wedded harmony.

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