Presidents Come and Go

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Every Tuesday night a tall, lean man with a white mustache arrives at a darkened and building about a mile northwest of the White House and jams a package into a crack between the glass doors of the entrance. In red crayon the package is marked the New Republic (whose offices are on the second floor), but addressed to no one in particular there; it is signed TRB. The need for secrecy vanished years ago--everyone knows that TRB's Washington column is written by Richard L. Strout of the Christian Science Monitor--but Strout is a meticulous and habitual man.

This week after 40 years, Strout ceases to be TRB. At 85 he decided that he could no longer do two jobs properly, but will continue to report Washington for the Monitor, as he has for 62 years. Strout is pleased but a little unnerved by the adulation of his colleagues and the attention he has been getting. The phone rings: the MacNeil-Lehrer Report wants him on the air. "I'm saying the same corny stuff to everyone," he tells them. "I'm warning you I'm running dry. Don't ask me to say anything profound."

Old men often find the old ways better, but Strout is a liberal who remembers without nostalgia when the World Almanac published an annual table of lynchings. He has watched at close hand one-third of all American Presidents. Characteristically, he insists that he has never been "intimate with any of them." He recalls being scandalized at his first presidential press conference in 1922 by irreverent questions thrown at Warren G. Harding, who in plus fours pleaded, "Gentlemen, go easy. I want to get out and play some golf." And when Calvin Coolidge dictated a single sentence, had 25 copies of it made and cut into two-inch strips, then handed them out without comment to reporters who had lined up. The sentence read: "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." Strout resents the later advent of TV coverage of press conferences, which turned reporters into "reluctant, unpaid Hollywood actors, encouraging the exhibitionists."

The TRB column (the initials stand for nothing) took Strout about eight hours to write, but all week he had been "storing up and getting mad at things." In recent years, anger at current issues often gave way to reminiscence, a valuable commodity in a capital with more monuments than memories. Strout considers Roosevelt "the greatest President of my time." He remembers the "charming, bumbling Eisenhower, who gave us a caretaker Government just when we wanted it, but who had the sense to look at the clock, not to try to turn it back." L.B.J. was "an elemental force" whose Viet Nam War Strout deplored, but then Strout goes to his files and unerringly turns up a note he made to himself while reporting Johnson's 1965 "We shall overcome" speech. The note read: "I shall always like Lyndon Johnson for his civil rights speech."

A few years ago, Strout ticked off some other presidential judgments. Nixon: "Of them all, he was the only one I actively disliked right from the start. He was a flawed and insecure man." Ford: "The least devious of them all." He likes Carter and Reagan personally and, when Carter was in office, felt like "sort of an anxious nanny about him." He was flattered when Jimmy and Rosalynn invited the Strouts to dinner, was pleased by a note from Reagan. He succinctly says what he thinks of their two presidencies, then decides he does not want it printed. But the judgment reflects his conviction that "we normally elect a President and then we find out about him after. That's our silly system." He wishes we had a parliamentary system like Britain's so that national leaders would not come out of nowhere. He further believes that our excessive balancing of power leads to stalemates and weak Governments.

TRB has long been the most popular feature in the New Republic, which, despite some occasional eccentricities is now the liveliest and best weekly journal of opinion. The elderly, courtly Strout was an anomaly on a staff of editors whose average age is under 30. Strout will be hard to replace, his journalist friend I.F. Stone says, because his thinking was firmly rooted in a "day-to-day reporter's bits of insight and vivid glimpses." Nor will Strout's lucid style, his knowledge and integrity be easily matched. Editor Hendrik Hertzberg and Owner Martin Peretz hope to find a successor who is content to remain anonymous, as Strout was for a long time. That is asking a lot in an age of celebrity journalists and in a Washington that resents secrets. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.