Hail to The Vacationer-in-Chief

By JAMES COLLINS

It is a truism that Americans expect and desire their President to have some of the qualities of a king. When noting this phenomenon, observers usually have in mind Air Force One, the Deaverish pomp of presidential events, the Secret Service agents who so resemble a monarch's elite household guard, the convoy of limousines that accompanies the President on his visits, and the other grandiose appurtenances of the presidency. Even Bill Clinton has benefited from this aspect of his office and so appears somewhat more imposing and regal than would the former Governor of Arkansas if he were treated like, say, the Prime Minister of Denmark. Nevertheless, as his circumstances this week all too readily indicate, Clinton is not in a position to exploit another quasi-monarchial institution that Presidents have often turned to good advantage: an institution we might call the Summer Palace.

Some part of the American psyche seems pleased to see the President as a sportsman who lives relatively well, occasionally with a hint of aristocratic idleness. The summer retreats of past Presidents have provided a setting where they could show themselves off in this light. John F. Kennedy went to Hyannis Port and sailed in all weathers; at his ranch in Texas (the Texas White House, as it was known), Lyndon Johnson hunted deer; Richard Nixon spent weeks every summer at his large house by the Pacific in San Clemente (or the Western White House, as it was known) indulging in Californian luxuriance; Ronald Reagan visited his ranch in California faithfully each August, where he rode and cleared brush and chopped wood; in Kennebunkport, George Bush raced around in his cigarette boat and tended his East Coast patrician roots. When some of these Presidents spent many weeks away from Washington at these August sanctuaries, only editorialists, not the public, seemed to object. Absent from this list is Jimmy Carter, whose peanut farm left no trace on the citizenry's imagination; after he left office, however, Carter did have built as a country place a modest log cabin in the Georgia woods, making him, as was said at the time, the only person ever to go from being President to living in a log cabin.

A residence in the country not only gives the President a patina of masculine, aristocratic ease, but in the specific ways the President uses it, it also provides a powerful second context, a non-Washington context, with which he can define himself. Not every summer White House would work for each President, but each gave the President a useful background outside Washington against which to set himself on a regular basis. Are there any more appealing images of Kennedy than those of him sailing, his hair tousled? At San Clemente, Nixon reminded the country that he was a poor boy who had made good and -- lest his native state forget it in the 1972 election -- that he was a Californian. Ronald Reagan -- code name "Rawhide" -- could not possibly have reinforced his image as a mythic cowboy any better than by riding at his "ranch." Bush used his powerboat, of course, to defuse accusations of wimpiness. Lacking a summer White House, Clinton misses the opportunity to burn such images into the mind of the public, which now tends to think of baggy running shorts when contemplating the sporting habits of its current leader.

Even if Clinton had planned his vacation in a more organized and less comic fashion -- if he had lined up that condo on Hilton Head Island in March -- he would not have taken full advantage of the opportunity an August progress can provide. When columnist Stewart Alsop visited Lyndon Johnson at the L.B.J. Ranch while Johnson was President, he was driven to make the most unlikely comparison: the L.B.J. Ranch, it occurred to him, had "odd echoes of Chartwell," the country place of Winston Churchill. "Mr. Churchill was marvelously and unashamedly proud of everything about Chartwell . . ." Alsop said years later. "But he was proudest of all of his goldfish pond . . . 'See that one there,' he would say . . . 'the one that looks rather like Clement Attlee? I paid only 10 shillings for that one -- worth fully two pounds now, I dare say.' " Alsop was reminded of his visit to Chartwell when he toured the L.B.J. Ranch at high speed in a limousine with Johnson himself at the wheel. Reaching a group of cattle, Johnson would "behave precisely like Churchill with his goldfish -- pointing out each animal in turn, occasionally comparing its appearance to that of some fellow politician and telling his visitors just what he had paid for it and precisely what staggering profit he expected to realize." But the similarity between Chartwell and the L.B.J. Ranch was evident in more than these details. Johnson's visitors, Alsop recalled, "have the same feeling that visitors to Chartwell have -- that they are expected, nay, commanded, to exclaim and to admire." A certain kind of country seat provides a President with the chance to impose his expansive, extraordinary personality on others; a condo on Hilton Head would somehow lack something in this regard.

But Clinton should be careful. In 1969, when Richard Nixon bought La Casa Pacifica at San Clemente, LIFE magazine ran huge color pictures of it and its proud new occupant. Over the years, scores of such photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines. Alas, it all ended in scandal: Nixon had misled the press about what he had paid for the property, and in fact his friend Robert Abplanalp had provided more than a million dollars' so he could buy it; furthermore, Nixon used several millions of dollars worth of government money to increase security and make improvements. Better a Clintonesque, jerry- rigged vacation than that.