FIRST WEEKS: A SENSE OF INNER DIRECTION

TWO weeks is hardly sufficient time to analyze an Administration's style, let alone its basic thrust toward the future. Nonetheless, Richard Nixon is making some first impressions that promise to be durable. The President seems keenly aware of the importance of the beginning. So far, he has avoided the blast of major action, but his carefully aimed shafts denote a distinct mood and temper. Paramount among these is what a sociologist might call a sense of inner direction.

The man himself seems seized by a feeling of self-confidence and assurance that he has not always shown in the past. He is thoroughly at home in the White House. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, Nixon seems to draw an almost visceral comfort from his new habitat. Far from feeling claustrophobically fenced in, as his immediate predecessors often did, Nixon luxuriates in the ambience of privacy and power. For Kennedy and Johnson, "home" always seemed somewhere else. For Nixon, a man without deep geographic roots, home is now the apex to which he aspired for so long.

Social Monuments. He inspects the kennel with his new Irish setter, King Timahoe, and finds it satisfactory. He enthuses over the fact that it takes just a couple of minutes to walk to work. He uses the private movie theater to show a film on Apollo 8. The small, comfortable sitting room adjoining the Lincoln bedroom has become a nighttime hideaway and study.

The White House is the Nixons' home, and like all first families they have quickly put their brand on it. White tie is back for formal occasions. Hard liquor was nowhere to be found at last week's diplomatic reception; the guests were served champagne and church-social punch. During the past eight years, the White House was a slightly manic mansion, with friends, newsmen, relatives, and buddies from old political and real wars bustling in and out. Among the Nixons' guests during their first fortnight were a few personal friends of long standing, such as J. Edgar Hoover, and some social monuments like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 84, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter. Instead of traipsing through Georgetown or the Virginia suburbs on evenings or weekends when the White House was quiet, the Nixons have been dining with each other--something of a novelty for them.

When the President has gone out into the city, it has usually been on business. On successive days he visited the floors of the House and Senate--a first for a President since Harry Truman dropped by to watch his electoral votes being counted 20 years ago.

Nixon, of course, was assiduously wooing the opposition that controls Capitol Hill. In a display of bipartisan jocularity, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield assured Nixon that the Democrats would do their utmost to contribute to the Administration's success.

Nixon's lack of rapport with Negroes obviously bothered him. So in company with the capital's Negro mayor, Walter Washington, the President dropped into a black ghetto, shook hands with the boys at the local pool parlor, and inspected the clearing of ruins caused by the Washington riots. Then he brought out a tough new anticrime program for the capital (see following story).

Absent Mother. In an effort to cement relations with the federal bureaucracy, Nixon visited the Defense, Justice and State departments. At State, there was not a word of the house-cleaning of personnel Nixon talked about during the campaign. Instead, in an effort to allay fears that Henry Kissinger's national-security staff at the White House would pre-empt State's jurisdiction, Nixon said that the Secretary of State and his department would always rank No. 1. There were similar kind words for the generals, admirals and attorneys.

But Nixon was also making demands. His methodology calls for microscopic scrutiny of individual problems. Thus the National Security Council has spent one Saturday on Viet Nam, the next on the Middle East. While U.S. negotiators in Paris were pushing a proposal to rid the Demilitarized Zone of combat operations, the President last week sent State, Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency a long questionnaire, officially known as National Security Council Study Memorandum No. 1. Its aim: to elicit a fresh assessment of the situation in Viet Nam. The Pentagon was also asked to draw up a report on precisely how the draft could be replaced with an all-volunteer Army after Viet Nam.

As the Administration began to make its impact on Washington, the President was establishing his persona with the nation at large. Obviously, it is to be cool, methodical, "action-oriented," in the phrase of Communications Director Herb Klein. Nowhere was the new approach more evident than at Nixon's first press conference as President. With only a microphone in the East Room of the White House--"Mother," Lyndon Johnson's monstrous, multigadgeted lectern has been stowed away--Nixon skillfully answered a wide range of questions on subjects from Viet Nam to crime in the streets of Washington. Nervous at first, with a tremor in his voice, he quickly gained confidence, moving from topic to topic with a lawyer's precision. He ticked off points with a "first," "second" and "finally," and his choice of words was indicative of his concern with organization and teamwork. In 32 minutes he mentioned "guidelines" and "new teams" four times each.

Sufficiency Is Sufficient. While he gave few indications of what he would do specifically, Nixon did give a sign of where he might be headed. He declared that he was in favor of negotiations with the Soviet Union to slow the arms race. However, departing from the previous Administration's policy, he said that he would try to achieve some kind of political agreement at the same time. In one of his most widely noted comments, the President implicitly retreated from his campaign pledge to boost U.S. armaments and seek clear-cut strategic superiority. Now, he said, "sufficiency" would be enough.

Later in the week, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who was Nixon's military adviser during the campaign, reluctantly admitted that his boss was right on sufficiency--which to Laird was apparently synonymous with "superiority." To further that end, said Laird, the Nixon Administration would continue with the $5 billion-to-$10 billion Sentinel antiballistic missile system. Designed to ward off a primitive Chinese attack--but virtually useless against a heavy Russian assault--Sentinel, in Laird's view, would nonetheless be an important bargaining pawn when negotiations do start with the Soviets. Many Congressmen, who grudgingly agreed to the Johnson Administration's request for funds last year, will disagree. Thus Sentinel, which even many defense experts believe is worthless, may provide the Nixon Administration's first major test on Capitol Hill. If his first weeks are any indication, Nixon will be prepared for it.

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