White House All-Stars

That tireless sports fan, Richard Milhous Nixon, has been at it again. Since he proved ineffective in dealing with football futures earlier this year (his diagrammed play did not keep the Miami Dolphins from losing 24-3 to the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl), he turned this time to baseball past. At the behest of an RKO General radio reporter, and later in a bylined article for the Associated Press, President Nixon elaborately documented his choices for an alltime, All-Star baseball team.

With help from another eminent baseball authority, Son-in-Law David Eisenhower, who compiled player statistics in 1970 for the then Washington Senators, the President picked two separate teams, pre-and post-World War II, for each league. He explained his choices in some 2,800 words that re flected both a sure grasp of sport cliches and his own brand of rhetoric. He repeatedly used the term "get the nod" and said of a choice: "I have always had enormous respect for him, not only as a fine player but as a leader of men."

In general, the President's selections were obvious enough (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays and the like). They spread across a movie infantry-platoon ethnic spectrum. As New York Times Columnist Red Smith noted, Nixon "saluted young and old, white and black, Latin and Nordic, lefthander and righthander, Catholic and WASP, Jew and American Indian." No one would be offended, except perhaps a handful of Liechtensteiner and Tibetan diamond buffs.

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