Passing the Equinox

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

IN the hall outside the President's office they hung up those beautiful 15-by-18 color prints of his second Inauguration. There was Nixon with a huge smile, in tux, enfolding his glowing family as they all got

" ready to celebrate. Here he was riding down "the Avenue," leading his triumphal parade to the White House. There was Pat on the Inaugural stand, hugging Mamie, and here was Nixon sitting in a quiet corner of the White House, tooling his Inaugural Address. They hung where Nixon could see them every morning when he strode over from the mansion to go to work.

Everything about Nixon's new term is still fresh. They have not even finished knocking down the Inaugural stands and putting that used lumber "on which the President has trod" up for sale at the usual exorbitant prices. But despite all that sense of new beginning, there is something else that one feels in this city. It is a little like some of the ground mist that drifts up from Foggy Bottom on these rainy mornings. It seeps into your very bones, and you are not quite sure how to define it, but you are sure it is there.

The fact: Richard Nixon has become a lame duck. He has passed the equinox.

He has less time to serve in the White House now than he already has served. His time is beginning to run out.

He still has the power. There are worlds yet to conquer. He will dominate our lives right up to the end. But there has been a subtle change. The political carnivores of Washington have gotten the message that his power is finite.

It happens to all Presidents. But it has happened to Nixon sooner than to others. Perhaps it is another reflection of his thin national popularity, which still haunts his stewardship. It also is an accumulation of singular circumstances. There is Watergate. The people involved, including the White House, simply will not tell the truth because it is too embarrassing.

There is the peculiar end of the Viet Nam War. Nixon, with justification, thought it would come with some shouts of joy and relief, some ringing declarations of "Hail to the Chief." Not so. That strange struggle has so upset rationality that there was almost more carping during the signing of the cease-fire than before. It is unfair to Nixon.

They were having a briefing in the White House and Ron Ziegler, the czar of non-information, was giving out no answers to a whole range of bitchy questions about the budget, peace and bugging, when Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News glanced out the White House window and blinked. There was Nixon striding by, alone, eyes on the middle distance, the picture of a bothered President.

When he came out for his press conference he was grumpy. He wouldn't look the newsmen in the eye as he talked, complaining about the media and Congress, giving the Peace Corps a kick. There was just a faint whiff of that time back in 1962 when Nixon thought he was done with politics and walked off in self-pity.

There was John Connally, too. He rises like a specter at the least mention, almost as if there were a great national yearning for him to be a premature President. One sentence was spoken casually by one Administration official about how Nixon had mentioned Connally as a likely successor, and in an instant the story was bigger than life. Rightly so. The very afternoon following Nixon's press conference, when he tried to squelch the 1976 talk, old John came around to the White House for a secret meeting with the President.

It is normal for some men to leave an Administration halfway through, so some of the departures and firings now are expected. Yet there are a few people, like Speechwriter William Safire, who are edging toward the exits for no better reason than that they sense the beginning of the end. Herb Klein, the longtime Nixon friend and press aide, is looking into the condition of the publishing industry, and he will be drifting off. He has been in and around Washington almost as long as Nixon. He will be missed. He has been a monument to civility and decency in some bleak times.

One also gets the feeling from those new and unknown Cabinet officers and agency officials that they are to be caretakers, come to Washington to burnish the family name, get a little free travel and have a platform for a better job in another couple of years.

Nixon may have a Hanoi or a Havana summit soon. There may be an enormous battle over the new budget. But there is this persistent feeling these February evenings round the fire that Nixon has established the outer dimensions of his presidency. He has won the peace, perhaps ushered in an era of tranquillity. He has set the lines for public debate on the size and function of Government

It is not beyond belief that when we look back on this remarkable man, we will come to see that on the splendid evening in Key Biscayne last December, with his re-election fresh, with "peace at hand" and a pineapple sundae in his grip, Nixon was at his peak.

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