Happiness Under Red Stars

By Hugh Sidey

Crouched and perspiring in the frenzied moment, Photographer Dirck Halstead squinted through his telephoto lens last Thursday at the animated face of Richard Nixon and squeezed off what may have been his 25,000th shot of the famous visage in six years. As he zoomed in and out to include Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet boss, it suddenly crossed Halstead's busy mind that he had rarely--certainly not for years--seen Nixon so happy.

The President and Brezhnev raised and clinked small glasses of tomato juice, toasting each other. They traded quips, squeezed one another's elbows and floated down the lines of dignitaries on their special cloud of power and personal rapture. It was a curious sight, this American President, whose relationship with his own people is so fragile and distant, so joyously in the embrace of a Communist dictator, so transported in the grandeur of the Kremlin, where the Czars once walked.

Nixon is not a man without a country--but he is now a man who finds more honor and respect, cheers and adulation beyond American shores. There is something wistful about his journeys. People in the streets by the thousands shout his praises. Kings attack his political enemies at home. Communists pump up his stature and give him the security and secretiveness he cannot have in a democracy.

It is the life that Nixon relishes and one in which he excels. Beyond the catcalls of Congress, beyond the Investigators and the hostile press, he is sovereign. His flying White House is self-sufficient. The American diplomatic, military and commercial presence all over the world forms a system of arteries that pump in services, advice and even encouragement. (Bebe Rebozo was "in the neighborhood" when Nixon arrived in Brussels and so hopped up from Spain for a few minutes' chat with his friend.) The President's meetings are small and confidential. His right to stay above and beyond the masses is absolute. It is one of the ironies of the singular career of Republican Nixon that palace life fits him better in many ways than life at the White House.

This voyage began with the booming approval of NATO's Secretary General Joseph Luns. The handshake of this genial giant following the signing of the declaration on Atlantic relations rippled all the way up the President's arm and into his chest like a shot of Adrenalin. When Nixon walked from his residence to King Baudouin's for lunch he spied the guards that so impressed him on his last visit that he had special uniforms made for the White House police. There was so much American laughter that Nixon abandoned the scheme. But there must have been some regret lingering in the President's mind. Before going into the palace, he went up to the head of the guards, who was mounted on his horse. "I remember you from last time," he said. "I still think it is the best guard group in the world."

When he walked into his Kremlin apartment the next day, Nixon looked down the long, elegant hall. "It's a magnificent place," he told those with him. "You think of all the history these walls have seen." He paused a moment, then added, "Come to think of it, we made a good deal of history here in 1972." Nixon pointed to a chair, savoring his recollections. "I remember sitting right there and talking with Kissinger. . ."

That night he and Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig, his staff chief, strolled through the Kremlin grounds talking softly in the dark with no worry of intrusion from photographers or constituents. The three men walked by the apartment where Lenin had lived when he came to the Kremlin to direct the revolution and formation of a government. They went by the modern auditorium built beneath the ancient church spires with gilded onion domes. Nixon noted how old and new were fitted together behind the Kremlin walls. He paused a moment In the discussion to take another look at the monstrous, potbellied Czar Cannon that still stands as a reminder of old glories--and repressions.

The red stars of Russia glowed from the high spires of the Kremlin towers in the mellow night, casting a special spell over the three Americans so far from home who by themselves were shaping the U.S. position in an uncertain world.

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