Hazardous Course for Carter

By Hugh Sidey

The President, a noted historian reported, had a calm confidence that great things would be accomplished, that he could perceive, through God, what those things were, that he had the energy and artistry to communicate them persuasively.

In tracing the origins of the President's views, the same historian described him as a middle-class Southern boy who had deep religious feeling, a romantic view of knowledge and intense ambition. Once he had wept when he listened to a Communion hymn. He read Scripture and prayed daily. The President was convinced that God was accessible, both through prayer and in His revealed word, which provided both strength and comfort. He also found occasion, said the his torian, to interpret as the Lord's will convictions that other men attributed to less remote sources, and to find considerable moral content in issues that other men felt were secular and casual. Because of this, the President sometimes relied less upon facts than upon intuition in making up his mind.

The President, our author continued, described himself as "an idealist, with the heart of a poet." He wrote of his love of wife, family or friends with an un ashamed sentimental fervor that embarrassed some and amused others. Sometimes, the historian wrote, the President substituted a beguiling jargon for a program. The President explained at times that he would carry out liberal and reforming programs along conservative lines of action. He would preach a new morality.

The President, the author said, made evangelical didacticism a foundation for his foreign policy. Moral principle was something that every nation should not only obey but also insist upon in others. There was, the President felt, an order in human affairs determined by God and perceivable by men.

The President was not Jimmy Carter but Woodrow Wilson. The account was written 20 years ago by Yale's John Morton Blum. There are differences between the men as vast as the similar ities in the foregoing spiritual profile.

But that profile, which could apply to either man, adds interest to the mounting debate on Carter's approach to the world.

At the State Department they sometimes refer privately to Carter as "the missionary." His conduct--his human rights pronouncements, his visions of global disarmament, his policy of dispensing aid and arms according to his measure of the rectitude of various societies--sometimes does seem more emotional than practical. Add to that Rosalynn's and Secretary Cyrus Vance's Latin American entreaties on human rights and U.N. Ambassador Andy Young's thunder against white governments, past and present, and there are days when it seems we are getting nothing so much as a sermon.

Carter's Notre Dame speech, considered his most definitive statement on foreign policy, had biblical overtones ("But through failure we have found our way back to our own principles and values"). So did some press conference remarks last week ("I think there is a general sense in the world we had better get our own houses in order"). Also, a fortnight ago, Carter called a White House meeting of ten Southern Baptist leaders to plan global missionary strategy, a rare blending of presidential aura with a religious program.

Woodrow Wilson's spiritualism, so fervidly translated into his political approaches, helped defeat his great dream of putting America in the League of Nations. But it was at the core of Wilson's talk and thought about peace, a legacy that has helped raise him to high historical status.

Professor Blum contended that as Wilson met the needs of his own personality, it led him to make statements rooted in illusion. Wilson, in the judgment of his chronicler, was at once the keeper of a rigid conscience and the creature of a political system that worked only when he bent that conscience to conform. Wilson found that the power of his office could carry him only so far. Then, the historian declared, the President either had to combine influence with compromise or, defending virtue, lose his way. Carter, "the missionary," travels a hazardous course.

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