The Politics of Amazing Grace

By Hugh Sidey

Most modern summit meetings have been meticulously prepackaged: speeches composed, "spontaneous" encounters with the natives scheduled, communiques trumpeting the arrival of a new era of understanding and cooperation written, edited, mimeographed, stapled and flown to the conference site ahead of time, along with the Presidential Seal and the First Lady's hairdresser.

So it probably should have been anticipated that the practitioners of such a vital art form would finally do what they did last week and proclaim several days before Jimmy Carter left for Germany that the Bonn economic summit was, in effect, over--and it was a washout. From the White House, which last week issued a new official portrait that it hoped would look more "presidential" than last year's photo, came willing explanations for the predestined disappointmen--Congress refused to support Carter, the American economy chose the wrong season to inflate, the New York Times--CBS thoughtlessly polled the people about their confidence, and the Soviet Union decided to act as mean and strong as it really is.

This all would be laughable if it weren't so important. The Bonn agenda may be relatively meaningless, but the drama of Jimmy Carter on the world stage is critical The measure of the competence of the American President has become about as significant an aftermath of the summit as anything else.

The jet plane made summitry casual. Summitry has personalized diplomacy, settled more responsibility on the men and women at the top. "At that level, decisions are all personal," former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said. "And how they are made and who makes them does make a difference." By one globetrotting diplomat's count, Carter went to Bonn with real support only from, Britain's Prime Minister Callaghan. The sentiment of the other five ranged from doubt to contempt.

The members of that summit fraternity enjoy belittling one another, albeit nicely. But politicians and technicians at lower levels generally try to avoid personalities and look at inexorable global forces and bureaucratic intractability as the ingredients of most trouble. And even that is now changing in Washington. One after another of these foreign policy specialists last week in private asked the question: How much of the current diplomatic neurosis, and the U.S.-Soviet hostility that lies at its core, has been brought about by Jimmy Carter's singular view of how to improve the world and his fellow man?

There is no easy answer. But at least one courageous writer, Thomas Hughes, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has put in print what many are thinking but do not want to say. Hughes suggests, in short, that something he calls the "pentecostal presidency" or the "commencement-day view of society" or the "politics of amazing grace" is faltering. The reluctance to discuss the issue stems from the fact that it deals with Jimmy Carter's spirituality, a dimension of the man that in almost all other ways is considered commendable. Even Kissinger, a man not given to flattery, has said that Carter's broad consideration of individual events frequently "is intelligent, prudent and good." At the other end of the scale, almost everyone attests to his mastery of detail. The middle ground seems to be the area of trouble.

Carter moralizes when he should calculate and manage, he preaches when he should devise a strategy based on reality. Diplomats claim that Carter cannot see the relationships between events. Politicians claim he misses the psychological impact of Ms actions.

An old diplomatic rule is that objectives must be firmly based on one's power and ability to achieve them.

Jimmy Carter's lofty world of words and godly intentions has involved him in a human rights campaign that is portraying the U.S. as a bully to small nations and furnishing an arena for the Soviet Union to demonstrate its strength.

A while back, after Carter had surprised people by postponing production of the neutron bomb, a White House staffer was asked how he had reached such a decision. "On his knees," was the answer. There may be more truth--and trouble--in that than we realized.

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