In Jerry's Crystal Ball

October 1978. Hail to the Chief booms out over the assembled dignitaries in the East Room of the White House. The President strides in, smiling broadly. He announces yet another Middle East peace agreement worked out by his ubiquitous Secretary of State, this one between Israel and Jordan. It is the third in a sequence that began a year and a half ago with an Israeli-Egyptian treaty. While he has the rapt attention of his audience, the President reveals that the SALT II agreement signed twelve months earlier has worked so well that the Soviet leadership wants to move on to Phase III, a sizable reduction in major weapons. The President says he will be leaving next month for his third summit with Leonid Brezhnev. All this hope, continues the President, coming on top of the announcement that very afternoon that U.S. inflation fell below 4%, calls for a small celebration. His guests are invited into the Blue Room for a glass of champagne, or a martini if they want one.

There is a little poetic embellishment to the above scene, but it is pretty close to the picture of how-things-might-have-been that emerges from the relaxed mind of Gerald Ford, ensconced last week at the edge of Thunderbird's glorious fairways in Palm Springs. If he had been elected two years ago, Ford goes on, he would have kept the B-l bomber moving, gone ahead with the neutron bomb and the M-X missile. He also would have had less trouble than that fellow now in the White House in getting a Panama Canal treaty approved, in ending the Turkish arms embargo and in selling planes to Saudi Arabia.

He would have moved ahead with a modest tax cut, he says, not tried trivial tax reforms like reducing deductible martini lunches. He would have designed an energy policy to encourage new oil exploration and alternative sources, not to tax them. He would have moved harder for deregulation of natural-gas prices. He would have fought for a more restrictive federal budget and he no doubt would have a string of vetoes hanging on his belt. But he still would have called up his friend House Speaker Tip O'Neill for golf at Burning Tree to rib him about the rebellious state of the Democratic majority in Congress.

"We were getting it to work," said Ford, thinking back to when he left Washington. "Another four years and we could have proved everything worked. I think we were right on the crest of this [new national conservative] movement. That convinces me, among other things, that in another four years we would have been moving with the tide."

Thus does the sunshine affect this political warrior, who loves it away from Washington but misses it. He will spend 24 days of this month campaigning for the Republican cause (and a little bit for Jerry's cause, whatever that is).

Ford said long before he left the White House that Carter's big problem was that he had not been in the big leagues. "I would repeat that, and I would add that it has been compounded by a staff that doesn't measure up. There is some evidence that their on-the-job training has been helpful, but they have a long way to go."

And on those water projects that Carter wants to kill--Ford's own budget man tried to get him to slash them, but when he saw they were all started, a red flag went up in the back of his mind. "I said we might as well finish them. But then we should lay down a policy of no new starts ... I'll bet you before they are through, every one of the projects will be complete, and it will be more expensive because they stopped construction and then resumed it ... They had lots of ideas about what they were going to do and it sounded good on the campaign trail."

Indeed, it sounds a little like the campaign trail at Thunderbird, with a martini over ice and not an enemy in the world, not even Jimmy Carter. Don't get him wrong, says the former President, "I am not sitting here scheming to get back and be President." But he does like to imagine how it all might be...

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