The Shape of Things to Come

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

In the Pentagon they call it the "Bay of Rugs." The humor is a little weak, but the point is valid. Just as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 sobered John Kennedy's Government, so has the Iranian crisis shocked today's Washington into a new sense of reality.

The world, the U.S. and the White House are different. Just how, we will begin to see when the tension now girdling the capital is finally eased, with or without tragedy. A new era is coming.

"We will hear fewer prayers and more verses of the Marine Hymn in the next year," says one member of the White House. Gibes a Marine officer: "That was always good music."

Some vindicated prophets are already riding high. Among them are Washington's Henry M. Jackson, who has fought a lonely battle for more U.S. power year upon year, Georgia's Sam Nunn, who saw a crisis coming and used the SALT debate to nudge the Government toward more concern, and New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the preachers of the new reality. Jackson's phone has been ringing with callers urging him to get into the presidential race. Sam Nunn looked up at an aide last week and marveled at the sudden interest the media were displaying in the defense budget. For at least an hour a day now, Moynihan fields calls from his intellectual friends across the nation; the subject--the new shape of America. Universities have found in the New Yorker a new Pied Piper.

Diplomatic standings will change in the coming era, some up, some down. The Soviet Union's smooth-talking Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin will rate lower. So will former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and certain diplomats from the Third World. Henry Kissinger, former everything, will step a notch up. So will Anwar Sadat's skillful Washington envoy Ashraf Ghorbal. Spies are back, and the Carter Administration will not be using the word love quite so often or in quite the same way.

After the world has been steeped in the preaching of Khomeini, the traditional American political flaws of booze, sex and money will not seem quite so bad, predicts the American Enterprise Institute's Ben Wattenberg. "Libertines will get a boost."

Pentagon spirit is on the rise. Marine Lieut. Colonel Arthur Brill walked into a bar in Manhattan's Grand Central Station, and the bartender, spotting his uniform, announced: "The first drink is on me." Brill was flabbergasted. That had not happened to him for years. "I'd like to see Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden take their tour today," he mused. Many more television programs and movies are being submitted to the armed services for consultation and technical advice. Marines are going to be good guys again on film. Says one officer: "We have learned there are some things in this world you cannot solve with a bumper sticker."

The military-industrial complex is in subterranean motion. Within hours of the start of the crisis, men from Lockheed, makers of the giant C-5A troop and equipment airlifter, were in Secretary of Defense Harold Brown's office, reviewing the American capacity to move military forces around the world. And engineers and tacticians from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas scurried to the Pentagon with the announcement of plans for a Marine Rapid Deployment Force. The current official vocabulary has to do with American bases abroad, overflight rights with friendly countries, aerial refueling capacity. The adrenaline is flowing, but there are some tough problems on the way back to first-class power. A red-faced White House is learning that a new airborne carrier may be needed for cruise missiles. The Administration is making embarrassed inquiries about a version of the B-1 bomber canceled in 1977.

At this rate the gin martini may be embraced next by the Georgia White House. That's O.K. There is a body of opinion that the world worked better before men took to mineral water.

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