Closing Out an lnterim Chapter

(2 of 2)

Even as Ford gathered his family around him in defeat, there were shadowy reminders in his White House of the continuous American drama. Teddy Roosevelt rode his horse in the great oil paintings that festooned the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing. T.R. was a Ford favorite, but his exuberance was both physical and intellectual, something that Ford could not emulate. And Harry Truman was there in bronze and canvas, his guts and spunk something that Ford wanted to capture and use for himself but could not quite bring off.

Surely there will be a place some day down in the White House foyer for the portrait of the man who pulled the country out of its worst political scandal. Few Presidents have done more than one thing for their nation or left more than one thought or one mark in history. Ford has done that. The portraits that hung in the darkened foyer on Tuesday night included those of Truman and Eisenhower but also of Franklin Pierce and Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover, not men of greatness, but men who did their best. In that there is honor. Ford can proudly take his stand in such company.

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He will hand the presidency to Jimmy Carter in good shape. It remains the world's most powerful office, stripped now of some of the imperial trappings that caused trouble, subject to more restraint in certain areas by the Congress, but—as symbol of the nation's ideals and administrator of American life—larger than ever. It cannot possibly live up to this country's soaring expectations, but the presidency is unfettered finally from Viet Nam and Watergate and ready for a new try.

By one calculation, at least. Jimmy Carter will come to Washington less experienced in the ways of the power society than any President since Zachary Taylor. He has never stayed overnight in the White House, actually visited the building only three times and only for a couple of hours each time. But his distance from the Oval Office has been his strength, and with luck and skill it could be his genius. Those who have run the capital for so long have created a mystique about its complexities and its rituals, a device to persuade the nation to keep them in power.

Carter's victory seems to have changed that—how completely could be judged by the tearless acceptance of the verdict. For the most part, the Republicans jammed into the Sheraton-Park Hotel were free of bitterness, the Democrats in the Mayflower Hotel more reassured than exultant. And through the night, the other people of Washington, so sensitive to trauma, did not maintain a nervous vigil outside the gates of the White House.