Nation: I Did Not Want the Hot Words of TV

And Other Presidential Reflections in a Crisis Week

RICHARD NIXON did not watch television once during the Middle East crisis. He scanned the morning newspapers, but he did not dwell on them. Lingering too long in the headlines, he feared, would raise his blood pressure. "There is an old Quaker saying," he said: " The most important quality in a crisis is peace at the center.' "

For those eight days the center was the White House warren, where he roamed in the cool and very calm corridors from his hideaway in the Executive Office Building to his small study, to the Oval Office, into the Rose Garden, to the staff quarters, on over to the mansion. But the outside world was let in only in controlled doses. He had the reports and memos of his men on the crisis itself. He relied on his own special news summary. "I did not want the hot words of television. Anyone watching television would have thought that war was declared eight times. Just so the man here doesn't think that."

In 20 months of stewardship, the President has grown some deeper crevices around his eyes and his hair is a shade more silver. Those who watched Nixon during this time found him calm and confident, still with that element of cunning that has always been part of him.

Nixon ordered that neither his time nor his mind was to be cluttered with the details of how many ships should go where. "It is very important to take the long view," he cautioned. "That has to be conveyed to everybody. I am not going to get bogged down in details. Look down the road. I want to pound that into the whole bureaucracy."

In the aftermath he credited his strategy with cautious success. It was a crisis, but not, perhaps, as great as reckoned earlier. It was like others before it. It will not be the last of its kind. "Russia is going to continue to probe."

Nixon stands face-to-face with his old adversary again. In a way it is somewhat of a comfort to grapple with naked power, to hear the names of men he has known for more than a decade. He has laid all the pieces of this crisis out around him for deeper study. The Soviet cooperation in the later stages he rated better than their actions in previous times of tension. But their initial violations of the cease-fire is another matter. The issue will come up again, the President believes. "It will not be overlooked," he told one of his visitors.

U.S. foreign policy, the President reflected, has long been "provincial rather than global. They talk about neoisolationism. That's not new. We've always been isolationist. The role we have is not a role we would have preferred. The Marshall Plan and other acts of help were reactions to problems rather than calculated moves in a master plan of world dominance like those devised in other generations by Germany and France. The Peace Corps touched the heartstrings of America." But more than idealism is needed. The U.S. must make certain that other nations have the chance to develop as they wish, "whether it be left, right or center."