THE PRESIDENCY by HUGH SIDEY: Drum Rolls and Lightning

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Nixon's writing will offer ideas about strong leadership, rules of international positioning, in which he believes. "We are now in a war called peace ... The time is right for leadership from the United States. That means not only from the President (people expect too much from the President) but from opinion leaders, corporate heads and others ... We need a revival of will." A President should be a man viewed as capable of acting "rashly," Nixon contends. He should be a man who is feared. "The next President's qualifications should be tested against foreign policy. If he fails there, we all fail."

Dealing in this world takes a man who believes in the right principles, Nixon says, but a man who also has "street smarts" and "can play every trick ... We want him skillful, shrewd and as tough in the clutch as the other guy. The presidents of the top 50 or so corporations in the United States might be more intelligent, smoother, better poker players, have better manners, but there are no more than two or three of them I would want in a room with a healthy Brezhnev. But I do know some labor leaders I would put in there."

From his Pacific heights Nixon detects a change among intellectuals abroad and here. "They are beginning to take a second look at the world around them, a more realistic look." If they can join with the leaders of American society, then, he believes, we may be headed out of an era "lost in uncertainty" and "paralyzed by propriety." That way, says the exile, this "dicey time" could turn into an era of opportunity.