Nation: TEES, TIGERS, TITMICE--& A PRESIDENT TOO?

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Whether they are running or nonrunning, the top G.O.P. presidential potentials must fight gamely to keep up with their home and hobby life. Remarkably enough, most of them seem to be winning the battle.

Barry Goldwater still putters in his Phoenix saguaro cactus garden, where he has rigged heat lamps that glow automatically whenever freezing temperatures threaten. Nelson Rockefeller steals moments at his hifi, sits fascinated by the Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman bands of the '30s. Dick Nixon thrills to the rough (but losing) play of New York's hockey Rangers. Maggie Smith sits with opera glasses in her Silver Spring, Md., apartment, spots sparrows, cardinals and titmice flitting among ten feeding stations and birdhouses. She sets out raisins, notes that "the mockingbird always takes two, four, never an odd number." Henry Cabot Lodge likes to walk in the Saigon zoo. With surprising delight, he tells how he once strolled too close to a tiger cage and the big cat sprayed him with urine. "The Vietnamese," he says, "tell me it's great good luck to have something like that happen to you."

Day-Stretchers. One way to find moments of leisure is to stretch out each day. Goldwater normally arises by 5:30 a.m., takes a sandwich at his Washington desk if he lunches at all. George Romney gets up at 5:45, jogs through his Lansing neighborhood in sweat togs before breakfast, lugs peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the office in a brown paper bag. Bill Scranton is up at 6:30 in his Indiantown Gap executive mansion, 20 miles from Harrisburg. Mrs. Smith is awake at 6:45, keeps a blender in her office to whip up a dietary lunch of powdered milk, cereal and a caloric mix.

For some, the logistics of housekeeping are enormously complex. Rocky and Happy constantly shuttle between the executive mansion in Albany, their 14-room Fifth Avenue apartment (estimated cost: at least $150,000, plus yearly maintenance of $20,000), and their 3,000-acre estate in Westchester County's Pocantico Hills. If there were time they could also visit their fully staffed house on Washington's Foxhall Road, their summer home in Seal Harbor, Me., or their Venezuela ranch, where they honeymooned. Bill and Mary Scranton often drive 150 miles from the executive mansion to spend weekends at Marworth, their $350,000 longtime home at Dalton, Pa. Their furniture is still scattered among these two homes and a Georgetown residence in Washington, which was sold to the Averell Harrimans and then occupied temporarily by Jacqueline Kennedy last December and January. The Lodges have plenty of household help in Saigon—and also quite a gaggle of boarders: two of their live-in Vietnamese servant couples have a total of twelve children.