THE ADMINISTRATION: Gerald Ford: Off to a Fast, Clean Start

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Ford's first week ended with one of the liveliest White House evenings in years, a party for King Hussein and Queen Alia of Jordan. Betty Ford was well aware that guests are supposed to remain at White House dinners until after the President and the First Lady leave; the Nixons, as a rule, withdrew as soon as the entertainment ended. Mrs. Ford was having none of that: "I'm just going to tell the guests that they can leave whenever they want to," she said, because "nobody's going to get us off the dance floor at 10 o'clock."

"We love to dance," the President declared at the party, and proved it by dancing again and again with the beautiful Alia, while the King twirled Betty Ford round the floor. Later, as the royal guests departed, the Queen pronounced it "a swinging party," and the President kissed her on both cheeks.

After bidding goodnight to the royal guests, the Fords came back to dance some more. Guests applauded as the President, paired off with Cindy Nessen, the Korean-born wife of NBC Newsman Ron Nessen, improvised his way through Big Bad Leroy Brown.

Among the guests were Senator Mark Hatfield, a liberal Republican who had not been welcome at the White House for at least five years; World Bank President Robert MacNamara, who said that he had not been there since 1968; Mrs. Ogden Reid, wife of the New York Congressman, who marveled that she and her husband had been invited because "we are Democrats now"; and anti-Nixon Congressman Pete McCloskey of California. Also present were a covey of White House reporters, including one from the Washington Post, whose staffers nearly two years ago were being banned from even covering White House social events let alone, horribile dictu, participating in any of them. "Happy New Year!" Senator Hatfield shouted, and McCloskey called the scene the harbinger of "a new day."

New Mood. Some might have sniffed that this hastily planned state dinner offered beef à la bordelaise and no special entertainment. But this party, coming only a week after the cataclysm, offered something far beyond entertainment: the signal of the new mood in Washington and in much of the nation, the satisfaction that came from having a new and relaxed man in the White House who had unaffectedly asked for the nation's prayers in saying, "I want to be a good President."

Enormous and evident problems in the economy and elsewhere confront him, and they will not be solved by mere good cheer. Yet unpredictably crises surely lie ahead, and in the first fine careless rapture of Gerald Ford's accession, no one can predict what kind of President he will prove to be. For the moment, after the miasma of Watergate, that could wait. Last week Washington and the nation seemed satisfied to rejoice in such simplicities as having a Chief Executive who worked in his shirtsleeves, who said what he meant and meant what he said, who by his honesty and accessibility was swiftly exorcising the pinched ghosts of the Nixon era from the White House. At the end of his first week, the President of the U.S. was still jumping to his feet and coming out from behind his desk to shake hands with Jerry terHorst whenever his press secretary, a friend of 25 years, entered the Oval Office.