Ready for the Grand Tour

Pomp and uncertain circumstances greet Reagan on his trip to Europe

"It's a great world stage for him," said one of the French officials involved in planning Ronald Reagan's ten-day visit to Europe this week. Indeed, the pomp has been designed to match the circumstances of the President's first visit overseas since taking office. There will be a meeting with other Western leaders at Versailles, with a formal dinner in the fabled Hall of Mirrors and a king's bedroom for Reagan in the Grand Trianon. Then on to Rome to meet the Pope, as well as Italy's President and Prime Minister. In Britain the old celluloid trouper will canter with the Queen through Windsor Great Park before becoming the first U.S. President ever to address members of both houses of Parliament. Finally, after a NATO summit session in Bonn, there will be a pilgrimage to that oppressively ugly symbol of Communist tyranny, the Berlin Wall. The schedule is exhilarating and the pace exhausting: on one day of the trip, the President and Mrs. Reagan will have breakfast in Versailles, lunch at Rome's Quirinale Palace and dinner at Windsor Castle.

"I know better than to anticipate that I'm taking a leisurely trip," said Reagan last week. At Versailles, where leaders of seven major industrialized nations will hold their annual economic summit, he will have to fend off criticism that high U.S. interest rates are largely responsible for the recession afflicting Western economies. The NATO meeting in Bonn will give the President, in company with other allied leaders, a chance to display the vitality of Western resolve in the face of a Soviet challenge and to celebrate Spain's accession to the organization.

But the importance of the tour far transcends whatever economic and security understandings may be reached in Versailles and Bonn. It offers Reagan the chance to conduct for the first time diplomacy on a grand scale, to exert the natural leadership of the American presidency within the Atlantic Alliance, and to continue his efforts to regain from the Soviets the propaganda initiative on disarmament. The ambitious goal: to show that there is still a fundamental unity among America, Western Europe and Japan that transcends the well-publicized strains within the alliance.

As a key part of this effort, the White House views the trip as a major opportunity for the President, whose most important political asset is his infectious personal charm, to dispel a still prevalent impression in Europe that the leadership of the Western alliance is in the uncertain hands of a trigger-happy cowboy. A growing mood of pacifism on the Continent, suffused with latent anti-Americanism and guided in part by leftist forces, threatens NATO's plan to modernize its nuclear forces. The President will attempt to counter this attitude in a series of interviews with European newspapers and television stations as well as in his speeches to Britain's Parliament and West Germany's Bundestag. According to a ranking White House official, Reagan's address to Parliament will stress "the unity of the West and our common ground." In his Bonn speech, "the emphasis will be on peace through rational security measures and genuine arms reduction."