Hail to The Vacationer-in-Chief

It is a truism that Americans expect and desire their President to have some of the qualities of a king. When noting this phenomenon, observers usually have in mind Air Force One, the Deaverish pomp of presidential events, the Secret Service agents who so resemble a monarch's elite household guard, the convoy of limousines that accompanies the President on his visits, and the other grandiose appurtenances of the presidency. Even Bill Clinton has benefited from this aspect of his office and so appears somewhat more imposing and regal than would the former Governor of Arkansas if he were treated like, say, the Prime Minister of Denmark. Nevertheless, as his circumstances this week all too readily indicate, Clinton is not in a position to exploit another quasi-monarchial institution that Presidents have often turned to good advantage: an institution we might call the Summer Palace.

Some part of the American psyche seems pleased to see the President as a sportsman who lives relatively well, occasionally with a hint of aristocratic idleness. The summer retreats of past Presidents have provided a setting where they could show themselves off in this light. John F. Kennedy went to Hyannis Port and sailed in all weathers; at his ranch in Texas (the Texas White House, as it was known), Lyndon Johnson hunted deer; Richard Nixon spent weeks every summer at his large house by the Pacific in San Clemente (or the Western White House, as it was known) indulging in Californian luxuriance; Ronald Reagan visited his ranch in California faithfully each August, where he rode and cleared brush and chopped wood; in Kennebunkport, George Bush raced around in his cigarette boat and tended his East Coast patrician roots. When some of these Presidents spent many weeks away from Washington at these August sanctuaries, only editorialists, not the public, seemed to object. Absent from this list is Jimmy Carter, whose peanut farm left no trace on the citizenry's imagination; after he left office, however, Carter did have built as a country place a modest log cabin in the Georgia woods, making him, as was said at the time, the only person ever to go from being President to living in a log cabin.

A residence in the country not only gives the President a patina of masculine, aristocratic ease, but in the specific ways the President uses it, it also provides a powerful second context, a non-Washington context, with which he can define himself. Not every summer White House would work for each President, but each gave the President a useful background outside Washington against which to set himself on a regular basis. Are there any more appealing images of Kennedy than those of him sailing, his hair tousled? At San Clemente, Nixon reminded the country that he was a poor boy who had made good and -- lest his native state forget it in the 1972 election -- that he was a Californian. Ronald Reagan -- code name "Rawhide" -- could not possibly have reinforced his image as a mythic cowboy any better than by riding at his "ranch." Bush used his powerboat, of course, to defuse accusations of wimpiness. Lacking a summer White House, Clinton misses the opportunity to burn such images into the mind of the public, which now tends to think of baggy running shorts when contemplating the sporting habits of its current leader.