THE PRESIDENCY by HUGH SIDEY: Yearning for Morality

THE PRESIDENCY

Out on the prairies last week, Ronald Reagan missed few opportunities to reveal his indulgence in prayer and Bible reading. About the same time, California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Jesuit seminarian, was walking among the fishermen of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, testing his presidential potential with scriptural overtones (“He who enters last shall be first”).

It seems now to be an article of political faith that Americans want a man for President who reflects a strong and true strain of the basic precepts shared by our various religions. At the same time, Americans also seem to want their Presidents to retain a certain detachment from any one denomination.

Jimmy Carter is the fellow whose unabashed, if not totally strict Evangelicalism brought this all up. Is he exploiting his religion to gather delegates? Or is there some deeper national yearning that is moving people toward him as the first to express so openly his spirituality?

One who has pondered the question is Dean Francis Sayre of the Washington Cathedral, who a few days ago passed his 25th anniversary up on Mount St. Alban, which looks out over the capital. He is one of eleven people born in the White House (Jan. 17,1915, in a small chamber near the Lincoln Bedroom), grandson of Woodrow Wilson, onetime secretary to F.D.R.’s political chief James Farley and friend or acquaintance of every President since then. The lanky Sayre has some of the Wilson profile and a lot of the inner fiber: he denounced McCarthyism, stood with the civil rights marchers, and marched to the

White House to protest Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing of North Viet Nam. He has preached to Presidents, helped bury them, prayed with them and counseled them. He has put his cathedral into governmental life, opened the Gothic chasms to Methodists, Jews and Billy Graham. Dean Sayre is theologian, historian and a bit of a power broker. He is worried —but fascinated by the political drama all about him.

Our country was created by those people from a decaying Europe who sustained what he calls “vivid pockets of conscience.” They established an ethical and moral government, he says, but not a government to be run by a monarch or a church. “Every aspect of our democracy comes from these vestigial remnants of that faith,” the dean insists. Up until recently, as he sees things, we could take politicians of common stripe and at the moment of inaugural turn them into leaders who could justly be trusted with this moral heritage.

“Andy Jackson,” muses Dean Sayre, “was a dirty old soldier before he came to the White House, and Lincoln, this fellow of the prairie, we’ve had no more religious leader in all our history. Wilson had a vision. Harry Truman, that haberdasher from Missouri, he was a towering figure of moral probity. American people expect it in our system, but the more

recent Presidents have hardly been mindful of it.”

At present, declares Sayre.

Americans are wallowing, trying to recover what they had before Viet Nam and Watergate.

It is not something that can be identified as Episcopal or Baptist. The dean sees people who are almost unmindful of issues, being drawn to someone like Jimmy Carter “because he is the one who most looks like he has this spiritual quality. Does he? I don’t know.”

Dean Sayre is sure that if Americans find a man of the proper moral dimensions, it will hardly matter whether he is liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. “What will matter,” he says, “is the passionate care that he brings to the White House.”