THE PRESIDENCY by HUGH SIDEY: Proud of Being a Politician

The Presidency

The de Havilland Sky Hawker is all fueled up. The Hasselblad camera is packed away in its tan case with the Senator’s favorite 120-mm lens nestled in leather. He has a clutch of Arthur Adler’s summer suits ready for rumpling. Tab, Fresca and coffee by the gallon are in the hold. The ghost of Everett McKinley Dirksen has been signed on. About this time Howard Henry Baker Jr. (5 ft. 7½ in., 160 lbs.) is ready to roll through 26 states, thumping and sweating and striving to be President of the U.S.

There is something bright and burning about this Republican camera nut and son-in-law of the late Dirksen. It is Baker’s season. In six months he has come up ten to twelve points in the opinion polls. In the Kentucky hills and along the clear streams of Utah, when they take time to think about politics, there are unusual numbers of queries now about Howard Baker.

Teddy Kennedy this week will be camping in the cool Berkshires. Ronald Reagan is taking off the entire month of August. Jimmy Carter hopes for an interlude soon on an ocean island, savoring a fisherman’s solitude. Not Baker.

He will inspect beef cattle and beauty queens and shout to everyone that “I am proud of being a politician!” He will tell his audiences that he is sick and tired of hearing that professional politicians are not worthy of trust, that he is fed up with amateurism.

The Senate minority leader has a remarkable record on the issues. He is responsible, often original and almost always ahead. He dived in to help the President win the Panama Canal Treaty and the arms package for Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Down at the G.O.P.’s Tidewater Conference he seized the moment and focused on SALT as an occasion for a broad re-examination of the “total military and foreign policy relationship between the Soviet Union and the U.S.” It was, in Baker’s eyes, time to dispel the tattered remnants of Arthur Vandenberg’s bipartisan tradition, something that was right a generation ago, just after World War II, but is not fully applicable in today’s psychological struggles.

Baker articulated the dark thoughts that crossed the mind of many a citizen stuck in a gas line. If the big oil companies were gouging the American people, Baker declared, they risked nationalization. Baker was wildly against even the thought of such a measure, but as a professional pol he sensed an ugly mood. His warning nearly cracked the picture windows in Houston’s Petroleum Club. Baker’s mail showed it.

He went to Moscow and warned Leonid Brezhnev about the doubts the Senate had over SALT. He raised his questions back home, and his state of mind is crucial as the debate rumbles along. When Jimmy Carter came down from the mountaintop in his new leadership robes, Baker, who was not invited to the seminars, swallowed hard, but once again supported his political rival.

“Deep down I’d like to tell him to go to hell,” Baker muttered to friends.

But he did not. Instead, he said he was “willing to lay aside animosities . . . He is President, we are in a tough time, he’s got a big problem, the country has a big problem. And I’m going to give him his day.”

Therein is the legacy of Dirksen, who used to reside in Baker’s Capitol office, doing Baker’s leadership job. “I saw it close up,” says Baker. “Right here Dirksen and Lyndon Johnson worked out their differences for the good of the country. They were adversaries but not enemies.”

So Howard Baker insists that judgment should be first but politics a close second. That means some solid whacks, as well as support in critical times. Baker was the one who labeled Carter “a yellow-pad President” and suggested that while the President “was saying the right things, I’m not sure he can make them happen.” Politics, Baker believes, is results, though even he sometimes pauses to make a few notes. They are always brief enough to go on the backs of envelopes.