Richard Nixon completes his first hundred days in office next week. Hugh Sidey, TIME'S Washington Bureau chief and former White House correspondent, gives his assessment of the President's performance thus far.
IN a hundred days Franklin Roosevelt led a foundering society back to self-confidence, and no President since 1933 has been allowed to forget it. John Kennedy complained shortly before assuming power: "I'm sick of hearing about a hundred days. I'm not Roosevelt, and these aren't the '30s." But the legend persisted. Lyndon Johnson, in fact, encouraged comparisons, and with pockets stuffed full of legislative box scores he could show by certain singular mathematics a better record than that of his old mentor, F.D.R.
Richard Nixon is silent. There are no compilations in his coat pocket because there has been no significant legislation. Nixon does not even have a slogan for his Administration. There is barely the beginning of a program. He has not yet brought peace, slowed inflation, cleansed the air and water, warded off piracy or uplifted the ghettos.
In the White House, they quickly slide over the hundred days odium. Aides refer instead to the year's "first quarter," as if the Administration were a corporation. The first quarter of this new business was logically concerned with organization and getting acquainted (Nixon's visits to Government agencies, his trip to Europe, his televised news conferences). All this Nixon has accomplished with decency if not grace, with competence if not brilliance. In a world and nation grown weary of a looming Uncle Sam and a volcanic Johnson, the new pace is comforting to many.
Besides the pause, Nixon has brought a promise, and it may be enough for now. The old measuring rods of bills passed and billions appropriated cannot be used to calculate leadership in a time of spiritual rather than economic depression. His orderly and modest manner has won respect. Louis Harris finds that 61% of the public credit Nixon with "inspiring confidence personally in the White House." L.B.J.'s last reading was 33%. Nixon has not, as Communications Director Herb Klein claimed last week, "calmed the waters of America," but the President has set a new tone in much of the country, a vital ingredient if Nixon is ever to focus and release national energies.
He is in a sense the "unheroic" President that Eugene McCarthy urged last fall. Nixon has not heaped promise on promise. He has instead pledged himself to consolidate and manage. He has walked through his role austerely, a man alone much of the time, not posturing or parading, but embracing the "normalcy" of those middle-class Americans who voted for him. His priorities read neatly—Viet Nam, inflation and crime. Billy Graham's spirituality pervades, the humor is genteel, and the thoughts drape sensibly, like Pat Nixon's wardrobe. The effect in Oklahoma and Colorado and Iowa, if not in the ghettos, is to stimulate faith. Nixon's memorized facts of national life are delivered with an easy candor over television. He is the family lawyer or the local banker, not necessarily inspiring, but welcome in a time of uncertainty.