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In Moline, Ill., the other night, a lady asked whether Carter's manner was more a return to simplicity or mediocrity. It is a delicate distinction. The wearing of neckties on certain occasions evolved out of respect for others. Trumpets were used for centuries in tribute to people and deeds. True, all those renditions of Hail to the Chief never made Richard Nixon a good or great man. But, damn it, whispers a military historian, Hail to the Chiefis an old rouser going back to the 19th century, which is used to lift spirits and tell people the President is there. The history of those honor guards that Carter is curtailing—Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rated only a four-man color guard—goes back to the Bible; in the U.S. they have been lined up for 200 years according to the manual of Baron von Steuben. There is protest that a patriotic message that has reverberated through every city and hamlet is being muted.
Jimmy Carter gets a chuckle out of the argument. As a man steeped in the virtues of "Sunday clothes" and educated in a military academy, he is not unmindful of tradition or innocent of the doubts he has stirred. But his long march across the nation to the presidency led him to believe there is a new drumbeat out there and he is more in step than a lot of others.