41

WHEN THEY MOVED INTO the White House, the president cautioned his wife that it is unlucky for a new occupant to make changes to the décor. Jacqueline Kennedy had gone on a spending binge to renew the old place, and her husband had paid the ultimate price; Nancy Reagan, who did not go that far, saw her husband survive an assassination attempt. Perhaps worse in the eyes of the president, the White House had been seriously redecorated by his predecessor, at great cost to her popularity, which played a small but significant role in her defeat for a second term.

“Hon,” the president had told the first lady, “if they don’t kill you, they vote you out—and I ain’t about to lose a second term because of some gay son-bitch wielding a fine aesthetic and an unlimited expense account.”

With a sure sense of the American electorate, the president hardly requires an opinion poll to know the great unwashed was disgusted by the Franz Kline abstract in the Lincoln Bedroom and the Jackson Pollack in the Oval Office. His predecessor allowed presidential power to go to her head and in the process badly misjudged the tastes of the American people. Even her Democratic base looked upon the redecoration as a form of desecration when opposite a full-length Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington was hung a mobile in primary colors by Alexander Calder. One Fox Television personality termed the result “Washington crosses the nursery,” and spent a month—forever in air time—demanding the Calder be scrapped. Wall Street, the Hollywood elite, museum curators, writers, and gallery owners protested that removing the Calder (to say nothing of the Rothko, two de Koonings, and that very large Jackson Pollack) would be giving in to American mass culture, while the rest of America demanded that the White House continue looking like the White House. The president did not need more than a minute to weigh the issues. “Some of this stuff ain’t to my taste,” he announced at a press conference, making sure to sound down-home. “But I’m no expert. So I am appointing a commission to study this issue and make recommendations.”

Regarding the emerging situation in the Middle East, the president will be similarly decisive. In Washington, the appearance of action is better than action itself. Appearance rarely involves consequence.