The Older the Newer

By Hugh Sidey

Gary Hart claims to be the candidate of new ideas. Walter Mondale can't see it. In a strict sense, Mondale is right. At least, that's how Harry Truman would have seen it. Back in 1961 Truman, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated May 8 around a world still appreciative of his stewardship, told Author Merle Miller: "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know. The only thing that changes is the names we give things."

Most ideas that work their way up to the presidency have been around for a while in one form or another. A lot of the nostrums for the Depression, for instance, were debated in the days of Herbert Hoover. But the man who got serious about them and acted on them, Franklin Roosevelt, became known as the New Thinker. John Kennedy did not dream up the Peace Corps. He swiped the idea from Congressman Henry Reuss and Senator Hubert Humphrey, who, of course, borrowed it from church dusted-off, replated New Deal.

Political tradition allows an idea, no matter its vintage or origin, to be claimed as new when unearthed and proposed by a new contender under new circumstances. Indeed, the older the newer.

The easiest riposte to such new political thought is to claim it does not exist ("Where's the beef?"). By dismissing a new notion out of hand, a critic hopes to pre-empt debate on the idea without being forced to wrestle with the merit or the substance. For longer than anyone in Washington can remember, Presidents have been confronted by frothing opponents who claim, "He has no foreign [or domestic] policy." Translated, that generally means, "I won't accept his ideas but I don't have anything of my own." Fortunately, such obfuscation does not prevail long. The political record indicates that any President who acts successfully to change things gets the credit for initiating a fresh approach no matter how old the ideas.

Many people heard Johnson in private yearn to sit down and talk over the world with China's Mao Tse-tung. L.B.J. did not raise the idea publicly or make it his doctrine. Richard Nixon did, and is credited with the most creative diplomatic idea of the era.

Ronald Reagan's ideas are as old as Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait still hangs in the Cabinet Room. Yet scholars now are writing that Reagan, agree with him or not, brought dramatic new methods and directions to the presidency.

Hart can justly claim new ideas for these tunes, particularly on defense matters, but as Truman's comment suggests, most of them were thought up long ago by others. None is as hoary as Hart's belief that U.S. land forces must learn maneuver warfare, a concept rooted in the thought of Sun Zi 2,000 years ago. The Chinese warrior wrote that successful offensives should be like streams rushing down mountains, seeking the paths of least resistance, flowing around obstacles instead of trying to go through or over them. Hart has consulted the fusty volumes of strategists like Germany's General Karl von Clausewitz and America's Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Senator has studied Indian warfare, Napoleon's defeats, the apocalyptic battles of World War I. His advocacy of a stronger Navy, simpler and more reliable weapons and advancement of field officers over bureaucrats stems from his finding that when armed forces stay lean and flexible, they can defeat superior masses. A new old idea if there ever was one.

While the Pentagon constantly discusses and experiments with such concepts, no one in the Reagan Administration has put them together as Hart has done. Nor has Mondale, whose campaign oratory is rife with phrases about returning to the ideas and programs so rudely interrupted by Reagan. They are ideas that apparently have not been judged by many Americans as new. Perhaps Mondale's ideas are not old enough for this year's political rite of newness.