For President, Being On Vacation Means Just That

Here is a metaphysical question: What does the president of the United States do when he does nothing at all?

That question emerges as President Clinton, entering his third week of vacation, is said by an aide to be spending some of his days doing--or not doing--just that.

The answer, of course, is that on vacation, this president, like his predecessors, is still doing something. Staring blankly into space is not a presidential occupation.

Time must be put to its best, most efficient purpose--even when that purpose is doing nothing.

“He seemed very well rested and relaxed, and sort of really taking advantage of the time,” said Joe Lockhart, a deputy White House press secretary who took advantage of some quiet moments to interview the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton on how they are spending their days, holed up, as it were, on a private estate on this coastal island.

The headline from the in-house interview?

“He remarked that there are some days that he’s just done nothing at all,” Lockhart said.

But what does nothing mean? No golf? No parties? No greeting clamoring tourists? Exactly.

Doing nothing does mean Scrabble. It’s jogging and working out in a private gym. And it’s reading. (The daily briefing for reporters here includes a report on Clinton’s reading choices. Most recently he devoured “Power Curve,” in which a president dies in office and the elevated vice president is confronted with a war between China and Japan on her first day in office--but such matters are considered relaxing for a vacationing president).

And cooking is on the list.

Cooking? Yes, said Lockhart in his account of presidential goof-off time. “I know that they have been doing the cooking. . . . Groceries have been brought in, and they’ve been doing their own cooking.”

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Doing nothing meant, adamantly, not taking part in a high-powered discussion of race relations in the United States--Clinton’s apparently favored topic of domestic concern ever since he exhorted his fellow citizens at a speech last June in San Diego to confront the nation’s troubled racial history.

A race conference held here Friday evening drew such figures as Anita Faye Hill, the law professor whose allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas galvanized the nation during his hearings for confirmation to the Supreme Court, and Harvard University law professor Charles Ogletree.

It was the sort of topic that would, on other occasions, set the president theorizing and questioning and probing for answers for hours on end. But not now.

Nor would he attend a celebration marking the 90th birthday of writer Dorothy West, saluted as “the grande dame of the Harlem Renaissance and one of Martha’s Vineyard’s most distinguished citizens.”

“The president is on vacation, and I think we’ve tried very hard to protect this time for someone who, 49 weeks out of the year, is working most of the time. So it’s just a decision to try to protect--wall off some time where he can relax and not work,” Lockhart said.

It would be, well, too public. It’s just not the same, he said, when the president takes part in such public forums as when he finds himself conversing about race relations at “a private dinner party where you sit and exchange views.”

“It involves a lot of preparation,” the spokesman said, “and those kinds of events we’ve tried to avoid simply because we don’t want to impose upon the limited vacation time he has.”

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Hillary Rodham Clinton has her own ideas about what constitutes a proper vacation. She offered them in the newspaper column she produces each week.

“For me, vacations have always meant pulling out the cards, board games and jigsaw puzzles and getting together with family and friends for long, relaxing days and evenings of game playing,” she wrote.

She and the president, “a kindred game-playing spirit,” she said, have spent “countless hours” over the years at Trivial Pursuit and charades.

And in it all, she wrote, is a lesson she learned as a child from her grandfather, on vacation at the family cottage on Lake Winola, Pa.

As a nonagenarian neighbor would stalk off, upset over the course of a card game, her grandfather would “wonder whether a man who couldn’t play games could really enjoy life.”

With jigsaw puzzles and pinochle waiting, she said, she, the president and their Stanford-bound daughter Chelsea, would win some, lose some, and, like her game-playing grandfather and other family members, live with the frustrations of the game.

And in this time of doing nothing, the summer vacation, “maybe, like my grandfather, we’ll learn something about ourselves and life from all our fun and games.”