Showing the Occasional Wart : Isn’t there room in presidential life for a little public spontaneity?

From ancient times, great leaders have insisted on meeting amid pomp and ostentatious display, the better to convey images of their power and self-confidence. In the modern era, when democracy has placed the fates of high officials in the hands of voters and with TV coverage providing an intrusive immediacy, national leaders have come to worry less about wowing each other and more about wooing their constituents. That’s why staging now threatens to become almost as important as substance when heads of state get together. Consider this report on the planned weekend meeting between President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“The White House ‘communications cluster,’ ” John M. Broder and Doyle McManus wrote in The Times this week, “ . . . has been reviewing accounts and videotapes of past summit meetings with an eye to creating camera angles, backdrops and other visual elements that will cast Clinton in the most flattering and statesmanlike light . . . advance operatives have traveled to Vancouver to take photographs of likely settings and have begun to piece together the script for the show.”

Now of course image management is not the invention of the Clinton White House. Attempts to control what Americans are able to read or see or hear about their Presidents go back a long way, the constant purpose being to make the chief executive look good, if not physically then at least politically. Now, however, the backdrop, the lighting, the camera angle have become almost as much the message as the words that are spoken. It is all planned with infinite care, it is all rehearsed to a fare-thee-well, and it is all so depressingly artificial.

May we raise a small and no doubt futile voice on behalf of at least an occasional return to spontaneity and naturalness when our Presidents put themselves on public display? Is there not room in a President’s public life, even at summit meetings, for the unplanned gesture, the extemporaneous movement? “As of early this week,” The Times reported, “aides had not yet found time with the President to run a dress rehearsal” (for his summit appearance). How refreshing it would be if that’s the way things stayed.