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tennis doubles with some White House aides while the first lady massaged the president’s neck and shoulder muscles and the president, in shirt-sleeves, nibbled on grapes.
    Just before dinner, the security forces suffered another setback. Not only had they closed off all approaching highways and roadways, butthey had theoretically erected a security barrier overhead by ordering all air controllers to close the airspace over the Baker homestead. Even soy Dinah Shore, the singer, who is a Tennessean and a friend of the Bakers, slipped through the net. She arrived for dinner by air, unannounced. “She came flying over in the tiniest helicopter I ever saw, directly over the guesthouse, and landed not fifteen feet from the president’s bedroom,” the senator explained, “The Secret Service was just apoplectic, but they couldn’t do much about it.”
    With shades of Oriental food tasters, the security precautions for the Reagans even affected the Bakers’ barbecue dinner. Several days beforehand, the White House had obtained two place settings of Mrs. Baker’s china and her silverware which were flown off to Washington. “They fixed his dinner at the White House
on her china
and brought it down, which created a real problem in our kitchen,” the Senator said. “They brought their own White House stewards, and they were dressed just like the caterer that we had. I don’t know whether they brought the food down hot or not, but they cooked it in Washington.” 6
    By the time dinner was over, things were quite relaxed. Dinah Shore suggested that if the president and Mrs. Reagan didn’t “mind some pickup musicians, we’ll just play awhile.” Governor Lamar Alexander took over the piano, country-western singer Chet Atkins pitched in with a guitar, and the Reagans joined the Tennesseans in a sing-along with Dinah Shore.
    Outside in the darkness among the chirping crickets, the Secret Service had assembled an army of about 250 agents, highway patrolmen, military SWAT teams, and local officers. “The irony of the whole goddamned thing,” Senator Baker recalled, “is the entire, tiny, town constabulary, which is two or three people, the county sheriff, who had about twenty, and the highway patrol were all gathered up in the intensive security operation for the president, and while the dinner party was going on, somebody robbed one of my neighbor’s houses—Ross Faires’s—because they knew full well there wasn’t a policeman left anywhere around.”
    Quickly he added, “We had a marvelous time that night.”
    The Image of Power: The President as John Wayne
    The presidential circus that enveloped the Bakers and Huntsville may be a more intimate and amusing glimpse of the chief executive than most people experience. But the Huntsville story fits the public’s general image of a Gulliver-sized president. At close range, any presidentand his entourage are overwhelming—filling every available room, setting up their global command post, tunneling telephone lines, swarming the woods with SWAT teams, commandeering every local deputy within miles, flying in hordes of reporters. Action. Power. Even at a distance, the massive apparatus of the White House radiates the impression of almost limitless presidential power.
    But that awesome image of near invincibility is misleading. It exaggerates the actual power of the presidency, which is considerably less than suggested by the public attention which gets focused on the single figure at the apex of our political system. Indeed, the absence of hierarchical power in politics baffles and aggravates corporate executives when they come to take political jobs in Washington. Political power does not work the way they expect. As a nation, we focus obsessively on the president, out of proportion with other power centers. This happens largely because the president is one person whom it is easy for television to portray and whom the public feels it can come to know. Other power centers