THE VENICE SUMMIT : Reporter’s Notebook : The First Shall Not Always Be Last

There has been a good deal of debate in Venice about the extent of the role played by President Reagan at the summit conference. Was he, as chief of the world’s most powerful nation, really in charge here?

But in one area there was no doubt. According to official protocol, Reagan was the senior leader at the conference, entitled to the most honors accorded by traditional diplomacy.

Reagan derived that distinction from serving longer than the only other chief of state at the conference, President Francois Mitterrand of France. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has held office longer than either of them, but she is a chief of government, not a chief of state. Under diplomatic rules, chiefs of state rank higher than chiefs of government.

Reagan did not always receive the honors due him. Perhaps because of a bit of impatience on Reagan’s part and a bit of dilly-dallying on Mitterrand’s part, Reagan did not always manage to have the distinction, as dictated by protocol, of arriving last at all meetings. Reagan’s launch, for example, reached the dock of the conference center on San Giorgio Maggiore island at 9:32 a.m. Wednesday, one minute ahead of Mitterrand’s launch.

Both presidents, who had met together earlier, showed up late for the ceremonial reading of the summit declaration in the late afternoon. Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani waited for them for a quarter of an hour and then started to read the declaration without them. Five minutes later, Reagan sheepishly took his seat. Mitterrand, in a breach of protocol, arrived a minute later.

During the long and soporific reading of the declaration in Italian, Reagan was seen popping a pill into his mouth. Reporters wondered what this was all about and questioned the White House Press Office staff.

Five hours later, the press office announced that Reagan had been bitten on his scalp by an insect at Camp David on the weekend of May 29-31. The bite had become infected, and an antibiotic had been prescribed.

“The President today took the final pill in a routine course of antibiotic treatment,” the press office said in a statement.

It was well known in the corridors of the conference that many American reporters were looking for evidence of any Reagan weakness at the conference. But Mitterrand, talking with reporters after the summit ended, refused to be drawn into the journalistic quest.

He was asked by Pierre Salinger, the Paris correspondent of ABC television news and the White House press secretary under President John F. Kennedy, to assess how well the Americans had done at the summit. Mitterrand smiled and replied to Salinger, who is well known by French politicians, “That’s an American question, and since it is asked by a reporter whose talents are known, I won’t come to his aid.”

In the midst of the conference, the tides of the lagoon of Venice rose, and water lapped into the magnificent Piazza San Marco for several hours. Most of the square was covered with six inches or so of water, leaving only a path of relatively high ground for pedestrians to cross from the docks to their hotels.

The flooding, which was relatively mild by local standards and receded after a couple of hours Tuesday night, drove home to many at the conference one of the most nettlesome problems of the magnificent Renaissance city of Venice. The constant attack by the waters deteriorates the ancient palaces of the city. Many Italians were alarmed in 1966 by a flood that put the Piazza San Marco under more than three feet of water.

After a number of studies, the government of Italy has granted a concession to a group of Italian companies known as the New Venice Consortium. They plan to put up movable barriers before the end of the century that will hold back the tide from time to time at the openings to the lagoon.

Italy is the land of espresso, the dark coffee with its stirring aroma that you can buy at a bar on almost every street corner. But some aides of President Reagan were chagrined, upon arrival in Venice, to discover that they could not buy weaker American coffee.

In desperation, aides in Venice telephoned White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. in his car as he was driving to the airport to fly to Italy and pleaded with him to buy some instant coffee.

At first, Baker believed his aides were kidding, but he gave in, stopped his car at a small grocery store and bought three jars of American instant coffee.

Reporters in the White House Press Room usually pay scant attention to the television sets in the room offering closed-circuit scenes of Venice, summit scheduling announcements and Cable News Network news bulletins. Yet the sets drone on and on.

But when Fawn Hall, the former White House secretary who helped Lt. Col. Oliver L. North shred secret Iran- contra documents, testified before the congressional committees investigating the affair, attention in the room was riveted on the young woman.

So on Tuesday, when her appearance before the panels was coming to an end, a U.S. Information Agency aide, acting under what he said were White House instructions, hurried to the television sets and turned them off--saving Secretary of State George P. Shultz from the difficult task of holding a news conference at the front of the room, with the flickering image of Fawn Hall to either side of him.

Los Angeles hairdresser Julius Bengtsson, as he has for years, accompanied First Lady Nancy Reagan when she left Venice for a two-day trip to Sweden. The trip was even more special for him than usual, for he grew up in Sweden. Asked if he had seen any of his family while in Stockholm, he replied, “No, I was too busy giving interviews to the Swedish press.”

Before he arrived, Bengtsson said, he received a handwritten note from Princess Lilian of Sweden asking him to fix her hair. “She called me three times one day,” he said. But he was too busy with the hair of the First Lady and with the Swedish press.

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Betty Cuniberti contributed to this story.