Lunch at Library to Make History : Presidents: The meal after the Nixon birthplace dedication will be the first ever shared at a public event by a chief executive with three predecessors.

When President Bush and his three Republican predecessors gather for lunch today after dedicating the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace, it will mark the first time in American history that four Presidents ever sat down together for a meal.

It’s a unique event, and it will provide a unique lesson on the care and feeding of commanders in chief.

The current and former Presidents, according to their aides and associates, are old acquaintances unlikely to stand on ceremony when they sit down for their brief but historic meal. Still, the event has raised unusual logistical, security and protocol concerns.

Some of those problems have been dealt with before. The Secret Service, for example, had to protect four chief executives when then-President Ronald Reagan invited Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to the White House before they all attended the funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. But, unlike today’s event, that meeting was private. Today, security forces will be forced to safely transport the four Presidents through a crowd expected to surpass 25,000.

The Secret Service refused to discuss security arrangements. But Hamilton (Ham) Brown, a retired Secret Service agent, predicted that security arrangements will be coordinated by President Bush’s contingent, although an individual Secret Service detail will be responsible for each man. Aides to Nixon, who has declined Secret Service protection in favor of a private security team, said he will accept the government’s services for this occasion.

Brown added that while an event involving four Presidents does involve “a lot of planning and coordination,” agents are well prepared for gatherings of several dignitaries.

“We started protecting (foreign) heads of state back in the late ‘60s,” said Brown, the executive secretary of the Former Agents’ Assn. in Annandale, Va. “We would go into these summit conferences, where you’re talking about more than one head of state. For instance, if the president went to the U.N. in New York for a summit, we would have details with 20 or 25 protectees. So it’s not unusual.”

Like the security arrangements, protocol considerations also differ from the 1981 meeting at the White House. Although four past and present presidents were in attendance then, the former chiefs came to the White House at the invitation of the President of the United States. Reagan, therefore, ran the show.

Today’s situation, however, is different. Many Washington insiders agree that while protocol guidelines call for everyone to defer to Bush, they also note that he was invited to the dedication by Nixon, placing Bush in the role of guest. Reagan and Ford are also guests, but, said one White House aide, Bush is “the leading guest,” and perhaps entitled to a greater share of the limelight.

Aides and associates of all four Presidents dismiss any talk of protocol as insignificant. The brief luncheon in the library is expected to be somewhat informal, they said, and Bush will likely dispense with the normal guidelines of etiquette.

“I don’t think there’s any problem,” said Kenneth L. Khachigian, a speech writer in the Nixon White House and an organizer of the dedication ceremony. “They all know each other, they will all be somewhat relaxed around each other. If any protocol is to be observed at all, it would be in deference to the President and the First Lady, but Bush is not one to stand on great formalities.”

Officially, however, the White House says Bush will let Nixon have his day.

“The event is a Nixon event per se, and (the Bushes) are guests of the Nixons,” said Sig Rogich, assistant to the President for public events and initiatives. “He’ll be introducing President Nixon.”

Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose, a University of New Orleans historian, agreed that “they’ll all defer to (Nixon) because it’s his day.”

“He (Nixon) tends to monopolize conversations anyway,” Ambrose said. “He will probably dominate the conversation with reminiscences.”

Unlike Tuesday’s meeting between Nixon and Reagan, when the two former world leaders shared views on the political situations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during an hourlong meeting, Ambrose predicted that conversation between the Presidents and First Ladies will amount to chit-chat.

“I guarantee one thing they’ll talk about will be presidential memoirs,” Ambrose said. “Another thing they’ll talk about is presidential libraries--that’s a natural topic for discussion. I don’t think they’ll talk about the S&L; problem or the deficit. They may talk about (Soviet President Mikhail) Gorbachev a little bit.”

Khachigian noted that presence of the Presidents’ wives may encourage them to discuss topics that both the Presidents and the First Ladies have in common, such as family matters or the experience of living in the White House.

“You’d be surprised at how informal an event like this could be, although everybody will be polite,” Khachigian said. “They’ll be like any other fraternity or sorority of people who get together to tell war stories.”

The luncheon is scheduled for 11:20 a.m. The light menu, prepared by the Los Angeles eatery Chasen’s, includes watercress and pea soup, Dover sole with lemon butter sauce, and three kinds of berries topped with Devonshire cream.

Each of the presidential plates will bear the signature of one of the attending Presidents on the reverse side. Nixon’s plate will display signatures of all four Presidents.