* A major ideological crisis had developed from economic stress and the breakdown of traditional values among hard-hit social groups. Ideological anarchy threatened when tried-and-true maxims finally proved useless for dealing with everyday reality. Only a central figure in authority could restore some sort of order.

* The president needed to win acceptance for a new concept of governmental power to supersede laws, political norms and elite values lingering from the economy's earlier stages.

Roosevelt, hardly a radical or socialist sympathizer, learned two crucial lessons. First, even if a president sees that prevailing economic conditions demand radical remedies, he must cast his political programs in terms of mainstream values and legal norms--even if that semi-radical program is ultimately no threat to the ruling class.

Second, to safely protect economic elites in crisis, the president must champion the cause of "neglected" social groups, assuring the public that a return to old values is, in fact, what is needed to relieve economic and social stress for all.

NIXON IS THE first crisis president since Roosevelt. Only that fact makes his dramatic turnabouts understandable--from laissez-faire conservative to price controller, from commie-hater to champion of the detente.

TWO STRUCTURAL changes have reshaped the economy since World War II: In relative terms, power on the domestic economic front has shifted to what historian Kirkpatrick Sale calls "the economic sovereigns of America's Southern rim, the 'sunbelt' that runs from Southern California, through Arizona and Texas, down to the Florida keys":

They are for the most part new-money people...whose fortunes have been made only in the postwar decades, mostly in new industries such as aerospace and defense contracting, in oil, natural gas and allied businesses, usually domestic rather than international, and in real-estate operations during the postwar sunbelt population boom.

On the other hand, established corporations have turned their attention to international investment through multinational enterprises. Such projects, especially the extraction of foreign natural resources, require new forms of government protection and rely on supposedly neutral planning and development agencies.

The "cowboys," as the Southern rim's entrepreneurs have been called, and the multinational industrialists face three immediate problems:

* Traditional U.S. legal norms and New Deal-type regulatory agencies are incompatible with the new expansion and the stability of the new elite's power.

* "Internationalism" has acquired a bad name because of the Vietnam war, and widespread environmental concern has cast the oil men in a bad light.

* Popular unrest in the U.S. threatens to undercut support for a powerful chief executive--the primary agent of the growing industrial supergiants in their efforts to circumvent New Deal government regulation.

These when added to the always-smoldering social unrest under capitalism, are the ingredients of Nixon's economic and political crisis. Nixon also faces the continuing threat of war to the structure of multinational capitalist expansion and additional domestic anti-business sentiment as a consequence of galloping inflation.

To overturn the institutional remnants of the New Deal, he has turned to a set of beleaguered social groups for support: the so-called Silent Majority of lower-middle class, white urban ethnics and small-town and rural people of the South and Midwest.

Watergate was part of the program Nixon men designed to reshape the political system to support their economic and political rule. The Watergate conspirators are closely tied to the Southern rim's magnates. They expected to go unpunished--even if they were caught--because of Nixon's unprecedented executive power, his subversion of the New Deal ethics, and the distance he has established between himself and Congress. They almost got away with it--and Nixon may get away with it still.