Jimmy Carter's Rite of Passage

...Rusthoven On January 20 of this year, James Earl Carter, J r . , repeated the oath adopted some 190 years ago by the Constitutional Convention and took office as the Nation's 39th Chief Executive...

...Columnist Mary McGrory, no enemy of Sorensen, described him as "stiff-necked and wintry...

...One morning he will awake and discover he cannot remember how it was, standing there in the winter light, looking out at the multitudes awaiting his inaugural speech...

...and unlike the plan pronounced by his successor, justly required those who refused to serve to earn their readmission to the privileges of full citizenship...

...But what will we know then that we don't know now...

...So, he will be bombarded with requests from liberals who want cuts in defense spending and more money for the arts, left-wing activists who, when they hear the word "gun," reach for their culture...

...But perhaps too much is being made about both his "mysterious" quality and the problems he will inevitably face...

...In January, bitter cold and Jimmy Carter-in that order--came to Washington...

...Jerry Ford for most of us, I suspect, it requires a conscious effort to recall in full detail these events of so very recent history...

...The ghost of Joe McCarthy stalks the land," said McGovern...

...But be that as it may, the Carter inaugural also displayed another quality which, no matter how often remarked, remains among the most significant aspects of our constitutional republic --namely, the orderly, dignified, and peaceful transfer of executive authority...

...I do not know the meaning of it all...

...He will also have the enmity of the conservatives and the watch-and-wait, cautious enmity of members of his own party who lost to him in the primaries and who now suffer from peanuts envy...

...So he will go downstairs to work...

...For Theodore C. Sorensen, corporate lawyer, former Presidential aide, and the only self-proclaimed pacifist ever nominated to be head of his country's intelligence agency, the weather must have seemed positively balmy in comparison to the reception he received before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...

...But his humiliating failure to be confirmed recalls what Prguy once wrote: when a man dies he does not die of a disease--he dies of his whole life...

...We have ways--unpleasant ways--of making you talk...

...And on that day, whenever it comes --and it will come--we will learn all we ever have to know about Jimmy Carter...

...The defeat came to Carter only three days before the Inauguration, and Carterologists in the press and in Congress wondered if this was an isolated goof or a sign of things to come...

...Carter remains my leading candidate f o r " Strangest American Political Figure of the Century...

...To be sure, no one has forgotten the Watergate affair, or the first resignation of an American President...

...Robert Michel of Illinois...

...He will desperately try to recapture that moment...

...But Peter J. Rusthoven is a practicing attorney in Indianapolis...

...Sorensen himself said he felt as if he had been "blind-sided by a truck...

...But I am forced to work with Gestapo barbarians...

...and it is not too much to say that conduct of that sort was precisely and preeminently what the nation needed...

...Could it be that Sorensen forgot --or Carter never knew--that Washington is a place of long memories as well as long knives...

...In a city used to moderate winters, God's meteorological eccentricities are not appreciated...

...It is already difficult to remember how troubled and disturbed the Nation seemed in August of 1974, when Gerald Ford became President...

...A few things: Carter will have been savaged by the media, betrayed by one-time political allies, tested by the Russians, and challenged by Congress...

...I leave to psycho-historians and other adepts of the occult arts the difficulties of plumbing the psychic depths of the man who boasts he read War and Peace at age twelve...

...Mr Ford, to be sure, warrants his share of credit in more specific areas as well...

...So, Jimmy Carter is President and as this is written the deep-thinkers in the press have written their Sunday-afterInauguration think pieces telling us the meaning of it all...

...Both he and Carter found this out too late to avoid embarrassment...

...It was left to Senator George McGovern to provide the most original excuse for Sorensen's failure...

...William F. Gavin Jimmy Carter's Rite of Passage It was an ominous Inauguration Week: the city lay frozen, shades of Joe McCarthy stirred, and the new President remained a mystery to the pundits...

...I can see him portraying one of those cultured SS officers we used to see in films made during World War II: "I myself prefer Goethe and Shakespeare...

...And it is to Mr...

...I have never met Sorensen but his public appearances make me believe he missed his calling...

...There are, of course, blemishes on the Ford record...

...Gavin zs currently an aide to Rep...

...Without seeking the office, and with little time to prepare for its responsibilities, Ford nevertheless approached his duties with courage, integrity, and no little degree of ability...

...Washington commuters, who break down and cry when it rains, screeched and bumped their way along the area's ice-slick roads and bridges in a frenzy of despair and anger...

...Carter's inauguration was, on any fair appraisal, far from the most inspiring ever witnessed on these shores...

...No one believes any of this, of course, except the groups to whom promises were made and they will believe nothing else...

...His program for Vietnam draft evaders and resisters likewise displayed compassion...

...they create themselves as they go on...

...Indeed, to judge from all the fluttering in the press, the day's most noteworthy feature was the new President's decision to walk, not ride, in his inaugural parade--a situation which led William Satire to comment, in the New York Times, that if Carter's major accomplishment of the day was being a pedestrian, his address certainly partook of that quality as well...

...Nor was his the backroom manuevering and horsetrading savvy of a Lyndon Johnson, whose skill in these areas was so admired for a time by media amateurs who fancied themselves experts in realpolitik...

...Our interests were, from almost any perspective, little advanced by the Helsinki agreement...

...He did not possess the so-called "charisma" of a John Kennedy, a dubious qualification that fawning political commentators had extolled until they sounded like a collection of stringers for movie magazines...

...But not even the Sorensen fiasco could spoil Jimmy's big day...

...If this be existentialism, Carter (who no doubt read Sartre at age four) will surely make the most of it...

...Given a choice between retaining Henry Kissinger at State and J ames Schlesinger at Defense, I believe that a different conclusion was called for...

...This led one Congressional aide to suggest that Sorensen's chances might have been better if Carter had provided him with an exorcist...

...The cold weather hit most of the nation, but only in Washington was it seen as a personal affront...

...And some of his appointments--such as Daniel ]~doynihan at the United Nations--stand unsurpassed...

...9 . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE NATION'S PULSE by PeterJ...

...to mention highly partisan...

...Ford's responses to Angola and to the Mayaguez affair were the responses one hopes will always be forthcoming from an American President--but were particularly gratifying in this time when so many attempt to use Vietnam as an argument for a posture of perpetual impotence...

...Carter's walk along Pennsylvania Avenue was very popular...

...But four major decisions will have to be made by noon...

...Visitors who jammed the halls and committee meeting rooms and Congressional offices in the House and Senate Office Buildings talked about the walk much more than they did about Carter's speech, which was delivered in that curious, halting Carter style, with pauses in unlikely places giving the eerie impression that he is always speaking over a faulty public address system that conks out every few seconds...

...This sort of thing enrages the resident bureaucrats, but Inauguration Day serves to remind them every four years that Washington doesn't belong to them anyway...

...Instead, Ford, more than any President since Harry Truman, brought to the Oval Office a deep regard for those simple and basic values on which our civilization and our constitutional republic depend--values such as honesty and decency, self-discipline and individual responsibility, respect for others and for one's self, and all those other attributes which collectively constitute character...

...The icy stare, the prim, tight line of the mouth, the quiet voice always under control, the grim facial expression that says someone, somewhere is boring him and had better stop--surely these would have made Sorensen a top character actor specializing in sinister roles...

...Before Sorensen was to appear, they let it be known that a former conscientious objector and Kennedy apparatchik who left the White House in 1964 with seven boxes of classified documents just might not be the man to inspire confidence, both in the nation and among allies, as CIA chief...

...Whatever strange fish swim in the Carter stream of consciousness, he will be faced with a number of difficult situations, none of which he can deal with without getting hurt...

...Whatever else he may be, he's not shy or unambitious...

...This is a properly lady-like way of saying that he is viewed by many in Washington as unendurably arrogant, not William Iv...

...In six months or so we'll forget we ever saw Carter as mysterious...

...Sorensen appeared before the Committee, read a speech in which he neither apologized nor explained, and then said he was quitting...

...The daily, painful trauma of more than a year's duration--with its unending series of fresh accusations and revelations, of acrimonious exchanges between an aggressive and often less-than-fair press and a defensive and often less-than-honest President--all this has faded, in large measure, from the national consciousness...

...Persistent vetoes of the sillier legislative offerings of the most adolescent Congress in our history have undoubtedly spared us much future hassle and grief...

...Members of the Committee thought otherwise...

...The questions that had been raised about his qualifications, taken one by one, need not have ruined his chances for confn-mation...

...The New York Times wept, gnashed its teeth, poured ashes over its head and, amidst sobs, said Sorensen deserved "full, personal vindication...

...He has promised a balanced budget before his Administration is over, a reduction of the unemployment rate to three percent, "simplification" of welfare laws, a reduction of from five to seven billion dollars in the defense budget, creation of a Department of Education...the list goes on and on...

...Carter's credit that his first statement as President was a gracious nod of thanks to the man who, less than two and one-half years ago, assumed office at a time when order, dignity, and peacefulness were less associated with the White House than at any time in memory...

...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 Presidents are neither born nor made...

...In any event, perhaps the time has come for the formation of the "Ad Hoc Committee to Grant Amnesty to Joe McCarthy's Ghost," a poor shade regularly blamed for calamities which devout liberals cannot explain by natural means...

...For reasons still not clear, Jimmy Carter thought Sorensen would be a good choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency...

...One cannot help but be staggered by the federal deficits of recent The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 23...

...That it has done so in such a relatively short period of time is no small tribute to the efforts of Gerald Ford...

...The night before the Inauguration, traffic in the city was tied up even more than usual because of thousands of Inuagural visitors' cars blocking roadways or otherwise illegally parked, either out of desperation or calculation...

...But placed in the context of his history as a Camelot commando, and given his incurable case of stiff-neck, these questions doomed Sorensen...

...In the conduct both of affairs of state and of his own life, Ford daily demonstrated that regard...

...The pardon of his predecessor was a courageous, compassionate, and far-sighted act --and will, I believe, be so viewed by the conventional wisdom of a future and, one hopes, less strident era...

...The weather cooperated and the big crowds poured in...