Presidential Greatness in the Age of Carter
Lipset, Seymour Martin
"Presidential Greatness in the Age of Carter" Abattle could be sparked anywhere, but beginning last year (1977) a major trouble site in Little Peng's hometown was the movie theater. Members of different gangs were attracted there by films from...
...professor Schlesinger at CIA and Defense...
...Except for Brzezinski, and very recently Strauss, the top echelon in the White House is all Georgian...
...He emphasized his campaign commitments to an open administration, to regular cabinet meetings, and to a cabinet that would function as a body and possess real authority...
...Cameron argues that even though Carter may not have known the ideological backgrounds of any of these individuals, and did not directly appoint most of them, they were hired because they exhibit the political tendencies and approaches to government that he personally likes...
...On one occasion, Ikle complained to Ford about agreements reached by Kissinger with the Russians, and the President overruled the Secretary of State...
...Recognizing that different values and interests produced different "solutions," he made a habit of assigning the same problem to people or agencies with varying biases on the assumption that they would disagree and submit alternative policies to him...
...Without an orderly structure, there's no accountability, no orderly flow...
...Joseph Califano heads Health, Education and Welfare, which is larger than many national governments...
...on Israel has repeatedly created conflict between Carter and pro-Israel groups, particularly the Jews but others as well, most of whom have been traditional Democrats...
...In his rejection of interests, Carter resembles the unlamented former politician John Lindsay...
...troops from Korea has led conservative Japanese politicians to feel they may have to come to a closer accommodation with their Communist neighbors...
...Those involved "functioned as if they were a self-contained unit and their task as hush-hush as the Manhattan project...
...Presidents coming into office, including Jimmy Carter, have not usually appreciated this...
...What is wrong with this view is that it is basically apolitical and undemocratic...
...When they demonstrated anger at being ignored, Carter quickly backtracked—he could hardly do otherwise...
...An article in the New York Times commented: "Once perceived as being 'too stubborn,' Mr...
...It is an image that still conveys...
...Fifty years ago, a few people were beginning to understand that it was a little more complicated than it looked...
...But what happened...
...Carter is his own chief of staff...
...When asked by Saul Pett of the New York Times what was his "greatest single satisfaction with the job so far," he replied that it was creating a "harmonious and highly efficient team...
...As a system the presidency, or the government, has become an all-powerful institution...
...And then there were some movies with exciting trapeze artists....I guess if a western [European or American] movie got there, it wouldn't even have to have a nude scene to make people even wilder...
...The White House staff, or the Executive Office, thus becomes a second cabinet composed of the president's people...
...Of course, all these movies have a little love story in them...
...But Young is not in an area of direct concern to his constituency...
...That is, Dunlop had close ties to the labor movement...
...the government, however, should represent allthe people...
...Women's real desires were more mixed than the most self-aware quite knew...
...Fighting was taking place all the time around there...
...It was, and remains, a valid conception...
...If we didn't think so, we'd stick the butts right into your mouths.' This was, of course, a matter of human self-respect...
...There was always the honing of mind on mind within a self-confident elite...
...But independent of personality, to control a large and differentiated government means that the president has to be isolated from many people who have good reason to see him...
...The president obviously cannot react to all the memoranda he receives from the myriad of government departments...
...If they increased the number of showing times, there'd be much less trouble....The theater was small and the number of tickets was limited...
...According to Flora Lewis, writing in the New York Times of April 1, 1978, European leaders express "uneasiness and bewilderment" over Carter's foreign policy...
...professor Mathews at HEW...
...his passion for privacy, and his suspicion that the bureaucrats were trying to do him in, as in fact many were...
...Under Nixon and Ford, Fred Ikle, the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, frequently disagreed with Henry Kissinger over arms control...
...According to newspaper reports, Dunlop was rejected because he was considered weak on affirmative action, and various black and women's groups publicly opposed him...
...and Israel may disagree, but such disagreements are among close friends...
...Yugoslavian love stories are really vivid," Little Peng explained...
...If it does not, it remains to be seen whether Carter will resist the pressures on him to modify his stand...
...But the "famous man" had earned the right to a respectful audience...
...According to Richard Cheney, Gerald Ford's chief of staff, this procedure cannot work: "Somebody has to be in charge...
...As Steven Roberts has written in the New York Times: "Citizens say they want Government off their backs, but they welcome Federal benefits....These demands on the Federal Government have been compounded by the enormous growth of special interest groups, which often concentrate on one issue: equality or theenvironment, birth control or gun control, prayer in schools or money in campaigns, saving the whales or saving the family...
...As with the State Department, Carter's domestic administration contains a large number of McGovernites—many of whom even backed Fred Harris or Morris Udall for the nomination in 1976—while almost no one who supported Henry Jackson holds a major position...
...The American Spectator June/ July 1978 9 This pattern of public confrontation and retreat under fire has reduced Carter's credibility among participants in the disputes at home, and among our friends and enemies abroad...
...But when you're twenty-five or even later, you feel the symptoms....I could have used my fighting days to learn a skill or a trade—to learn something," he added...
...Labor defends labor, business defends business...
...The American Spectator June/ July 1978 7 awful lot of stuff he shouldn't be doing...
...professor Dunlop at Labor...
...In France, not surprisingly, the conservative Le Figaro wrote some time ago of its concern over the influence of left-oriented "progressistes" on American policy in Europe...
...Members of different gangs were attracted there by films from Albania, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, shown for the first time since the fall of the "Gang of Four" and the easing of the ban on foreign films...
...Coolly, she pointed out the obvious: that when sharing is a matter of largesse, it doesn't assume very large proportions...
...Ironically, the very growth of government makes them appear weak and ineffective...
...As various publics have been educated to demand more from their governors, those in office find it impossible to deal with them...
...When Lindsay became Mayor of New York, he announced that he would not deal with the "power brokers...
...He said he always meant to appoint Ray Marshall...
...Virginia Woolf was very clear about the way intellectual achievement requires privilege...
...Franklin Roosevelt tried to increase his ability to make effective decisions by including in his government people with diverse approaches to the same area...
...Carter's conception of government is avowedly populist...
...Little Peng and his friends were told this once by a famous fighter who was now much older and openly regretted his fighting days...
...The capacity of politicians and governments to satisfy the often contradictory demands of these external constituencies and internal bureaucracies has declined...
...The way in which Carter's most important domestic program, his energy package, was put together reveals his preoccupation with expertise and harmony...
...As an anti-establishment outsider, Carter prefers others similar to himself...
...Carter did a sudden turnabout and began to espouse positions on minimum-wage and trade-union-rights legislation which the union movement advocated...
...Nothing was more wrong with that television serial based on the Nixon administration, "Washington Behind Closed Doors," than the statement of President Monkton, "Don't hire anyone from Harvard," a statement Nixon actually made...
...In the October 1977 issue of Fortune, Juan Cameron wrote that "a great many of the sub-Cabinet-level positions have been given to a diverse array of public-interest lawyers, consumerists, civil-rights workers, and environmental advocates...
...Prearranged fights always involved the use of deadly weapons, because (as Little Peng put it) "fists alone are not enough for venting your hatred...
...that it is based on conflict among interests...
...and if a fight between him and the president had developed, and Dunlop threatened to resign, as he had done in the Ford administration, that would have meant a conflict not just with Dunlop, but with the labor movement as well...
...Meanwhile, there was the matter of "Arthur's Education Fund...
...Women's handicaps were subtler and more pervasive than the most militant had supposed...
...The Carter administration is also composed of outsiders...
...Those at the summit, mayors or presidents, are blamed for these failures and, not surprisingly, their popularity goes down...
...Carter has shown an alarmingly visceral streak when under pressure.' " Like Lindsay, Carter has turned out to be more vulnerable to interest-group pressure than politicians who recognize from the start that they must negotiate with the interests if they are to maintain an effective coalition...
...Between them, these two essays sum up just about everything 20th-century women are up against in trying to express themselves as human beings with intellectual as well as emotional dimensions and with legitimate ambitions to have a hand in running their world...
...To answer the one about why so few female geniuses, she replied by introducing Shakespeare's sister...
...In October, following public outrage against the joint U.S.-Soviet statement calling on Israel to recognize "the legitimate rights of the Palestinians," Carter caved in again...
...Carter has done the same thing, although his cabinet does contain more people with Washington bureaucratic experience than either Nixon's or Ford's...
...We fought so hard that one of them got a bloodied head-and another had his foot hurt so badly he couldn't walk...
...So does the image of the inviolate room of one's own...
...Patricia Harris, Secretary of HUD, has taught at Howard University Law School, serving briefly as Dean...
...and professor Burns at the Federal Reserve...
...This is not to say that the image of the imperial presidency is wrong, or that what gave rise to it has disappeared...
...Serious injuries and even death might follow...
...It should be recalled that Hamilton Jordan had said, "if you find Vance and Brzezinski in this administration, you'll know we did something wrong"—but they and others like them were appointed...
...Commitment to withdrawal of U.S...
...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who disagree with Carter's energy plan have felt compelled to wage bitter campaigns against it in the Congress...
...government faces the same dilemma...
...The one exception to this is Andrew Young, who does have a constituency in the black civil-rights movement...
...Writing in the Washington Post...
...When Richard Nixon first took office he held a televised press conference to introduce his cabinet members...
...The weakness of the Carter presidency may be due largely to certain basic trends in democratic politics, specifically, the fact that welfare states are exposed to steadily increasing demands from growing numbers of well-organized interest groups, outside of and within the government...
...Most assume that because they are smart they will know how to control...
...When they attacked the administration, the White House backed down...
...A place to be alone, and somebody else doing the housework...
...As this article goes to press, the President is trying to get authorization from Congress to increase sizeably the number of highly-paid senior assistants in the White House...
...Nor does Jimmy Carter, who repeated this entire Nixon episode...
...Robert Wagner, his predecessor, had negotiated better contracts from the city's point of view by making covert agreements...
...Still, there are many academics at the head of Carter departments: Brzezinski in National Security, Brown in Defense, Marshall in Labor, Schlesinger in Energy, and Kreps in Commerce...
...Like Nixon, he had been elected by a narrow electoral college majority, and thus had to begin work on his reelection campaign the day he entered office...
...James Howe, Jr., an adviser to Roosevelt and other Democratic presidents, agrees: "Carter's doing an • According to Don Bonafede, writing in the March 4, 1978 National Journal, the Executive Office of the President has grown "since the beginning of the Carter administration...
...The number of people working directly for the White House has steadily grown—even though every recent president has promised to cut down the size of the executive branch...
...You always run the risk of being blind-sided...
...and he appointed academics, not because as a group they were Republicans or conservatives, or because he had a constituency in academe, but because they were experts...
...Carter has become increasingly subject to criticism which is strikingly similar to the kind that was directed at John Lindsay...
...Foreign Service Officer Neal Boyer noted in a (leaked) confidential memorandum that "of the 36 most senior positions in this department, 22 are filled by political appointees, as compared with only 12 in the last administration...
...This article is drawn from Dialogues on American Politics by Irving Louis Horowitz and Seymour Martin Lipset, forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...Cyrus Vance, Michael Blumenthal, and the rest of the cabinet do not have constituencies either...
...Lindsay was broken by them, and capitulated to them more than the wheelers and dealers had...
...In Cameron's words, "There is no question that a curious affinity exists between the Georgian's traditional populism and the leftish thinking of the public-interest people who surround him...
...After a while they realize that this is impossible...
...Nixon's administration was full of people from Harvard and other Ivy League schools...
...Carter's White House is organized, not in hierarchical fashion, but rather like "the spokes of a wheel," with different aides having equal rights of access...
...As a populist he thinks little of interest groups whom he believes to be incorrigibly selfish...
...Nixon did not want independent cabinet members...
...As a result, the State Department under Carter and Vance is more openly politicized than in previous administrations...
...professor Moynihan in Domestic Affairs...
...It was wanting to own property and to decide whom to marry without asking Papa...
...It so happened two others of our gangwere nearby and came to our aid...
...Sometimes, internal injuries were incurred which remained "undetected" until years later...
...He noted that the "new" urban program made public on March 25, 1978, the product of an interdepartmental task force assigned the job a year earlier of getting rid of programs which did not work, "proved mainly to be a device for protecting every program of every agency represented....None of the 160 recommendations call for eliminating any single existing federal program—despite the almost universal acknowledgment that some of them are real losers...
...A hypothetical girl just like him in brains, energy, imagination—everything except sex...
...1=1 Seymour Martin Lipset Presidential Greatness in the Age of Carter There has been a tide of concern in recent years over the "imperial presidency," yet in fact it is the weakness of the American presidency today that is indisputable...
...For all the brilliant effects of her self-education, this Victorian daughter always resented missing the university training her brothers got...
...On a larger scale, the U.S...
...In the Transition Task Force which they dominated they recommended each other...
...According to the New York Times, "the plan was conceived in secrecy by technicians" and "reflected a detached, almost apolitical attitude...
...All those concerned with the Middle East share the viewpoint outlined by Zbigniew Brzezinski in a series of articles published in 1974 and 1976...
...If fate had not whisked him suddenly and finally out of the Chinese context, he would even now be walking cocksure down some street looking for trouble...
...He had little education...
...Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who welcomed conflict and tension within his administration and who gave the various segments of his coalition the sense that their representatives were part of the government, Jimmy Carter sees harmony as a virtue...
...There was the building of the old-boy network so the elite could take care of its own and keep the outsiders out...
...Virginia Woolf faced t.11 the embarrassing questions...
...Anne Crutcher The Feminine Mistake A. hundred years ago, feminism was wanting to vote, to go to college, to earn a living at a profession other than the oldest...
...8 The American Spectator June/July 1978 Carter's reliance on New Politics types does not contradict his dependence on experts, or his concern with finding the correct "solutions" to problems...
...We now know what actually happened —the enhanced power of the White House staff of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the conflicts over authority and control...
...McGovern himself has said that State Department appointments have been "excellent...quite close to those I would have made myself...
...A great fight can get started like this...
...But 40 years ago, it was possible to see it all spelled out, complete with nuances, by a woman who knew how to transcend feminine disadvantage as well as how to identify it...
...In "Three Guineas," she took on the Victorian proposition that women don't need to earn money because they share so fully in the resources of the men in their lives...
...George Meany voiced regret for having worked so hard for Carter in 1976, threatened not to do the same in 1980—and had his way...
...The interests revealed their power...
...She saw how keeping women out of the professions and the more desirable economic activities denied them these elements of fulfilled humanity...
...but they still remain a clique and basically rely on each other for information and ideas...
...What then would there have been for her but to hang herself...
...The conclusion had to be that the woman's share was her pearls and dresses...
...The effect of having drawn almost all foreign-policy experts from one ideological camp can be seen in Carter's Middle East policy...
...She would have been home learning to bake and brew while he was out talking to soldiers, travellers, tavern trulls, and courtiers...
...Trying to deal with differentiation led to the basic problems of the Nixon presidency...
...But recently, according to Miss Lewis, a "surprising attack came in a front-page article in Le Monde, a [left-oriented] newspaper that had long been sharply critical of what it considered over-assertive American 'superpower' attitudes around the world...
...and that there is no common interest other than that which emerges out of the struggles, compromises, and deals...
...Treasury Secretary Blumenthal is a businessman, but he is a businessman with a Ph.D., a former professor who does not have strong ties to the business community...
...By that time, Virginia Woolf had written both "A Room of One's Own" and "Three Guineas," the first in 1929 and the second in 1938...
...He refused to deal with the AFL-CIO for some time, and the AFL-CIO became publicly angry with him...
...The authorities," scoffed Little Peng, "have absolutely no control.'' ' It was through such fights, some accidental and others prearranged, that "great fighters" rose to fame—those "who fought under any conditions—even four people at a time—and who didn't bother with second-rate fighters...
...Look at the cabinet...
...Moreover, the cabinet members, though appointed by the president, actually become the spokesmen for their departments...
...Newsweek reported: "The complaint is commonplace in Washington that Carter, far from being the stiff-necked purist of Georgia legend, bends too easily under pressure...
...What the president needs, therefore, is a staff loyal to him which will oversee the departments...
...On January 1, 1966, the day he took office, the unions went on strike...
...Following Sadat's initiatives, Carter has finally challenged the Begin government's tough territorial line, presumably in the hope that the coalition regime, which includes a number of "doves," will break up...
...Jordan and his friends are there to manage them, to give the President his options, to protect him against the departments...
...Thus, a pattern of standing on high principle and then giving way emerged in the first fifteen months of the Carter presidency...
...In so doing he follows in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, who also depended on lawyers, albeit corporate ones, and professors...
...And David Broder has stressed the inability of the Carter administration to stand up to the pressure exerted from inside government...
...One of us got a sprained wrist...
...Like other ministers, he winds up representing his department to the president...
...Now, it said, Washington is failing to protect Western interests, especially in the Horn of Africa, but also in East-West relations generally...
...Carter wants to be a strong president, and that requires that the White House, rather than the cabinet and departments, be the center of policy...
...As such, Georgians are no better or worse than Kennedy's Boston Irish mafia or Nixon's California mafia, but a Georgian background is inherently more provincial...
...10 The American Spectator June/ July 1978...
...Dunlop was not appointed Secretary, despite strong backing from the AFL-CIO...
...The prevalence of New Politics supporters in foreign-policy and arms-control posts, people who are convinced that a mutually advantageous accommodation with the Soviet Union is possible, increasingly worries America's allies in Western Europe and Japan, who see Russian armament policies and maneuvers in the Middle East and Africa as evidence that Soviet expansionism continues...
...Of course, being at the summit they have been able to meet everybody in Washington and thus become more cosmopolitan...
...He said he represented the people, and would not negotiate private deals with the unions...
...Parents were always warning their kids not even to go near one....The authorities are so stupid...
...When Carter took office, he too was determined not to deal with interest groups...
...I'll bet the audience will rush up front and try to climb up the screen...
...New York City broke down financially...
...She compared figures on the money going into exclusively male causes and interests and the money going into projects women might share...
...J immy Carter, however, by believing there is a "correct" solution to every problem, by relying on "experts," and by insisting that he make all decisions himself, has reduced his options and made himself a servant of his subordinates...
...professor Schultz at Treasury...
...The reason is fairly simple...
...Similar events occurred with respect to the Middle East...
...Indeed, he recruits his experts among New Politics academics and public-interest lawyers...
...If Carter were to remove Young as UN Ambassador there would be an outcry from blacks...
...His professors are concentrated more at the subcabinet level...
...It was a desperate battle...
...His friends still are...
...You went to the movies at the risk of your life," Little Peng said...
...We said, 'What did you do that for?' They said, 'We did it because we think you're great stuff...
...But the main consequence of bigness is differentiation, and that means that the chief executive, as an individual, loses much of his ability to control the government...
...Under both Nixon and Ford, although nobody seems to have noticed, there was professor Kissinger at National Security and State...
...What would have happened...
...Clear-cut, and rather humble, goals...
...Carter appointed people he can fire tomorrow if they disagree with him, knowing that no one will make a fuss about it...
...But the truth about cabinet authority can be found in the story of John Dunlop, a man widely rumored in the press to be a candidate for Secretary of Labor...
...she would have had less...
...They all have one thing in common that does not characterize me...
...Populists fail to recognize that democracy is inherently pluralistic...
...And the Economist noted that the behavior of the White House has "made our conclusion of a year ago seem almost embarrassingly prophetic: `Mr...
...I believe him...
...She understood the connections between successful functioning, power, and self-respect...
...One movie I saw was called The Bridge—it was an antifascist film...
...Then, wham—another fist back...
...One gang member goes up to another and says, 'Have you got a ticket?' The other says, `No.' The first one says, 'Let me search.' The other refuses...
...Furthermore, she was as aware as any affirmative-action purist that Oxbridge and its American equivalents give their customers more than book-learning...
...Pressure by the U.S...
...David Broder has emphasized that Carter's experience "tells you a great deal, not only about the inability of this President to achieve his goals, but about the inherent frustrations of a governmental process so big and complex as to overwhelm almost anyone...
...Carter is now seen by many as a man prone to retreat too quickly...
...In foreign policy and defense his experts largely come from one ideological camp—New Politics, McGovern liberals and members of past administrations who have publicly recanted their role in the Vietnam war...
...The old become practical when the fun's over...
...The two of us got into a terrific fight with them...
...Not one of them has a constituency of his own and I do...
...But to be reelected he must have the votes, and in particular he must not alienate the constituencies that elected him...
...Given these developments, it is curious that Jimmy Carter, alone among modern presidents, has tried to operate without a chief of staff—someone with authority to control the flow of information and to influence his personal agenda...
...He must be exhausting himself on things that aren't that important...
...In even the most prosperous Victorian households, nobody thought of investing in higher education for Arthur's sisters...
...This is as true of Jimmy Carter as it was of his predecessors...
...He resembles Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, another ex-professor businessman who retained close connections to the academic world...
...To a considerable degree, of course, the isolation of the Oval Office was a function of Nixon's personality, Seymour Martin Lipset is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of sociology and political science at Stanford University...
...Dean Butz, former professor, at Agriculture...
...But Dunlop himself explained what really happened: Carter never intended to appoint me...
...He introduced his cabinet members to the public and announced he would have a truly collegial cabinet whose members would have broad authority...
...After one such confrontation in July 1977, Carter held a meeting with the presidents of major Jewish organizations at which he said that, unlike his predecessor, he would never pressure Israel by threatening to withhold aid, that the U.S...
...We used everything we could lay our hands on—sticks, rocks, knives...
...Little Peng himself was once involved in a fight when he went with a friend to see a movie: "There were four of them there [in front of the theater] standing around smoking...
...that coalitions among diverse interest groups are the stuff of politics...
...So it seems that Carter deliberately planned to have, not an independent, but a weak cabinet over which the White House staff could exert influence and power...
...It got so fierce that onlookers called the police—but we scattered before they came....If they made an investigation, it led nowhere...
...It made sense," Little Peng accorded, but he was plainly unmoved...
...The people who entered the White House with Carter knew each other well in Georgia and stayed together throughout the long campaign...
...They flicked their cigarette butts at us...
...He told a group of pro-Israeli congressmen that he would sooner commit "political suicide" than endanger Israel's security...
...If she ran away to London to go on the stage as he did, either rape or passion Anne Crutcher is an editorial writer for the Washington Star...
...The prominent members of the Democratic Party who disagree with it have been excluded from discussions in both the National Security Council and the State Department...
...They're already censored [in China], but what little is left is enough to drive the audience wild...
...Other presidents followed the same strategy...
...He was giving advice—the sort that Little Peng and his friends would never have tolerated from their parents or anybody else...
...As FDR noted about a much smaller presidency in 1939: "It has become physically impossible for one man to see so many persons, to receive reports directly from them and to attempt to advise them on their own problems...
...professor Levi in the Attorney General's office...
...Carter consciously balanced this provincial-outsider White House by appointing many Washington insiders to the cabinet, something which shocked his Georgian populist collaborators...
...He would represent the interests of the people...
...Carter and Brzezinski undertook a policy of pressing Israel to compromise, to yield on crucial issues (such as the demands of the Palestinians) which Israel believed detrimental to its security interests...
...So, wham—out comes a fist...
...You may not feel anything when you're sixteen to nineteen," he told them, "maybe even through the age of twenty-three...
...Had he been appointed Secretary of Labor, he would have had the AFL-CIO behind him...
...would have made her pregnant at 16...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
