Carter's Dog-Keeper
TheoLippman Jr.
Theo Lippman,Jr. CARTER'S DOG-KEEPER James Fallows'' The Passionless Presidency' '-a joke that everyone missed. My favorite reporting on the White House is Dog Days at the White House: The...
...That's what this is...
...The clue came to me after I had pondered the meaning of his two Atlantic articles for quite some time...
...I also hope I have not embarrassed all my friends in the Washington press corps who missed the point and took the thing seriously...
...I am sorry to report that there is no dirt in the Passionless Presidency...
...Compare, just forgone example, this (from Kennedy by Theodore Sorensen): Around 1:30, and, if possible, a second time in the evening, he would take a fifteen-minute swim in the heated (90-degrec) White House pool, usually with Dave Powers...
...He was always praising "divines" and doers of good deeds, all the while laughing at religion and the Boy Scouts...
...For example, he was upset because Carter gave him and the rest of the White House staff raises...
...With his moral virtues and his intellectual skills, he is perhaps as admirable a human being as has ever held the job...
...Naturally, then, when I heard that James Fallows was writing an insider's acTheo Lippman, Jr., tarites editorials for the Baltimore Sun...
...He objected to Carter's spending too much time on detail...
...Sometimes one or two from a group of trusted staff aides and friends would join Kennedy in the pool, and often there would be just one other male and female to make up a foursome...
...Mencken...
...That's like Mencken praising a professor of English...
...The rest is only failed stabs...
...Fallows isn't funny, but he means to be...
...Mencken loved to ridicule his targets by praising them for those attributes most honored by a society or culture he himself despised...
...He tells me he has never written humor before...
...Anyway, I hope this explains "The Passionless Presidency...
...if I had to choose one politician to sit at the Pearly Gates and pass judgment on my soul, Jimmy Carter would be the one.'' "Except this...
...He is a stable, confident man whose quirks are few Carter is usually patient, less vindictive than the political norm...
...He's trying to be another H.L...
...By today's Washington standards, those are scandalous faults...
...Listening to recorded show music in the background, exchanging sports stories or anecdotes with Powers, he regenerated his energies and ideas, often giving Dave a list of messages he wanted delivered during the lunch hour...
...Fallows has too little to do...
...In fact, it is the one part of the essay that approaches true humor...
...He said of Carter that he believes 50 things but he doesn't believe one thing...
...No question, Fallows is ridiculing the man for what Carter, the dummy, is probably proud of...
...Too many senior advisors are Georgians...
...Carter set deadlines-wrong-and he didn't set deadlines-also wrong...
...The fact that he had the wit to make that up in his conversation with me shows he may yet become'a funny man...
...with this (from Dog Days at the White House): I remember one time it was a beautiful tall blond girl skinny-dipping in the pool with him...
...Fallows is one of the most celebrated doves of this era...
...How did I miss it the first time...
...It's arch...
...Jack Kennedy was already there, lounging naked beside the pool and sipping a daiquiri...
...JFK liked to swim nude and so did some of the girls who popped in to visit him...
...I simply didn't get it...
...Bryant could combine objective journalism with insiderism and produce the perfect book of this genre...
...Except this: "I fully believe [Carter] to be a good man...
...Of all the contenders on the horizon, none would be saner or surer than Carter in those moments...
...I mean that Carter obviously regards speeches as no more important to governing than John Kennedy regarded owning a cocker spaniel or wolfhound...
...that when questions of life and death, of nuclear war and human destruction were laid upon his desk, he would act on them calmly, with self-knowledge, free of interior demons that might tempt him to act rashly or to prove at terrible cost that he was a man...
...She came in the South West Gate and straight to the South Portico, and a trusted aide met her there...
...But Mr...
...Because his job carried with it no prestige, nor involved him in any way with politics or statecraft, Mr...
...That seemed to me a perfect description of Fallows himself...
...too many senior advisors aren't Georgians...
...Hamilton Jordan wore a suit, but now it was too late...
...Some people may not have gotten the point, but what Fallows is writing is humor...
...As anyone who has ever listened to a Carter speech knows, speechwriters are this administration's equivalent of dog keepers...
...The same sort of thing continued into the second article, which opened with Fallows lamenting that he wasn't around in the good old days before Nixon covered up the White House pool...
...Even at the height of the Cuban missile crisis he made time for his dip in the pool...
...When [another time] the President noticed that some of us male workers were standing outside the glass door watching him swimming nude with mixed company, he ordered the door to the pool changed to frosted glass...
...Then I came across this: "I came to respect Brzezinski" Wait a minute, I thought...
...Fallows has too much to do...
...they weren't simple enough...
...I had an aide to put in the jokes in the President's speeches," he said...
...But this particular girl must have been just waiting for the First Lady to be on her way...
...That explains the line about the Pearly Gates...
...I left his service feeling that when moral choices faced him, he would resolve them fairly...
...He respects Zbigniew Brzezinski...
...He complained about everything but there was no theme...
...Fallows was free to peer through any unfrosted doors and then tell the American people what he really saw...
...He wanted Carter to be austere...
...Everything began to fall into place...
...I went back to the first article and read that paragraph about Carter's personal qualities...
...As I say, I still hadn't caught on...
...Jokes in Carter's speeches...
...Later Carter turned over details to his staff, and that upset Fallows...
...He is probably smarter, in the College Board sense, than any other President in this century...
...Fallows should be encouraged in his trying...
...Fallows is an atheist...
...That's a pretty good line...
...Then he was upset because his raise wasn't big enough...
...He walked her through the Diplomatic Room and along the Colonnade, as if he were taking her to the President's office, but instead he took her to the gymnasium, where she shed her clothes and went into the pool...
...His speeches were too simple...
...count of the first two and a half years of Jimmy Carter's White House for the Atlantic Monthly ("The Passionless Presidency," May 1979, June 1979), my heart leapt...
...In his ability to do justice case by case, he would be the ideal non-lawyer for the Supreme Court...
...One factor in our choice of Presidents is their soundness in the ultimate moment of decision, when the finger is poised over the button and the future of the race is at stake...
...Fallows was the chief speech-writer for the President...
...Hamilton Jordan wouldn't wear a suit, which was a silly insult to the conventions of Washington...
...He fasted to dangerous skinniness and feigned madness to beat the draft and later wrote about this maneuver at length...
...My favorite reporting on the White House is Dog Days at the White House: The Outrageous Memoirs of the Presidential Kennel Keeper, by Traphes Bryant with Frances Spatz Leighton...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
