Pressing the President

...His three-piece suits are expensive and conservatively cut, much as one would expect of a successful banker...

...Though they entertained sparingly, when they did, they did it right...

...The President is rather a cold fish and Bert was one of the few people he could relax with...

...Last July 8,1 told Jody Powell that Lance's complex financial affairs were about to be digested by a half-dozen media mills, all grinding away in search of bits of scandal...

...for his political campaign—itself financed through bank overdrafts?eventually caught up with Bert, It would not have happened had the President given Lance two or three weeks last December to sell the bank Hock and tidy up his estate...

...But unlike the other high and mighty, he listed his home telephone number—an uncommon practice even among third-level bureaucrats in this city...

...The opportunity was provided by the Senate hearings of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, where Lance confounded his sanctimonious foes, such as Charles H. Percy (R.-IU...

...congressional leaders, looking grave, would be summoned for consultations...

...Before the Lance Affair hit town, the young Georgians working for Carter quietly hoped they would soon be embroiled in a nifty crisis...

...To make one's private number public, It Is widely fell, is both a drop in status and a virtual invitation to any half-crazed flake in the country to call at two in the morning, Lance, who also picked up the phone in hit office when It rang, limply did not care...

...With the proper steps, taken at the proper time, Bert Lance would not have become the number-one target of investigative reporters on the nation's leading magazines and newspapers...

...This was the fellow whom the President had picked to balance the budget, to make the bureaucracy fly right, to cajole tycoons to go along with the Administration...

...When Jimmy and Rosalynn went to the theater, they asked the Lances to Join them...

...He said absolutely not...

...Unlike Nixon, Carter is too smart to publicly attack the press...

...Hence, it was not long before editorial writers were talking of the need for the President to avoid further references to new moralities, fresh winds blowing, hounds' teeth, and other uplifting sermons...

...In addition, Carter had promised that his Administration would bring new and higher standards of morality to the scandal-ridden capital...

...for his part, was not about to line up against one of his own committee chairmen...

...To pull off this financial coup, Lance went deeply into hock...

...It would not have happened had Carter allowed him to put his Atlanta bank stock in trust and keep it there, u Carter was doing with the land he inherited from hit father in Sumter County, Georgia...

...A one-time country banker, Lance had statewide political ambitions, which he saw crushed in a narrow primary...

...The price was too high, for committee chairman Abraham R. Ribicoff (D.-Conn...

...It would not have happened had Lance sold his stock at $20 a share to a Kuwaiti group, as he could have In March, had he overcome hit doubt and those of the President about permitting the bank to fall under Arab control...

...Of course, that is exactly what happened to the amiable Bert Lance late last month: Finally convinced that the politicians and the press, increasingly clamorous over Lance's finances, would pull them both under, the President accepted his friend's resignation as director of the Office of Management and Budget...

...He had said nothing about the morality of lending Lance's bank-owned airplane to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the midst of his Presidential campaign...

...With the fate of his energy program and Panama Canal Treaty still uncertain, the President knew he needed Byrd even more than he needed his longtime friend—and that he could not have them both...

...Washington-USA PRESSING THE PRESIDENT BY ANDREW J. GLASS WASHINGTON Aman who worked closely with Jimmy Carter tor many years once said of him: "He will tote you through the swamp all day long and all night long, until he i.s absolutely certain he is going to drown and then he'll drop you...

...When the crisis came, however, it involved no foreign leader, no distant war, no proclamations, and no thunderclaps...

...He thereupon became a big-time Atlanta banker, taking over with two associates the National Bank of Georgia, Atlanta's fifth largest...

...Napoleon once said every soldier of France carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack...

...Unfortunately, precious few of them have ever been to the board rooms of the big-city banks where Lance cut his multimillion-dollar personal loan deals...

...He was too abstracted to pay the slightest heed...

...privately, he keeps score...

...The Reporters could not prove what they wanted to: that Lance was an outright crook...

...But all along, the rub with Lance was that his image ran against the grain of the one Carter had created to get elected—the populist who would represent the interests of the little people, the fellows attending county fairs...

...In the end, the same national press corps that propelled Jimmy Carter from an obscure candidacy to fame and success destroyed his closest ally in government...

...Yet they are also invariably rumpled, like those of a preoccupied small-town politician...

...after that, it was merely a matter of letting him leave on the upswing...

...For a time, Bert and LaBelle were Washington new Fun Couple...

...By Labor Day, Lance had become too heavy a burden...

...This, plus the earlier borrowing...

...The 46-year-old Lance looks like an oversized Teddy Bear, and is one of the friendliest persons 1 have ever met...

...Carter, though, wanted to make his mark on the Ford budget and his friend had to hurry here to set things In motion...

...A month later, Lance was still saying that, which was part of the problem...

...Presidential Insiders, distinguished envoy*, Influential columnists, and Carter himself graced their dinner table...

...And it would not have happened had the Chief Executive not asked a Senate committee to relieve Lance of his pledge to sell his holdings by the end of the year...

...Then the world would gel the true measure of their superbly self-disciplined taskmaster who had so skillfully weathered the storm...

...That same day, I asked the Budget Director whether there was anything in his background that would be embarrassing to him if revealed on the front page of The New York Times...

...The lights would burn deep into the night in the White House Situation Room...

...had lined up with the New York Times in calling for the Budget Director's resignation, and Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D.-W.Va...

...When he came here in January, he and his delicate, God-loving wife, LaBelle, rented a Georgetown mansion...

...Yet they could and did publicize the fact that Carter's Great Georgia Hope to balance the budget had skated on the thinnest financial ice while seeking to make his personal fortune—cool irony for a hot summer's reading) These stories, in turn, brought on a thorough investigation by the Comptroller of the Currency, which yielded many more details of Lance's shaky financial activities...

...Similarly, since Watergate, a lot of young journalists have come to feel latching onto a scandal is all it takes to win a Pulitzer Prize...

...Still, however badly the Senators came off, sinking into self-doubt and squabbling in front of a national TV audience, Carter could not defy them and keep Lance on...

...The trend worries Bob Woodward, a good reporter who recently observed that "Carter is not Moses and Lance is not Judas...

...Only a fog bank was visible, slowly rolling over the While House gales and enveloping a Georgia-bred millionaire, one of their own, whose staggering debts very nearly equalled his formidable assets...

...hard decisions would be made and announced to an anxious public...

...Nevertheless, Hamilton Jordan so admired Lance's political prowess that he spoke hall'-seriously of leaving the While House someday to run Lance for President...