Carter's Quick-Study Foreign Policy
GLASS, ANDREW J.
LEARNING ON THE JOB Carter's Quicks Study Foreign Policy ^andrewjglass Washington SrNCE Jimmy Carter began his quest for the presidency knowing next to nothing about foreign affairs, he decided...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy repeatedly used the presidential office as a pulpit...
...He orders his speechwriting crew—whom he ranks in status somewhere below Hugh ("Cousin Cheap") Carter, the paper-clip counter—to marshal facts and to eschew all oratorical flourishes...
...Do you think Carter will be a one-term President...
...Carter disdains personal puffery, however, as much as he does the inevitable personal rivalries of those who serve him...
...Thus AFL-CIO President George Meany is left free to attack Carter's "sacrifice of equality," rather than "equality of sacrifice," without having to worry that a writer of Sorensen's caliber is standing ready to respond in the President's name...
...In raising the lack-of-leadership issue, Carter's critics accuse him of being inaccessible and unwilling to face controversies before they reach the memo-writing stage...
...In the earnest manner we have since become familiar with, Carter answered that he was a member of the Trilateral Commission and that, moreover, he had led several overseas trade missions on behalf of his state to such places as "London, England" and "Tokyo, Japan...
...The governor is a quick study and he is determined to learn all he needs to know before he strikes out for the big time...
...Still, Carter is a realist...
...The questions prompted him to call Rusk anew, and that is how he got to know Zbigniew Brzezinski of Columbia University, Cyrus Vance of Wall Street and similar individuals...
...Then Jimmy Carter, having learned on the job, can spend the next four years telling Americans how bad things really are and reminding them how little he as President can do about it...
...He knows that the volunteer Army is in shambles, not prepared to fight a conventional war...
...He reads more history books than any president since Harry Truman...
...He draws some comfort, for example, from the intelligence that the Soviets are having their troubles, too...
...Carter is convinced his foreign policy woes will not bar him from again securing the party's nomination without much trouble...
...And by the middle of 1976 the Carter line was being widely embraced...
...He knows he has no real leverage on the Chinese, who are acting in Vietnam much in the same way the United States would have acted 15 years ago...
...Carter reviews the cold facts...
...someone recently asked Eugene McCarthy...
...The question is: should he tell the people the bad news, or should he wait...
...An 11.2 per cent annual inflation rate at home and a gnawing suspicion that the upheaval in Iran is far from over does not help them in their work...
...Yet I felt a pang of sympathy for Carter, in part because my employers included Georgia's two leading newspapers...
...A draft for the State of the Union message by JFK speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was largely shoved aside...
...During this period, at one of those breakfasts Washington reporters employ to size up presidential aspirants before most people have ever heard of them, the late Peter Lisagor, then bureau chief of the now defunct Chicago Daily News, asked Carter to list his foreign policy qualifications...
...The "dump Carter" movement currently being organized in New York, California and within the ranks of labor, it is reasoned, lacks a viable alternative candidate...
...And while there are those around him who are quick to explain why he is not really at fault for what has gone wrong, and why things would be far worse had not the President exercised his masterful sense of restraint, he (and they) cannot help noticing that things are rapidly going to hell...
...He knows that with the hostility of Howard Baker, the Republican leader, plus George Meany, he cannot possibly get a two-thirds majority in the Senate for the salt treaty...
...So I told Carter's political managers that the New York, Washington and Cambridge barracudas would gobble him up like a Andrew J. Glass, a frequent New Leader contributor, is head of the Cox Newspapers bureau in Washington...
...Back went the word to Chicago, Illinois, that Carter was a hick...
...LEARNING ON THE JOB Carter's Quicks Study Foreign Policy ^andrewjglass Washington SrNCE Jimmy Carter began his quest for the presidency knowing next to nothing about foreign affairs, he decided to make a virtue of his ignorance...
...What is more, since this capital lives on momentum, right now the Carter folks are racking their brains to figure out ways to reverse its present course...
...But, somehow, Carter the Sunday school teacher has never felt altogether comfortable in the traditional presidential role of educating the public on the issues of the day, of seeking to mold opinion by the force of his words and ideas...
...flounder fillet unless he began speaking coherently and cogently about major foreign policy questions...
...The charge is pointless: Lyndon Johnson, for one, could talk to people for hours on end about foreign affairs, Scotch in hand, yet that did not spare LBJ from making some dreadful mistakes...
...Moreover, his blunt talk within this group—it does not go far beyond Brzezinski, Vance, Vice President Walter Mondale, Hamilton Jordan, Charles Kirbo, and Rosalynn Carter—would astound the chroniclers of the supposedly saccharine President...
...He knows that the United States, with 5 per cent of the world's population, cannot go on much longer using a third of the world's energy...
...In private...
...Neither leader was above striking a pose or creating an exaggerated image to win wide approval for his policies...
...Americans reelect presidents because they bring peace and prosperity and not a tide of troubles...
...Experience teaches that reporters are well advised to suppress any friendly sentiments they might harbor toward politicians...
...In a way, they were right...
...Today, Roosevelt and Kennedy are revered...
...Poland and possibly Rumania could try to break away this year...
...Yes, I think he'll make it," he replied...
...they show that citizens need symbols, as well as reason, to live by...
...A year earlier, Carter had begun making the rounds of the editorial boards and television anchormen in Manhattan as an obscure former Southern governor with the strange but persistent notion that he could be elected to the country's highest executive office...
...At bottom, these platitudes meant that here at long last was someone who could clean up the mess the Vietnam war had left...
...That—or a half-dozen other unforseen events like it —could change the momentum, the President's inner circle keeps telling itself...
...If the Russians move against Warsaw, some White House analysts think there is a good chance the Polish Army will fight for Pope and country...
...More out of a sense of politeness than anything else, he was occasionally asked to name his foreign policy advisers...
...He knows that the American industrial machine is suffering from a lack of capital and worker productivity...
...The problem with the nation's foreign policy, he often said during his campaign, was that Washington's insiders had balled things up with their secrecy and amorality...
...One might add that it is not Carter's part of the Camp David accords that has come unstuck...
...The Carterites also think their Republican rival in November 1980 will be Ronald Reagan, and that faced with an either-or choice, most Americans will stick with what they've got, warts and all...
...Nowadays, as President, he spends many hours in his cozy study near the Oval Office poring over memos, checking off boxes and writing his responses in a firm hand as a Mozart string quartet plays on the stereo...
...When it comes to foreign affairs, Carter excels as a detail man...
...Journalists of Lisagor's sophistication dismiss the Trilateral Commission as one of those gilt-edged Rockefeller boondoggles which permit busy people to say weighty things to like-minded people who would otherwise be too busy to read them...
...No problem, they responded...
...Although the polls say otherwise, the self-confident Carter has not the slightest doubt in his mind that he, too, will go down in history as a great President —a man who met the difficult needs of his times...
...An honest answer at that point would have been that he really had none to speak of, although he did enjoy talking with Dean Rusk up at the University of Georgia in Athens...
...He wrote the entire peace treaty between Egypt and Israel himself—an astounding feat in an age where most documents of any import are drafted by faceless persons for the approval of their principals...
...Nevertheless, the soaring phrases and grand gestures continue to elude him...
...Carter promised to deal an open hand to the American people in adopting a policy as good and kind as they were...
...the would-be dumpers can be made to look like a bunch of crazies, all ambition and little sense...
...The charge is also false: Carter is accessible, albeit only to a very tight circle of advisers...
...Yet Carter is serene...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 6
