Hindsight without Insight

...He does not look back to wonder if he put too many chips on Hamilton Jordan and his unorthodox secret-mission negotiations through the two questionable intermediaries, Hector Villalon, the high-rolling Argentine businessman, and Christian Bourget, the left-wing French lawyer...

...The President, having originally decided to await "some proof of wrongdoing," left Lance to defend himself, and when he had successfully done so, still pushed him into resigning...

...Jordan is also more candid about the political considerations that prompted the overreaction...

...He finds comfort in the "beautiful" remarks of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich at a farewell dinner that Verdi, Puccini, and Beethoven were scorned by contemporary audiences, but "the masses of people were often wrong...

...There, predictably, he had no chance...

...Senator Russell Long was "a shrewd negotiator, and I like him" although "it's hard to get down to specific agreements with him—in fact impossible...

...One of the group also asserted that Carter had misrepresented the sense of the meeting, which involved issues much more than personalities and produced nothing like a consensus in favor of these resignations...

...But, perhaps more than any President in this century, Carter also immersed himself in the business of governing and negotiating...

...For example, one paragraph begins, "We came to Washington as outsiders and never appreciably changed this status...

...Carter deserves credit for tenacity during the thirteen days at Camp David that produced the Begin-Sadat accord...

...This suggests that a more measured and less frantic response by the American Government and media might have obviated the long crisis...

...If you think he is ready for self-examination, you are wrong...

...Relying heavily on his diary and other contemporaneous notes, Carter reports, but makes little effort to evaluate, his actions in the hostage crisis...

...Typically, the President reacted less vehemently to the confusion of policy than to the disclosure of that confusion...

...His cancellation of a scheduled energy speech over the July Fourth weekend in 1979 was designed "to get the attention of the news media and the public...

...Remembering Powell's daily sneers at "the imperial media," that must be some kind of joke...

...Even Colonel Charles Beckwith ("really a tough guy") displayed quivering chin and tears "running down his cheeks" as he told his President of the aborted rescue mission...

...Carter says that he was advised to "stop having so many news conferences" since "I could not win a war with the press...

...Ah, for the day of Churchill and reflections in tranquillity...

...And, when he helicoptered from Camp David with a Sadat-Begin peace treaty to be signed at the White House, he was aware that, "because the new fall television programs were heavily advertised at this time, we had an extraordinarily large viewing audience...

...Our most recent ex-President seems still to be brushing away a tear in Keeping Faith, a methodical memoir full of bitterness and almost empty of perspective...

...The born-again Christian seems to have borne many crosses—bad luck, a bad Congress, a bad Khomeini, a bad Kennedy, bad "special interests," and, perhaps worst of all, the bad news media...

...Hayakawa, the President agreed to read Hayakawa's book on semantics and consult him on Africa—all in vain...

...The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was "the most serious international development . . . since I have been President...

...Helens takes its place in the Carter scheme of things as "the most formidable natural disaster with which I have had to deal as President...

...Sharing no common language with his shadowy contacts, Jordan engaged the prestige of the Presidency in a weird series of negotiations...

...This abdication of executive privilege reaches an extreme in the explanation of the misguided mid-term Cabinet purge...

...repeated claims that old people had to eat pet food because I did not care for them...

...About Lance, Carter writes that he felt obliged to follow the "unanimous" recommendation of Vice President Walter Mondale, Charles Kirbo, and Jody Powell that "Bert had won a great victory and should step down...

...Then the President called to Camp David a group of "senior political advisers," including Kirbo, Clark Clifford, Sol Linowitz, Lane Kirkland, John Gardner, and Jesse Jackson, and says that "the group felt" Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal was out of step with the Administration and Congress, and "they were especially critical of [HEW Secretary] Joe Califano...

...Best for him...

...Nothing better reflects the Rover Boys mentality of the whole thing than the way Jordan describes his reaction to Carter's decision to proceed with the rescue: "The President got right to the point...

...If Carter is aware of the Truman adage about where the buck stops, he shows no sign...

...Helmut Schmidt of West Germany, on the other hand, was "somewhat unstable . . . ranting and raving...

...He seeks to share with Jefferson "the consolation that during the period of my Administration not a drop of the blood of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war...

...His Cabinet, intact for thirty months, was "the most stable in modern American history...

...Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am seriously considering an attempt to rescue the hostages.' I could feel my heart speed up: He's going to do it...

...One of Carter's more revealing diary entries reflected, "In many cases I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do with the others, although the others, the liberals, vote with me much more often...

...my favorite among the whole [European] group . . . personable and cordial towards me...

...Sadat was "a great and good man . . . whom I would come to admire more than any other leader...

...Carter writes that he was also advised, during the Camp David palavers, that the relationship with the White House press corps was bad and unlikely to improve "in spite of Jody Powell's efforts...

...So with other aspects of his Presidency...

...In mustache and disguise provided by the CIA, he flew secretly to Paris to meet an Iranian official, since identified (after his execution for treason to the Khomeini regime) as former Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh...

...On Inaugural Day, 1977, "a few tears of joy ran down my cold cheeks" seeing onlookers weep at his walk down Pennsylvania Avenue...

...Carter may have felt himself at war with journalists, but he also seemed obsessed with manipulating the media to his own advantage...

...His day-by-day account of this monumental effort at accommodation is lucid and the best episode in the book...

...Somehow the hostages and the election were woven together in my mind...

...THE LAST YEAR OF THE CARTER PRESIDENCY by Daniel Schorr by Daniel Schorr Jimmy Carter seems to look back on his Presidency as a vale of tears...

...That is his worst limitation, and it is why his own book, long on apologia, short on apology, ends up diminishing him rather than enhancing him...

...He's had enough...

...Carter has a way of looking for faults and finding them— in others...

...He writes that he conferred with Lance, and "we agreed that we had two or three days during which to make a final decision about what was best for him to do...

...Begin, on the other hand, was "unreasonable . . . obstacle to progress . . . irresponsible...

...Carter writes that "most of my advisers, including Fritz [Mondale]," urged "major changes in my cabinet...

...He arranged "a successful television extravaganza" for the signing of the Panama Canal treaties...

...When I wasn't thinking about Kennedy, I was thinking about Khomeini, and when I wasn't thinking about Khomeini, I was thinking about Kennedy...

...Here was a sectional, transitional President who could throw his energies at problems, but not rise above them...

...It dispels the impression of an irresponsible Amaretto-spilling playboy, substituting the impression of a well-meaning but irresponsible amateur diplomat, over his head in international imbroglio...

...Jimmy Carter wants us to know how hard he tried to be "a good President," working at meeting America's challenges and maintaining the peace...

...Courting Senator S.I...

...In the early stage of the revolution, Administration policy seems to have wavered between supporting the Shah and encouraging his abdication...

...Carter conceals the knife behind typically ambiguous language...

...I opened my arms, and we embraced and wept together," Carter recalls...

...In some ways, dealing with limits would become the subliminal theme of the next four years and affect the outcome of the 1980 election...

...At their suggestion, the President sidetracked his long-suffering Secretary Cyrus Vance and the State Department, "which the Iranians claimed was controlled by David Rockefeller...

...His fight for the Panama Canal treaties was "one of the most onerous political ordeals of my life...

...A populist who must look to posterity for acceptance is a failed populist...

...He won three Emmy awards for his Watergate coverage for CBS News...

...He has an unpleasant practice of passing the buck for unpopular decisions to advisers, whom he names, in obvious violation of their confidence...

...Giscard d'Es-taing of France was "a very strong, competent man...

...personally abusive towards me...

...And even the eruption of Mount St...

...On election eve, 1980, domestic adviser Stuart Eizenstat "burst into tears" over impending defeat, and "I put my arms around him to comfort him...

...The paragraph goes on, "Nowhere within the press, Congress, or the ranks of the Washington power structure were there any long-established friends and acquaintances that would naturally come to our defense...

...It is the media he blames for the scars incurred from brother Billy's flirtation with the outlaw Khadaffi regime in Libya ("wild and exaggerated accusations . . . dominating the news . . . wreaking havoc with our efforts to deal with anything else") and the scandal that led to the resignation of Budget Director Bert Lance ("there was no adequate forum within which he could be 'tried,' except the daily news media...

...And Carter seems unable to address the reasons for his failure, sometimes concealing them behind opaque writing...

...The handling of the Iranian hostage crisis also represented a monument to tenacity, but not to sagacity...

...He means the limits of external circumstances, but the statement could apply to his personal limitations...

...good persons, bad persons...

...A more honest sentence would have read...

...what was best for me that he do...

...It emerges from Carter's tortured prose, however, that Lance fell victim not to the media but to Presidential spinelessness...

...He reports the information from Ghotbzadeh that the occupation of the Tehran embassy was originally intended to last only a few days and was prolonged when the young occupiers were surprised to find themselves "national heroes" because of the attention focused upon them...

...Senator Edward Kennedy, on the other hand, "weakened his party's chances for success...

...The occupation of the Tehran embassy was "the beginning of the most difficult period of my life," the failure of the rescue mission "one of the worst [days] of my life," and the final negotiations up to the end of his term, "the most dramatic moments of my Presidency...

...Lance had made clear it was best for him to stay in office...

...Jordan, whom Carter describes as the aide who was "most seriously misunderstood and underestimated by the press and the public," provides a more detailed account of this period in his companion volume, Crisis...

...In Jimmy Carter's egocentric little world, things are categorized, but not explained: best days, worst days...

...Daniel Schorr is senior correspondent of Ted Turner's Cable News Network...

...Author's italics, and he's welcome to them...

...Carter has a way of substituting superlatives for evaluations...

...Looking back to the day he became President, Carter writes, "It was not possible even for me to imagine the limits we would have to face...

...Two of that group have told me they felt "used" and "betrayed" by Carter, who had urged them to speak with utter candor on a pledge of complete confidentiality...

...To complain that he found few friends in the Washington that he had defined as the enemy qualifies as chutzpah...

...However immature, Jordan is more candid than his principal about some aspects...

...Carter seems not to perceive how mind-boggling it is that two adventurers, presuming to speak for the Iranian regime, could dictate the elimination of the State Department from the handling of a crisis...

...He fell short for reasons that he still assigns mainly to others...

...In the White House, as on Broadway, there is no business like show business...

...United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim had "tears in his eyes" as he recounted his "horrible experiences" dealing with the fanatics in Tehran over American hostages...

...He writes that he had rejected the idea of an Inaugural Day walk to the White House as "rather silly" until it occurred to him to make a "vivid demonstration" on television of being more secure than the Presidents of the Vietnam war period...

...Carter reveals—without the slightest retrospective regret—that he threatened to respond to further leaks by firing the responsible State Department desk officers, "even if some innocent people might be punished...

...Along the lachrymose way, President Omar Torrijos "broke down and sobbed" in the White House when the Panama Canal treaties were signed...

...Also impressive was the patient shepherding of the Panama Canal treaties to ratification against initially heavy odds, and his account of what it took to change those odds...

...It was no wonder that Lance's wife accused the President of having betrayed his best friend...

...The ill-fated mission was followed by the ill-fated rescue effort...