Why Carter Fails: Taking the Politics Out of Government
Lemann, Nicholas
Why Carter Fails: Taking the Politics Out of Governmmt by Nicholas Lemann Last summer and fall. President Carter undertook to learn’the federal tax system. He had promised during...
...Many times in 1976 reporters had asked about the specifics of the programs he was promising, and many times he had answered that he didn’t know the specifics yet...
...During the campaign there had been tantalizing glimpses of the Carter program, ideas like eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, but these were not the tip of the iceberg they seemed to be at the time...
...One result of Carter’s personal inaccessibility (as opposed to his tremendous accessibility on paper) is that any hint of where hestands, such as his scribblings on memos, is accepted as Gospel...
...Members of the White House staff say, generally, that it isamazingly easyto get paper in to Carter, and that often he has corrected the spelling, punctuation, and grammar-but seldom the ideas...
...Whereas his predecessors might have given their aides some broad outlines for a new policy and left the details to them, Carter likes to handle the details himself...
...Thus he could come out for harmony with thecongress, but refuse to bargain with or flatter its members...
...No,” the official said...
...Political wooing and flattery don’t come naturally to him...
...The second bothersome point was that the tax system seemed to beset up to benefit unfairly the well-off, to allow them special little deals that would be far out of the reach of average working people...
...And among those who are not old friends, the next year will be crucial...
...and while the President has been a dutiful pupil he has not been theoriginator ortheinstigator ofsparks of insight about how to get control of the government...
...Even now there are moments when the Carter magic can be seen...
...Shortly after that a major inter-agency briefing for press officers was held in the auditorium of the Executive Office Building, where John Gilligan, the director of the Agency for International Development, told the assembled masses about the activity swirling around this pressing concern of the President’s...
...He listens intently, sometimes asking a question, sometimes soliciting someone's views...
...Very early on, Carter let it be known that he prefers to do business by decision memo, and he spends a good deal of every day (starting as early as 5:30) sitting alone in a small room adjacent to the Oval Office reading them and checking off options, very neatly, in a black felt-tipped pen...
...If an aide in the Office of Management and Budget should have an inspiration about speechmaking, or an assistant secretary of Defense a brainstorm about welfare reform, it’s possible he can get it to the President or his closest aides, where it will be read and ignored...
...Carter is relatively easy on the staff...
...Hedoesn't trytodominate...
...Occasionally he adds comments in the margins, such as “proceed with caution” or “move quickly on this...
...He’s not a man who likes to bargain, to trade favors, to form alliances, to control the Democratic Party-all that may be necessary in a campaign, but fof: Carter, campaigning and governing are two different matters...
...The same goes for spending more money...
...Meetings are usually followed by "decision memos," which are the procedural backbone of the White House...
...Carter apparently doesn’t see his dealings with his staff as a colossal missed opportunity for information, for the generation of ideas, and for control of the government...
...A veteran of Capitol Hill serving a president in trouble on Capitol Hill, a former chairman of the House Budget Committee working for an ardent budget-cutter, Adams was consulted by the White House on narrow transportation issues exclusively...
...He has only Carter is singularly unadept at the use of people-his own people no less than his adversaries...
...but sincerer words were never spoken...
...With organized groups, Carter, no jawboner, is equally lacking in natural rapport...
...Before a meeting he has almost always read a lengthy memo giving him background on the subject, and on those rare occasions when he hasn't had time to prepare he says so...
...For instance, at precisely I :45 on the afternoon of March 16 the President strode into the Oval Office to greet Maury Gladman, a California banker who is president of Kiwanis International...
...Apparently this is a matter of principle: the principle that using people is part of politics and that politics is something you use to get elected but not to govern...
...Why Carter Fails: Taking the Politics Out of Governmmt by Nicholas Lemann Last summer and fall...
...Carter listened impassively to a lecture by Meany on how deceleration was out of the question, and at the end of it he stood up, said, “If you can’t support me I’d rather not talk,” and left the room...
...a pale shadow of the insecurity and determination to prove himself that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had, perhaps most clear in the intensity of his Calvinism...
...Chiles...
...When a domestic-policy issue comes up, he never deals with it off-the-cuff with aides...
...Hence his injunction to Califano...
...otherwise his suggestions, when they come at all, are along the lines of across-the-board budget cuts...
...Carter’s own view of governing is like a parody of a League of Women Voters pamphlet on efficient public administration...
...Occasionally Carter is said to have a firm idea about how a program might be improved, when he has had a directly related experience in Georgia...
...he holds aseries of meetings...
...But that attitude implies that a big picture can be imposed on the administration after the fact, so that Carter will nothorror of horrors-have to impose one in the doing of his daily business...
...Well, said the President, you must write a note that I cancarryto him, and Gladman did...
...They had agreed to pledge overall support for the President’s policy, special cooperation in certain areas like health care costs, and restraint on wage demands if prices stayed steady...
...He is one of the few elected officials in Washington who will take the time to read enough to master complex material about government operations...
...When the official was finished, Carter said softly, “Is there anythingelse youwant to tellme...
...So although Carter’s mastery of the workings of the government is growing with time, time has also brought a more and more restless staff, a staff full of people wondering whether they should get out before the administration’s prestige sinks any lower...
...He just knew welfare was a mess, wanted very muchto makeit better,and figured that when he took office he’d make arationalstudy ofthealternatives and choose the best one...
...So he held a series of meetings in the White House, at leastsixofthem,noneshorter than two hours and one four hours long, with officials of theTreasury, theoffice of Management and Budget, and the White House Domestic Policy Staff in attendance...
...That was the important word, restraint-the White House has wanted labor to promise wage “deceleration,” but George Meany couldn’t agree to that...
...The next morning he was awakened at home with a phone call from Frank Moore, who was on Air Force One flying to Panama...
...Apparently Carter signed the bill in a free moment, thus not wasting any time, and didn’t tell the liaison office about it...
...Moffett figured that he might a t t e n d the signing, t h a t some photographers might be there, that a Dicture of him watching the President Answer Io lasf rnonfh’spuzzle: signing his bill might grace the front pages in his district...
...It was illiterate, he said, unintelligible, not good enough...
...A few handwritten words cause major tremors...
...Few presidents would get involved in anything but the broadest decisions on taxes...
...As is now obvious, that’s not how the presidency works, and hence Carter’s record of missed opportunities, programs that never went anywhere, lack of direction, and misuse of personnel...
...Hecouldn’t stomachthat-this was, after all, the nation’s highest civilian honor-so he tore up the list and gave out just two awards, to Dr...
...Officials from the relevant Cabinet departments, from the Office of Management and Budget, from the Domestic Policy Staff, from the Council of Economic Advisors-all gather with the president at the White House...
...Thus he could in 1977 choose an energy plan that c o n t r o l s consumption through higher prices, and stick by it in 1978 while declaring himself to be battling inflation...
...A close look at how the President prefers to conduct the business of governing-what he considers important, and what he doesn’t-shows a lot about why his administration has been so disappointing...
...As far as I’m concerned, what you’ve just told me is that our welfare system can’t get any better...
...That’s vintage Carter...
...No, Carter would insist, that may be true in other countries, but it’s not true here in America...
...So with his staff and with competing forces in the political world, such as congressmen and members of interest groups, he turns off the charm...
...He is said at those times to be uncomfortable and unimpressive...
...When John Chancellor and an NBC film crew followed himaround for a day last year, they caught him saying at dinner, “And then 1 spent some time talking to Chancellor...
...Outside of the first and second floors of the West Wing, it’s a government of hired hands...
...A crisis that precludes systematic consideration throws the President off...
...A few weeks ago, The New York Times reported that Brock Adams, the Secretary of Transportation, was dissatisfied to the point of thinking about resigning...
...The President has a very keen sense of fairness, and although he is not an eloquent man, the tax situation has driven him to some Nicholas Lemann is Managing Editor of The Washington Monthly...
...If I see a memo saying that there is a unique problem in the area of relations with Puerto Rico,” says one of Carter’s aides, “and that we need a special White House office of Puerto Rican Affairs because the existing agencies can’t handle the problem, I know he’ll say no...
...Let’s do it,” the President wrote in the margin...
...Not long ago Rafshoon sent Carter a memo suggesting, among other things, that he address a joint session of Congress...
...Among all but the top staff, there’s little sense of ferment, of being on the team, of knowing where the administration is going...
...Moore’s office promised to cooperate...
...Carter turned to him and said, “Joe, I don’t want to spend any more money on this...
...One person who has been in meetings with Carter calls him papal-a small, frail, almost delicate man, waxen in complexion, so soft-spoken that it's sometimes haid to hear him...
...The least believable of Carter’s campaign promises-that he’ll balance the budget-may be the one he most deeply wants to make come true...
...One Sunday back in March there was anemergency meeting on the coal strike for which Carter flew in from Camp David...
...Carter walked in, smiled, and gave a little speech, saying how important fighting inflation was to him, how glad he was that he could count on the cooperation of labor, how crucial the policy of voluntary wage deceleration was...
...The experience of one first-term Democratic congressman from a Republican district is typical...
...Carter’s alertness never flagged...
...Ill...
...He is admirably concerned with reducing the size and cost of government...
...Like most of the men in his organization, Gladman is not of the President’s political persuasion, but he was nonetheless won over...
...Udall...
...A course he has avoided is the one Franklin D. Roosevelt (equally uninformed and undirected in 1932) took: surrounding himself with the best talent available, filling the government with it, and using these people, through argument, flattery, and cajolery, to find out what needs doing and to get it done...
...A simple one, like a cover memo for a minor executive order, might briefly describe the order and then say “Approve/ Disapprove...
...Anything that saysweneed morestaff he’ll reject...
...More elaborate memos are carefully “staffed out” to anyone in the government who has an interest intheir outcome, then reassembled with many options, pros and cons, and conflicting recommendations listed...
...Once-, having never asked a favor of Carter before, he called the presidential appointments secretary and said he needed a letter from the President to read at a banquet in his district...
...Does Carter have one person who would stick with him to the end...
...Charles Schultze, the chief economic a d v i s e r , o l d e r , more intellectual and original of mind, with more influence than he is commonly given credit for...
...On vacation at Camp David for the Fourth of July, he decided to spend a day visiting the Civil War battlefields, and as preparation had Jody Powell bring in Shelby Foote, the novelist and Civil War historian, togive him a tutorial on the subject...
...Also, Carter doesn’t like small talk-it’s almost as if he considers it an abuse of the public trust to spend any of his time as President (as opposed to campaigning) shooting the breeze rather than reading briefing books...
...He might have realized the tremendous opportunity he had to use the public’s strongest feelings about politics...
...Still not good enough, Carter said...
...The knack of either knowing how the miners might react or of finding that out very quickly, Carter didn’t have...
...The President’s mind does not comfortably embrace the idea of arguing out welfare program by program-inciting the kind of competitive presentation of views that would stimulate him to figure out where duplication exists, where money is being paid to people who don’t need it or need less than they’re getting...
...On the other hand, he hadn’t given a lot of thought to what, exactly, he was going to do to the tax system...
...Carter is singularly unadept at the use of people-his own people no less than his adversaries...
...There are a lot of people in this town who could agree with Jimmy Carter,” says one member of the White House staff...
...Because you’re not going to get anybody tc) support an entire 40-point policy just because Carter thinks it’s right and went through the decision memo carefully...
...In the manner of a small town patriarch, the President is gracious and solicitous when someone he knows is ill or in trouble, or when he meets someone for the first time...
...Apparently this is a matter of principle: the principle that using people is part of politics and that politics is something you use to get elected but not to govern...
...The meeting was held in the Executive Office Building...
...What he didn’t do, however, was ask Califano and Marshall what all the federal income suDDlements-Social Besides the Cabinet secretaries, the political appointees in the departments are people he doesn’t know, didn’t appoint, never sees, and makes no effort to win over-apparently on the assumption that if he, the celestial watchmaker, gives the Cabinet members their orders, then everything will work fine down the line of authority...
...Thus is policy made in the Carter administration...
...In fact, that mixture of sincere belief and self-interest that constitutes political loyalty doesn’t extend, in Carter’s case, much beyond his immediate family and his four or five closest advisors...
...He makes quantitative judgments where he should be making qualitative ones...
...Carter sat listening, completely expressionless, leaving his visitor with no clue as to how he was reacting to what he was hearing...
...For the next several months, the staff has decided, every message from the President will concentrate on five key thrusts of his administrationinflation, energy, civil service reform, unemployment, and tax reform...
...Finding the Morally Superior Position Another member of the staff remembers having an argument with Carter during the campaign...
...He once spent an hour and a half discussing the resurfacing of the White House tennis court...
...The President mentioned that he was about to visit the aircraft carrier Eisenhower, and Gladman said that was a coincidence, his son was an assistant navigator on the Eisenhower...
...And when that doctor didn’t pay his $14,000 in taxes, other average American working families had to pay his taxes for him...
...Certainly it’s not unusual that Carter has enemies among the country’s politicians-every President does...
...In the Cabinet meeting last year when welfare reform was first discussed, Joseph Califano made the opening presentation, explaining in a few minutes that a new welfare program would need so-and-so many dollars to work...
...His White House has barely a trace of the culture that produced Watergate...
...So he’s left with little firsthand knowledge or great forethought, relying on the government’s notoriously bad r e g u l a r channels of information to provide him with that...
...This Carter is extremely loath, by nature, to do...
...Besides the Cabinet secretaries, the political appointees in the departments are people he doesn’t know, didn’t appoint, never sees, and makes no effort to win overapparently on the assumption that if he, the celestial watchmaker, gives the Cabinet members their orders, then everything will work fine down the line of authority...
...Two young lawyers onthe White Housestaff spent a weekend rewriting it and sent it back in...
...He could make a coalition with them...
...Carter was accustomed to saying, over and over, that the United States is the first country in history where there is absolute compatibility between liberty and equality...
...A sign of that lack of the instinctive ability to get to the heart of an issue, to e x t r a c t the main points from knowledgeable people, and to synthesize them, is Carter’s behavior in the face of enforced disorder...
...Carter discussed an endless series of details, matters as minor as why, since meals at country clubs aren’t deductible, meals at downtown lunch clubs are...
...One political appointee in a Cabinet department remembers Hamilton Jordan telling him, “Christ, to think that a campaign organization with few people who had more than a high school diploma could recruit people for key positions in HUD and State was ridiculous...
...The President continues to judge the programs and i n f o r m a t i o n his subordinates present to him, rather thanarguingthemout,and continues to govern by attention to detail and procedure rather than politics...
...Because he is very strongly a man of his word, the President nowwas determined to deliver to the American people what he had said he would...
...For another example, the idea of reforming the civil service came not from Carter but from Alan Campbell, the head of the Civil Service Commission...
...he frequently enjoins his staff to bring him the best possible program, the ideal, and let him worry about selling it to the public and Congress...
...Most American citizens don’t have a yacht, and when they do go for asmall pleasure ride, if they do have a small boat, they can’t deduct it as an income tax deduction...
...On any domestic issue he will consult Stuart Eizenstat, the chief domestic policy advisor, a steady and reliable man with a surer sense of Democratic Party constituency than Carter has, a man who is sometimes spoken of admiringly as a “neutral broker,” a presenter of ideas, a boiler down...
...To the President and those closest to him, the problem is one of public relations and can be solved by two means...
...This islegalunderthe present law...
...It’s noteworthy that he seemed to have little idea what kind of welfare system we need-he was vague enough o n t h e subject that the formulation of the welfare reform policy turned into a war, Califano and HEW vs...
...He bewilders and i n f u r i a t e s politicians by casting his pleas to them not on the terms they’re accustomed to-“Can you help me out on this...
...The Celestial Watchmaker One departmental official remembers going to the Oval Office for a private meeting with Carter...
...Reminders at Key Moments With C o n g r e s s , Carter’s bad relations are usually blamed on Frank Moore, the chief of congressional liaison, just as his bad relations with interest groups were blamed before her demise on Midge Costanza...
...Carter’s ethic is that those who work for him have a specific job-an area of operations, as they say in the military-and should be concerned with only that...
...Instead of doing an hour and a half‘s p a p e r w o r k , I had an hour of conversation with him...
...While doing his paperwork, he has his secretary play classical music and type up the program on a card so he can memorize it-no sense wasting that chance for a musical education...
...Hetalksasa real person would talk, calmly and knowledgeably, not in a politician's boilerplate phrases...
...Ray Marshall and the Labor Department, negative income tax vs...
...Last Christmas he sponsored a reception for his staff-the reward for a year of hard work-but neither served any refreshments nor showed up...
...It will be hard to make the world believe in a forceful, dynamic Jimmy Carter, aman with well-defined broad goals that he’s moving impressively toward accomplishing, when in fact he continues to govern by sitting in his private office, listening to Bach, and checking off dozens of Option Ones and Option Twos, each of them, without a doubt, carefully considered and absolutely right...
...back from the West once on Air Force One with Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a powerful politician in a region where Carter needs help-and spent the trip closeted in a private room with his precious memos, leaving Magnuson sitting all alone...
...The President greeted him with a warm “Hello, Bill,” and then said, “We followed your campaign and I think we were able to help each other”-though in fact Gerald Ford had carried John’s district...
...The aide would say, liberty and equality aren’t compatible, Governor, they’re at each other’s throats and the government has to balance them...
...The Presidmt is a man who has aninclinationtoward, in the words of Joseph Kraft, “finding for each component part the morally superior p o s i t i o n . ” R a t h e r t h a n compromise between two competing good causes, rather than strike bargains in quest of his goals, rather than carry out all his ideas to their logical conclusions, the President stands by his twin convictions that everything must be right and that everything must be neat...
...some complain that he has been too easy and too loyal to old friends from Georgia who are not doing well in top White House jobs, men like McIntyre and Robert Lipshutz, the White House counsel...
...He takes his considerable charm out of the drawer only when he’s in a situation where he can say to himself, “this is politics, not government...
...At the time people doubted that, thought Carter really knew what he wanted but wouldn’t reveal it for fear of alienating voters...
...In fact, that mixture of sincere belief and self-interest that constitutes politic a1 loyalty doesn’t extend, in Carter’s case, much beyond his immediate family and his four OX five closest advisors...
...Maybe it’ll pay off...
...But for the most part he seems to regard skill with people as something necessary to get the job but irrelevant or distasteful in performing it...
...course, not small talk or favors-for support on government reorganization...
...Decision Memos He is an organized man who would like to be remembered as a top-flight manager of the federal government...
...Moffett’s pet cause was an insulation bill-he wrote it, wooed all parties involved, followed its progress in the Senate as well as the House, got himself put on the relevant subcommittee...
...He flew Does Carter have one person who would stick with him to the end...
...There are a number of reasons for Carter’s limited contacts...
...He has told all of the several Rhodes Scholars on his staff, as a sort of joke, that he tried for the Rhodes his senior year at Annapolis and lost, but that he guesses it didn’t do him much harm in the long run, did it...
...Once on a memo Carter wrote, “We ought to do something to aid the third world,” and a couple of months later, on another memo, “What ever happened to efforts to publicize aid to Latin America...
...For the information of those who have lived lives away from managerial America, a decision memo is a bureaucratic art form in which an issue is presented succinctly and then a series of options and recommendations are offered forth...
...One department sent one of its assistant secretaries to the White House Columbus Day reception last year on the pretense that he was Italian, because that was likely to be his oneand only chance to meet the President face to face...
...One evening Moffett started to get calls from his hometown papers-how do you feel, they wanted to know, about your bill being signed...
...One is a fear of leaks, j u s t a s s t r o n g in this administration as in past ones (though in this administration, more is leaked...
...Phil Wise, the appointments secretary, and Rick Hutcheson, t h e s t a f f secretary, are considered impartial in letting people and paper into Carter’s presence...
...They had to spend another weekend and do another rewrite before they could get it by Carter, though in substance it was virtually unchanged...
...if there is an exodus Carter will have litt!e chance of using his increasing knowledge to turn the administration around...
...but on the only terms he is comfortable with-“This is for the good of the country...
...The other solution is to manage Carter’s image better-hence the bringing on to the staff of Gerald Rafshoon to coordinate that effort...
...So the congressman called the congressional relations office and complained...
...Last fall, his staff put together a lengthy m e m o r a n d u m f o r him (following lengthy negotiations) on reorganization of the government intelligence agencies-an unwieldy document, but one that all parties involved were satisfied with, except Jimmy Carter...
...Carter plainly feels that this is the most useful way for him to spend his time as President...
...Carter apparently didn’t know before taking office where he stood on this question, though there is hardly a more pressing one in politics today...
...The decision memo on urban policy for example (famous for its great length) handles one issue this way: Under the heading “Program Coordination and Implementation" there are three subdivisions, each followed by a descriptive paragraph: I. The Problem...
...The President walked in, precisely on time, said hello, and without further small talk asked the official to brief him...
...A banquet in his district was small potatoes, he was told...
...The congressman (let’s call him John) made his first trip to the White House with the House Government Operations Committee, which Carter was lobbying-via briefing, of...
...So impressive in other meetings, so cool, so in command, in this one Carter let the discussiondrift aimlessly and end with everyone convincing each other, erroneously, that the miners would go back to work if so ordered...
...A president who comes to office relatively undecided about what to do and uninformed about the ways of the federal government has to undertake a self-education, and this Carter has done, resolutely-through reading memos...
...Why aren’t these guys his best friends...
...Few people can pay attention to anything for that long, let alone tax policy...
...Carter is said to be bored with personnel matters...
...He likes to discuss policy well prepared and outside the realm of what’s politically feasible...
...But compared to Johnson’s and Nixon’s obsessive raving about the Eastern Establishment, that’s a mild degree of insecurity indeed...
...Carter has an impressive ability to inspire popeyed devotion in people on first meeting them-in fact, that ability is what won him the Iowa and New Hampshireprimariesin 1976andis why he is president today...
...that’s just not the way his mind works...
...An apparent mistake by the President causes a panic because it’s so hard to get back to himand ask whether he really meant to check Option 2, and it’s impossible to askanaidetodecidein lieu of Carter...
...But beyond that, Carter didn’t know much about how the taxsystem worked or what he wanted to do to itsurprisingly little, for a man who has been in public life for 15 years...
...Security, unemployment, welfare, food stamps, veterans benefits, pensions, and so on-cost and what they did...
...and James McIntyre, the budget director during Carter’s governorship and now his presidency, a nice and earnest young man who is widely felt to be in over his head...
...Carter is a man who likes his government programs neat and orderly...
...One was that it was messy, full of loopholes and special provisions...
...He needed until recently to be reminded which key congressmen to call at which key moments, and while his instinct for that is improving he still has to be reminded which interest-group members to call when...
...Absent this knowledge, Carter’s best course was to gather around him many talented and creative people and plumb them for information and ideas-to argue out the problems of government, to consult broadly, to balance out competinggoals and parties, to arrive at a sure sense of what themajor problems were and how they could be met...
...What’s unusual is the blandness of his friends’ positive feelings about him...
...genuinely impassioned remarks, like this one: “Last year, one medical doctor, a surgeon, owns a yacht and he took a $14,000 tax credit, tax exemption, for entertaining other doctors on his yacht...
...He's low-key, impassive, and-on this everyone is quite emphatic-extremely intelligent and hard-working...
...Research assistance was provided by Joseph Noceraand Frank Packard...
...Muskie...
...Even Nixon had people like that...
...2) OMB and IGR have developed a proposal utilizing an interagency committee headed by a senior White House or EOP staff person...
...We’ll think of a topic later...
...While these long, detailed meetings were going on, there was at large in the land tremendous mistrust of government...
...He then got up as if to go...
...Under this third heading come the two options: 1) Secretary Califano has suggested that a Special Representative for Domestic Assistance be created...
...In any discussion, he’s likely to ask whether the new policy will create more federal employees, more big government, more complication, more red tape...
...Proposed Initiatives...
...He had promised during his campaign that he would reform taxes, and the public had responded to that promise...
...The department’s weekly summary memo had just come back from the White House, she said, and next to a brief description of the fraud case the President had written “continue to press on this” and she thought the Secretary would want to know that right away...
...Adams denied it, but the Times’version of his woes rings true...
...the letter was out of the question...
...He has received decision memos that proposed more than 100 matters for him to decide...
...Carter did bring to his job a strong .grounding in some broad principles that he applies to program after program...
...He worked on it for six months, and when it passed he began to call the White House to see when the President was going to sign it...
...In fact, the bad blood is largely Carter’s fault...
...As it was, he came to office knowing astoundingly little about how the federal government works or what new policies were needed...
...He prefers to make each initiative the sum of 40 or 50 small decisions, very difficult to paint in the kind of broad brush strokes that would be understandable to his staff, to Congress, to the public...
...He is a perfectionist, a man who drives himself hard toward selfimprovement and who wants to have every detail right...
...In hindsight-the meetings having produced a complicated tax reform program that is not widely understood and is going nowhere-it’s amazing that Carter didn’t think to harness this public sentiment and stood by mutely while the “tax revo1t”did so instead...
...First, Carter can play tougher with his own government, making it clear that appointees should be loyal to him, that the departments should never publicly question his policies, that the Cabinet secretzries should go out and promote the administration’s goals rather than their own pet programs, that congressmen who double-cross the a d m i n i s t r a t i o n will suffer the consequences...
...The memo then discusses the pros and cons of each option and ends with Decision: Support Option 1 Support Option 2 Do not have coordinating effort...
...He doesn’t foster a slavish cult of personality among his staff...
...One important reason Carter was elected is that Americans felt they were paying too much for their government and getting too little in return...
...President, I want you to hear our response...
...He and Carter talked about service clubsCarter himself is a past governor of the Lions-and the need for voluntarism and community service...
...Nunn...
...Jonas Salk and (posthumously) to Martin Luther King, Jr...
...A few months back he had a meeting with the executive council of the AFL-CIO to discuss labor’s role in his program of fighting inflation through voluntary restraint...
...And there’s very little contact with Carter...
...Existing Programs...
...This caused in Califano a rare moment of speechlessness, for which Carter must be admired, but otherwise it was a curious performance on the President’s part...
...Carter has no one guru, as many senators and congressmen do, who makes all the decisions for him on some issue...
...It is obviously very important to him to be a good and moral man, a man who always does the right thing...
...Once he was given a long list of suggested winners of the Medal of Freedom, which under Johnson and Nixon had become an indiscriminately distributed reward to friends...
...public service jobs...
...Thank you,” said the President...
...Ray Marshall and Robert Strauss had done the spadework with the labor leaders...
...On matters that he gets personally involved In, he is almost physically unable to allow himself to be cursory, even when he ought to be...
...Even Nixon had people like that, and Carter doesn’t...
...How can we reform welfare without spending any more money...
...Moore just wanted to say he was sorry, and that the letter was on the way, Similarly, Toby Moffett, a secondterm Democrat from Connecticut, compiled an impressive record of support for the President in the early days of the Carter administration...
...He is a Navy man, asmall businessman, a man whose experience is that of taking over a command, being told what the problems are, weighing the a l t e r n a t i v e s , then making a decision-giving the order, seeing it carried out down the chain...
...Why does it always have to be Carter against the world...
...With the passing months this congressman compiled a record of voting with the administration more than almost any other member of the House-a fact the White House congressional liaison office appreciated but Carter himself couldn’t have cared less about...
...Meany stood up and said, “Wait a minute, Mr...
...On the other hand, thejust-do-yourjoband-don’t-expect-any-gratitude atmosphere has meant a White House remarkably free of internal politics, because nobody’s likely to rise or fall...
...Even during those periods when his public relations advisors seem to have him on the road all the time, he still manages-through the exercise of even more than his usual self-discipline-to keep up with the memos...
...He might have had a clear idea of which laws and which organizations most needed changing, all balanced against a sense of the public mood, of the congressional leadership, of the proximity of the 1978 elections, of which interest groups’oxen would most likely be gored...
...Another is Carter’s faith in Cabinet government...
...In one department, the senior staff was meeting with the Secretary one day to discuss the recovery of some money the department had lost through fraud, when the secretary’s assistant burst into the room, breathless and excited...
...Two pointsseemed particularly to irk Carter about the tax system...
...Mild Degree of Insecurity Jimmy Carter is in many ways the most admirable man to hold the office of president in years-possibly the smartest, certainly the most honest, the most upright, the hardest working...
...This kind of big-picture veneer won’t change a man with a small-picturesoul...
...the Senate and House are full of men who vote on the basis of 30 seconds' whispered summary from an assistant...
Vol. 10 • September 1978 • No. 6
