An American Redemption: The Presidential Character born Nixon to Ford to Carter
Barber, James David
An American Redemption: The Presidential Character born Nixon to Ford to Carter by James David Barber Nearly eight years ago, we published an article by James David Barber called ‘<AnalyzingP...
...Which makes it all the more impressiveand meaningful for Jimmy’s world view-that Miss Lillian kept pushing...
...So he held himself stiffer than ever, and the chamberlains held up the invisible train...
...The next year would show victory, and 1977 a new President called “Jimmy,” not only by his intimates, but by every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the land, to whom the name “Carter” had meant ink and liver pills but an historical moment ago...
...Then, in long work far easier to write about than to perform, the Carters built a fortune, valued today at about $5 million...
...One night, surfaced in a roaring Pacific Ocean, a wave swept him off into the cold sea-normally a fatal experience-but by luck another wave dropped him back on the deck, 30 feet aft...
...What balm it must have been to his bruised power sense to hear his CIA director say, “There is only one President at a time...
...Carter was...
...Back when he took over, Jerry Ford he put it this way: “I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government but civilization itself...
...It was an extremely interesting time,” Carter writes...
...And earlier, when discussing the cover-up with Ehrlichman, Nixon equated “being forthcoming” with “caving [in] .” The point is clear: although Nixon eventually does all the things he is “tempted” to do in these passages, he does them long after they would have done him any good...
...John Kennedy in the office next door, young Rep...
...Repeatedly, her car was soaped and the aerial knotted...
...this is not your house”and urged a change of mind...
...God created us in his own image, hoping that we’d be perfect, and we turned out to be not perfect but very sinful...
...Nixon’s own penchant for hyperbole lasted beyond 1972, as he dramatized his history, seeing his life as a series of sharp discontinuities...
...those whose skins were darker-dark at all-were named by the whites, respectfully “Neg~es,” contemptuously “nigers,” but day by day, in Jimmy’s world, an easier phrase, “colored ‘people...
...The public could not be allowed to hear him plotting to fool them because “the President of the United States, under our Constitution, has a responsibility to this office to maintain the separation of power and also maintain the ability of not only this President but future Presidents to conduct the office in the interests of the people...
...After the election, “There I was, every morning, from 4:30 until about 9:30, helping with the cows, cleaning up the barn, you name it...
...At the last of it, the tingling fear of betrayal in the moral tarkness of that place came to preclccupy its inhabitants...
...Nixon was in an important sense “alone” even in the midst of company...
...He has absoutely no tact-doesn’t care for anything...
...The war was over...
...when life is happening, no one feels any great need to make a narrative of experiences, and when that is later demanded, art shapes memory...
...But the war and being overseas changed my mind about the role that America should play in the world...
...As the Watergate crisis failed to fade back into the wake of the Nixon progress, Nixon’s enemies, so perceived, multiplied...
...He was put on the appropriations committee, on a special education commission...
...Nixon had no need to march on the Capitol at the head of his White House guard or to throw barbed wire around the Justice Department...
...There were at least three varieties...
...Nothing is more familiar to those who lived attentively through those days than Nixon’s extraordinary capacity t o link his pettiest acts with his proudest purposes...
...As he passed, hundreds came to give him words, flowers, favorite foods...
...Given that festering anger, no wonder he turned to a man of the type Charles Colson used to be, a hit man ready to obey when the President told him to “break all the china in the White House if you have to” to do his bidding...
...They were not invented, in some burst of evil creativity...
...He was-is, has always been-a step-by-step thinker of the Republican persuasion (and the only Republican among the active-positives, at least since TR), so it is hardly surprising that he did not trumpet grand themes...
...But his main reputation in the senate was as a hot-shot legislative professional...
...For still others, it’s women...
...In the end it was not an argument, but a story...
...The famous “enemies lists” ran the gamut from James Reston to Robert Shemll, and included such dangerous folk as Carol manning, Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck, Bill Cosby, Joe Namath, Tony Randall, Barbara Streisand, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, and Dick Gregory...
...I don’t care that they are disloyal to me personally...
...What is interesting is the way Nixon’s powerful rhetorical style worked, and may work again, to distort and undercut the great democratic conversation that is politics...
...He could make a game of life’s little harassments, could see how externally determined breaks and blocks made all his choices conditional, but he had also seen what his own initiatives could make of the available materials...
...John spent hours coaching Ford in oratory, with no great success-he progressed to believable but fell short of inspiring...
...The Old Style Nixon’s political style, with its overwhelming emphasis on rhetorical manipulation, persisted strongly from 1972 to his resignation in 1974...
...When black Bishop Johnson’s son came home from his college up north, Lillian let him in the front door and served him coffee-which sent Earl out the back door...
...He waited patiently while each farmer got his words together, made notes of their complaints, and, shaking hands goodby, said, “Remember the name-Ford...
...As the crucial moment approached, Jimmy gorged on bananas to meet the weight and stood on Coca-Cola bottles to fix his flat feet...
...Like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon could demonstrate his power in the pettiest ways, such as demanding, on a sudden whim, to be taken to a concert at the Kennedy Center, despite all the inconvenience and disruption that it caused...
...Earl’s secret life, exposed to his son too late for the expression of filial gratitude, shifted the ground of Jimmy’s identity, reinforced his sense that one can be hard and kind, competent and compassionate...
...Suddenly he got a lucky break: the leading Democratic candidate for governor dropped out and Callaway shifted his ambition to the governorship...
...I work only for you,” or to learn that his White House general-in-residence informed a Deputy Attorney General of the United States: “Your commander -in-chief has given you an order...
...In 1966 Carter decided to go after Callaway...
...So don’t turn them down...
...Jerry seemed so much the sacrificial lamb that Jonkman disdained to campaign against him at first, and later, as the election approached, he was trapped in Washington anyway, when Harry Truman called a special session to embarrass the “do-nothing 80th Congress...
...He was against knocking down Nixon-“After a play is called, you shouldn’t tackle your own quarterback”-and having laid his hand on the Bible in front of all his old congressional friends, he turned to the President and said, “You have my support and loyalty...
...Jerry’s issue was Vandenberg’s: “I believe in aid to Europe, with emphasis on making certain the common man in the countries we aid gets the maximum benefits...
...Try to be conciliatory when others are conciliatory toward you, but when the other side doesn’t want to heal wounds, fight ’em-you get more respect.’’ In a world of piranhas, one had better be a shark...
...If I get to Congress I’ll remember what you’ve told me...
...It was quite an ambition for an Archery boy...
...If he had no clear vision of the way things ought to be-no comprehensive social utopia-he could see what was wrong, and he said so...
...I really covered those counties...
...He began to think he would like to be Speaker some day...
...And so on...
...in the realm of action (becoming), where results counted, one always had to settle for less...
...The President, I think, thinks of himself as the supreme politician in this country...
...He will assiduously do his homework, try to organize facts into long-range goals, and be willing to admit his mistakes...
...As was the case during his years up to 1972, those who looked to Nixon’s own statements for guidance to his character would soon be lost...
...the liberal, political ‘them’ was in the process of destroying itself by narrowing its base along severe ideologicalfaddist lines...
...At one farm, Jerry got carried away: he promised a dairyman that if he won he would work for two weeks in the man’s barn-a seemingly safe bet, given his chances...
...We are moving with history md moving history...
...I’ve been your neighbor for the last 41 years.’ I’ve known black people and they know me...
...Statistics were to be gathered on how many people saw the President, and aides were to “build on the theme that he’s the most ‘Open Door’ President in history...
...Teeny Ratliff got it...
...To his sister: “Dear Gloria, Please do not call me ‘Hot’ and please do not write to me on lined notebook paper with pencil...
...Jerry Ford swept the district23,632 to Jonkman’s 14,341...
...Be on the lookout for floating debris left by submarine USS Pomfret, believed to have been sunk approximately 700 miles south of Midway Island...
...Wars become romantic adventures, depressions provide material for folksy fables, the pestilence is made into an antique amusement...
...When we were around each other,” Carter remembered, “both of us were somewhat tense...
...You tell Henry he’s to talk to no one, period...
...that’s the way people are, in his mind...
...Race issues confronted him and he tried to meet them with the integrity appropriate to Lillian Carter’s son...
...I promise never to betray your confidence in me...
...That same first year home brought news from Washington...
...Yet she was a “white lady” and her home was not the same...
...what it meant to him is summed up in...
...He thought it “not too strong a statement to declare that this”student demonstrations-‘% the way civilizations begin to die...
...As with the other active-negative Presidents, over time his dominant style element invaded and exploited the rest of his style-Nixon turned everything, including his intense homework and conspiratorial conversations, to the task of impression management...
...there were ready excuses for cowardice and indifference lurking there...
...Yet this character is a fictionalized version of the same President who had to ask his aides for permission to enter their conversations-“ Can I spend a minute...
...Earl came up to see him his first Thanksgiving at Annapolis, and Jimmy went home for Christmas...
...Nixon spent hours alone in the Lincoln room, which is furnished for one, the air-conditioning on high, the fire ablaze at the hearth, pondering his fate to the strains of “Victory at Sea...
...She was about as good a white lady as I’ve ever seen...
...The Fords went off to Washington and he took his place in the last row on the House Republican side...
...Something was gnawing at him...
...As in the histones of other Presidentsto-be, Carter’s history showed a pattern: he had emerged from relative obscurity (Plains) to relative prominence (Atlanta...
...With perhaps a little maternal dramatization, Miss Lillian’s memory is that her Jimmy “cried like a baby...
...And if he had trained the blackness out of his accent, he had one mode of it in the rhythm of his speech...
...Truth Is the Glue’ To those who see no presidential virtue in anything less than large leaps forward, Ford was a presidential failure...
...That was a hard line for a moralist to draw...
...It’s really a compensation for an inferiority complex...
...His eagerness to achieve results may lead him to try cutting corners in difficult times, although not to the point of selfdefeat...
...My God, we’ve never had so many serious problems in the history of this nation...
...Jimmy’s pal, black A.D...
...They smell different, they look different, act different...
...The Carters had always been Christians in the relaxed sense of the American vocabulary...
...Visiting home again just before his last Annapolis year, he began an even better intimacy: cruising around in a rumble-seated Ford with a friend, they came upon his sister Ruth and her pretty friend Rosalynn Smith and made a double date for the movies...
...President, whether we’re in politics or not, have weaknesses...
...But from his point of view, the press was the essential hostile threat: “they” could present his drama “in a way” different from his way, could warp his intentions away from the ideal, could pervert his most well-meant initiatives, and, most important, could refuse that enthusiastic consent which, if granted, would make his way work...
...When Carter’s leave was up, he went back north to Rosalynn and the children...
...In his time and place, the issue was race...
...He was as insightful as ever about his own character...
...Rosalynn rose to the occasion, as she would right into the White House, packed off to Norfolk, and, during her husband’s long absences, managed on $71 per month beyond the rent...
...But I do a lot of things the ladies of the church think I shouldn’t do...
...1 had run for governor and...
...I don’t want anyone crying...
...But he was not yet carrying his own ball...
...he was not taken up with such other big issues of the 1950’s as witch-hunting for Communists or the war in Korea, but he saw-up close-the face of evil behind the bland conventionality of the system...
...Then there were his people, his folks, some so close they seemed a part of his self, some a little farther out but still within the circle of intimacy and all-forgiving loyalty...
...Once in the senate, he made his own way...
...Thus Vandenberg was looking for someone to unseat this bothersome critic...
...One of his early speeches was against the notorious “30 questionsyy-clever constitutional questions designed to confound black citizens who wanted to vote...
...Maddox won the run-off...
...This was more than just the experience, more common in the nineteenth century than in our own wordy age, of pleasure in mastering nature or unpuzzling a recalcitrant machine...
...He wrote his own material...
...Jerry came home, joined a wellknown law firm, and played golf...
...The flood of factpacked books on the subject has strained their authors’ capacity to title them...
...Nor did he understand why that culture can only afford to romanticize the Harry Trumans of this world in retrospect...
...His old “friend” John Mitchell, along with numerous others who had staked their careers on his success, became “hors d’oeuvres” wherewith to sate the appetite of the prosecutors-“Give ’em an hors d’ oeuvre and maybe they won’t come back for the main course,” our President told the remnant of his palace guard...
...But he also saw his neighbor behind the racist’s sneer...
...By then, Carter had been stepping along the road to the convention for 33 months, having been set in motion by a psychiatrist, Peter Bourne, who had assayed the Carter personality and politics at close range when he worked for the Governor in Georgia...
...In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end...
...They made the trip and settled into Plains’ public housing project, rent $30 a month...
...Every last letter was answered...
...He became a committee man par excellence, particularly in mastering the tangled details of defense budgets...
...Running Still he was riding high again...
...It’s an entirely different matter, however, when one person gives his word to another...
...As Watergate deepened, this famous loner of a President got loner and loner...
...They minded: that was no lady, that was a nigger...
...His senior law partner gave him time off with pay, and Ford hit the trail like a whirling dervish...
...He’ll walk right through doors,” Nixon bragged...
...He got a quick briefing from Jerald terHorst (a local reporter who would become President Ford’s press secretary) on which cows were which colors...
...Gerald R. Ford...
...this was especially so after Watergate gripped him...
...By April of that year, J. Anthony Lukas reports, “nobody trusted anybody in the Nixon camp...
...This has always been your short suit with the news media and the general public...
...So in 1962 Jimmy ran for the state senate and won...
...McKay kept Jerry waiting four hours, then dismissed him with hello-go odby . Willkie lost the election, but carried Michigan...
...His mentor Charles Kirbo set up a November fund-raising dinner at which Carter was toasted by all factions and, in the glow of appreciation, intimated that “There may yet be another day...
...Still, what was that “something” that kept showing up in the most amazing places...
...The man for President Ford to beat, they thought, was some part of Kennedy-WallaceJacks o n-Muskie-Mo n d a1 e-BentsenM cG ov ern - S t ev en son-BayhChurchUdall-Bumpers-Wendell Ford-AskewBy rn e- Gil li ga n . Aft e r s tudying through the winter, by April the editors were hypothesizing that Senator Edward Kennedy would be the choice of a deadlocked Democratic convention, because “with a host of contenders and more presidential primaries than ever before, it now seems certain that none will emerge with enough delegates to win a first-ballot nomination, or even an early-ballot victory...
...The business was a family affair, though it must have involved business dealings with suppliers and customers...
...They tried to fry him for it...
...As before 1972, Nixon’s world view came to focus on process, not substance...
...Those who breach that bond suffer an incalculable loss of credibility...
...Occasional visitors from Congress and the press gave shocking and similar accounts and the President’s own voiceon tape heard by members of the House Judiciary Committee and in print read by the world at largeexhibited with unusual clarity the depth and nature of his struggle...
...He was alone-all alone against...
...Plains was where they had medicine shows and the traveling circus, log-cutting contests put on by the ax salesmen, Halloween carnivals, and marble games...
...Clearly the Nixon who saw, as he wanted and needed to see, his life as a fascinating and heroic drama was still there in his time beyond 1972...
...It wasn’t a voice of God from heaven...
...News and World Report surveyed the 1976 Presidential scene...
...Everybody wants to make a name for themselves in this [unintelligible] . They’ll drag it on and on and on...
...No one would be called “nigger” in her house, and no child of hers was allowed to address an adult black by his or her first name without the respectful preface “aunt” or “uncle...
...He made himself a leader, but the ordinary camaraderie, which facilitates corruption and fruitful compromise, was not part of his style...
...At least one white customer left in disgust at this affront to common understandings...
...What was to trouble, inspire, and confuse different multitudes in times to come was that Jimmy Carter became a Christian...
...How precious did that grace appear, The hour I first believed...
...Jimmy Carter’s need for high achievement, his excitement when exposed to possibilities of excellence was very real and stayed real for him...
...The President’s physical separation from others, dangerous as that was, was only part of the picture...
...We have seen the suffering and striving Nixon already: working to all hours, exhausted, constantly complaining and reaching for sympathy, all the while denying that he needs any of that...
...In all three visions of people, Carter’s vision saw them positively, as sources of good motives and morals, if not necessarily wisdom...
...For some, it’s drinking...
...My wife and I were born and raised in innocent times...
...That propinquity may not impel communication was evident in one of these “gesture period” meetings, when Republican Senator Robert Packwood looked his President in the eye and gave him a civics lesson: “All of us, Mr...
...Similarly with checks and balances...
...Earl’s outdoor eyes were not much for reading, though he would leaf through US...
...Not until that game was over, and Jerry Ford was suddenly thrust onto a much wider field, would anyonehimself included-see the Presidency as his goal...
...I intend to root them out...
...Would Jerry join the revolution of purity...
...One might call it an identity crisis, building over the years...
...Ruthless people laying for you in the bushes- that was Nixon’s vision of the political landscape...
...He lived in a generally dangerous world, as he saw and felt it, and he always had...
...It has found us together in the spirit of brotherhood and love...
...He dwells-though without rancor-on the sins of the legislative world, but what is missing is pleasure and practice in the give and take-even the friendship-many a legislator has found rewarding...
...Three destroyers sank with most of their crews...
...The overriding challenge, the purpose of the enterprise, fell away...
...Ford’s leader was Arthur Vandenberg: “I really admired him...
...His contacts with the press had already been in steep decline and became even rarer...
...A reluctant Nixon took him, in October 1973, as his Vice President, to replace the disgraced, resigned, and indicted Spiro Agnew, who, it was said, had preferred to receive his payoffs in cash in brown paper bags...
...I spun over on my stomach and luckily dropped over the edge onto the catwalk just below...
...Grown up Carter could hear, how it had sounded, after the voices found themselves in the first verse: ‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved...
...There was no real trouble about his nomination: it seemed everybody loved him...
...His intimates had cause to blacken his name, but the detail and convergence of their stories lent them plausibility...
...One of his orations was: “If I ever let you down in my actions, I want you to let me know about it and I’ll correct it...
...He was not a “civil rights activist...
...I put my feet out and fortunately my heels hit the little rim that surrounds the flight deck-I was heading straight for the ocean...
...Carter had to learn farming over again and catch up with the new methods...
...An Even Better Intimacy He was not, during this time, cut off from Plains...
...The only thing that motivates them is their desire for the realization of their left-wing goals, in education or health or welfare or whatever their field is...
...Rosalynn was a 1 9-year-old graduate in interior decorating...
...In 1936, the Carters were so enthralled as they listened to the Republican National Convention on their battery-operated radio that, when the radio went dead, they took it out in the yard and hooked it up to the car battery to hear Alf Landon nominated...
...One could go along a long time hardly noticing, certainly not feeling guilty, at least until certain rites of passage called attention to the situation...
...Carter came to share with the Founding Fathers, I think, a sense of a real world usefully discernible through metaphors of mechanism-a sort of hydraulic worldview...
...Jimmy did talk to Ruth,” Rosalynn remembers, “and she did have an impact on him-but there was none of this going out under the pine trees and having some sort of religious experience...
...What follows is an excerpted version of those three chapters...
...You have no alternative...
...One day they’re blocking something deliberately, the next they’re forgetting to do something I made a commitment to do...
...However, if I made the slightest mistake, in one of the loudest and most obnoxious voices I ever heard, he would turn around and tell the other people in the area what a horrible disgrace I was to the Navy and that I ought to be back in the oldest and slowest and smallest submarine from which I had come...
...It was not a profound stroke of miracle...
...We’ll kill ’em with love...
...In his list of self-identifications, he included “planner...
...And I think second to my own father, Admiral Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man...
...He has had, from some quarters, an historical bum rap on this point...
...See this Liddy is crazy and Hunt and the whole bunch conducted this [inaudible] Mitchell wasn’t minding the store and Magruder ia a weak fellow-and the damn thing-and then afterwards they compounded it by what happened afterwards...
...But memories vary...
...He was my mentor...
...Education made people “brighter in the head but weaker in the spine...
...He felt he could count on a lot of chums-like young Rep...
...The Presidents, in Barber’s system, were either active or passive, positive or negative: Taft was passive-positive, Eisenhower passive-negative, Kennedy active-positive, and Johnson activenegative...
...The candidacy bug was nibbling at him...
...The campaign had cost $7,200...
...The American Political Science Association had named him a “Congressman’s Congressman...
...He applied, got in, trained six months in 1948, and emerged a full-fledged submariner...
...In the midst of his hot campaign for governor in 1970-this time to win for sure-he excused himself for a week to work at a mission in an Atlanta slum...
...A clear continuity was Nixon’s active-negative character...
...A friend gave him a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics and they had some talks about it...
...Mostly he wanted cowboy and Indian stories, and was pleased-momentarilywhen his teacher prescribed something called War and Peace...
...Plains was different: “During my childhood,” he wrote, “I never considered myself a part of the Plains society”-neither did Miss Lillian-“but always thought of myself as a visitor when I entered that ‘metropolitan’ community...
...Maybe Jimmy Carter...
...none of Earl’s family had even graduated from high school...
...As a candidate for President in 1976, Jimmy Carter said, “I want to be tested in the most severe way...
...But when Louis smashed Schmeling into unconsciousness in the first round, the blacks went silent, said “Thank you, Mr...
...He was a man in motion, restlessly flying off to Camp David, Key Biscayne, or San Clemente, where he often asked his Secret Service guards to “drive somewhere, anywhere...
...Jerry went down to New York from Yale weekends to work for Willkie (whose motto was “Win with Willkie...
...Nixon by Christmas 1973 “didn’t want to see anyone and no one really wanted to see the President...
...Visits for God Politics delivers its verdicts harshly...
...These jackasses got off,” Nixon told Henry Petersen...
...Later, Ford remembered, “I thought about it and thought about it and finally I decided that although I probably couldn’t win, he ought to be challenged...
...Through so many evennumbered years in the past, the discovery of new Nixons seemed to have become a national pastime as observers hoped against hope that he was not what he had been...
...Nixon’s reply was to say, “Thank you,’’ and move on to the next man...
...his bumper sticker said, “I fight poverty-I work...
...For the first time, Jerry had stepped into politics and scored...
...This article is from the new edition of his book, The Presidential Character, to be published this month by Prentice-Hall...
...One can hear the congregation’s interpolated encouragements at each period in his sermon to a black church in Indianapolis: “They care for me and I care for them...
...As part of “Operation Candor,” in November 1973, Nixon went into a social blitz with Congress: in eight meetings in six days, he met with nearly all of the 234 House and Senate Republicans and with 46 Democrats...
...Earl set quietly to work cultivating the congressman who would make the decision...
...The People” was a romance, an idealized appreciation of the heroism of the everyday life...
...Virtue was the surprise...
...Dad listened, and against his better judgment agreed to go on the County Committee...
...The problem with the public is that they no longer believe you...
...At age four he got from his godmother, who must have had either unusual prescience or an overstocked library, a set of all the works of Guy de Maupassant...
...he helped them with their studies...
...For that is what Nixon brought off, for a time, and he very nearly succeeded in bringing it off for good...
...The human brain seems to have an enormously rich store of de-dissonancers, including all the ambiguities in the language...
...She jostled their minds with a program of contests-debating, essays, recitations, spelling, play-acting, Bible memory, reading contests for gold and silver stars...
...completely dedicated...
...As long as I am physically able,” he pledged in November 1973, “I am going to continue to work 16 to 18 hours a day...
...The Supreme Court said it was against the law to sort children into different public schools according to their race...
...Gerald R. Ford came on too fast for confident prediction...
...His discovery and downfall were nearly accidental...
...And as the L niformity of the Communist menace faded in his mind (it had begun to fade a good while ago) the form of Nixon’s mindset found another enemy in the tight and evil cabal he saw implacably stalking him: the media...
...Category after category of Americans earned his disdain...
...The thought crossed his mind, “I could probably talk my way out of it...
...In the Navy, Jimmy got to Washington now and then and stopped to visit the Senate chambers and talk with Senator Richard Russell...
...But he had taken the initiative-he was not drafted-and he had insisted on seeing the fight through to the end...
...often seasick-he would carry his vomit bucket with him to the bridge...
...Nixon had to ask, as if no one had ever done that before...
...The goddamn traitors...
...Jimmy Carter remembers-well, all and none of the above...
...History was neither futed nor randomly fluctuating...
...It took four and a half years for Congress to begin to suppose that his impeachment should be suggested, and that only after they had evidence hard and massive enough to choke Caligula’s horse...
...No bearded madman gesticulating from a balcony...
...But once in the ~~ 1950’s Jimmy tried to let a black woman get her wagonload of peanuts ahead of a line of white men-“You fellows don’t mind if the lady goes first...
...In class, Jimmy found he could get through his lessons quickly and read whatever he wanted, tucked behind the textbook...
...Jimmy Carter was barely a blip on the national political horizon when, in September 1974, US...
...Men went mad there...
...But he also voted for some segregationist amendments to the state constitution...
...He thought about the state senate, but he found out a senate seat was not much of a prize: as in some other states, it was rotated among three counties, for two-year terms, so no one could get much of a handle on the job...
...His aide Safire thought he was the first political paranoid with a majority...
...This general, who more than a year previously had ripped out Nixon’s taping systems without permission, in the summer of 1974 entered into negotiation with the Vice President regarding the conditions under which he could come to power-the general again acting on his own...
...Hans Christian Andersen How quickly the fog of history settles over the brutal terrain of the past...
...I’m going to come home...
...Not that the choice to come home was simply a matter of sentiment or philosophyeconomic realities were pressing-but his reasoning about it refocused his vision of his world...
...who needed the Navy...
...They see it in personal terms whereas I see the press totally in impersonal terms...
...Yes, he got that from me,” she said, “I’ve always been like that...
...He stood with Lillian and came to believe that Earl would have come around, given time...
...Home on Navy leave, Jimmy proudly told Earl how his whole crew refused to attend a fancy party because its one black member was disinvited...
...In private, Nixon brooded over a biography of Napoleon, perhaps imagining his own Elba...
...they have no real concern for the well-being of America...
...So it was not the hope of victory but the spur of conscience that pressed Ford to compete...
...Now we went through this gesture period of having congressmen and senators down to see him-but it seems to have ended...
...Son Chip, aged fourteen, got beat up at school for wearing a Democratic button...
...He taxied them to church on Sunday, though as often as not he would leave them there while he strolled downtown for some unsanctified conversation...
...Most important, Rosalynn most definitely did not want to go back to Plains...
...His mother was forever reading books, and books became his favorite Christmas present...
...In the intervening Plains years, he seems to have been something of a loner (setting aside the family), though he and Rosalynn had a few young married friends...
...His family helped him, not only by energetic campaigning but also by providing political exemplars and a legitimizing familiarity with political doings...
...Changing that mood will be Carter’s greatest challenge, and it will take genuine achievement to do so...
...But whatever I have as a responsibility for the rest of my life, it will be with that intimate personal continuing relationship...
...Whether because he learned to play the press like a violin, counting on its short attention span and shallow insight, or because the press was in the main, with a few national exceptions, attuned to his Republican rhetoric, Nixon came through, time and time again in his career, forgiven before he was explained...
...Strangely, no one seems to have suggested that Watergate (by which I mean the whole wash of woe that flooded forth after that gate was opened in June 1972) gave us a “new Nixon...
...Carter did so well he was brought back to sea through the launching of the Navy’s first new post-war ship, in 1950...
...For instance, not noticing...
...Along the way, the temptations-to cry or quit or talk-must be resisted with all his moral force and fervor...
...Nixon’s view of human nature continued to be jaundiced...
...It was just a nightmare, the President after Nixon told us, and it is all over...
...In stark contrast, Ford was just what Diogenes had been looking for-Mr...
...By the end of November 1973, the President had stayed in the White House only four of the 44 weekends of his second term...
...It was a busy life, with a significant possibility of death to follow...
...But there were so many ways to mute the psychological conflict...
...was supposed to start calling Jimmy “Mister Jimmy...
...Such understandings went way back, had been learned at many a mother’s knee...
...That strandthe drive for excellence-comprises, I think, about a third of the Carter worldview and illustrates an important outgrowth of his character...
...He missed a deacons’ meeting and discovered later that because of church integration attempts in nearby Americus, they had voted, eleven to zero, with the pastor’s backing, to keeps blacks out of the worship services...
...Oh boy,” he said, “you can count me in on that...
...There were the “Harvards” (of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox’s 37 staff lawyers, 36 were Ivy League graduates), the Kennedys (Nixon on tape: “I was reading a book last night...
...the social-cultural elitist ‘them’ was useful as a foil that would help attract workingmen to a Nixon coalition...
...His expansive rhetoric may occasionally exceed, or even elude, the facts, and thus draw him criticism...
...He talked the idea over with a visiting pastor who bunked with the Carters for a week...
...Later he explained, “I didn’t see nobody in there colored but me, and I decided I’d go up there where colored people sit...
...Miss Lillian recalls that “Jimmy didn’t want to come back to Plains...
...But generally, in those days, Jimmy Carter did not hide his beliefs, did wish there could be some way to stop the injustices, did speak out courageously when hard decisions split the neighborhood...
...You won’t hear that in Sunday School, but it’s true...
...Dad was skeptical: his son might get dirtied up in politics, and besides, the family could use some Jerry-generated summer income...
...The “new managers” in business were pusillanimous-they “paint their tails white and run with the antelopes,” Nixon thought...
...He’d love it...
...That sense would carry over-in Carter’s penchant for political blueprints, long-range strategy memos, big pictures...
...He had served in the Army in World War I; the academies gave a free education...
...No tanks in the streets...
...It wasn’t anything of that kind...
...I think there’s a difference between religion and Christianity...
...And tell him not to call me, I will accept no calls from him.’ With that he slammed the receiver in my ear...
...So one type of experience Jerry Ford shared with such Presidents as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and a President-to-be, Jimmy Carter, was a handshake with death, up close...
...sophisticates thought him ill-informed...
...She held Jimmy at bay for months, but they were married at last in the heat of July 1946...
...Your average politician would rather talk than eat, argue than sleep, continue to converse than go the bathroom-and with the more the merrier...
...But the mule could be guided: leaders who had the imagination to discipline themselves might beat the odds of historical chance and personal stagnation...
...The Lone Struggle As far back as January 1971, Nixon realized isolation was a part of his public image and proclaimed “Open Door Hours...
...Baby Jeff was still Baby Jeff when, in 1953, the Carters quit the Navy and went back to Plains to live...
...he visited seven farms before eight a.m., one day, in the pouring rain...
...On the contrary, Safire, who had heard Nixon fulminate that “the press is the enemy” a dozen times, explained: “In all the world of ‘us against them,’ the press was the quintessential ‘them,’ the font and succor of other ‘thems.’ In terms of power, the academic ‘them’ was insignificant...
...The family business was in trouble: Earl had some $90,000 out in shakily secured loans...
...That’s his problem, he’s not getting it...
...The nation was at war...
...We speak the same language...
...It was personal contact politics, flat out, every day and night, the “technique” by which many a supposedly secure incumbent has been toppled...
...It was the metropolis where, as a high school student, Jimmy’s mind took an expanding leap...
...He called up his mother in the middle of the night and said, “Mother, I have no alternative...
...The state was reforming the legislature, putting an end to the rotation system...
...In the course of his term as President, James David Barber predicts, Jimmy Carter will prove himself an active-positive, a man who directs toward the job a great deal of energy and derives from it a great deal of enjoyment...
...His ship’s radio transmitter went out and the Navy lost contact...
...But he was a veteran, and he soon found himself in league with other exGI’s, who, trying to build little houses, ran up against the tightly united, McKaylinked banking, zoning, and real estate interests of Grand Rapids...
...At the end of April, Nixon at last fired these brittle and prideful counselors and took on a new crew...
...I think He likes what I do...
...My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over...
...I believe Nixon would have done the same and that the person might well have been Senator Edward Kennedy, particularly if the Watergate investigation had developed in Kennedy’s committee...
...President, that is not an adequate standard of conduct for those who have been accorded the privilege of governing this country...
...at point after point he could have been rescued by other accidents or by easy efforts of his own...
...Joyless, Brooding’ Reliable Nixon continued also in his stance as a suffering martyr in the presidency...
...He saw it as a broadening, from a restricted striving upward to a wider community life...
...And he had the gall to oppose a constitutional amendment calling for the worship of God, a move which earned for him, in some quarters, a reputation as an atheist...
...But most important to Carter’s presidency, Barber thinks, will be the mood of the nation, which at the moment is deeply suspicious of people in power...
...Together, though, they chose to meet their responsibilitieshis to his homefolks, hers to him...
...Remember, you are a member of the President’s Cabinet...
...after a foul-up...
...he sails right by-“My church life became far more meaningful to me”and on into the peanut business...
...He was single, 33, and apolitical...
...I think he was figuring out what to take seriouslyand how seriously, to discern what his particular life really meant...
...He talked it over with a fellow officer, who recalls, “He was really tom by the situation...
...There is no evidence that he was overly affected by the social sciences...
...Some 200 were there, and fifty-odd voted...
...But he thought, “The procession must go on now...
...Sometimes it took a reactive initiative...
...He felt that if he didn’t go back and take the burden, the town would die...
...There are no tales of spellbinding speeches, dramatic revelations, highpowered public relations techniques, witty epigrams, or philosophic peregrinations...
...He was quiet and nearly Puritanical personally, but he liked to get to know other talented types, like Gregg Allman and Hunter Thompson...
...Colson-he’ll do anything...
...Of course that is the Nixonian way of looking at it-another of his victories over the popular mind that he so often startled and dazzled as its attention began to focus too strongly on him...
...There were congressmen yith their doubts about Ford, but as one of them put it, Ford voted “wrong most of the time, but he’s decently wrong...
...The rhythm of life’s seasons could break in unpredictable ways...
...Carter in 1966 could not, like a business executive denied a promotion, keep it in the family, say he had been “reassigned”: he had been defeated despite all his competence and energy and elan...
...To Jon kman, the Vandenberg-backed Marshall Plan for reconstructing postwar Europe was anathema, and he said so at every opportunity...
...But whatever Ford’s intentions, most thought, along with David Broder, probably the country’s best-informed political reporter, that Ford as a potential presidential candidate for 1976 could “probably be safely ignored...
...He was of his time, but he also knew his place-out front if necessary...
...I worked like hell,” he said later...
...They named their first son, born in 1947, John William after her grandfather...
...Colson reports the President’s reaction to an apparent Kissinger press leak: “He exploded, ordering me to call Kissinger at once...
...As he had before 1972, he poured on energy, night and day, at home and away;his presidential activities came to take up nearly all his waking hours, and, more and more frequently as his end approached, he woke and worked at night...
...He was not intellectual enough, not literary enough for our increasingly wordy political culture...
...He wore off twenty-two pounds and wore out his vocal cords...
...He read some in the Bible book of Luke, “to understand more clearly the admonitions about pride and self-satisfaction...
...And like a whole generation of young men who, in their innocence, had gone off to fight, he came home with questions about matters larger than his own fate...
...That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad...
...Earl’s dying revealed what that hard man had done and meant...
...A fellow legislator said he sought to run for lieutenant governor...
...1964 was the year of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide, but Barry Goldwater swept Georgia, the first Republican presidential candidate to win there since Reconstruction days...
...Given the national climate of expectations, his decency was an enormous advantage-and a distraction from hard questions about his beliefs and skills...
...His father, Earl, agreed...
...The moment a leader shows timidity he encourages people to go after him...
...Who could possibly beat Callaway for governor...
...His father lay dying, long before his time...
...the ambiguities of “impotence” could detract from the important political truth that Nixon was a President in perpetual anxiety about holding and advancing his power...
...Nixon’s power sense (which he saw equalled only by John Connally’s and Nelson Rockefeller’s) fluctuated in a way expressed precisely when he said to his press secretary: “That’s an order, Ron-no discussion...
...A system that has to depend on that kind of fortune is dangerous...
...but the journalistic ‘them’ was formidable and infuriating, a force to be feared in its own right, but even more important, a magnifying glass and public address system that gave strength and attention to all the other ‘thems.’ ” Specifically on Watergate, Nixon said he had “never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in my 27 years of public life...
...I mean no one...
...Dereliction was never surprising to Nixon...
...A stalled submarine engine could be fixed because it was a machine: its parts made up an ordered whole, designed for motion...
...She’s just as strong, if not stronger than I am...
...The crew heard a disconcerting message about its ship: “To all ships in the Pacific [in that area...
...Just some quiet little rearrangements to keep things going-without the interference of the People’s Choice...
...Nixon demonstrated the weakness, the vulnerability of the American political system...
...Ideologues...
...The normal thing to do was to go to church...
...The Emperor writhed, for he knew it was true...
...He recalls it as “a time of challenge, excitement, and learning...
...That is a bond which those of us in politics revere highly...
...His racist neighbors were still his neighbors...
...Vandenberg passed on a wisdom that was well-suited to the needs of the senior congressional sages -concentrate on committee work, cultivate the constituency, let the bigwigs make speeches on the floor...
...Appointing a special ])rosecutor would “just put another loose cannon right there rolling aiound the deck...
...Carter’s obscurest style element in these early stones is negotiation...
...He followed Rickover’s political fortunes...
...Admiral Hyman Rickover became his hero...
...Worse, in the larger scheme, Republican Howard “Bo” Callaway (later Nixon’s Secretary of the Army and Ford’s campaign manager) carried Carter’s home district and became their Congressman...
...To fix it you had to get out the blueprint and understand it...
...When he was 16 years old, an assassin shot his grandfather, and he ran after the assassin and got shot himself...
...Jimmy’s interest in getting educated went back to his fifth year-the same time he started selling peanuts, if the tales are true-a time of expanding horizons...
...And then when Christ was asked what are the two Great Commandments from God which should direct our lives, he said, ‘To love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ So I try to take that condensation of Christian theology and let it be something through which I search for a meaningful existence...
...The stock market went up 26 points...
...But he was forever railing against it at the same time he was struggling to control his own aggressive impulses...
...I’m going to get into this thing when I get back from service and 1’11 take your place...
...But it was the press in general-the sum of the specifics-that got to him...
...My father was never a racist, and I grew up trying to be compassionate and kind to everyone...
...In the end, he lost not only power but authority, not only sanction but office, and along the way his aides learned to discount his more ridiculous orders, such as not to serve soup because some spilled one day or “No more landing at airports...
...When I succeeded in something, it was a horrible experience for me...
...Everything I did was not gratifying...
...Michigan’s Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who had made one of those rare sea-changes of mature political opinion-from isolationism to fervent, practical internationalism-was being bedeviled by the congressman from Jerry’s district, a man nearly twice Jerry’s age named Bartel Jonkman...
...Through nearly all his presidency, Nixon, to enhance his power, had but to assert his authority, be it the power to bomb or tap, to impound or burgle, to broadcast, blackmail, or bribe...
...Again and again, Nixon demonstrated, as Safire put it, “the uncanny ability to step outside of himself and coolly misread the man he observed...
...He failed, but got in some practice speechmaking and handshaking...
...In a campaign crisis, he quickly recruited an effective team...
...She did what she could, but in those days it was like swimming against the tide...
...But he candidly confessed his ignorance when necessary, and said, “But I’ll find out for you...
...but he had already taken his own initiative, applying for and winning an assignment to a program for developing the Navy’s first atomic submarines...
...He was older and so good looking”-but before long she was looking across at him...
...Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth Bloomer Warren became Mrs...
...Oh, I don’t mind their hate...
...He found young, handsome veteran Jerry Ford...
...at last cried all the people...
...If there is one thing no one can find in the Nixon presidency, despite volume after volume, it is a serious policy direction, a program or order of priorities from the White House...
...Lots of candidates besides Carter had heard the call, but the race winnowed down to former Governor Ellis Amall, a liberal, Lester Maddox, a downspout demagogue (“Treason is the Reason”) populist race-baiter, and Jimmy Carter, an unknown-“Jimmy Who...
...Discipline was harsh and quick and inevitable-“There was no way to escape, not even for the best behaved of midshipmen,” Carter recalls...
...Jimmy got boycotted again because he spoke up for me,” Fortson said...
...his comment to his then-friend John Dean, on March 13, 1974: “Bullshit: Nobody is a friend of ours...
...They kept their names...
...Your weakness is credibility...
...His “but - t ha t - w o ul d-b e - t he-easy-way” habit continued: “The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign...
...Fortunately it was one of the Nixon administration’s few Horatios, rather than one of its many Iagos, who grabbed the power...
...But here and there, people began that mysterious “mentioning” process that has produced many a candidacy...
...Discussing the fate of John Mitchell with John Ehrlichman, Nixon, scoutmaster for the whole troop, says, “But what the hell, I am always kind...
...Sometimes that took stubborn resistance, as when the White Citizens’ Council came calling three times to recruit him-fust two, then eight or ten, then 30 or 35 neighbors, escalating their threats from displeasure to boycott of the business-and he told them to go hang, becoming the only man in Plains not to join...
...In 1976, article after article would plumb his soul and many a reporter would have to cram fast on this strange religion, as if it were some ethnological eccentricity brought back from Pago Pago by Margaret Mead...
...He was no great shakes as a public speaker...
...None of these weaknesses applies to you...
...To be sure, he spoke more often of history -“The United States is once again acting with assurance and purpose on the world stage...
...Ruth remembers from that time a broken Jimmy who called her home to share “the personal, big secret” of his despair, and “that moment of sitting out in that woods under the tree when Jimmy’s whole life went before him, as he held his face up, the tears were just falling, and he said, ‘Ruth, I don’t know how I hesitated...
...The family must have thought he had something special...
...Or, we are told we now can see, such a mad Resident would inevitably have staggered into the Constitution’s warning systems...
...McKay’s slippery shenanigans were beginning to become visible...
...And it would conjure up burning crosses, rabid literalism, Wilsonian rigidity, Nixon’s prayer breakfasts, and many another ghost of “Christians ¶’ past...
...Most people ’ are good not because of love,” he said, “but because of fear...
...In 1972 Barber published his theories in a book, The Presidential Character, and his predictions about Nixon quickly began to come true...
...On the other hand, throughout his exhortations, Watergate threatened the presidency itself, the fundamental constitutional order, and the very peace of the world...
...I began to expand my personal service in the church”-making more speeches (to as many as 5,000), traveling to Pennsylvania and Massachusetts for week-long missionary stints...
...the system.’ ” So his rescue would be totally dependent on himself...
...He had demonstrated a side of his character that was not clear before: he could be “stubborn as a South Georgia turtle,” as an old politician said of him...
...There were individual targets there, too, such as Daniel Schorr (“that son of a bitch”) and Joseph Alsop (who described Nixon as “the armpit of humanity”), and individual collectivities like The Washington Post (scheduled by Nixon for “damnable, 18 damnable problems” after the election...
...But that would be a cowardly thing to do,” he said in a television address, and then when the cameras were off, he told the crew: “It wasn’t easy...
...We sing the same hymns...
...Lillian’s influence can be seen in what happened: A.D...
...In 1976, speaking in Boston, Carter said, “When civil rights legislation was passed, I didn’t have to walk across the street and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter...
...She and Jimmy wrangled hard over it, “the first really serious argument in our marriage.’’ - The terms of that argument are unrecounted...
...Thus Earl...
...It is his political aspect that lends immense significance to his tawdry triumph over our Constitution...
...Their first year home saw one of the worst droughts in the history of Georgia...
...People can sense when a leader is timid and they automatically attack...
...Carter and his classmates expected to graduate to combat assignments...
...Afraid he may have been, but he did not hesitate to stand against nearly everyone-friends, relations, customers, neighbors, deaconsif that had to be...
...The first day of school, the bus came for the white children and left the black children behind to walk to their school nearer-by . A subtler transition came when, somewhere along the way, A.D...
...As he saw himself, “I could always get along with anybody...
...The Pornfret went to China, saw the Chinese Communists’ campfires in the hills above one port...
...Clean himself-as became clear when hundreds of FBI agents fanned out across the country on a failing mission: to search out Ford peccadilloes...
...The fact of Nixon’s isolation is evident...
...What To Take Seriously In a sense, intimacy had won out over excellence...
...Callaway’s ideology had been plastic enough for him to switch parties, and by 1966 he was dangling off the right Republican wing...
...I see the press totally in impersonal terms...
...He was very popular, unopposed for his party’s nomination...
...At the end, he was drinking heavily, sleeping sporadically, frequently out of touch with the reality gathering around him, often enraged and raging, at times a weeping, staggering, irrational man...
...Earl,” walked across the tracks into one of their houses, closed the door, and then broke forth in pandemonious celebration...
...they were inherited-that is, each Jimmy and each A.D...
...The material we have selected is all new, published here for the first time...
...Her professional work went on too busily for her to bother with diagnostically useless distinctions...
...Back in Plains he took over Earl’s place as a deacon, again taught Sunday school, went with the pastor on recruiting visits for the annual, weeklong, revival service, and spoke in neighboring communities on such topics as “Christian Witnessing...
...The politics of gesture,” Barber says, ‘Cvill not sustain hope long, and political faith is frCgile...
...The black workers were allowed to join the Carters when they set the radio on the window sill to listen to black Joe Louis box white Max Schmeling...
...He sure as hell did...
...They fear me and so they hate me...
...It was agony...
...What were his visions of the central moral-political conflicts...
...That lasted till the end...
...His mind could widen that circle, probably did when he, having left Archery, came home to Plains...
...a great scientist...
...At first she looked up to him-“I guess I always idolized him...
...In politics,” quoth Aristotle, “we must be satisfied with a tincture of excellence...
...But it is interesting that he came to know and like a lot of different people-different from him, different from one another...
...He would get good grades, but he expressed no contempt for his idle classmates...
...He sought out extra burdens, memorizing hundreds of aircraft silhouettes while on guard duty, learning to fly seaplanes, listening with rapt and scientific attention to classical records...
...Jimmy had a strong sense that nobody in his family could hold it all together but him...
...Life is a continual knotting and loosening of strands...
...Jimmy’s thoughts were jelling...
...There were personal dimensions: Callaway was a West Point graduate, a “wealthy textile heir,” leader of the Young Republicans who were arrayed against Carter’s Young Democrats, the man who had tried to thwart Carter’s crusade to get a four-year college in southwest Georgia...
...We know where we ire going...
...Rosalynn, perhaps, saw it as a narrowing, from the cosmopolitan to the parochial...
...James Earl followed three years later...
...For too long, this administration has given the public the impression that its standard of conduct was not that it must be above suspicion but that it must merely be above criminal guilt...
...Another military leader, the Secretary of Defense, established a system by which he could veto the Commanderinchiefs orders to the armed forces...
...But once in office, he spoke a programmatic language-comprehensive plans for reform in education, taxation, mental health, election law, budgeting...
...Other senators began to turn to him for advice, to accord him a certain authority...
...He and Milanowski established what terHorst calls “one of the smoothest ‘district-serving’ systems on Capitol Hill...
...Our Constitution works...
...That teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, was one of that remarkable breed who sense in the mixed minds of adolescents, for all their surface cynicism and ingratitutde, the excitement of excellence...
...sometimes repeatedly in the same conversational sequence, as his own version of his tapes reveals...
...He jabbered on to Gerald Ford, driving him “close to distraction,” according to John Osborne...
...He found the bureaucracy particularly infuriating, and HEW the most maddening of all: “What is it about those guys, anyway...
...Perhaps the center was falling apart: not long thereafter, young Billy joined the Marines (to show, he said, he was a “badass”), and Lillian took a place as a fraternity housemother at Auburn University and started a nursing home in Blakely, Georgia...
...When push came to shove, family loyalty won out over personal ambition...
...The demands were never met, never could be-in a sense were not meant to be met...
...Senator Barry Goldwater saw what those meetings amounted to: “I’ve never known a man to be so much a loner in any field...
...He was in bed below when the alarm sounded, dashed up to the reeling flight deck, slipped and “slid across the deck like a toboggan,” he remembered...
...Rosalynn’s business talent had vast new complexities to deal with...
...He became: president of the state Certified Seed Organization, district governor of the Lions Club, president of the Georgia Planning Association, chairman of the Sumter County school board, and member of the local Library Board and Hospital Authority...
...He told the Cabinet that he could not resign because that would change the Constitution, and so “I will go through this with my head high-right up to the end, if it comes...
...Thus with Watergate...
...Everything is likely to blow iiround here...
...He decided to speak white, but he liked blacks...
...and the thought came back when, preparing a speech, he methodically added up all the “visits I had made for God”-an impressive 140...
...A fascinating book, although fun book...
...As he had tried to beat the farm’s champion cottonpicker (he lost), in school he took on the Plains brains and won...
...Rickover] demanded from me a standard of performance and a depth of commitment that I had never realized before that I could achieve...
...Carter graduated with his class and started a two-year hitch of sea duty...
...Carter grinned and said, “Why lieutenant governor...
...the newspapers dubbed him...
...in California...
...Fight...
...on Kennedy’s Thirteen Mistakes, the great mistakes”), the “upper intellectual types,” the “establishment” (“dying”), Jews (Nixon’s oft-repeated comment: “The Jewish cabal is out to get me”), and Italians (“They’re not like us...
...Extensive data about Nixon’s character appeared as the tragedy of his presidency deepened...
...But it is obvious that what this President wanted to believe about himself was that he was powerful indeed, a “sovereign” who had his “subordinates” “on a short leash.’’ ‘The Easy Thing’ Like his active-negative predecessors, Nixon moralized his preferred line in such a way as to define alternatives as temptations, and thus his resisting them as virtuous...
...Instead, he took a speed-reading course and read them all, which taught him a great deal about the mechanics of government and about the risks of promises...
...Lillian’s brother, Tom Gordy, a world-traveling Navy man, was Jimmy’s “distant hero,” who became a lightweight boxing champion...
...In any case, somehow or other we “got rid of” Richard Nixon, so we should put all that nastiness behind us and move on to make a better future...
...Jimmy said, “I don’t blame you...
...But in the daily ife of the White House, it seemed the ,:ourse of history could take most any .urn...
...Many a time he would hike or ride into Plains, to visit and then come home again...
...Barber sees some potential troubles ahead for Carter, too...
...On shipboard, he Sunday-schooled some more and led the submariners in an Easter service...
...It was nice to have a non-crook Vice President, but few thought Ford would rise above that post...
...But the truth is that Nixon, despite many castigations of Kennedy and the Kennedys (not to mention such Kennedyists as Archibald Cox), targeted his anger not primarily on a person but on the media...
...In the early post-Navy year...
...Unless, of course, you disagree...
...Nixon was used to that...
...Then during his second summer cruise, in 1945, the whole picture changed...
...He backed an integrationist school consolidation plan (his cousin Hugh was on the other side), but made no discernible protest against the extra pay and privileges white teachers got...
...A black who worked for her said, “Miss Lillian’s house was just like a colored person’s house, far as colored people...
...Now, in preparation for a revised edition of The Presidential Character to be published later this month, Barber has written three new chapters, applying his analysis to the post-1 9 72 Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter...
...They could stand together, but had to divide to sit down, as he could have noticed the first time he went to the movies or the first time blacks were let into his church for a funeral...
...Miss Lillian attended services, but she was no churchophile: “I’m a Christian, the way I see it...
...His speechwriter William Safire, aping Gertrude Stein, saw that “to the real Nixon, the real Nixon is not the real Nixon...
...But the new aides, as Theodore White saw, “were loyal only to the public policies of Richard Nixon, his proclaimed purposes, the record that had won for him the largest popular election margin in American history...
...When Earl died, they offered Lillian his seat in the state legislature and when she said no, they gave it to a friend of Earl’s...
...Ford picked up the challenge and ran with it...
...Jimmy wrote off for the catalog, pored over its every paragraph, and pondered whether such sins as “malocclusion of teeth” or “retention of urine” would bar his admission...
...He knew, too, how to cooperate with the empiricism of history, by drowning the truth in the facts...
...And Carter, in classic response, began to think, “why not...
...Much as he felt that political leaden in the Middle East could rely “only on my words” and that agreements with the Soviet Union “were possible because of a personal relationship that was established between the General Secretary and the President of the United States,” Nixon came to see Watergate as no one’s but his: “No man in public life,” Nixon said in a speech, “has ever had a more loyal group of friends...
...To take on Callaway, Carter had first to get the Democratic nomination...
...The dentist wrote him in the Navy, and Jerry wrote Dad, “If the Home Front ever asks you to do something, don’t turn them down...
...Dad said to go see Frank McKay, big-time Republican boss, a man who seemed to collect at least one cherry from every pie baked in political Michigan...
...I don’t think God is going to make me President by any means...
...He gave up when some white businessmen got a black school bus stop moved to a back street, telling his black housekeeper, “Lexie, there’s nothing I can do...
...He spent more than a quarter-century in the House of Representatives...
...trouble is, you can’t find one who is honest...
...Just at the time he was refusing to obey subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee, President Nixon issued his Law Day 1974 proclamation: “The law retains its value and force because every person knows that no man or woman is above the requirement of the law...
...In the event, though, old reliable Nixon came through...
...The Appeal to Faith I will spare readers an extensive account of Nixon’s litany of selfjustifying idealisms called forth for protection from the prying eyes of reporters, courts, and special prosecutors...
...lost...
...Suddenly he remembered the campaign and the enormous energies he had poured into that-“300,000 visits for myself in three months, and 140 visits for God in fourteen years...
...In my book, that’s pure courage...
...But it was, no jolly time: “I was going through a stage in my life then that was a very difficult one...
...Not only did his Cabinet members have trouble seeing him, his own lawyers were sometimes cut outJames St...
...They admired him as a brain, but one misses any claims of the heart...
...The other side of the temptation coin is the exhausted face of the gladiator straining upward, lost in his quest, experiencing the sufferer’s confirmation that he cannot be doing this from any selfish motive...
...He said, “How would you like to be pastor of a church with 80,000 members...
...In Atlanta, he ran into 2,500 bills, surely excuse enough for modifying his intentions...
...axis...
...Everybody’s for himself...
...Vandenberg himself felt he had to stand above the fray, could make no public move for Ford...
...Carter gave up safety and reached for danger...
...Carter writes, “It seems hard to believe now, but I was actually a member of the county school board for several months before it dawned on me that white children rode buses to their schools and black children still walked to theirs...
...I understand it...
...Theodore White saw the task of the White House staff, as of August 1974, as “the management of an unstable personality,” and others, similarly averse to hyperbolic diagnoses, used similarly strong language...
...Even out there there were demeaning amenities...
...He excelled at his political and governmental homework, as he had at Miss Julia’s...
...When guns were fired at the home of blacks who worked in a little biracial religious commune, he had only private sympathy: “It’s a shame and a disgrace on Sumter County that something like this is going on...
...But all that was going through Carter’s mind before the fall of 1966: “I never knew anything except going to church...
...To which Henry Petersen gave the desired response: “I don’t even know why you want the job...
...he and Earl had a chance to talk “about old times together” before the end...
...At the peak of his Navy career, thinking he might one day be its topmost officer, enjoying good money and the Rickoverian stimulations, Jimmy chucked it all...
...Tkat is not surprising given his pre1972 style, which he practiced over a Lifetime in politics...
...From “the largest dinner ever held at the White House” to “the greatest year of progress since World War 11,” Nixon zigged and zagged through wide varieties of “toughest” decisions, “most difficult crises,” and “deepest valleys...
...You had to keep thinking all the time and an officer had to see to the delicate dovetailing of specialized teams...
...I wish there were some way it could be stopped...
...he was “the Pharisee,” loudly advertising how wonderful he was...
...After a while, his colleagues voted him one of the five best senators, no doubt a gratifying experience if not quite up to Admiral Rickover’s standard...
...Nixon was practicing his reverse-of-the-facts rhetoric when he said, “The critics don’t bother me...
...Issues, in the sense of concrete, detailed proposals for government action, appear to have played little part...
...People were always letting you down...
...Another day, in 1941, Jerry happened into a conversation with McKay’s archenemy, a determined dentist who called his organization “The Home Front” after the English farmers preparing to wield their pitchforks against Nazi paratroopers...
...became objects of disdain and derision, to be “stroked” or “nailed...
...His father was the mainstay of that town-the banker and the landowner...
...Along the way he was picking up impressions of people...
...I have concluded that their disloyalty has reached such a magnitude that it seriously threatens our constitutional system, and even the nation...
...Fight...
...Using biographical in formation, Barber traced the character development of various t wen tie th-cen tu ry Pvesiden ts and how it affected each man’s way of governing...
...I think I’m on the right side of God...
...watched awhile and then snuck off to the balcony...
...But the Federal bureaucracy must not be disloyal to the Presidency-or the country...
...Some of Earl’s celebrated money-luck came their way, but the prime ingredients were force and determination...
...Yet he never had been an isolated, mechanical man...
...That is, her son got it from her, and she got it from her father-the handing down of belief is often personal and particular, especially where people grow up closely and visibly interdependent...
...It was then 6:30 a.m...
...As for his stance toward the press, Nixon said, “The critics don’t bother me, even though I have had the most unfriendly press in history, it has never bothered, me, but it deeply bothers Pat and my daughters...
...For instance, silence...
...The system” took care of it (and surely would again, if need be...
...Down under the water he found challenge aplenty...
...Among the people whose attention Barber’s work attracted was the governor of Georgia, who in 1974 had Barber to dinner and who two years later, on the eve of his presidential nomination, said, ‘7 think I have been heavily influenced by James Barber’s writings and I think a lot of my ideas come from there...
...He got on the school board and worked for fixing up the black schools...
...It bucked the interests and won-not everything, but some land and some key changes in the law...
...When his friend Warren Fortson, the county attorney, was being driven out of town for proposing a biracial committee, Jimmy collected 200 signatures on his behalf...
...He finished third...
...Earl, he was sort of a hateful man,’’ a black remembers, but adds: “People in those days were all kind of mean, and I guess he had to go along with the rest of them...
...It did not work and could not last, because Nixon simply was not an Open Door person...
...He did walk in the woods with Ruth and she did ask him if he would be willing to give up politics, but-as he recalls-“I thought for a long time and had to admit that I would not...
...He was a baron in a feudal situation...
...He announced his candidacy for Congress right after the senate adjourned that spring, and took off campaigning...
...It wasn’t mysterious...
...To Senator Buckley’s suggestion that he resign, Nixon replied sarcastically that, “While it might take an act of courage to run away from a job that you were elected to do, it also takes courage to stand and fight for what you believe is right, and that’s what I intend to do...
...The Power Disease Jonathan Schell finds “the fear of impotence” a recurrent theme in Nixon’s public statements, as when Nixon worried about moves to “tie the hands of the President,” or “cut off the President’s legs,” or that America might become “a pitiful helpless giant.’’ One need not go that far...
...the total fabric of it, in any period, is a mixed weave...
...To the central person in the White House, such matters were derivative, secondary to the purpose of tending to whatever came through the door of the store...
...His repeated rising up through the processes of nomination and election shows better than any hypothetical supposition could show how the national evaluatorsthose supposedly knowledgeable citizens the public counts on to recommend presidential candidates-failed miserably, over at least a decade, despite the most abundant evidence ever available regarding any potential President, to predict and guard us from the machinations of an expert flim-flam man...
...She’s fully equal to me in every way...
...He changed his mind on a few specificsbut specific issues, in their substance, had never meant much to him anyhow He told some Republican congressmen concerned about budget deficits: “It will take you a little while to get used to fightingfor what you’ve been fighting against all your lives...
...When he got homesick as an Annapolis freshman, he went to the chapel and prayed...
...One had a responsibility to be practical, to work on the specifics without sacrificing all chance of leadership in a quixotic crusade...
...For others it’s gambling...
...In contrast, sister Gloria remembered Jimmy musing, “If I died, nobody would really care...
...he served two terms...
...The important point here is not that Nixon was a bad man (he was) or that he was legally convictable (we will never know) or even that he was psychiatrically committable (maybe, near the end...
...James David Barber is chairman of the political science department at Duke University...
...Politics had played no important part in his life, but he had done some dabbling in it before the war, and his father had broken the ice: during the war Dad headed his county’s Office of Civil Defense (uncomplainingly, despite hard pain from stomach ulcers), and when Jerry came home, Dad was already into his second year as County Republican Chairman...
...It crossed Jimmy’s mind to ask for it himself, but he let it pass...
...Georgia Democrats, meanwhile, had been riding low...
...And when he gets it, he won’t listen to it...
...Harry Truman made the Japanese surrender...
...He figured the odds at three to one against him...
...Far more so is the part of his world view that saw chaos rampant at the same time conspiracy was closing in...
...When the Bishop himself wanted to talk to Earl, he sent his driver around to the back door and Earl met the Bishop in the yard...
...Davis, could, as a child, have the run of the Carter house, but when Lillian took him to the movies with her flock and sat them together downstairs, A.D...
...Ford’s carrier caught fire...
...Even without an enemy looking for them, submariners had their own war, a war against the elements, against fear, against mechanical failure...
...That is the way to build democracy...
...the President has to be first among ‘US’.’’ The lesson simply would not take...
...The best prospect immediately available, from Ford’s viewpoint, was Wendell Willkie, a big, shaggy, outspoken businessman who had mastered the art of seeming not a politician and who set out to challenge the great Franklin D., then violating tradition in a shocking appeal for a third term...
...A change happened within me during the war,” he said...
...I’ve grown out of it...
...In his campaign for the Presidency, Carter was at first reticent about the faith he had found, and then, as questions kept focusing on it, he tried to explain : “In 1967...
...An American Redemption: The Presidential Character born Nixon to Ford to Carter by James David Barber Nearly eight years ago, we published an article by James David Barber called ‘<AnalyzingP residents...
...He hated to give up his career...
...And being a loner, I think he sits by himself and tells himself what he’s going to do...
...Where did Jimmy’s “liberalism” on race come from...
...We’ve overcome the same obstacles...
...Those on the paler side of the spectrum called themselves “whites...
...At the end of the Nixon regime there was‘ a coup: the presidency was run by a general, Alexander Haig, who, by the luck of the draw, had a passion for reason, if also a certain lack of moral imagination...
...Of course Nixon did tolerate insubordination-or at least he experienced plenty of it at the end, when he could not find much subordination anywhere...
...He could trust such men to serve such public purposes, but not to protect him personally...
...People like Rickover made their marks on the world by holding in mind impossible superlatives, demanding of themselves and others nothing but the best...
...This bent, little, nearsighted woman served her students a cafeteria of intellectual wonders: great poems and paintings and some approximation of great music in her requirement that each play an instrument, be it only the ukelele...
...the stage is set for tragic drama...
...The front door was a boundary...
...They would pull down our institutions if they could...
...Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean were routinely taping their conversations with each other and any other potential witness...
...And they should fear me...
...His interpretation of Tolstoy was that leaders come and go, but “common, ordinary people” make history“Their hopes and dreams, their doubts and fears, their courage and tenacity, their quiet commitments determine the destiny of the world...
...indeed, the friend remembers it became “a political Bible” for Carter, and that the two of them concluded that “love and kindness meant a great deal in one-toane relationships but not in dealings with structures and corporate groups...
...In the end, Ford’s weighty legacy was as simple as this: he revived his country’s hope for faith in government...
...I will not tolerate insubordination,’ he barked into the telephone...
...Nor, he found, could he fall back at ease among “the normal thing...
...The Academy’s academic programall required courses except the choice of a foreign language (his being Spanish)- stressed engineering: the way things work, a link to Earl’s mechanical instructioh...
...just talking as he did was dangerous and wearying...
...I told them I would go...
...Even the version of the White House tapes he himself released to the public has him in continual complaint: “This damn case...
...and whenever the Admiral would come around to inspect my work, if I had done a perfect job-which wasn’t too often, but every now and then I did-he never said a word, never once did he say, ‘good job, Jimmy’ or ‘well done, Carter.’ Zf he found no fault, he simply looked, turned around, and walked away...
...But then he was off coaching sailors...
...In a thinly disguised account of a diatribe by President “Monckton,” John Ehrlichman portrays his boss’ power feelings: “. . . this government is shot through with miserable little people who do not love this country...
...However, he did change my life because he had one characteristic, and still has it, which has always been unique...
...Her father had died (despite Miss Lillian’s nursing) when she was 13, so her mother had to eke out a living as a seamstress...
...Not really care...
...It was all at the edges of his mind, but available for memory when his time came...
...He wrote home a lot...
...The other three active-negative Presidents I studied, Wilson, Hoover, and Johnson, eventually fastened their ire on a single, personal enemy...
...Rather they were counsels of perfection that could lend daily life a certain gallantry, could make meaningful-and enjoyable-the chosen routines...
...Earl had been a veritable closet foundation-cash at need, debts forgiven, scholarships, dresses for the little neighbor girls...
...Classes were small and run competitively: the homework impossible to complete, “constant pressure for speed and accuracy,” supplemented with endless practical exercises, summer cruises through sub marine-e n dangered waters in creaking ships spareable from war duty...
...Jimmy and Ruth, Daddy’s darling, carried the news to the farm’s black workers the night he died, and saw, to Jimmy’s surprise, their tears spring and flow...
...Cynics said that when he wanted to be alone, he brought along Bebe Rebozo, and they would sit together, talkless, for long stretches...
...The upper intellectual types, the soft heads” were valued less than “average people” who “won’t think it is much of a crisis unless it affects them”-hardly a ringing endorsement of the average person...
...I feel that I am among friends,” he said as the hearings began, and when he came to the House chamber to take the oath he promised, with refreshingly credible sincerity, to “do the very best I can for America...
...Uncle Tom sent Jimmy postcards and pictures, and through some mix of perceptions stimulated the boy to decide he wanted to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis...
...Busy as he was farming, Jimmy tried the organizations route instead...
...American Dissonance Gunnar Myrdhal, in An American Dilemma, found hope in the fact that racist practice conflicted with the predominant American beliefs, was a “cognitive dissonance,” as we would call it now, in which the beliefs might win...
...Even after his enormous victory in the 1972 election, Nixon conveyed a “joyless, brooding quality,” one of his Cabinet members remembered, and talked of how all Presidents had gone downhill in their second terms...
...I would rather have what you have than to even be President of the United States...
...The pastor was appalled that such a fine young man would consider such a lowdown life: “If you want to be of service to other people, why don’t you go into the ministry or some other honorable social service work...
...Carter saw it happen once...
...That way we may gain at least a somewhat better capacity to predict-and prevent-another American tyranny...
...We’ve seen the same poverty and the same disease...
...And they hate me, because they know I will try to stop them...
...Carter had won with a rhetoric of indignation, an appeal to the better and braver civic mind, friends-andneighbors politicking, and the display of a character bent on excellence (as in the promise to read every bill...
...The tapes are full of presidential metaphors of masochism: having to “bite the Dean bullet today,” to “prick the boil and take the heat,” “to get beat on the head and shoulders,’, “to be nibbled to death by a thousand hurts,” not to mention numerous variants of Nixon’s “scabflicking” simile...
...Their force was their conventionality...
...our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men...
...As the “crisis” deepened in the fall of 1973, Julie Nixon wrote on her calendar, “Fight...
...In 1976, Carter remembered that “I was by far the dominant person in the marriage at the beginning, but not any more...
...He proved a quick study, not only learning such facts as hap pened to come his way, but actively searching out needed information, old and new...
...He was 19, and weighed 121 pounds...
...in his last six weeks in office he spent only six days there...
...no matter what I thought of them...
...How did history work...
...Perfection was to be held in mind (in one’s being...
...Rtchard Nixon upstairs...
...Carter took it one step at a time...
...William Greider of the Washington Post perceived that “He has the faith of a technocrat, believing in the mechanics of objects and situations, confident he can figure out how they work...
...Carter could sail into the Congressional seat...
...We lost five seamen or officers during that storm-sliding over the side and into the sea-so I guess I was one of the lucky ones...
...Carter’s knack and training in engineering also affected his mind...
...News and World Report, but his lessons in practical technology linked up with Jimmy’s school science...
...His lifelong weakness at negotiation could lead to problems in getting his programs implemented...
...But when Dad saw Jerry was determined, he advised him how to do it...
...Perhaps that was a long-range advantage, something his community had over places where life had been more rationally and abstractly divided into distinct components...
...At the same time, he went along with white parents who wanted a black school located farther away from their school...
...Political Fortunes Jimmy and his family went to every kind of political rally-he remembered one where a speechmaking Senate candidate was upstaged by a breadslicing machine...
...His family lived in Archery, a place left out of laws and maps, incorporated only in the minds of its inhabitants, known, if at all, as “near Plains...
...Surely in the long view of historical hindsight, Nixon’s press will be seen as charitable in the extreme...
...At the next congregation meeting, Jimmy stood up and reminded them where they were-“This is not my house...
...In his own religious (in Miss Lillian’s sense) life, Jimmy Carter had exceeded the requirements, like a First Class Scout bucking for Eagle...
...He could see that his history had worked when he reached out for high opportunity...
...said, “I don’t know whether I’m ever going to say ‘mister’ to you all...
...I formed a very close, intimate relationship with God, through Christ, that has given me a great deal of peace...
...He was a maverick outsider, an engineering genius shuttled aside by the Navy bureaucracy until he was finally found and empowered by President Harry Truman...
...I ought to be the one crying...
...The train that could be made to stop at Archery had one passenger car, but in Jimmy’s first ride he and his black companions had to separate and sit apart...
...Miss Lillian heard the difference the words made...
...But if he stood, he did not lead...
...He made the point-if people throw rocks at you in a parade, you cannot sit down and look for protection...
...It would scare nervous pragmatists, who don’t mind Christians as long as they don’t really mean it...
...I now solemnly reaffirm my promise I made to you last December 6: to uphold the Constitution, to do what is right as God gives me to see the right, and to do the very best I can for America...
...the new senate seat would represent seven counties...
...As the end approached, Nixon said he would not resign because, “From a personal standpoint, resignation is an easy copout...
...We share a common faith in Christ...
...In Why Not the Best...
...A presidential order conveyed to the Secretary of State elicited the reply, “Tell the President to fuck himself...
...All he needed to do was finish second to qualify for the runoff...
...Like Richard Nixon, Jonkman had quickly picked up the social vibrations that were to explode into McCarthyism, the sense that, in our fervor to whip the Fascists of the right, America had let nefarious leftists sneak in the back door...
...Jimmy garnered six votes: his, Rosalynn’s, his son Jack’s, his son Chip’s, Lillian’s, and one other...
...In grade school, he had demonstrated strong talent...
...His ideas may have seemed consequential to him, but not much so to the voters (to whom the price of milk meant more than a European renaissance) or to the band of Home Front Republicans on his team, who were bent on knocking off the McKay-Jonkman...
...When he was with others, he kept them away, psychologically, by dominating the conversation or by just not listening...
...Jimmy Carter was launched from Wise Sanitorium on October 1, 1924, as President Calvin Coolidge was trying to rouse himself to stave off the challenge of John W. Davis...
...Indeed there are only two names in Carter’s chapter on his senate years, neither a colleague: Horace Tate, executive director of the black teacher’s organization, who, the author notes, “became one of my early supporters when I ran for state office,” and Reinhold Niebuhr, known to Carter through his books, the man who “observes that the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world...
...Why did Petersen play the game so straight with us...
...Near the end, as his political defenses crumbled, so did his psychological defenses, and Nixon revealed the fragility of his self-esteem, the fear and trembling that hid behind his mask of stoic toughness...
...When Norman Mailer came to Plains, Carter was nice to him...
...Everywhere he went Ford challenged Jonkman to debate...
...He had “some torturous days” thinking, feeling what to do...
...The Emergent Enemy “As you know, we’re up against ruthless people,” Nixon reminded Alexander Haig as the crisis persisted...
...Jerry organized an association...
...Let Agnew be President for a while...
...It might have been the same kind of experience as millions of people have who do become Christians in a deeply personal way...
...then Jeffrey in 1952-all while their father, in his twenties, was sailing all over the place...
...Elliot Richardson tried to get across to Nixon’s aides that “if you’re President, there isn’t any ‘they...
...The release of the IrJixon tapes-edited by the President lo show himself in the best possible light-conveyed to the great American Iublic just how much like a deck full (if loose cannons the Nixon White IIouse was...
...I’ve stood alone in Plains, Jimmy and I have stood alone...
...The barons, unsurprisingly, came to like him, and Ford, ever the loyalist, built into his style their delicate ways, into his thought their assumptions...
...But he graduated from high school at 16, spent a year in a nearby junior college and another year at Georgia Tech, and was off to Annapolis in 1943...
...in Plains, however, he was no questing civil rights revolutionary...
...He was lucky to find a first-rate aide, John Milanowski, a former speech teacher and link to the Grand Rapids Polish community, a connection infuriating to certain local elements who warned Ford to get rid of “that Polack popelover...
...It turned out Mr...
...He would have been class valedictorian, they say, if he hadn’t skipped school to go to the movies...
...So “he and I agreed to avoid racial subjects on my rare and brief visits home .” And a thousand other ways...
...At least once, Nixon in a fury undertook to rein in Kissinger...
...That election, Miss Lillian ran the county Democratic headquarters...
...The temptation was always toward weakness, relaxation, collapse : “All these people have come in here crying...
...Near the end, the Carters thought it looked good...
...As a matter of fact, all the time I worked for him he never said a decent word to me...
...He soaked up facts...
...Mr...
...He prowled the bureaucratic hallways quizzing startled officials at length about just what they did there...
...That came in 1948...
...His commanding officer reported him as one “who no matter what he does ends up being the boss...
...Clair confessing he had not heard the crucial tapes, Leonard Garment complaining, at the end, “We had no access to our client...
...But he knocked into a cocked hat, for once and all, the idea that the presidency had to turn a man into a majesty...
...In the end, though, Carter concluded the best thing to do was to go home, and the reason, he wrote as he ran for President, was, “I had only one life to live, and I wanted to live it as a civilian, with a potentially fuller opportunity for vaned public ’ service...
...What this article can do is not untangle the whole story in all its rich putrescence, but point to the key evidence on critical points...
...Henry [ Kissinger] has that of course...
...But far from passive acquiescence, Nixon would do unto others as he expected they would try to do unto him, by sharp, disciplined struggle, however “painful...
...Congress has come to expect that many people who testify before it lie...
...Ego is something we all have,” Nixon admitted, “and either you grow out of it or it takes you over...
...But when Jimmy, at school, heard the black accents in his own speech, he worked at talking white and insisted Gloria do the same...
...He spoke rarely and kept to the point...
...One could not foresee when a war would end, a wave wash you overboard, a father die, a drought come...
...All that we have risked,” he said, “hangs in the balance,” as he struggled with the Vietnam question...
...It is not hard to tell why, from Carter’s own account: “. . . probably the greatest engineer this nation ever produced...
...And its meaning was in an old song, Jimmy’s favorite from childhood on, written the year after his earliest Plains-buried ancestor was born, by an Englishman who had “servant of slaves” carved on his tombstone...
...Jimmy ate it up...
...Like other safely positioned golden youths, Jerry felt the urge to “do something...
...The active-negative’s enormous capacity for moralistic self-justification shone brightly through the Watergate miasmas...
...I don’t worry about it too much any more...
...Later Atlanta and Washington would replace Plains as places for an outsider to break into and prove himself...
...We’ve seen the same struggles in the South and the same growth...
...today the obsessed Watergate buff can find a lifetime occupation tracing out just where, say, Ulasewicz was when he called Kalmbach on such and such an evening-much as the assassination buffs used to do...
...Each evening, Earl had had the children come down in their pajamas and bend against him to say their prayers...
...He wanted others to know that “I sometimes feel like I’d like to resign...
...Like them, Ford came away with a strong reinforcement of something that was there before-the sense that “I was one of the lucky ones...
...And last there were people he knew, friends like Bob Dylan and his Annapolis roommate, acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers-merging out into a real-world counterpart of The People, a corrective, in part, to the sentimentality of the ideal...
...His reaction was to try hard and do better...
...He was baptized at the regular time and taught Sunday school at eighteen...
...But even in his own account of the senate years, there is very little “we,” very little sense of the collaborative, and almost no mention of the many names a team-politician would have relished recalling...
...You can lead a President to conversation, but you can’t make him listen...
...Richard Nixon was at that point only a few months into his presidency, but Barber predicted that he would be an active-negative and that if he ‘1s ever threatened simultaneously with public disdain and loss of power, he may move into a crisis syndrome...
...Such are the exigencies of biography...
...Nixon’s rather rancid view of the world bore up well after 1972...
...He would never accept mediocrity or low average achievement in relation to anything he did or anyone others develop the first two atomic submarines...
...I wouldn’t either...
...Sitting in his pew in the Plains Baptist Church, he heard the preacher demand to know, “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict YOU...
...In an interesting passage, Nixon in February 1973 told his Cabinet what he had learned from another sovereign : “I was talking to King Hussein of Jordan...
...He got some technically interesting assignments, some travel, but it was a downbeat time, spent hacking around in leftover ships: “I became most disillusioned with the Navy, and the military in general, and probably would have resigned had not I and all Annapolis graduates been serving ‘at the pleasure of the President.’ ” Then his own pleasurable anticipations picked up when he heard about submarines-“tough, dangerous, and demanding’ ’ duty , sophisticated machinery requiring meticulous attention, the Navy’s new thing, run by an alert elite, the commandos of the sea...
...Even when he sat at ease in Washington while his bombers smashed out the lives of Vietnamese peasants, his sense of proportion and comparison deserted him: the Vietnam bombing became “my terrible personal ordeal...
...What was significant in those years between childhood and politics was the package of politically relevant beliefs he was putting together-his gathering worldview...
...Gloria says he rested a few days, then took his family to the beach and “came home talking about the shrimp boats, went down to the office and started talking about the next campaign”off and running again...
...Former friends (Dean, Magruder, Mitchell) and worshippers (Hunt, Liddy, Barker, et al...
...Jerry himself was caught up in the campus excitement of the spring of 1940, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht lashed across Europe, threatening Britain itself...
...Indeed it is not yet clear how much remains of the political evils he set in motion...
...In the process, he “became an expert on many unimportant matters,” but, in the campaign and the senate, he learned also to get facts for a purpose...
...But he has nothing on...
...He volunteered to teach a Sunday school class of ten-year-old girls (including the admiral’s daughter), and he brought some religious arguments to bear in student discussions “about why we are here, who made us, where we should go, what’s our purpose...
...He was no Christian...
...We have a lot in common, a belief in one another...
...Nixon’s fatalism is not nearly so evident in the Watergate period...
...I’ll give up everything...
...He did well enough, finishing 59th in a class of 820 without excessive grinding...
...Later, when possibilities of power came his way, he showed more clearly what he would do to get it and what he would do with it in hand...
...Now he told his friend Rabbi Korff that he could not resign, lest “foreign affairs . . . suffer irreparable harm...
...Jimmy rushed home on leave...
...And as a result he’s not getting advice...
...But the way the people’s government cheated the vulnerable made him mad-the madder because he himself had almost been cheated out of legitimate victory-and he said so...
...At some exuberant moment of the campaign, probably responding to a typically ignorant question, he had promised to read every bill...
...Miss Lillian was a lady and thus had leave to expect certain natural courtesies from males...
...In this matter, nothing is >eyond the realm of possibility,” he ::aid, and added later, “It is breaking so fast...
...I am the first President in this century who really threatens them, and they know it...
...One night in the 1940s when Ford was serving on an aircraft carrier, a terrific typhoon came up...
...To highlight a certain continuing strand in Carter’s development, I have pulled it out of context...
...He was an active person, but also an attentive one, maintaining “a posture of learning” through these experiences, absorbing relevant images and drawing conclusions important for his life...
...Earl could not see what there was to be proud of in that...
...Because he was only Vice President, it did not seem to matter much...
...On the one hand, Watergate was one of those “petty, little, indecent things that seem to obsess us,” one of “the murky, small, unimportant, vicious little things” contrasting so sharply with the high task of “building a better world...
...He did not think so and said he did not intend to be a presidential candidate in 1976, as Coolidge had said of 1928...
...In college I had been a real isolationist...
...Ford put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and said, “John, don’t worry...
...He could sense the lurking ambushers: “I guess the Kennedy crowd is just laying in the bushes waiting to make their move,” he told John Dean...
...Callaway got the most votes in the general election, but another crazy quirk in the Georgia constitution let the Democratic-controlled legislature pick the governor from the two top vote-getters, and it chose Maddox...
...Like a television camera, Nixon moved on from scene to scene quickly, lest understanding set in...
...It set forth a theory about the personalities of American Presidents and the impact of those personalities on the conduct of the office...
...His first serious campaignthough not as a candidate-was to get the school merger plan passed...
...They no longer trust the integrity of the administration...
...Nixon at the end was lashing out in nearly every direction at “the people who won’t rest until they get me...
...His religion will be a positive force, helping him retain his humility and remain open to new ideas...
...As Jonathan Schell put it in his The Time of Illusion, Nixon “invented crises and then he made ‘great decisions’ to resolve them...
...God helping me, I will not let you down .” In that sense, the most important sense, he did not let us down...
...He and his friends studied the statistics and developed the usual bloated estimates of potential money support...
...That summer Jerry worked full time in the Willkie campaign in Grand Rapids...
...found them already there, in all their apparently unalterable commonness...
...He got there early and stayed late, five days a week instead of the usual four...
...He simply set up his own little government on top of the constitutional one and dared the world to say him nay...
...Net income was $254...
Vol. 9 • April 1977 • No. 2
