The Nation: The Charlie Behind Jimmy

A new face appeared in Washington last week, and insiders were trying to figure out how important he was. Charles Kirbo of Atlanta was Jimmy Carter’s hand-picked envoy to the capital. TIME National Political Correspondent Robert Ajemian visited Kirbo in Atlanta before he came north. Reports Ajemian:

The one man Jimmy Carter depends on and trusts above all others, Charles Hughes Kirbo, 59, was talking about his boyhood days in the peanut and sawmill country of rural south Georgia. Kirbo’s voice is so slow and soft that people sometimes cock their heads to hear him. His daddy, Ben Kirbo, he said, used to be a court reporter in their home town of Bainbridge and often worked right through the day into evening sessions. The son always took Ben a sack of food at night, and then stuck around to watch the trials. In those days the court’s criminal trials were the region’s chief entertainment; the more notorious cases used to attract hundreds of people from miles around. Local churches sold box lunches, and there was usually a medicine show set up near the courthouse.

Courtroom Star. But the real stars were the trial attorneys, some decked out in swallow-tailed coats, others with flowing, silver hair, warming up the court with folksy anecdotes and at the same time cannily analyzing their juries. As a young man, Charlie Kirbo thrilled to this important courtroom theater. He remembers the vivid silence of the room, broken only by an occasional cough or a crying baby.

Years later, after graduating from the University of Georgia School of Law, Kirbo became one of the courtroom stars himself. Now he was the celebrated trial attorney playing to audiences hanging from the rafters. A gentle man with an understated, rustic style, Kirbo developed a reputation for becoming stern with witnesses who he thought were lying; his audiences looked for such moments. He defended blacks and whites alike, and he emphasized to the juries the need to be fair. Like his boyhood models, he studied his witnesses and jurors closely, searching for any clue that might aid his case.

Blue Eyes. Last week the former country lawyer was searching for clues in a far more glittering setting, but the technique was much the same. His friend Jimmy Carter had asked him to go to Washington to evaluate personally the half-dozen Senators whom Carter was considering for the vice presidency. It was an assignment that Carter would give to no other man. Kirbo talked at length with Walter Mondale, Frank Church, John Glenn, Ed Muskie, Henry Jackson and Adlai Stevenson III. In his measured, mannerly way, the taciturn interrogator with the clear blue eyes asked them questions about their taxes and net worth, their health, and about their personal lives. He had picked up information that one of the men had an undisciplined temper, that another was a poor manager, that still another’s personal conduct was questionable. Kirbo carefully raised all such subjects, listened to the answers, and at week’s end reported back to Carter.

Carter has been relying on Kirbo ever since they first met. In 1962 the politician from Plains lost his first primary election—for the Georgia state senate —by only 139 votes. Suspecting fraud in one county, he searched for a lawyer to fight his case and was directed to Kirbo, who had by then moved from Bainbridge to a top law firm in Atlanta. Kirbo had the suspicious ballot box impounded and opened. There, sitting on top of the otherwise orderly pile, was a wad of 111 ballots that had been clumsily stuffed into the box. “I could have fainted,” recalls Kirbo, who never expected to prove the case. Carter then won the general election by 1,500 votes.

Carter got elected Governor in 1970, and within three months Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell died. Kirbo remembers driving over to the Capitol to offer Carter his list of candidates for Russell’s seat. But Carter wanted to name Kirbo. The sagacious country lawyer declined; he preferred to stay at home in Georgia. A month later Carter turned to Kirbo again: he wanted him as state party chairman. Kirbo hated the idea but agreed, and for almost three years he tolerated the job only because Carter wanted him to. “He was a lousy state chairman. Charlie is just not a political animal,” says Georgia’s present state chairman, Marge Thurman, who has little use for Carter but praises Kirbo’s integrity. Adds another Carter critic in Atlanta: “If Carter ever gets to Washington, and starts to slide around, Kirbo will keep him in place.”

During Carter’s four years as Governor, Kirbo (his family name is of French derivation and originally was perhaps Courbeau) served as a sort of honorary chief of staff. Carter often summoned him, and the two held long talks alone on the back veranda of the mansion. The Governor ran all his top appointments through his confidant. Carter made a nearby Capitol office available to him, and several times each week Kirbo would pull up in his pickup truck, much to the annoyance of Capitol guards, and park in a VIP space.

When strategy sessions reached beyond 5 p.m., the tall (6 ft. 1 in.), big-shouldered Kirbo would usually rise and head for the door. No one, not even Carter, ever made any move to stop him; they knew he was going home to his wife and four children. Kirbo, in turn, never argued with Carter. “I gave Jimmy my ideas on things,” he says, “and if he didn’t like them, I’d pick up my hat and coat and just get out of there.” But whenever Kirbo disapproved of something, said Carter staffers, it troubled the Governor, and he would usually phone his friend to talk it over further.

Last April, Carter called and told Kirbo that the primary schedule was killing him; he was often hurtling breakneck six days a week. Kirbo, in his easy way, saw to it that the schedulers let up on him. A few weeks ago, with success assured, some of Carter’s top staff people came to Kirbo, worried. They told him they thought the candidate was acting too cocky and asked him to speak to Jimmy. He did.

His calm good sense and dry wit have made Kirbo something of a legend among the Carter staff members; they offer him deference mixed with affection. Says Carter’s media director, Gerald Rafshoon: “Charlie never plays any roles, any games. He never tries to impress anybody. All the rest of us need something from Jimmy. Kirbo doesn’t want anything. He’s the only guy I know who could walk away from all that power. If Jimmy ever got bigheaded, the first guy to straighten him out would be Kirbo.” Then Rafshoon adds wishfully: “Boy, would I love to do a film on Charlie Kirbo. I can see it all: Henry Fonda playing the lead.” Says Campaign Director Hamilton Jordan: “If Jimmy Carter were running against Charlie Kirbo, I’d vote for Charlie.”

One recent Saturday, picking his way through the 280 acres of thick woods around his lovely, tall-shuttered house 18 miles north of Atlanta, Kirbo spoke of his relationship with Carter and the possibility of going to Washington with him. He wore blue jeans, and as he loped through his plantings of grapes and sweet potatoes and peach trees, he was trailed by two of his three daughters, Betsy, 17, and Kathy, 13. He pointed out the old pump house, soundproofed with egg cartons, where his son Charlie practices with his rock band, called Pumphouse & Company. “I would never pick up and leave Georgia,” he said. “Besides, after I get through talking to Jimmy for an hour, I’m all talked out.”

Restore Integrity. Whether Kirbo would move to Washington has become a lively guessing game among the Carter staff. Pondered Kirbo: “I feel there would be times when Jimmy would need me, just to kick things around. But I don’t want a full-time job. I’d just like to be there for some of the tough decisions, perhaps a few days each week.” His face, usually deadpan, took on an even more set look. “I think Jimmy’s going to have lots of big problems in the beginning with this Government reorganization thing. I think I could help him keep the pressure on.”

He turned silent, as he often does during a conversation, and kept walking for a while. “I like Jimmy,” he went on. “He’s got faults, like all of us. He’s ambitious. But he’s not greedy, and he’s considerate.” He said he himself was probably a little more conservative than Carter but the two, from their rural roots, had similar ideas about helping poor people. Most important, Kirbo felt that Carter would restore integrity to the country. “Doing what’s morally right has always been important to him.”

By now he was back on his old-brick patio for lunch, and his wife Margaret, a good-looking woman he calls Boo, joined them. Kirbo, a devout member of the Christian Church, dropped his head and said grace. With his large hands and deep, soft voice, he seemed a little like Atticus Finch from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird—the wise, laconic, just man who knew exactly who he was and where he was. No matter what kind of Washington eminence he might become, or whether he decided to pick up his hat and coat and just get out of there, Charles Kirbo was very much his own man.