THE ADMINISTRATION: CARTER TAKES HIS LUMPS

In the Senate Caucus Room, both sides were poised for battle. At stake was the confirmation of Jimmy Carter’s nominee as CIA director: Theodore Sorensen, 48. Ready to bear witness against him were representatives of assorted conservative and right-wing groups, including the Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society. Prepared to defend him were some of the ornaments of the Eastern liberal Establishment such as Averell Harriman and Clark Clifford.

After Senator Pat Moynihan introduced his fellow New Yorker as a man by whom the CIA “will be well served,” the slender, bespectacled Sorensen took over. Looking grim and even more somber than usual, he read a vigorous ten-page rebuttal of what he called “scurrilous and personal attacks.” When he had finished, he picked up another piece of paper and began reading from it. “It is now clear,” he said, “that a substantial portion of the U.S. Senate and the intelligence community is not yet ready to accept as director of Central Intelligence an outsider who believes as I believe.” As the 15 members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence visibly stiffened, Sorensen went on to announce that he was withdrawing his nomination. The battle was over before it had really been joined.

Surprised Senators tried clumsily to soften the blow. Utah Republican Jake Garn assured Sorensen that his integrity had not been in question. Said the Senator: “I thought you were the wrong man for the wrong position.” Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh told Sorensen that some people were out to get him “because they don’t want a clean broom at the CIA.” Senator George McGovern emerged from the audience to remark that the episode showed that the “ghost of Joe McCarthy still stalks the land.” Committee Chairman Dan Inouye, who opposed the nomination, said that he hoped Sorensen would leave with no “bitterness.”

That was undoubtedly asking too much. With gallows wit, Sorensen remarked: “Well, Gary Gilmore and I…” He told TIME New York Bureau Chief Laurence Barrett: “As someone said to me this morning, a lot of dirty little streams flowed together to make this flood. There was the extreme right, the Kennedy haters, the Carter haters. The smokescreen reasons—outright lies and falsehoods—masked the real opposition. To boil it down to one sentence, people felt that an outsider with my beliefs should not head that agency.”

The withdrawal was a rebuke not only to Sorensen but to Carter. Only eight presidential Cabinet appointees have been rejected by the Senate in U.S. history. It is even rarer for a nominee to be turned down by a Congress controlled by the President’s own party. The last time that happened was in 1925, when Charles Warren, Calvin Coolidge’s choice for Attorney General, was rejected because he was too closely identified with the Sugar Trust.

In a narrow sense, Sorensen was not actually rejected, but if his nomination had come to a vote, it probably would have been defeated. On the eve of his Inauguration, Carter was thus given clear warning that he cannot take the heavily Democratic Congress for granted.

From the first, the Sorensen appointment seemed curious. He served as President Kennedy’s top adviser and speechwriter but has had little intelligence experience. Since he returned to private life (corporation law), he has urged a more modest role for the CIA and the curtailment of its covert operations.

The choice was largely Carter’s idea; Vice President Walter Mondale was equally enthusiastic. Sorensen was esteemed for both his mind and his morality. He was also an early backer of Carter for President, raising funds and tapping talent among liberals who had serious reservations about the Georgian. Beyond that, Sorensen was seen as a good soldier who would carry out Carter’s instructions at the CIA. Moreover, some Carter staffers reckoned that a liberal like Sorensen might be better able to defend the agency against criticism from the left. Said a close Carter adviser after the scheme had misfired: “What the hard-core conservatives who went after Sorensen have done is set their own damn course back.”

Intelligence Committee conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond were indeed up in arms over the nomination; their doubts had been fed by the intelligence community, which lobbied against Sorensen. But some liberal Democrats were scarcely less vehement in their opposition. One source of doubt was the fact that Sorensen had registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. Led by Hawaii’s Inouye, a much-decorated World War II veteran who lost his right arm in combat, the Senators wondered whether Sorensen would be able to approve agency operations that might endanger life. Sorensen also is a fierce Kennedy loyalist who still wears his PT-109 tie clasp. After the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, he was summoned to help draft the statement that tried to exonerate Ted Kennedy. Would Sorensen put family above national loyalty? Finally, there were nagging questions about his personality. He is intelligent, disciplined and principled, but he tends to be aloof, arrogant and occasionally self-righteous. Many Senators who generally share his political views simply do not like him.

On top of all that, some affidavits that he submitted in the Pentagon papers trial of Daniel Ellsberg surfaced! As a defense witness, Sorensen testified that he, like Ellsberg, had removed classified information without authorization. When Sorensen left the White House in 1964, he took along 67 boxes of documents, seven of them classified. Included were memos on the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit meeting in Vienna, the war in Laos, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. Sorensen used some of the material for his book Kennedy, then donated all of it to the Kennedy Library. He claimed a $231,000 tax deduction, part of which was rejected by the IRS. These actions were not exceptional. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House, he carted away mounds of documents, some of which wound up in his memoirs The Vantage Point. “It’s a bum rap,” said Mondale.

“Everybody has done the same thing.”

But not everybody is nominated to be CIA director. “The effect [of Sorensen’s appointment] on the clandestine services would have been serious,” said a committee member. “His actions with the classified material and his support of Ellsberg would have raised doubts with sources around the world about the reliability of the director.” A Democratic Senator added that because of the lack of confidence in Sorensen, “there was the certainty that the agency would either control him or ignore him.”

Trying to salvage his appointment, Sorensen called on every committee member—with the exception of Goldwater, who refused to see him. But Sorensen apparently was not all that persuasive. One Democrat, in fact, was put off by what he called Sorensen’s “intellectual convolutions.” Hard counts by Mondale and Carter staffers showed that Sorensen had only five committee votes, while nine were against him.

Already embroiled in a nomination fight over Attorney General-designate Griffin Bell, Carter felt he could not afford another. The question was how to cut his losses. In a long phone conversation on Sunday afternoon, Carter did not directly suggest that Sorensen bow out, yet managed to get the message across. Sorensen was more optimistic than Carter about his chances, but Carter kept leading him back to the hard facts. Carter said he was willing to support Sorensen if he wanted to confront his adversaries on the committee, but pointed out that the votes were not there. Sorensen replied that he would think it over. A few minutes before the hearings began the next day, Sorensen phoned Carter to say he had decided to withdraw. Carter did not try to dissuade him.

As the dust settled, it became apparent that Mondale had not been as alert to the hazards of the nomination as he might have been.

Though he had served on the Intelligence Committee when he was a Senator, he failed to consult its members beforehand on Sorensen; he also did not check their reaction until the appointment was just about doomed. But if Carter was disappointed with the performance of his Vice President, he was not saying so.

Many Senators were worried that the rebuff to Sorensen would provoke a display of Carter’s stubborn streak. It did not—at least, not yet—even though it left him in something of a predicament. He must find a replacement for Sorensen who is acceptable to Capitol Hill, though the Senate is not likely to turn him down a second time. The Intelligence Committee has anticipated him by offering some suggestions, including former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson and James Schlesinger. House Speaker Tip O’Neill proposed retired Army Lieut. General James Gavin, chairman of Arthur D. Little Inc., an industrial research firm in Cambridge, Mass. Yet if Carter chooses someone recommended by Congress, he will appear to have caved in to Capitol Hill.

The White House has floated its own list of candidates. The names mentioned most prominently are Thomas Hughes, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Paul Warnke, a Washington attorney who served as Assistant Defense Secretary; Burke Marshall, a former assistant U.S. Attorney General who is now a professor at Yale Law School; and Gerard C. Smith, a Washington lawyer who headed the U.S. delegation to the SALT talks.

In the wake of the Sorensen rebuff, Minority Leader Howard Baker tried, not too successfully, to be reassuring. “Nobody declared war on Carter,” he said smoothly. “The honeymoon isn’t over.” Perhaps not—but neither is it off to a terribly good start.