Nation: Assessing a Presidency

Carter remains what he always was: an outsider and an enigma

TIME Washington Contributing Editor Hugh Sidey has been reporting on the White House ever since Dwight Eisenhower’s second term 23 years ago. Here, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, he reviews the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

The stately old East Room of the White House, which has managed to maintain its dignity through the drying laundry of the John Adams family, the gallons of lemonade poured by the abstemious Lucy Hayes and the baleful exit of Richard Nixon, witnessed another extraordinary event last week in the long and colorful caravan of presidential history.

Jimmy Carter, the 38th man in this procession, went somberly and with weighted shoulders before the television cameras (nudging out M*A*S*H) to spend an hour attempting to untangle himself and his Administration from the clumsy conniving of his brother Billy for Libyan oil and a vision of millions in commissions.

It was the best of Carter, a profoundly caring man, loving his brother through stress, as honest as a political human knows how to be, skillfully projecting his concern from his electronic stage to an estimated 65 million Americans. He was forceful in his conviction of his own rectitude and a master of every detail in the intricate caper of Billy, the wily and greedy buffoon.

And it was the worst of Carter, the President. Rarely in the past 3½ years have we seen the President so focused and eloquent on a problem—a problem that never should have been, and even now should be relegated to the lawyers who love to niggle. In a world that is stalled and frightened, with only a handful of men and women wielding the power to address the malaise, Jimmy Carter, as so often in his stewardship, confused his personal and political concerns with his larger duties as President. While most Americans surely felt admiration for Carter the man, there hovered in the background those dark clouds of doubt about his leadership that were reflected in the question by CBS’s Lesley Stahl, “How do you think you got into this big mess?” He never seemed to understand why this was the real question—and the implications of his failure to answer it.

West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once broke into tears in the presence of a friend, so distraught was he over his conviction that Carter did not grasp his true responsibility as leader of the U.S. The world drifts toward war, believes Schmidt, with Carter uncomprehending. The same sentiment echoes from Asia, where Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew finds Carter’s vision “a sorry admission of the limits of America’s power.” An official of Moscow’s Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada complains: “What drives us crazy about Carter is his capriciousness, his constant changing of the points of reference in our relationship.” Following this summer’s economic summit meeting in Venice, a participant observed: “Mr. Carter cannot merely keep declaring himself the leader of the free world; he must demonstrate that capacity.”

When Jimmy Carter stood before the 1976 Democratic National Convention and pledged “new leadership,” he had never met a Democratic President or slept in the White House. The presidency was a legend from books, the Federal Government a classroom exercise, and Washington was a distant citadel of power that somehow had been corrupted by its residents. “It’s time for the people to run the Government,” Carter told his audience in that moment of warm, rising hope that filled New York’s Madison Square Garden.

After greeting a Democratic President in the bathroom mirror every one of 1,299 mornings and sleeping in the White House at least 700 nights, Carter has indeed brought the nation a new kind of leadership. It is at least one promise that he kept among the 600 that he made during his remarkable march to the Oval Office.

But if Carter’s years have been a true return to Government by popular will, filtered through the mind and ear of this earnest troubadour of the town meetings and televised press conferences, therein lies a huge and unexpected irony. The people do not like their own political creation.

Never in modern history has a President fallen to such murky depths in the national affection. George Gallup, the dean of the opinion samplers, who has been measuring voter sentiment since 1936, found just 15 days ago that Carter had only 21% approval, eclipsing Richard Nixon’s 24% and Harry Truman’s 23%, the other lows. In the data that Pollster Louis Harris has assembled is even worse news. On no single issue surveyed does Carter have a majority of voters who stand up and say they like him. Question the American people now about the hostages in Iran, our approach to the Soviets, the U.S. economy or unemployment, and they say that Jimmy Carter has failed them.

“He is like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, “sighed a Democratic Party official who has helped Carter over these years. “He is disappearing into the trees, and there is nothing left but the smile.”

And, yet, he may not disappear. The complexities of this time in politics and the singular forces at work in the world may join to give Carter the four more years he now covets so much. In fact, he possibly could be ready to become the leader he has not been. It also could be too late for all that. By almost every measure of the opinion polls and also by precinct explorations of intrepid reporters, the message clatters in from sea to shining sea: this election is for Ronald Reagan to lose. And Jimmy Carter made it that way.

In a trade that is lubricated by conviviality and depends on the intimate knowledge among friends accumulated over a lifetime, Carter remains a perplexing figure, self-contained and often unfathomable. It may be that even after 3½ years in office the Carter presidency ultimately is founded on the judgment of six people: Carter and his wife Rosalynn, Attorney and Friend Charles Kirbo, Political Strategist Hamilton Jordan, Press Secretary Jody Powell and Domestic Adviser Stuart Eizenstat. There are many other influential people around the President, of course, such as Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler and Pollster Patrick Caddell. But for the final balancing of major policy decisions, there is no higher or more potent tribunal than the President and those five original Georgians. One day when Carter was chairing a National Security Council meeting on Iran, and he had been hesitant on some of the options laid before him, he excused himself for a few minutes to take a call from Rosalynn, who was out campaigning. When he left, Jordan looked around the table, rolled his eyes and said, “Boom, there goes Iran.” That was Jordan’s hyperbole, but Carter’s visibly toughened stance, once he was back in the meeting, was pure Rosalynn.

There has been no room for anyone else in this select fraternity. The crusade of the Georgians had been against Washington, bigness, sin in public places and institutions as viewed and defined from Plains. Carter no longer wages war against the deductible three-martini lunch, but he has never reconciled himself to those who indulge. Nor is there any evidence that he has ever gone off secretly to contend, over dinner, with the forces of Washington outside the White House. “Carter is alone in this city,” says a former Democratic Party official who worked for Lyndon Johnson. “Not a single Senator and very few members of the House have stood up for him. He does not have friends in other areas.” This man recalls how L.B.J. once hustled off to Georgetown to sell his Great Society to a collection of reluctant corporate executives. Johnson ate and drank with gusto, told stories, recalled almost every person’s name from old encounters, removed his coat and straddled a chair backward, and explained for hours his grand vision of abolishing poverty and giving every child in the U.S. a chance to thrive.

“The Georgians gloried in being outsiders,” says a former Carter Cabinet officer about the inner White House circle. “They never understood—and do not today—that if you are going to govern, then you have to reach out.” A couple of years ago, when trouble for Carter’s programs was developing on the Hill and it was apparent that the gap between Congress and the White House was widening, Carter was urged to select certain compatible Senators and Congressmen and get to know them over dinner or at other social occasions. Maine’s then Senator Edmund Muskie was viewed as an important figure who could mesh with the President. Yet Carter balked for weeks, reluctant to court someone from the world of the Capitol hideout and the burble of good bourbon used nightly “to strike a blow for liberty.”

Finally, Carter yielded. The Senator and his wife Jane were asked to dinner. The results were startling. Ed Muskie proved to be warm and reasonable, even in disagreement. “The most wonderful dinner I’ve ever had,” said Carter later. Jane Muskie was a bit surprised over the President’s enchantment, since such affairs have always been a vital part of official life. The Muskies were asked back to dinner, and one day the Senator told his staff, “I don’t want to hear any more anti-Carter talk.” When Jimmy Carter needed a new Secretary of State, he did not have to think very long. He called up a man he knew, Ed Muskie, who accepted eagerly. But there was only one Ed Muskie.

The President and his people learned the names of the congressional players and they went through all the traditional routines of breakfast, lunch and massed receptions. Power, however, is a very personal thing. It works on subtlety and nuance. It is in the end a matter of caring. And it is a matter of years and years of listening, thinking and adjusting. The Carter White House never could come to believe in Congress or its odd rituals. The leaders of both houses now stand at arm’s distance or worse. Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill, who will chair the Democratic Convention, is hesitant about Carter. Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who was overlooked for a major role in New York, let his displeasure loose in a bitter criticism of the President’s handling of the Billy Carter affair.

Describing the nation’s problems and the world’s ills is one way the Carter crew answers its critics. No less a doubter than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declares that the President is not responsible for the growth of Soviet military power, which has neutralized our own; the decline of American political authority because of Viet Nam and Watergate; the conditions that led to the revolution in Iran; the growing self-assertion of the industrialized allies; and the energy squeeze. Carter has not fragmented the Congress or created the fierce independence of its individual members. The wealth and power of the lobbies and their ability to thwart legislation was a fact before Carter got to town. American productivity had run into problems years ago, and Big Government had been on the lips of an anguished majority for even longer.

Carter’s record of achievement is not a bare cupboard. There is civil service reform, airline, trucking and financial institutions deregulation, the Panama Canal treaties, restored relations with China, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and a commendable energy program on the books. As a symbol of personal integrity and candor, he is undimmed. A majority of Americans probably would still endorse most of the ideas he set forth in his first euphoric weeks, ideas for tax reform, national health care and Government reorganization. For the most part, Carter’s farm program was a wonder, expanding exports and raising prices and farm income. He has increased the military budget, put the new MX missile system in planning, leap-frogged a new manned bomber to develop the cruise missile and persuaded NATO to make significant increases in arms and readiness.

Yet Carter is today a political cripple both at home and abroad because the larger issues have swamped him. Inflation and interest rates have doubled in his time. The true anguish at home, as described by Patricia Harris, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is among members of the middle class, who are far from deprivation but find themselves losing ground economically. Their fear is directed at Carter. Overseas, Soviet influence massed and grew and almost everywhere shoved a clumsy and reluctant U.S. against the wall. “We feel,” says Raymond Aron, the distinguished French student of Realpolitik, “that American power is in decline. It is that simple and that unfortunate.” It is, for instance, one of Kissinger’s views that Americans are beginning to reproach themselves and Carter because the U.S. did not take dramatic action to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis when it first occurred. The public wanted nothing done then, but now is blaming the President for failure to act against popular will. That may be another manifestation of what has gone wrong on Jimmy Carter’s watch. In his own inexperience and uncertainty, the President could not define a mission for his Government, a purpose for the country and the means of getting there. Former Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal confided to friends after he was fired that at first he thought Carter’s long pauses during economic discussions were periods of thought. Later he decided they came from Carter’s inability to decide what to do or even what questions to ask.

When the President moved into foreign policy there was a similar inability to view the entire world and calculate actions on a broad strategic canvas. A member of the National Security Council marveled at Carter conducting the discussions about manufacturing and deploying the neutron bomb. “It was out of a high school civics lesson,” this man reported. “It was viewed in terms of sovereign countries, a bunch of equals deciding on a policy. It never seemed to occur to Carter that he was the leader and should make the decision in the free world’s interest.”

Visitors to the White House have wondered at Carter’s literal acceptance of dovish letters from Leonid Brezhnev. The ruler of a critical Middle East country showed another statesman a handwritten note from the President that was viewed by the recipient as a near insult, a naive and flawed view of the forces at work among Arabs. During the months that the Panama Canal treaties were being discussed, Carter worried in his secret meetings about the fact that the U.S. had never admitted guilt in grabbing control in the Canal Zone and demanding absolute rule there. His hang-up on this point came from the popular book,

The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough. When the Soviets subverted the government in Afghanistan in 1978, the official protests went out routinely, but in the National Security Council, Carter paid only perfunctory attention, though the act was clearly described to him as the possible prelude to trouble. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, the President’s indignation was triggered by the act of the border crossing; his mind focused on that narrow episode, not on what had gone before.

Carter was told by some of his counselors when the issue of the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba surfaced that he should never have allowed it to develop in the fashion that it did. But faced with the fact, these counselors said, he should broaden the issue and confront the problem of the Cuban mercenaries operating in Africa. For a moment, according to one witness, his interest was roused, but in the end he would not shoulder the burden of confronting the Soviets.

His civics-class approach to the world appeared again when the Shah of Iran fell. While cautious in public statements, Carter in private had nearly convinced himself that Iran would return to the constitution of 1906, that the legislature would reassemble, the military would hold order and a stable government take root. “It was preposterous,” says one who helped plan the American response. “The President’s thinking was not based on any actual experience of how governments really work in this world.”

In trying to fathom the man and his times, almost every Carter analyst comes back, both in admiration and in doubt, to the President’s religiosity. It bolsters him for the great waves of criticism that pound now at the White House. But it also seduces him and contributes to many of his falterings. He is a believer—in-Bert Lance, his old friend and economic counselor whose banking improprieties forced him from the Office of Management and Budget; in Billy Carter, the kid brother with a good heart who must mean well; in Leonid Brezhnev, who pledged his hope for peace in the shadowy halls of Vienna’s Hofburg Palace. Carter’s matrix is that found in the Scriptures, where the rules of a just and loving life are laid out. He wants to prevail by purity. Applying those patterns of human concern and behavior to the world’s masses is far more difficult.

When a close Carter aide found out that the President was going to Washington’s National Cathedral to pray with the families of the hostages, he knew instinctively that the U.S. would not for the time being assert its power in any way that might jeopardize the hostages. For months Carter resisted using the rescue plan devised by his National Security experts. He was consumed by fear of losing individual lives in such an operation. The hostage crisis was incorporated into his political campaign, and from the Rose Garden he sounded the theme of peace, noting proudly that not a single American had died in combat during his presidency.

The wider interest of America’s position in the world was only vaguely appreciated, if at all. Always Carter’s mind fixed on the small parts of the effort and not the whole. At one stage in reviewing the attack plans on the embassy compound where the hostages were held, the President asked about the Iranian guards stationed inside the embassy, near the wall that the commandos intended to scale. Were they volunteers or conscripts? he wondered. If they were radicals, Carter explained, he could go along with killing them, but if they were only peasant conscripts, he wanted them knocked out temporarily. Carter was gripped by what Historian Thomas Bailey has called the “tyranny of the trivial.”

In almost every political arena that Carter has entered, his conviction that fervid good will would carry the day has proved false, and in many instances has worsened the problems. His belief that the Soviets would respond to dramatic overtures to scrap many of their nuclear missiles helped to fuel the continuation of arms competition. Carter’s human rights campaign is now viewed as having often embarrassed U.S. allies and hardened the opposition of adversaries. His vague notion, preached mostly by his friend and onetime U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, that the radical nations were our natural allies has been mocked in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Iran. “It is not that he does not mean well,” says one thoughtful critic of Carter. “It is that almost everything he has touched he has made worse. He operated from the wrong concept of his job, the wrong theory of international affairs, and he uses administrative procedures that fail.”

If there is a modern manual of leadership widely admired in the world today, it is the memoirs of France’s Charles de Gaulle. His lessons are simple but rarely heeded in most White House proceedings. De Gaulle wrote of the need to concentrate on the questions of greatest national importance, of the necessity of delegating authority, of remaining at a distance but not in an ivory tower, of talking constantly to his people not about themselves but the greater interests of the nation.

In a peculiar way Jimmy Carter is consumed by himself. His world still resembles the small stretch of Plains, Ga. His goodness becomes an end in itself, defined in the Main Street encounters where the audiences are people with names and problems that are manageable. This does little, however, to define the tastes of the presidency, where decisions must have heroic dimensions, where leaders must balance their immense egos against a deeper understanding that they are but specks of dust in the ultimate sweep of history, where the future must be just as real as the present.

But Carter is a marvelous neighbor, friend and Sunday-school counselor. His White House after 3½ years is heavily flavored with the tiny routines of being nice. Grace at every meal, prayer and Bible reading, personal notes, Willie Nelson on the stereo, the leafy glens of Camp David, three miles of jogging in the cool summer mornings, Sunday school in the balcony of the First Baptist Church.

The cardigan sweater endures. It was the symbol of his first days of power. That rather austere garment, which he wore both for warmth and to show the American people he was one of them, has been upgraded to a fuller and more stylish model with a collar. It is neatly folded on these scorching days on a table along the wall of the Oval Office. That office remains fundamentally intact as he established it when he came to power, but it is now enriched with the acquisitions of his years in office—a vase from Sadat, a glass screen from Deng Xiaoping, a bronze grizzly bear given to him by conservationists.

One of Carter’s Sunday-school compatriots describes “the pressures that are right there in his face.” But his doctor, Admiral William Lukash, sees a man who has developed a remarkable regimen of physical conditioning to protect himself from the emotional stress. The President’s weight is 147 lbs., his blood pressure 114/80 and his pulse rate that of a runner, 52 per min. His entire cardiovascular system is that of a man less than 55. Carter sleeps about six hours on an average night and emerges well rested. His eating remains under rigid control; he has a great fondness for fruits and salads. His skin, which used to get irritated by sunshine, has improved because he now uses a sunscreen for long exposures. Shin splints and sore muscles that afflicted the President when he began his running no longer occur. Carter runs a mile in a modest 8 min. and he is careful about stretching before running. Part of his preparation: 50 situps. On hot days Carter ends his jog with a swim in the White House pool, and he still relishes tennis two or three times a week. His is an American routine.

In the past few months Carter has become a capable fly fisherman and experiments with tying his own flies. This exotic craft seems to have captured his fancy, and he has become remarkably proficient at it in the limited time he can practice it. One of his creations, a green-tufted “Nymph type” fly, has proved so successful on the Big Hunting Creek in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains that it has been dubbed “the Jimmy bug,” at least partly in honor of the 18-in. rainbow trout the President landed. His interest in angling has grown to such proportions that Park Superintendent Tom McFadden gathered some flyfishing experts last month for a corn roast and a lot of gab with the President about the sport. A long time ago, another President wondered why so many of the select enjoyed fishing. Herbert Hoover concluded: “Next to prayer, fishing is the most personal relationship of man; and of more importance, everyone concedes that the fish will not bite in the presence of the public, including newspapermen.”

In a simpler age the range of homey interests, the kindness, the academic explorations of national problems might have been enough to carry Carter far in the annals of presidential success. The kind of fumbles and hesitations that are rushed to every living room every night were often overlooked when America had huge margins of wealth and power. “People have not blamed Presidents for incompetence unless it hurt them directly,” says Duke’s James David Barber. That is the problem. The pain today is too often genuine.

The scholars around the nation are harsh in their judgments of Carter, believing that if he is re-elected the country will get no different leadership than it has got from him so far. Stanford Historian Gordon Craig feels that most of Carter’s actions are geared to his political survival, that he really has very little expertise outside of campaigning for reelection. “The state of the economy is calamitous, but foreign policy in a broad perspective is even worse,” he says. “Carter does things based on how they will sound or look on television.”

Princeton’s Eric Goldman, who once worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, expected Carter to come a cropper from the start because, in Goldman’s words, “he does not understand modern America. Carter understands small towns, not the cities.” New York City University’s ubiquitous and biting Arthur Schlesinger Jr. feels that Carter is something the American people produced in their exhaustion and confusion after Viet Nam and Watergate. We are in a period of “national doldrums,” contends Schlesinger, and when the U.S. begins to stir again—and it will—the Carter era will be swept away with the lethargy. “Carter would have been O.K. for the Republicans who don’t want to do anything,” says Schlesinger, who worked in John F. Kennedy’s White House.

But in other quarters the verdict on Carter is not nearly so certain. There remains something admirable about the man’s determination to learn, his durability in these months of political assault. James R. Jones, an influential young Oklahoma Congressman who has pointed out Carter failings in the past, was a guest on Air Force One when Carter flew to Japan in July. Jones spent long hours with the President, talking, listening, viewing the U.S. and the world from the finest fuselage aloft. A very practical pol himself, Jones was surprised. During this encounter he found Carter to have a good grasp of the task ahead, to display better instincts about his leadership. Carter seemed to have learned a lot. Concluded Jones: “Jimmy Carter could be a good President these next four years.”

That is the central question this week about Jimmy Carter. How much has he learned? Can he break out of the cocoon of doubt that he seems to have woven for himself both at home and abroad? Can he visualize and then start to build a world that is not yet? Says Kirbo, the Atlanta attorney who counsels Carter: “I think he is the best-informed President that we’ve ever had. He has grown and matured, and now he has a lot of the tools in place that he did not have. This country can get great service out of him.” But it was wise old Harry Truman who said that men do not change much after a certain age, that we only learn more about them. New York Senator Daniel Moynihan has observed that Carter’s Administration has a “learning disability.” That also seems to be the essence of the skepticism that grips the majority of Americans. How Jimmy Carter resolves this debate will determine his future—and much of ours.