Washington

The story is told that at the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first White House press conference in 1933, the reporters in attendance suddenly burst into applause. It was not that all of the newsmen were necessarily sympathetic with the new President (in fact, most of their editors were outwardly hostile to him), nor that Roosevelt was going to make any less of an effort to manage the news and use the press than those who preceded or followed him (FDR was actually a master at doing both). What so delighted the White House press that day was simply a change in atmosphere: reporters would no longer be required to submit written questions in advance, as they were under Herbert Hoover, and there was a feeling of openness and friendliness on the part of the new Administration. Among other improvements, Roosevelt’s powerful and accomplished press secretary, Stephen Early, seemed to understand the needs of the reporters; he made them believe that he was working for them as well as for the President.

Comparisons in this area are hazardous, but the atmosphere in the White House press room also underwent a dramatic change during the first weeks of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. In contrast to Gerald Ford’s final months in office, when rancor and bitterness were the order of the day at White House briefings, there was an aura of joviality and friendliness; it was as if someone had walked through the room on Inaugural Day spraying good will into the air.

There is a certain irony to this. Jimmy Carter has done nothing dramatic to make the lives of the press any easier, and he does not enjoy the company or exalt the function of reporters more than Gerald Ford did. On the contrary, Ford, after twenty-five years on Capitol Hill, had close friends in the Washington press corps and was patient with their badgering and their deadlines. Carter seems neither to appreciate nor always to understand reporters; he is capable of slipping away for an afternoon at the opera without even telling the press of his plans. As one of the President’s close aides puts it, “Jimmy doesn’t like sitting back for interviews and being asked to introspect. He can’t stand questions like ‘When did you last cry?' He’s not interested in that stuff.” On the rare occasions when Carter has indulged in such a process he has sometimes gotten himself in trouble-as in the notorious Playboy interview that became a campaign issue.

The latest change in the press room atmosphere, and in White House relations with journalists generally, is more likely attributable to Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell. At thirty-three, Powell is the youngest press secretary since the much-detested Ron Ziegler, who served Richard Nixon and dissembled on his behalf until the bitter end; and he is the first since Ziegler who has never been a working newsman, but owes his job to a record of unstintingly loyal service to the man most recently elected President.

In a sense, Powell had an easy act to follow. Ron Nessen (who became Ford’s press secretary after Jerald terHorst resigned to protest Ford’s pardon of Nixon) had personality conflicts with most White House regulars, both on the staff and in the press, and although Nessen usually did a technically competent job, he came to be loathed by the people whose questions he was required to face every morning. But Powell is a prepossessing, self-deprecating, and unpretentious man who seems to enjoy the press secretary’s job more than anyone since Pierre Salinger, who served John F. Kennedy. Although he alienated some journalists during the campaign and transition, Powell has now cast himself as their friend, and most seem willing to go along, at least for the time being. After Nessen’s boring monologues (which, it can be argued, merely reflected the tenor of the Ford White House), usually unsuccessful attempts at humor, and nasty exchanges with his enemies, Powell comes off as a relaxed, down-home fellow, rather like the swimming pool lifeguard who wisecracks his way through the long days of his summer job. Reviewing the public reaction to the President’s first fireside chat, as measured in calls and telegrams to the White House, Powell was asked, “Did anybody at the White House in any way solicit reaction?” His reply: “All I know is a week ago we sent Miss Lillian six pounds of dimes.”

As he stands behind the rostrum in shirt-sleeves with open vest and loosened tie, he projects a bemused world-weariness and is not afraid to admit it when he has wandered into a subject that is way over his head. “You have reached the limit of my knowledge on this matter,” he said one morning while discussing the energy shortage. “I am sure I will be able to prove that to you in the next few minutes.” When the White House briefings become long and tedious and the reporters turn into a pack of snarling wolves, as they often have since the Watergate scandal, Powell is likely to employ sarcasm rather than snarl back.

Honeymoon ploys

It is not uncommon for new administrations—setting out to change enough things quickly so that the demarcation between Presidents will be clear in the public mind—to proclaim their intention to be more open and forthcoming than their predecessors. Nor is it unusual for the new team, after a relatively brief “honeymoon,” to become defensive, to begin over-reacting to criticism, and to retreat into a shell. If and when that happens to the Carter Administration, it won’t be because it hasn’t tried an extraordinary variety of gimmicks and techniques to reach what are solemnly known by the Carterites as “the people.” Some of the plans involve going over the heads of not only the press but also Congress and other established purveyors of the truth about government—a route that may ruffle feathers and cause trouble.

Already there is a certain skepticism and restiveness among the White House press about symbolic acts of little substance, such as Carter’s treatment of his first Cabinet meeting, an emergency one called to discuss the weather-andenergy crisis. Most reporters who attended the public phase of that Saturday afternoon session had a negative visceral reaction to the occasion. “There sat the President, telling Brock Adams [the secretary of transportation], ‘Keep your eye on the barges. You have responsibility for the Coast Guard,’ ” complained one of the reporters. “It was ridiculous. Adams didn’t need to be told he had the Coast Guard. . . . This was totally a media event, basically propaganda.” Some members of the White House staff, while insisting that Carter had sincere intentions, agreed that his plan to open other Cabinet meetings for public coverage was ill-advised. Said one aide, “I think everyone knows that if you do that, you’re just going to need another level of nonpublic meeting at which things are really discussed.”

The first action Greg Schneiders took when he assumed his job as director of special projects in the White House amounted to a technical reduction in presidential communication with the public. Reviewing the White House mail operation, he found that money could be saved and staff cut if Carter suspended the practice of sending a presidential letter of congratulations to nearly every high school and college graduate in the country and to some 30,000 people celebrating significant birthdays and anniversaries every year. (The lists of people to be congratulated were submitted by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, members of Congress, and individual nursing homes.) Schneiders drew up new guidelines permitting the letters to be sent only to those celebrating a hundredth birthday or fiftieth anniversary, and arranging for more of the incoming White House mail to be sent to the appropriate agencies for answers.

But then Schneiders set to work on the “people project,” Carter’s much-vaunted program to achieve a “de-isolation of the President.” One suggestion under study would have the President attend “peopleoriented events” rather than merely make speeches, and stay in private homes rather than hotels, when he travels around the country. Another would have the Carters invite “average citizens” (selected at random or from among people who propose themselves) for dinner and an evening of conversation at the White House; tentative plans also call for at least 10 percent of all the guests invited to state dinners and other formal White House functions to be “average people” with no particular claim to fame or glamour. In addition, Schneiders hopes to expand and upgrade the information centers established in federal buildings in major cities by the Johnson and Nixon administrations as places where people can ask questions or lodge complaints about federal programs.

Pat Bario is also borrowing from past Republican practice as she launches her “Office of Media Liaison.” But instead of sending Carter out to meet with carefully selected groups of sympathetic publishers, as Nixon and Ford did, she will invite groups of twenty editors at a time-from medium and small daily newspapers, weeklies, and radio and television stations-for day-long Washington seminars that will usually conclude with a halfhour on-the-record session with Carter. After a deputy press secretary under Ford warned her that relations between the White House press office and Capitol Hill press secretaries are usually minimal, Bario invited all of the senators’ press spokesmen and some from congressional offices to small receptions in the Executive Office Building. The primary goal of her office, she says, is to provide “the same loving care” to out-of-town and special-interest reporters that the regular White House press corps gets in the briefing room. (One of the first questions referred to her came from Stars and Stripes’ European edition, which asked what tie Carter had worn to the Inauguration. Answer: The same “good luck tie” he had worn on primary election nights when he swept to the Democratic nomination last year.)

Then there are the schemes of Barry Jagoda, Carter’s television and debate adviser during the campaign and now his special assistant for media and public affairs. After handling Carter’s first fireside chat, Jagoda arranged a radio call-in show featuring the President and Walter Cronkite. Later, he suggests, the White House may televise a “spontaneous” conversation between Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale or Budget Director Bert Lance. Jagoda will also commission a study to determine how much of the “audiovisual” money in departmental budgets is being wasted on self-promotional efforts and could be diverted instead into grants for public television projects. These efforts may not all be successful, allows Jagoda, “but we will try to be creative.”

Schneiders is personally responsible to the President, but all of these other functions—plus arrangements for the press on presidential trips and the previously independent speech-writing and photographic offices—fall under Jody Powell’s jurisdiction. The Carter White House proudly claims to be using only forty-three people to do press-related jobs that took sixtythree people under Gerald Ford, a 31 percent reduction in force. (Even after a reduction of that size, the White House press staff has imperial dimensions compared to the simpler past; Stephen Early handled most of Roosevelt’s public relations with a staff of two assistants and a few secretaries.)

First steps

In certain respects, the Carter team appeared to be a group of rank amateurs during its first weeks in power. The White House press office infuriated much of its regular clientele, for example, by failing to notify several key news organizations, including the Washington Star, the capital’s only evening paper, that Carter would make a hasty trip to Pittsburgh one Sunday morning for a firsthand look at the effects of the severe cold weather and the natural gas shortage. (The Star immediately began to fear that it would continue to receive the same second-class treatment—less favored than the New York Times and the Washington Post— that it felt it had under Ford.)

Far more glaring, however, was the confusion over just what the Administration meant to say about Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, and over whether United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young was speaking for the President and the State Department when he suggested, among other things, that Cuban forces were serving as a “stabilizing force” in Angola. Some observers thought that Carter was backing down from his strong concern for human rights in the Soviet Union when he declared that although he agreed with an unauthorized State Department warning against attempts to “intimidate” Sakharov, the statement should have been cleared through Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the White House before it was released. Meanwhile, Young was accused of undermining the existing American policv that relations with Cuba cannot be “normalized” until the Cuban troops are withdrawn from Angola, a policy that Carter himself later reinforced.

The official explanation was that the unauthorized Sakharov statement, issued in reply to a reporter’s question, had been hurriedly released by a junior deputy in the State Department’s Bureau of European Affairs via the official spokesman, a holdover not especially responsive to Vance; Carter was concerned because not all of the usual steps were taken. White House and State Department officials hastily explained that Young was accustomed to a more free-flowing congressional style, and he had simply not yet come to recognize the consequences of having his every word subjected to close scrutiny at home and abroad.

Asked whether the confusion resulted from simple and understandable early disorganization or from a let-a-thousandflowers-bloom attitude about everyone in the Administration speaking for himself, Powell observed wryly that “there was probably some of each.” But a State Department official suggested a related institutional problem, one which the Carter Administration might have to deal with for some time: the withdrawal symptoms caused in the Department of State by Henry Kissinger’s departure. During Kissinger’s three and a half years as secretary of state, said the official, “nothing moved out of here that he didn’t orchestrate and personally approve.” The State Department bureaucracy, cautious by training, became even more reticent under Kissinger; now, liberated from his constraints, it may break loose rather awkwardly and speak with many voices. What is more, with Kissinger gone, the National Security Council and White House foreign policy apparatus, under National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, may once again try to compete with the State Department. (Brzezinski even has a visible assistant for press and congressional liaison, Jerrold Schecter, a former Moscow correspondent, White House correspondent, and diplomatic editor of Time, who also assists Powell on foreign policy matters.) However, any undue competition on foreign affairs may disappear, the State Department official noted, after the White House people learn that “when you get thrown into the pot for the first time, you get boiled a little bit.”

Others may have been getting boiled, but Carter was off and running. Appearing at the annual congressional dinner of the Washington Press Club, he showed himself capable of poking goodnatured fun at reporters as well as himself. And in his first televised presidential news conference, Carter clearly had the best of it, demonstrating his familiarity with complex issues of arms control and turning tricky questions into opportunities to say exactly what he wants. In mid-February, Carter took the unprecedented step of holding a 40minute private meeting with seven reporters to explore the press’s grievances about his attitude and accessibility; although he made no promises, he demonstrated an openness to the needs of the media.

Checks and balances

Whatever other forces are at work and whatever special projects are in operation, much of the Carter Administration’s image and its reputation with the influential opinion-molders in Washington will depend upon the performance of the White House press secretary and his staff.

Jody Powell, himself a South Georgia farm boy, was dismissed from the Air Force Academy in 1964, when he was a senior cadet, for cheating on an exam. He later graduated from Georgia State University with a political science degree and began work on a doctorate at Emory University in Atlanta, but dropped out to join Jimmy Carter’s 1970 gubernatorial campaign. Powell began as a driver, but soon evolved into a press secretary, which he has been ever since. Carter has often said that Powell “probably knows me better than anyone else except my wife.”

Powell’s deputy for news is Rex Granum, twenty-six, who is also a Georgian with a fierce loyalty to the President, but who has some reporting experience, with the Atlanta Constitution. The others on the staff tend to be a bit older and more knowledgeable in the ways of Washington; the oldest, at forty-four, is Pat Bario.

Groping for words to describe the spirit of the press operation-which, to the outsider, appears to be happily chaotic but of uncertain efficiency—Walter Wurfel, thirty-nine, Powell’s deputy for administration, says with a smile, “We’re a collegium. . . . We’re trying to eschew gobbledygook. . . . It’s not what any management consultant would design.” One of Wurfel’s first jobs was to run getacquainted and organizational sessions for the White House press staff and the chief department spokesmen. (The departmental press officers may be more important this time around than even the White House realizes. The selection of well-known figures for some of these jobs—for example, Schecter at the NSC, Eileen Shanahan of the New York Times at HEW, Thomas Ross of the Chicago Sun-Times at the Pentagon, and Hodding Carter III, a Mississippi publisher, at State—could go a long way toward creating an era of intense good feeling between this government and the national media. It is difficult to have a we-versusthev attitude when we and they have been friends for years; but the chummy situation can also pose serious hazards and credibility problems for a supposedly objective press.)

The meetings with the departmental spokesmen and Powell’s clearance of their appointments—actually no more and no less than most press secretaries of newly elected Presidents have done in recent history—fueled the rumors that Jody Powell intends to set himself up as an information and policy czar. But he dismisses that suggestion with the explanation that he thinks it is important for “the White House and the agencies to be moving along the same wavelength.” Powell also asserts that his supervision of the White House speech-writing operation, headed by James Fallows, comes at Carter’s personal request. “If he wants me to look at everything before he sees it (and he does), then I need the authority to tell the speech-writers when to give it to me,” Powell explains. “Jimmy’s just not accustomed to working with a speechwriter, and he’s not an easy person to write for. . . . He’s very meticulous. He needs to be able to put his own imprint on everything.”

Inevitably, Powell’s multiple roles lead to comparisons with almost everyone else who has held the job since World War II. Will he remain as personally close to Carter as Bill Moyers once was to Lyndon Johnson? Will he be as powerful and occasionally vicious as Jim Hagerty was under Dwight D. Eisenhower? As unbending, devious, and loyal as Ziegler, thus losing his credibility? Will he continue to play the buffoon the way Salinger did?

Powell seems to have thought little about such parallels. But he is quick to acknowledge that, never having been a working newsman, he is at a serious disadvantage. “It’s true, ” he says, “that I don’t know what it’s like to meet a deadline, or to be unable to reach someone in a hurry when I need to. . . . If 1 were advising an adolescent on how to end up as White House press secretary—God forbid—I would suggest that he work as a reporter first.” But what he lacks in experience, he more than makes up for in access to the President. Because he knows how to measure and use that access wisely, after seven years of working for Carter, Powell may be able to get an audience with and an answer from the President more readily than anyone else in the country.

It is just this combination of inexperience and closeness that makes some Washington journalists feel troubled by Powell’s presumed inability to have the “divided loyalty” that is traditionally considered a qualification for his jobloyalty to the press as well as to the President. “There is certainly a middleman nature to the thing,” he concedes, “but obviously my loyalty is to the person I work for, to this Administration. . . . Yet I do also feel a loyalty to certain standards and rules of behavior. I don’t feel loyal to the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press, any more than they do to me. But they can count on me, and I can count on them, to behave in certain expectable ways.” Do those standards and expectations include the possibility that Powell would lie on behalf of Carter (which some reporters claim that he did during the campaign)? “There might be a time-an extreme circumstance, where people’s lives or the security of the country is in danger-when you might have to flat-out tell a lie. . . . But to misrepresent the truth is, at the very best, an evil to avoid.”

Powell recognizes that he is as much the beneficiary as the creator of the unusual good will between the White House press and the new Administration. He realizes that it may not last indefinitely, but he hopes that the attitudes of government and press toward each other can now settle into a new equilibrium. What with Vietnam and then Watergate, he observes, “the press, as an institution, was not happy with the relationship that developed over the last ten years. Things weren’t right. . . . This may be the first opportunity to break with the last decade. It is an opportunity that the Ford Administration, in fairness, did not really have, because of the carry-over from the Nixon Administration. . . . Now is an opportunity to see if things can be readjusted.” But Powell also knows that his own effectiveness may eventually fade, especially if he becomes besieged on Carter’s behalf. “There may be something to the notion that usefulness in the job diminishes over time. There comes a point where a new face and new style might be useful. . . . Obviously, a Vietnam situation would chew up people, good or bad, in a hurry. Difficult times tend to wear people down.”

If Powell has had an early success in anything, it may he in convincing people that he does not take himself very seriously, and that they might advantageously try out the same attitude. When one reporter recently called late on a busy afternoon to ask an oft-repeated question whether it was not true that the Carter Administration had chosen most of its key personnel from the same old sources-Powell leaned back, rolled his eves up toward the ceiling, lit a cigarette, and grumbled into the telephone, “You just keep talking, Jim, and I’ll try to think of a euphemism for ‘crock of shit.’ ”

-SANFORD J. UNGAR