The Passionless Presidency Ii: More From Inside Jimmy Carter's White House

On a crisp Saturday last October, six weeks before I left the White House, I went with my wife to Cambridge for the dedication of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I have never felt drawn to the Kennedys. Their celebration of excellence seemed too much like a celebration of themselves; they were too taunting and competitive, too eager to win and too jubilant when they did. My favorite among them had long been Teddy, the soft one, the one who made mistakes.

All the symbols of their heritage were on display that afternoon in Cambridge: the surviving senator, the glamorous widow and famous heirs, and, throughout the crowd, men now in their middle age who had served John or Robert Kennedy fifteen years before. Their faces made me uncomfortable as well; they seemed too satisfied with their skills and elegance, too certain that they and those like them had a right to rule. I never met John Kennedy, but I could not imagine that he was any more decent or morally admirable than the man who then employed me, Jimmy Carter. Any list of insiders or good old boys in the Carter White House would certainly have excluded me. but I felt more at ease with the likes of Hamilton Jordan or Gerald Rafshoon than with this proud remnant of the Kennedy years.

Yet, as I watched them reminisce about “their” administration, I could not ignore the part that was missing from “mine.” Long after their time in Washington had ended, these people still felt enhanced, even ennobled, by the opportunity to bask in the old glow, I wondered how many would gather around the fire for Jimmy Carter fifteen years from now; I knew how few would do it even as he served. It took Richard Nixon until the last days of his reign to get down to as small a core of supporters as those who were passionately loyal to Jimmy Carter during the time that I worked there. I often thought that, in a catastrophe such as Nixon’s or in adversity such as Harry Truman’s, the only ones left defending Carter would be Rosalynn Carter, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, and Carter’s secretary, Susan Clough. The others would be busy reattaching themselves to law firms, universities, or new political champions, while Frank Moore and Robert Lipshutz would walk around asking what all the excitement was about.

I wondered that afternoon at Harvard, as I wondered so often in Washington, why a man as decent and intelligent as Carter should find it so hard to inspire either loyalty or its functional equivalent, the desire to act in the President’s name. Part of the reason, as I suggested last month, is Carter’s own reluctance to put forward an idea that might command the devotion of the public and his staff, and his inclination to be a good man rather than an effective one. But another part of the explanation concerns the nature of the organization he runs.

By choosing stability, harmony, and order as his internal goals, by offering few rewards for ingenuity and few penalties for dullness or failure, Jimmy Carter created an administration in which (so it seemed to me) people were more concerned with holding their jobs than with using them. Those on the upper level were not by nature determined to dig into the machinery of government; those lower down in the system were discouraged from doing so by Carter’s organizational style. The result was to evade many of the issues Carter had been elected to deal with, to switch on the automatic pilot and forget that the new crew had been chosen because of the need to change course.

Before I came to the White House, I had read all the histories and novels about the presidency and talked to many old hands. I considered myself ready for almost anything except what I found. I had expected a hotly competitive atmosphere, in which the possibilities would be great but so would the perils. I found something more like the feudal system, its hierarchy constant, its inner rises and falls few, its members arrayed according to the medieval principle of the Great Chain of Being. Every member of the cosmos had its place on the Chain, from God and angels, through kings, noblemen, and serfs, down to animals, plants, and stones; and so it was in the Administration. Powell, Jordan, and Rafshoon need never act petty or defensive, for their positions were impregnable. No more than a serf would usurp a nobleman would a newcomer or outsider threaten their standing in Carter’s eyes. This was a world of less brutality and viciousness than one that allowed more competition; it was also a stagnant world.

Those closest to Carter served him without stint, but their service did not include the pursuit of any goals independent of ones that had already occurred to Carter. I despaired of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s hair-trigger judgment,¹ and was relieved that Carter kept it firmly in check, but I came to respect Brzezinski as the one among Carter’s senior associates who tried every day to test the limits of his job and come up with new ideas. Brzezinski’s domestic counterpart, Stuart Eizenstat, was from the opposite—and for this administration, more typical—mold. He was pleasant, less high-strung and vain than Brzezinski; everyone liked Stu. But as Eizenstat himself admitted, he was a skilled version of an unimaginative breed. He would give you a lucid diagnosis of the four options placed before him, but would be the last man to suggest that some unlisted fifth option might be the necessary answer.

I witnessed none of the private influence that Rosalynn Carter undoubtedly exercised, but in the summer of 1977, soon after her trip to Latin America, I caught one semi-public glimpse. About a hundred and fifty staff members were invited to the family theater to hear her report on the trip. She had proven in the campaign to be an accomplished stump speaker, but here she had the air of a child at her first piano recital, anxious to please the parents who listened proudly as she performed. From the nervous glances she threw her husband, and the softball questions planted with State Department representatives in the crowd, I suspected that, like others close to Carter, she was interested in this subject mainly because the President seemed to be, and that the real purpose of her efforts was to prove her competence, rather than to carry out a long-considered goal.

The group known as the Georgians—Jordan, Powell, Rafshoon, Moore, and honorary members such as Tim Kraft and Evan Dobelle—was united less by geography than by a preference for a laid-back, Mr. Cool style. Not long after the Inauguration, Rolling Stone ran a full-page portrait of Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan in a pose reminiscent of Paul Newman and Robert Bedford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There was a little self-conscious joking when the issue came out, a few nervous wisecracks about what the Old Man would say, but the two of them were pleased as punch. The photo captured their fantasies more glamorously than they could have dared to hope.

A few months later, Hamilton Jordan had a similar picture mounted in the anteroom to his office, a rough draft for Time’s cover story on him and Powell, portraying them as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before the whitewashed fence. The allusion was different but the spirit was the same, cool guys getting the job done without trying too hard or taking it all too seriously.

Being cool did not mean being lazy; indeed, one of Powell’s favorite accusations, when calling junior staff members in his first-sergeant role, was that everyone else was a lazy son of a bitch who didn’t know the meaning of work. Hamilton Jordan essentially lived in his office, even on weekends, when it became a headquarters for watching the Sunday talk shows and arranging tennis games. But the jags of work, interspersed with jags of release, were undertaken with the spirit of enlisted men on maneuvers. They followed their orders, proved they were good soldiers by carrying fully loaded packs, but would have felt ridiculous and compromised to admit that any of it really mattered, or that there was something they cared about more deeply than the next weekend’s liberty on the town.

The one subject that did engage their passions was the one in which they had all proven expert: politics in the horse-race sense, winning elections. This made legislation and administration marginally interesting, but only to the extent that they affected the prospects for the next election. Flying back on Air Force One from a series of political appearances shortly before I left, I heard one of the Georgians say to several others, “You know, there really ought to be a place for people like us between the elections, someplace we could rest up and get ready for the next one.” This reminded me all too clearly of the conversation I had had two days before with one of the more highly respected members of the White House press corps. I heard his lament about the tedium of the White House beat; there was only one solution he saw, and that was for the fun and excitement of the 1980 campaign to begin.

Those at the next level down in the White House had, if anything, the opposite obsession. They had spent their years dwelling on subjects such as welfare reform and the Panama Canal; often they could talk of nothing else. Many of them came to the White House with a desire to act on the theories they had developed over the years; a few, mainly in the field of foreign affairs, got their chance. Most of them, however, did not.

Carter didn’t mistreat these troops so much as he ignored them. The first sign of his indifference was the style of their selection, for it was as if he had ordered up six dozen mixed elitists and inquired into the matter no further. Below the level of his own Georgian intimates, the Administration was full of those who had been hanging around Washington, Cambridge, and New York in law firms, Senate staffs, and think tanks, people who expected to end up in government no matter which Democrat came to power. Some of them were talented, others were not; but almost none of them represented Carter’s deliberate choice as opposed to the wholesale importation of a predictable governing class. After hearing Carter’s campaign attacks on the arrogance of the Washington elites, I had been misled into thinking that he would find other talented people to bring in with him. In the end, it was easier to swallow the embarrassment and accept the usual faces than to look hard for promising alternatives.

On the job, this casually selected group was treated in ways that made the least, rather than the most, of their talents. To begin with, the second-level troops were denied the usual blandishments that politicians use to build a base of loyalty and managers rely on to inspire efficiency on their staffs. Carter soon found out that he could not treat congressmen like robots; after the first few domestic trips on Air Force One, during which he holed himself up in his cabin and studied his briefing books, he learned to spend his time instead chatting with the congressmen who accompanied him, since the main reason for their coming was to be able to remark, “I was talking with the President the other day, and he said . . .

He saw no reason to apply the same lesson to his staff. Carter hated meetings with a lot of people in the room; they were disorderly, they made it hard to get things done, they made it impossible to prevent leaks. When a large meeting on tax reform or the budget had been arranged, he would enter the Cabinet room, glance at the extra bodies in chairs along the wall, and say to no one in particular, “I didn’t know this was going to be such a big meeting.” Eizenstat, Brzezinski, and the other main figures would get the hint and signal to their underlings to get out. Staff men who had been working on a project for months, who were always asked by their friends and relatives what the President was really like and had to reply that they had never actually met him, were thus denied the little glimmer of recognition and glory that would have sent them back to their tasks with renewed energy. Once Carter planned a series of “tours” of the White House, designed to combat this problem by reviewing the troops and building morale. He got as far as Jody Powell’s press office, fifteen yards from his own; no more was ever heard of the plan.

These were petty irritants, which would have been recognized as such were it not for a more fundamental complaint: the growing sense that a good job would not be applauded nor a bad one punished, perhaps because the difference between them was not recognized. At the top of the organization, it was clear that no standard of excellence affected Carter’s loyalty to his intimates. It is perhaps unfair to single out Frank Moore, since dealing with a truculent Congress was uniquely difficult, but his errors were the most flagrant, and the most flagrantly ignored. Several months after the Inauguration, Congress passed a punitive amendment which would destroy the discharge-review program Carter had authorized for Vietnam veterans. Carter had announced the program during his first week in office, balancing it with his amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. Even those who supported the amendment assumed that Carter would defend his plan by vetoing any bill to which the amendment was attached. When Carter went ahead and signed the bill, I wondered aloud how it could have happened. The reluctantly given explanation was that Tip O’Neill had asked Moore whether the President would accept the amendment, and Moore, in apparent ignorance of its importance, had said yes. Then, faced with the choice of embarrassing Moore or abandoning his program. Carter opted to save Moore’s skin.

Lower down in the organization, the first handwritten note expressing Carter’s displeasure sent an icicle of fear through the heart; the second and all further ones were ignored, since everyone knew that nothing harsher lay ahead, and that good performance was not really the question. The goal was orderly performance, according to the principles of team play. The worst tongue-lashings I received were not for bad speeches, of which there were too many, but for those that were disorderly in their preparation, or consumed too much of Carter’s time. Nothing drove Carter wilder than a briefing that waffled or a conversation that did not come quickly to its point. The virtues of an organization man—preserving order, preventing errors—were those Carter prized; and if an attempt to produce more imaginative policies, broader sources of information, even better speech drafts, would violate these principles of order, it was not likely to prevail.

After a talk with a friend who had studied, at great length and personal cost, the government’s failings during Vietnam, I passed on to Hamilton Jordan his recommendations about diversifying the President’s foreign policy information. The President should set aside a regular chunk of time, my friend said, perhaps half an hour every two weeks, to talk with a foreign service officer just back from the field. Neither Vance nor Brzezinski should be present at these sessions, to ensure that the impressions Carter received were not subtly shaped by his advisers’ predetermined molds. “He’ll never do it,” Jordan replied when I had finished my presentation, and he was right. Carter would consider it out of order, a waste of time.

During the most crucial domestic policy decisions of his first two years, the inflation strategy developed at the end of 1978, Carter grew impatient with the briefings and decision meetings that Eizenstat, Robert Strauss, Secretary Blumenthal of the Treasury, and Secretary Marshall of Labor had arranged. This wasn’t a decision meeting at all, he said at one critical session; instead of presenting him with options, the advisers were suggesting that there was no good option to choose. Robert Strauss volunteered that perhaps he was to blame for the irritation the President was expressing, since he had thought it important for the President to hear firsthand his advisers’ frustrations, to take part in their conversations and understand the pessimism and confusion so many of them felt. Carter did not pick up the point; he said curtly that the advisers should agree on a decision memo, indicate the choices he must make, and send it in to him. Then he left the room.

Strauss would think twice before taking that kind of risk again, as would anyone else in the Administration before doing more than the plainly stated requirements of his job. Franklin Roosevelt planted Raymond Moley in the State Department and Rexford Guy Tugwell in Agriculture, yet he pressed them and others constantly for their best ideas. Tugwell’s modern equivalent at Agriculture would be told to mind his own business if he discussed a subject broader than the support price for wheat. People may say kind and true words about Jimmy Carter’s character, but no one will ever say of him what these men said of Robert Kennedy (quoted in Arthur Schlesinger’s biography): “ ‘One of the hallmarks of the Kennedys,’ said William Orrick, ‘was that they expected you to do everything.’ . . . Said Louis Oberdorfer, ‘He had that quality of leadership that made us all play above our heads.’ . . . He had the quality, said Nicholas Katzenbach, ‘of bringing out the very best in everyone who worked for him.’ ” They were talking about the ability to make things seem larger than life; this administration makes them seem smaller.

I should confess the possibility of bias on this point, as on much else. I was eager to join the Administration not simply because I respected Jimmy Carter (as I do) and enjoyed writing speeches (as I once did), but because I thought it would be an opportunity to be tested to the limit, to participate, to serve. Physically, it was harder work than I have ever done before; a few months after leaving, I ran into a friend from the speechwriting department and instantly recognized the harried, slightly hysterical, aged-around-the-eyes look I had worn for two years. But intellectually and spiritually, it was far less demanding than it should have been, because nothing more was asked or expected of me than to fill my place on the organization chart. After a few months of sending memos to the President, Powell, Jordan, and Eizenstat on subjects unrelated to my stated functions—on the volunteer army, the tricks of monitoring bureaucratic performance, different gestures Carter might make—I learned to stop. It was not that my superiors disagreed with me, for I received little argument (except from Eizenstat) one way or another, but rather that I was out of my place. My job was to write speeches and edit memos, and to that job I quietly returned. The mistake was in failing to see that this was a bureaucratic organization, in the sense Max Weber defined: interchangeable people performing strictly limited tasks. Everyone was safe within the confines of his organization box; few were welcomed outside.

Run like a bureaucracy, the White House took on the spirit of a bureaucracy, drained of zeal, obsessed with form, full of people attracted by the side-dressings of the work rather than the work itself. The pay was good, the travel fun; friends and family thought you were a success. One year into the Administration, Jeff Greenfield wrote an article for New York magazine entitled “All the President’s Sad Young Men.” It said that working in this White House had become a kind of tax-supported fellowship for ambitious young people; they did not much enjoy what they were doing, but they knew that it would look good on their resumes.

Most of the ones I knew had come with enthusiasm and still envied their colleagues who had real work to do —the labor experts during a coal strike, the political operators who steered the Panama Canal treaty through the Senate. When those bursts of work were over, no consolation remained except the paychecks and respectability. I asked one of my friends, a lawyer whose own crash legislative program had just come to a successful end, why he stayed on. “Make me an offer,” he replied.

This retreat into bureaucracy may not have been surprising, but I could not help thinking it was wrong. I assumed that Jimmy Carter had been elected not just to hold office but to use it, and not only to use it himself (as with his foreign efforts and his first-year burst of domestic legislation) but to inspire thousands of others to use their energies, wit, and positions as well. Carter’s intentions are admirable, but the group around him slumbers, and the government, which he promised so earnestly to reform, operates as it always has. The taxes come in, the payrolls are met, millions of human beings pass through the cycles of their working lives; and all of these activities are governed, not by the standards a new administration said it would bring to Washington, but by the timeless inner logic of bureaucratic life, which follows roughly four patterns of behavior and thought.

The first is the government’s version of the law of gravity, that bad news never flows up. The only times I saw anyone struggle to warn his superior of impending trouble—a fraudulent program, a mistake in judgment, excess employees whose work did not need to be done—were on those rare occasions when the superior was sure to find out anyway. I manfully confessed to Jody Powell about one of my errors twelve hours before he would have read about it in the Washington Post; but when a far more damaging story was published out of town, I simply kept quiet, hoping that Powell and Carter would never hear about it, and certain that they would never look deeply enough into my operation to discover the inefficiencies and weakness I knew were there. When this is multiplied over dozens of departments and hundreds of thousands of employees, the result is a vast conspiracy of selfprotection, benign in origin but devastating in effect. It makes the norm for government performance bad performance, since the only errors noticed are those flagrant enough to emerge as scandal in the press.

Businessmen in competitive industries know they cannot survive without finding out what is going on at the delivery level; that is why Robert Townsend of Avis used to go incognito to his company’s local offices and try to rent a car. Congressmen, facing the constant test of the ballot box, must also make sure that their constituent-service departments are doing the job. There is no such market test within the rest of the government, unless one is imposed from the top, by leaders who know that efficiency, like liberty, is won only at the price of eternal vigilance, and who are willing to think each day about new ways to overcome the information blocks.

The second is the in-box mentality, which makes everyone in the government busy and few truly productive. Newcomers to government, having heard tales of its sloth, are often surprised to see so little plain idleness around them. Up and down the long corridors, people are usually doing something—answering letters, writing memos, holding meetings, carrying out their assigned tasks. At the upper levels of each agency, this work goes on at a feverish rate; there are always briefings to prepare for, crash deadlines to be met. In agencies such as the American Battle Monument Commission, where there is little real work to be done, this activity is a harmless masquerade; but in places such as the White House, it is something worse. There it is a way to deflect people from the jobs that truly need doing, an opiate that keeps them from thinking independently about how to use their time.

When a new Pope enters the Vatican, he finds himself buried beneath ceremonial functions—audiences, trips, encyclicals to prepare. Thus overburdened, he will never have time to tamper with the system the Vatican bureaucracy has set up. Within the government, the same process is self-inflicted: people are so tempted to deal with the chores that cross their desks each day that they rarely have time to ask themselves about the permanent problems of government they originally came to address. My first months in the White House were the most draining, because then, while writing an article for the President which would appear in the Insurance Institute magazine, I was vain enough to wonder whether this was the most productive investment of my time. Soon I stopped worrying, for I learned that if I did no more than carry out the tasks that showed up in my in-box, I would be busy, but rarely with such urgent duties that I could not set them aside for a game of tennis when Hamilton Jordan called.

The higher one goes in the government, the more intense the pressure of the in-box becomes. Midge Costanza spent most of her time at the White House responding to speaking invitations; certain Cabinet secretaries may spend weeks or even months with only the slightest attention paid to the real business of their departments, because of the urgent round of conventions to address, interviews to grant, and outside lobbying groups to receive. The President, like the Pope, is potentially the greatest prisoner of the in-box. He is in constant demand for speeches and meetings; petitioners are pre-scheduled into most of the hours of his day; there is always the allure of foreign affairs and the threat of foreign crisis. To his credit, Jimmy Carter tried hard to escape this prison, leaving great blocks of time open for reflection. But, having perfected himself, he was content; he did not insist that others follow his example.

Nor was the press likely to prod him, for reporters are more fully trapped by in-box thinking than the people they cover. The White House press corps prides itself on its independence, but it enjoys liberty within a narrow range. Its members may render harsh judgment on the Administration’s welfare bill, but they will discuss welfare only when the Administration is making a proposal. The government cannot determine the tone of their reports, but it can choose the subject; listen to Jody Powell’s news briefing each morning and, barring scandal, you have heard the lead story on the TV news that night. With such a torrent of material flowing into their inboxes—legislative messages, trips to foreign countries, backgrounders on new budgetary plans—the reporters are spared the necessity of ever stopping to think about what parts of the government are not being covered, or of examining the day-by-day realities of governmental life that determine how our taxes are spent and our problems solved or ignored.

The third is the capital city phenomenon. Named after the reporters, foreign service officers, and CIA operatives who congregated in the cosmopolitan centers of foreign countries rather than trekking into the bush, it signifies the way that comfortable surroundings, and the desire to keep them comfortable, can distort the actions and attitudes of those in power. For the Foreign Service in Vietnam, it meant dealing with the French-speaking people of the capital, not with the peasants who spoke Vietnamese. For the CIA in Iran, it meant working among the Western-educated elite of Tehran, not the masses who spoke Farsi and hated the shah.

For journalists, it means working from briefings and backgrounders; for columnists, taking a great man to lunch and composing a column from his leavings. For academics, it means working from printed sources rather than dealing with people in the field. For writers, it means a preference for book reviews rather than reporting.

And in the government, it means dealing with only those issues that present themselves to you in a convenient way, and imagining that the problems you see in the capital city are those of the world at large. The world of our capital is a special one; for those who circulate between the government and the law firms and think tanks that serve as its farm teams, society is composed of people who rarely make more than $70,000 or $80,000 but never make less than $25,000. All of them went to college, and most to the same few colleges. Such threats as layoffs and business failure are less real to them than the danger of missing out on Washington’s real estate boom. Jimmy Carter constantly reminded people of the different world he had seen, but he was one of the few.

In his recent book. The View from Sunset Boulevard, Ben Stein describes the colony of television writers who, living in Hollywood, imagine it to be the world, and write their narrow view large across every television screen. Those in Washington joke about its artificiality and detachment from the world “beyond the Beltway,” but behave as if only those problems that can be reduced to a decision memo, a discussion with an agency official, or a reporter’s lunch are worth serious attention. Fighting poverty means a briefing from a $30,000-a-year official at HEW. World hunger means a lunch at the Brookings Institution or Worldwatch to see a new report unveiled. Manual labor is as abstract as Islam; so are those parts of the government that, far from the planning sessions in Washington, actually deliver services. The one unit of government discussed with visceral emotion is the District of Columbia’s; it is the one whose inefficiencies and corruption touch people in Washington, as the sins of the Small Business Administration do not.

Most participants are sincere, but nearly all are wedded to a style of operation and a standard of living rather than to an insight into real human problems. If a delegation of blacks or city governments can afford a Washington lobbying office, their complaints may be acknowledged. If not, they barely exist.

The fourth is careerism. Writers of pulp novels portray Washington as a conspiracy, not understanding that it is really a collection of individuals in silent pursuit of their own ends. When trying to explain events within the bureaucracy, I looked first, not to ideology or the effect of special interests, but rather to the career interests of each of the participants. Some of them hoped for a long and happy life within the civil service; they would never openly resist a policy, but might silently inter one that promised to be inconvenient. Others had come to Washington with the President and knew their reputations would be made or broken along with his; they were fierce in their loyalty to his every wish. Some had already decided that their interests lay outside the government, and began playing to a different audience. Since I realized early on that I would return to journalism, I was more concerned, when talking with a reporter, that he consider me trustworthy and honest than that Jody Powell consider me a loyal propagator of the company line. Some see their aims enhanced by putting distance between themselves and a policy that might prove unpopular. There is only one State Department, and those who hope to work in foreign policy must arrange their lives so as to be eligible for appointment there again and again. They look for their model not to Walt Rostow. who went down with his policy, but to their leader, Cyrus Vance, who was legendary for “leaving no footprints” during the Vietnam War.

Such forces are the constants of bureaucratic life, indeed of all humanity. And while a few career incentives may be compatible with doing a good job, most of them are not. From a careerist point of view, it is often just as good to cover up a problem as to solve it. These forces will reduce a government to self-service and self-promotion, as they largely have, unless a leader sophisticated enough to understand them learns how to harness them to his own ends, by linking glory more closely to the jobs that need to be done.

So far, Jimmy Carter has shown little sophistication in coping with this or other aspects of the bureaucratic pathology. That is disappointing to those who supposed. as I did, that he came to office aware of the dangers he was most likely to face. The only thought more sobering is that, considering the competition, Jimmy Carter is still the best hope for someday bringing the government under control. A President Connally or Reagan or Kennedy or Brown taking office in 1981 might be more inspiring than Carter, but none of them would be more likely to recognize the bureaucratic pitfalls than a re-elected President Carter with four years of painful education behind him; nor would they offer the stability of character that is Jimmy Carter’s greatest strength. That is why I have placed bets with my friends that Carter will be reelected, and why I am prepared to vote for him again. His on-the-job training has been costly for all of us; soon it will be time for him to pay us back. □