President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  Mondale learned to his amazement what we already knew—that political considerations simply were a forbidden subject, and, as Ham widely observed—only half in jest—“The worst way to convince Carter to make a decision you wanted was to say it would help him politically.” Mondale further observed, “That soul of his wanted to do right, and in a strange way the very fact that the political system rejected him reassured him that he was right.” And yet he found this weakness was also his greatest strength: “Look at Camp David. I don’t think any other president could have done what he did. It was sheer, utter grit, drive, and courage that did it.”31 Moreover, Carter had a keener sense of the conservative mood of the country and an earlier awareness of the dangers of inflation than Mondale (or me).

  None of this takes away from the remarkable partnership of Carter and Mondale. As we shall see toward the end of the term, it came under severe strain, almost to the point of breaking. But it lasted and we are the better for it today. Joe Biden brilliantly and loyally carried on the Mondale legacy, and it was no accident that the first person he called when Obama asked him to serve as his vice president was Walter Mondale.32

  4

  A NEW KIND OF FIRST LADY

  Just as Carter and Mondale created the modern vice presidency, Rosalynn Carter became one of the most influential first ladies in American history. Rising from humble beginnings in rural Georgia, she carved out her own policy role on mental health and served as a true political partner and even a diplomatic representative of the president, while refusing to be merely a convenient social ornament. She had superb political instincts, gave her husband frank advice that he would have done well to have followed more often, while nevertheless fiercely supporting him throughout his term in office.

  If Jimmy Carter was an unlikely president, given his origins in Plains, Georgia, Rosalynn Smith Carter was an equally implausible first lady. Her father farmed and worked as an automobile mechanic and died of cancer when Rosalynn was thirteen, effectively ending her childhood. She and her dressmaker mother had to care for her young brothers and sister. Her mother said she was the kind of young lady who could wear a white dress all day and keep it clean. She was shy, read the Bible daily, and had the same zest for education as her future husband, graduating as valedictorian of her Plains High School class and from Georgia Southwestern College in 1946. Jimmy’s sister Ruth was her best friend, and when she saw his picture on her bedroom wall, she thought “he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. One day I confessed to her that I wished she would let me take the photograph home. Because I just thought I had fallen in love with Jimmy Carter.” Not long afterward they met, appropriately after a church meeting, when Jimmy drove up with Ruth, came up to her, and asked her to go to the movies. He kissed her good-bye, and after months of corresponding while he was in Annapolis, she was swept off her feet. After putting his proposal on hold for a year so they could better come to know each other and themselves, they were married shortly after his graduation from the Naval Academy, when she was eighteen and he was twenty-one.1

  Becoming the wife of a naval officer was her way of breaking out of the confines of her tiny hamlet. Because he was gone for long periods at sea, she was left to manage their home and a rapid succession of children: John William (“Jack”), the year after their marriage in Norfolk; James Earl (“Chip”) III, less than three years later in Hawaii; then Donnel Jeffrey (“Jeff”) in 1952, in New London, Connecticut. (Amy Lynn was born in 1967, the year after Carter’s first gubernatorial race.) This taught her to be independent. As she told me, “Jimmy always thought I could do anything.”2 Only once did they fail to make a major political decision together: Rosalynn learned that Jimmy had decided to run for the Georgia State Senate one morning when he donned dress pants instead of his work khakis, and she asked him where he was going. He replied he was going to file for state senate. That would never happen again, and to this day Carter cannot explain why he did not discuss his decision with her in advance. When he ran, Rosalynn took a correspondence course in bookkeeping to help keep the business thriving, coming to feel that she knew more about the business than he did. She advised him to give up the money-losing corn mill, and he came to rely upon her judgment in business and beyond.

  Rosalynn also got satisfaction from making it possible for Jimmy to pursue a political career, and even at this early stage she felt she was more a “political partner than just an appendage as a political wife.” Her hardest lesson was learning to cope with the criticisms that were part of political life.3 As she moved with her husband up the “greasy pole,” she learned Eleanor Roosevelt’s lesson that anyone in public life must develop “the skin of a rhinoceros.” Religion was an important part of both their lives, and she believed it had an impact on his foreign policy, feeling “it was always better to reach a peaceful solution than to go to war.”4

  As a young Southern matron, Rosalynn was painfully shy in public and did not make a single speech in Carter’s unsuccessful first race for governor in 1966. When she was unexpectedly asked to speak during his next campaign, at a luncheon in Gainesville in 1970, she stammered that her husband needed the help of the audience and sat down, fearful of what they might think of her. What really terrified her was realizing that she would have to go through it again and again as long as her husband was in politics.5 But as Rosalynn became an active campaigner, she developed a custom that would lead to one of her more controversial decisions when they reached the White House. She was constantly asked about Jimmy’s positions on issues, and would come home to ask him the answers. She insisted, both during the gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, on being fully briefed on the issues so she could respond correctly.

  I first came into her life in the fall of 1974, when Governor Carter invited Fran and me to a Sunday lunch at the governor’s mansion to thank me for my work with him as chairman of the DNC’s Congressional Campaign Committee. She agreed I could bring my parents, Leo and Sylvia, and Fran’s parents, Eli and Sarah Taylor, who were visiting from Boston. I found her attractive, quiet, and gracious. This was the first time I saw Georgia’s first couple together, and their love and mutual respect were obvious. I saw how naturally they held hands (and continued doing so frequently in the White House). When we finished lunch, Rosalynn took us on a tour of their greenhouse. My mother, Sylvia, bless her heart, saw a beautiful bromeliad flower, and to our great embarrassment at her unmitigated chutzpah, she brashly asked Rosalynn if she could take it home. Rosalynn, betraying no astonishment, reached down with a smile and handed it to her. She kept that plant for decades in Atlanta and brought it with her when she moved to Washington to be with us as her health began failing.

  ROSALYNN AS CAMPAIGNER, CABINET OBSERVER, AND CONTINENTAL DIPLOMAT

  This shy woman blossomed in the most wonderful way. For eighteen months in the presidential race, she was a relentless campaigner. She went to 105 communities in Iowa, spent seventy-five days in Florida, and became a trailblazer as a presidential candidate’s wife by campaigning so vigorously on her own. Tim Kraft, the young Iowa campaign manager (and later top political aide to Jordan in the White House) realized she was a “gold mine” in her uncanny ability to relate to voters.6 Once the Carters arrived at the White House, it was clear that she wanted to become a different kind of first lady with an agenda of issues that mattered to her, and an office and staff of her own. Presidents’ wives had traditionally had an office on the second or third floor in the family quarters; she was the first to have her own office with her own staff in the East Wing of the White House.7 But she went far beyond moving her office closer to the decision-making arena; she gradually moved into a front-row seat. After several months in the White House, where she handled the personal finances, children’s activities, and social events, Rosalynn would meet Jimmy at the end of his day on the elevator to the private living quarters with a list of things she needed his help to decide. She remembered that he dreaded seeing her with those lists, so he suggested they meet every We
dnesday for lunch to complement the vice president’s regular Monday lunches with the resident. She would arrive with a full agenda of subjects in a brown leather folder, an official French gift inscribed “Monsieur le President Jimmy Carter.”

  These sessions were not limited to social niceties. As Rosalynn traveled more widely, she continued to be asked where the president stood on various issues. She read news accounts voraciously and tried to sift through the comments about his policies. When he settled into the family quarters every evening after work, she bombarded the new president every night when he came home.8 One evening only about a month after he had been inaugurated, she raised a question about a commentator’s newspaper column. He said, “Why don’t you sit in on the cabinet meetings, and then you’ll know what’s going on and why we make the decisions?” The solution was unique to the Carter presidency: On February 28, 1977, the president’s wife began auditing the cabinet meetings as regularly as her own busy schedule allowed.

  She sat behind the cabinet table where I sat with the senior White House staff, but by the door leading out of the Cabinet Room so she could leave early if necessary. She took notes and never joined in the discussion. By evening she had a notebook full of questions for her husband and had no compunction about telling him if she disapproved of anything. This process gave her the assurance that she understood the general thrust of what the administration was trying to accomplish and to field questions about it with accuracy and authority as she traveled around the country. It was a testament to her political partnership with the president and her intellectual curiosity. Since she did not actually participate and only observed, I did not think her presence was inappropriate in any way, although she was quickly depicted by her enemies as a pushy wife interfering with her husband’s presidential business. She knew she would be criticized but felt it was worth it for something she wanted to do anyway, and with the full support of her husband.

  As busy as she was, Rosalynn tried to be in the family quarters by 4 p.m. on school days so she could greet Amy on her return from school. Rosalynn tried to make life as normal as possible for a nine-year-old under the media gaze of the White House press corps. Amy was enrolled in a local public school, the first for an incumbent president since Theodore Roosevelt’s son, rather than in one of Washington’s elite private institutions. She was allowed to roller-skate down the White House hallways; play in the treehouse her father designed; and get a dog (named Grits for the family’s Southern heritage) from her teacher, Verona Meeder. And her best friend was the daughter of the cook at the Chilean Embassy.9

  The president would leave his West Wing office, and he and Rosalynn would often jog around the track on the South Lawn of the White House or play tennis together in the late afternoon. They would then cool off in the Southern-style rocking chairs he personally designed, on the Truman Balcony of the family quarters, discussing what they had done that day. At 6:30 p.m. every evening when he was not tied up with official business, Carter would sit down for family dinner.

  Bizarre as it may seem, while Congress appropriates money to pay staff salaries (ninety-four people in Carter’s time) and to foot the bill for official receptions and dinners, presidents must pay for their own and their family’s food and drink as well as their personal guests in the personal White House residence and at Camp David. That not only meant daughter, Amy, but sons Jeff and Chip and their wives and children, who lived in the White House full-time; Rosalynn’s mother, who visited often; and of course Miss Lillian, who stayed for long periods and often parked herself for several hours at a time in the office of the chief usher, Rex Scouten, chatting with the staff and regaling them with stories. It fell to Scouten on the first night after the inauguration to give the Carters the bad news about their personal living costs, and when he presented the first month’s bill, he said they were “in shock.” But he stuck with the tradition of having his large family dinners, despite the unexpected cost.

  Nevertheless they made themselves at home and took great interest in the presidential mansion. Carter installed a sound system throughout the family residence to listen to his large collection of classical music tapes. (Unlike Nixon’s, the system was definitely not to record conversations.) A stickler for punctuality, he insisted on having the antique clocks reset whenever they were jostled off real time, often by a press scrum in the Oval Office. In the evenings Jimmy and Rosalynn often strolled together on the White House grounds under the old trees, which Scouten had labeled as well as the plants. Carter sketched out his own design for Amy’s treehouse on the South Lawn down to the last nail, and insisted on paying for it himself. When the National Park Service proposed chopping down one tree to expand the South Lawn maintenance shed, Carter studied the architect’s plan, paced the site for half an hour, and redrafted it to save the tree. In August, crabgrass on the manicured lawn turned brown, and Scouten wanted to chop up the sod and sterilize the soil, but Carter demurred: “It looks just like the grass down in Georgia; leave it alone.” He was overruled on only one major policy concerning the White House itself—his appeal to the public to save energy by turning down their thermostats to 65 degrees. That regimen lasted only about a year after both Miss Lillian and Rosalynn complained about the cold.10

  To his credit as well as hers, Carter did not waste time putting his wife to work. In the first months of the administration, she undertook a challenging diplomatic assignment unlike any first lady before or since, a grueling two-week trip to seven Latin American countries—Jamaica, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. This arduous journey was not to meet with her fellow first ladies as a goodwill gesture, but to bring to the region, studded with military dictators, the president’s new focus on human rights and democracy, nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, and reduction of conventional arms they had come to expect from the United States, regardless of how repressive their regimes. She spoke some Spanish, but to prepare she took language lessons three days a week, immersed herself in the novels, poetry, and history of the region, and absorbed briefings by scholars and government specialists.11

  Before she left, she and the president were severely criticized. Representative Dante Fascell, a Florida Democrat, complained that “the Latins are macho and they hate gringos and women.” Latin diplomats felt she would not be taken seriously. But—accompanied by two top officials, Assistant Secretary Terrence Todman from the State Department and Robert Pastor from the National Security Council—she brought home tangible achievements. Ecuador pledged to sign and ratify the American Convention on Human Rights; the military leader of Peru pledged to give up power and establish a democracy (four years later Rosalynn attended the inauguration of the newly elected president); the president of Colombia interceded with Panama’s general Omar Torrijos to help move the negotiations on the Panama Canal. But most of all, she planted the flag of human rights in Latin America in a tangible way and in the president’s name.12

  Latin America was not Rosalynn Carter’s only challenging diplomatic assignment. Half of Cambodia’s population was murdered by the brutal Pol Pot regime in 1975, and tens of thousands of refugees fled to Thailand. In 1979 she went with an expert group on a twenty-four-hour flight, and was warned by our ambassador Morton Abramowitz to brace herself for the degradation she would see—and smell. Her visit helped draw worldwide attention: She urged the king of Thailand to provide more support, prodded UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to appoint a special relief coordinator, pushed the administration to contribute several million dollars to UNICEF, and was instrumental in having food and emergency supplies airlifted to Cambodia by the United States.

  Rosalynn had a lifelong passion to help the mentally ill, prompted by the illness of one of Jimmy’s cousins. When she campaigned in the 1970 gubernatorial race, she told me the most frequent complaint from voters involved family members who were mentally ill but could only be treated in a deplorable state mental institution. As Georgia’s first lady, she worked to shift treatment to community ment
al health centers. In the White House she persuaded her husband to establish a Presidential Commission on Mental Health, with herself as honorary chair. Federal nepotism rules prevented her from taking an operational position, but she joined hearings around the country to expose the plight of the chronically mentally ill, eventually leading to federal legislation she took the lead in drafting, to integrate mental health services into the overall national health system, with funds for training caregivers at the local level and enlarging housing programs and Medicare and Medicaid funding.13 When she testified in its favor, she became the first presidential wife since Eleanor Roosevelt to appear before Congress on a bill. (Hillary Clinton later became the third.) She personally helped obtain the support of the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association and worked closely with congressional Democrats. The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 was signed into law two months before the presidential election. But her most solid Washington accomplishment became one of her greatest disappointments when President Reagan refused to fund it.