Also building on her work in Georgia, where Rosalynn had developed an ambitious children’s immunization program, she made it a national priority by working through Joe Califano’s health department and the Atlanta-based Center for Communicable Diseases to set up immunization programs in all fifty states—something that has recently, remarkably, become controversial. At the other end of the age spectrum, she lobbied for the Age Discrimination Act, eliminating mandatory retirement at any age in the federal government and raising the retirement age in the private sector from sixty-five to seventy.
With more general women’s issues she worked to find qualified women for major appointments, which helped swell to a record the number of women appointed by Carter to judicial, executive, and regulatory positions.14 The President’s Advisory Committee on Women found that women nominees for federal judgeships were being penalized for their scant experience on the bench in lower courts, often because they had taken time from their careers to raise children. Rosalynn interceded with her husband to have the attorney general mitigate this discrimination.15 Along with her husband, she was less successful with the organized women’s movement on one key issue—ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; but it was not for want of trying. The first lady did not last long on the Commission on Women chaired by liberal New York firebrand Bella Abzug. They were furious at Carter for not pulling out all the political stops to obtain ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and turned every meeting into a denunciation by Bella on the steps of the White House. Rosalynn became so upset over this that she “quit meeting with them.”16
Despite her quiet demeanor—I never heard her speak loudly or discourteously to anyone—she was a tough-minded, more practical politician than her idealistic husband, in part because she was able to break through the cocoon of the presidential entourage and meet people around the country. She developed a keen ear for people’s concerns and conveyed them to her husband in unvarnished form. She loved the politics that she felt were part of her responsibilities. While he enjoyed the problem-solving challenge of being president, she knew he disliked the “pettiness of politics” and did not have “any patience for the give and take”—as if these were not part of the process of addressing the nation’s problems. That, she said, was one reason he preferred dealing with foreign over domestic policy—“On foreign policy, the President can act.”17 This is a common affliction of most presidents, who find the allure and relative freedom to act as commander in chief more satisfying than buttering up Congressional egos and rallying interest groups and the public to win their votes.
The president Rosalynn described, who was more than familiar to us on the White House staff from a greater distance, was a highly private man who disliked the socializing that comes with his job. Rosalynn regretted that they turned down all the invitations from the Washington elite—“no matter who it was”—and as a result the Carters never got to know the Washington establishment at all. “If there is one thing Jimmy dislikes more than anything I can think of, it is a cocktail party or reception or dinner every night,” she said. For Carter the national capital was a repeat of his term in the Georgia statehouse, far from Atlanta’s lively social life. “He just works all day, comes home at night, and doesn’t want to go out,” she said, recognizing that “we would have been better off if we had cultivated some friends at one point in the social power game.”18
She felt another major mistake was barring alcohol from White House social events. When she first met with Rex Scouten, he told her he had read that the new first couple might not permit alcohol, and he priced the saving at a million dollars a year. When she told her penny-pinching partner, she said, “That settled it; we wouldn’t serve alcohol in the White House.” The press leaped on the story of a self-righteous Southern Baptist imposing his values on his official guests. Although the Carters ultimately served wines, cordials, and spiked punch, Rosalynn conceded that the initial stumble created a “stereotype that we never lived down.”19
* * *
Her more persistent and fundamental difference with her husband as president was that he was simply not a traditional politician. On vexed and unpopular issues, particularly the Panama Canal, she would ask him, “Why don’t you wait until your second term?” His rejoinder usually was, “Suppose I don’t have a second term? Do you want me to go down as a do-nothing president?” She saw her husband as a person who believed that getting those things done was more important than being reelected, and she threw that back at him by replying that reelection was more important “because you can get more done for the country.” That of course is the way he should have ordered his priorities, and she told me, “We used to have that argument all the time.” Even as governor, and then as president, she also felt he was taking on too many challenges at once and would “fuss with him,” telling him: “This is unreasonable; you know you ought not try to get so much [done] at one time; you can’t get it all [done] at one time [while] irritating everybody” in the process. He would reply that he wanted to enact the best possible legislation and, “Would you rather have me ask for 5 percent of what I want and get it and be a success, or would you rather [I] ask for 100 percent of what I want, get 85 percent, and be a failure?”20
The problem with that, of course, was he often would not get even that 85 percent, and should not have drawn the odds so starkly between doing nothing or doing everything. She would argue with him about taking on unpopular causes and damaging his political standing, but for him, she said, if “it needed to be done, he was going to try, no matter how many enemies he made.”21
Rosalynn was fiercely protective of his political standing. Although admitting they were “a little bit green with a lot to learn in the beginning,” she bristled at the criticism of the Georgia Mafia by the press and official Washington, and ranked disloyalty as the most unforgivable sin among his appointees.22 When she felt that a member of his cabinet was hurting her husband politically, she was not shy in saying so, even if the president would not himself. She directly confronted Califano, who led an antismoking campaign with scathing attacks on the tobacco industry, for hurting the president’s standing in North Carolina. And she upbraided her own husband over the behavior of his secretary of state when Vance ignored politics in favor of UN diplomacy on Israel while we were locked in a crucial primary campaign in New York City. Rosalynn also became a trusted conduit for his top political staff—Ham, Caddell, and Rafshoon—to call when they wanted to alert Carter to the unforeseen consequences of some decision he had made mainly on its merits. Pat Caddell, the president’s brilliant but hyperbolic young pollster, found her political instincts excellent and said that she had a much better sense of what was going on outside the White House bubble than did the president. “Where she was really influential was her antennae, [and] for being inside that bubble I found unbelievable,” said Caddell.23
Indeed, Rosalynn belied the Southern stereotype of the “steel magnolia”—a hard-hearted woman with a soft exterior, as her critics contended. Everyone who knew her on the White House staff, and her friends, recognized that even while she was giving her husband plainspoken advice, she was warm hearted and respectful, and did not play political games.
What Rosalynn saw with clear eyes, as Carter at times did not, were the political tricks played by others on her husband—and the ones he could play to his advantage. It was her idea to hold the Middle East peace talks at Camp David because of its beauty and isolation. Of course her advice was not always followed. She spotted the danger of Leonid Brezhnev’s enfolding kiss when Carter signed the SALT II agreement in Vienna and immediately realized it would make her husband look weak on television. She opposed his Rose Garden strategy of not campaigning against Ted Kennedy to demonstrate his total commitment to bringing home the hostages from Iran by staying aloof from politics. This placed even more of the burden of campaigning on her shoulders. And in campaigning, she had a fine sense of partisan politics, urging the president to stay on the campaign trail rath
er than abruptly return to the White House when a final offer came from Tehran on the American hostages on the weekend before the election.
Rosalynn was in many ways the president’s eyes and ears to the country, constantly reaching out to the vast number of friends she had made on her own. Like every president, every president’s wife is different, as is every presidential marriage. The template for the modern first lady veers from the politically progressive pioneer, Eleanor Roosevelt, to the culturally advanced fashion icon, Jacqueline Kennedy, who championed and elevated the role of culture and the arts on the national agenda. Rosalynn Carter enlarged the importance of the role from that of Mrs. Roosevelt, who put ideas and programs on the public agenda that FDR could and often did dismiss as something floated by “my missus.” From FDR’s betrayal of his marriage vows to his crippling illness, Eleanor was his partner but not his confidante and built a political network of her own to help him. With the Carters’ solid, loving marriage, Rosalynn’s actual influence over her husband’s policies was probably stronger than Mrs. Roosevelt’s over her legendary husband. This model of wife as political partner waxes and wanes, but it is possible that there would not have been a Hillary Clinton running for president, after an active period as first lady, without Rosalynn Carter’s demonstration of how to make common cause with her husband.
5
THE INDISPENSABLE MAN
Bert Lance came to Washington with Jimmy Carter as his closest friend, tennis partner, confidant, peer in age and background, and most experienced political adviser. As he put it, “I knew him as Jimmy Carter, not as Jimmy Carter the President.”1 He was the new president’s indispensable man, the extroverted, glad-handing deal maker for the introverted and analytical chief executive, the man Carter could least afford to lose. But once Bert’s legal problems were exposed, his position as Carter’s budget director became untenable. The Lance affair was the first crisis of the new administration. It exposed early weaknesses in the White House staff and ended the traditional presidential honeymoon period. Carter lost his essential liaison to the congressional power brokers as well as his chief link to his Southern political base. Months of focusing on Bert’s troubles distracted the president and cast a long shadow over his judgment when he wrapped himself around Bert to defend his friend, who was also his political wingman.
Bert was the Carter administration’s most-sought-after guest on the Georgetown social circuit, whose parties he and his wife, LaBelle, loved, and which in those days were an essential part of Washington political life. More than most of Carter’s Georgia Mafia—including the president himself—he understood how the administration’s agenda could be advanced by sharing tidbits of inside information with the journalists, opinion makers, think-tank gurus, corporate and labor leaders, foreign diplomats, and politicians who clustered at these dinner parties and receptions. Bert had direct access and was one of the only people the president genuinely liked as a personal friend. He was the kind of friend the president knew, as Bert put it in rural Georgia parlance, would “be willing to chase hogs for you in the middle of the night.”2
Bert could say things to and about the president that no one else could. During one meeting devoted to tax reform, he argued against the president’s desire to limit deductions for business lunches—what Lance called the “three-martini lunch.” Half jokingly the president asked: “What do you all do at [Atlanta’s] Commerce Club?” Bert retorted: “Mr. President, I saw you there in July last year, and I know what you were doing, you were getting a campaign contribution.” Undeterred, Carter insisted that the deduction for business lunches be expunged from the tax code. Bert pleaded: “I don’t drink martinis.… But I never had any business with a fellow who drinks three of them, because he’s totally incapable of carrying on afterwards.”3 In the end Congress refused to limit the deduction, but the term “three-martini lunch,” which had been bandied about before, passed into the English language, in part with the elevation Carter gave to the inequity of business people being able to deduct their expensive lunches, while working people had no such opportunity.
While Frank Moore was the titular chief of White House congressional relations, Bert was our informal liaison on the Hill and reached out just as effectively to the business and financial community, where he was respected as a former CEO of two banks. Bert had a long face with dark circles under droopy eyes, but he could unveil a smile that would melt steel. He talked with a chuckle and was gregarious in a way that made him almost impossible to dislike. A hulk of a man at six feet five and 245 pounds, he was warm, voluble, emotive, and colloquial, with a ready chuckle. He is credited with coining the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” By contrast, Carter, cool and analytical by nature, was slight, lithe, and only a shade taller than five feet nine and 155 pounds, but handsome, with penetrating hazel eyes and that famous toothy grin.
Their lifestyles also could not have been more different. Bert lived in a sixty-room mansion on a five-hundred-acre hilltop near Calhoun, Georgia. One side of the house was built to resemble the White House and the other, George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon. It had fifteen bathrooms, twenty bedrooms, and three kitchens. He used his bank’s private planes to fly around the state and attend political events around the country. Jimmy and Rosalynn, on the other hand, lived out their lives in a pleasant but unpretentious one-story redbrick ranch house in Plains. Bert never graduated from the University of Georgia, quitting in his senior year to work as a $90-a-month teller in his young wife’s family bank, while Jimmy attended Georgia Southwestern College, took mathematics courses at Georgia Tech, and graduated near the top of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy.
On a deeper level, however, they had far more in common. They shared the background of rural Georgia, Jimmy from the flatlands of the state’s southwest, Bert from the mountains of the north. Jimmy’s family were peanut farmers, Bert’s father an educator and president of Young Harris College. Both knew the pains and values of life on a farm, Bert from what he remembered as the “back-bending work” of picking cotton. He married his childhood sweetheart, LaBelle David; both had attended their local elementary school. In words that would later have national import, Bert recalled that LaBelle’s grandfather, the bank’s founder, “taught me his ways as a country banker, practices and values which I then applied myself as my banking career got under way.” He made loans on his local depositors’ character and circumstance rather than their collateral. It was a community banker’s code, and banking was in Bert’s blood just as much as in LaBelle’s family.
By the early 1960s Bert had become the youngest bank president in the United States and a chairman in 1974, until he resigned after Carter’s inauguration to follow him to Washington. He quintupled the bank’s assets from $11.9 to $54.1 million and likewise its profits by lending to help build the local economy, which benefited from cheap labor that made the district a major center for the carpet industry. He also served as president and director of Atlanta’s National Bank of Georgia, likewise increasing its deposits by half and almost doubling its assets. To foster economic development in what was becoming known as the New South, Bert led the effort to form an association of counties and cities into the Coosa Valley Planning and Development District, an organization that brought him in contact with Carter, who had formed a similar organization around Plains. Bert first saw Carter in 1966, when Jimmy was standing in the shade of a large oak tree on the campus of Berry College in Rome, Georgia, when both were attending a meeting of Bert’s Coosa Valley Planning and Development District. Jimmy had been elected a state senator and was making a run for governor. Bert was instantly taken by Carter and by his campaign message: “Government ought to be as good as the people it serves.”
They shared much beyond their rural Georgia roots. They and their wives were deeply religious born-again Christians, especially LaBelle. Another shared interest was rare among white rural Georgians of that era: support for civil rights for black Americans. (I use this term instea
d of the current “African American” because it is more authentic to that era.) Bert viewed civil rights pragmatically as a way to improve the economic status of the black population. As he put it, “Opposing the efforts of Dr. King and others harmed your own growth and development.… In addition to being morally wrong, it was bad business.” For Carter, civil rights were more personal. While there were few blacks in the north Georgia hill country, Jimmy grew up with black children in the fields around Plains and had served with black sailors as a naval officer in the close quarters of submarines. Nevertheless the two political allies came together on one conclusion: Discrimination was holding back the South they loved.4
When Carter was elected governor in 1970, Bert was asked to become state highway commissioner, to his great surprise, because it was a job about which he knew nothing. But just as when he was later named by Carter to manage the vast federal budget and its bureaucratic establishment, his task in Georgia was to apply his political skills to make state government work more efficiently. The bloated department that Bert Lance took over in 1971 was virtually a law unto itself. The new governor boldly fired the director, Jim Gillis, who had become the most powerful political figure in the state by directing highway contracts to the districts of key members of the legislature. Statehouse leaders warned that the new governor would need Gillis’s pork barrel for the votes required to deliver on his major campaign promise, to reorganize the state government. As Carter later conceded, “I would not doubt or deny that he [Lance] would pave a few miles of road in a propitious place in Georgia to get some votes.”5 While Lance made deals that Governor Carter loathed making himself, they helped them cut and combine more than three hundred agencies and advisory boards into a few dozen.
President Carter Page 15
