President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  But that climactic meeting also underscored the utter lack of integration of the political and policy aspects of the energy package and indeed more broadly for all the major policy initiatives of the first year of the administration. We had all been told to keep quiet. It was revealing that Ham Jordan, the president’s closest political adviser, was not even at the meeting, nor was he asked to calculate the political implications of this decision in the oil patch, where we would have to defend our victories four years hence.

  When Boren and Briscoe heard that Carter had reversed himself, they were shocked. Along with other governors who were in town for the March meeting of the National Governors’ Association, they had been invited to a briefing on the outlines of the forthcoming energy package by the president and Schlesinger in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building. As Boren told me later when he was serving as a U.S. senator from Oklahoma, “I’ll never forget when we both realized that pledge was not going to be kept.” When Boren turned to Briscoe, he saw that his colleague from Texas had turned pale and become physically ill. Briscoe returned to his hotel and refused to attend the dinner hosted by the president for the governors. Boren remembers Briscoe saying, “‘I can’t go back to Texas.’ He was very, very upset, and I was upset.”41

  What hurt them most was that they had been blindsided. Neither Carter nor Schlesinger gave them any advance notice of the abrupt change in policy. Carter may have thought they were told, Boren said, but they were not. “No, we learned that in a group in which there were governors from all over the country, not just the governors involved, and we learned it in a group, and for the first time.… We were upset about the way we learned it, as well as the [substance].” They had no time to prepare an explanation for the press and public “when this hit, this bombshell.” As Carter was leaving the briefing room Boren and Briscoe told him they could not understand why he had suddenly changed course and asked, “What in the world do you want us to say?” There was no response. It took Boren several months to repair relations with Carter, and Briscoe never did. Boren had been particularly close to Carter and gone into the political trenches with him early in his candidacy against a nascent stop-Carter movement in the Democratic Party establishment. “We knew each other so well that on two different occasions, when we were alone, we prayed together,” Boren said. On one occasion a few weeks before Carter was nominated, “He looked at me and said, do you think I’m good enough to be president?” And they prayed.42

  A cardinal rule in politics is never to surprise and embarrass another politician who is invested in an issue. If policy changes, allies are owed fair warning and a private explanation so they can crawl back off the limb together. Boren said he had been left out on a limb by Carter more than once, but, “He sort of didn’t want to take the time to play the politics of it.… [He] could get miffed by some of the details of politics and the pettiness.… I think he didn’t like politics very much.” Carter once made a politician’s congratulatory birthday call to Boren but made it on the wrong day. In national politics everything is connected. Months later, Carter called Boren, then still a governor, to ask him to endorse the Panama Canal Treaty. Boren responded, “‘I’ll consider it when you call me back and tell me that you’ve reversed your breach of your pledge on natural gas!’” As he told me, “We had some pretty strong words back and forth about it.”43

  Schlesinger had even less acute political antennae. When the National Governors Association returned to Washington the following year, he and the president again briefed the governors on the energy package. Schlesinger argued that as the price of natural gas rose to an equilibrium level with oil, it would suddenly flatten out. Boren recalled that he presented “the oddest-looking graph, which had a right angle, and then it was absolutely flat.” Rising from his chair, Boren asked, “How could that be? What magic occurs?” Schlesinger responded that once all the drilling rigs were working, that would cap new production. “That makes no sense,” Boren riposted. “That assumes you can’t produce more drilling rigs.” And in fact as prices rose, industry started grinding out new rigs, reaching a total of more than four thousand within a few years. But Boren recalled that Schlesinger “got very excited, and he was very angry” when his assumptions were challenged—and he stayed angry. That same evening, at a White House reception for the governors, Boren introduced his new wife, Molly, to Schlesinger, who rudely rebuffed her: “‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Your husband’s the man who called me a liar to the president.’” Then the energy secretary turned his back and walked off. Boren was so furious that he almost left.

  But that was not the end of the tale. In 1979, after Schlesinger’s resignation had just been announced and Boren had moved to the Senate, Schlesinger phoned to break many months of silence between them. Boren wondered why Schlesinger was calling: “I thought he must have a little list of people that he wanted to tell to go to hell before he left his job.” But instead Schlesinger said, “Well, I just want to tell you … I reread all the files, and I looked at the staff studies prepared for me.… And I just don’t want to leave office without calling you and telling you that you were right, and I was basing this on the faulty assumption that there could be no more rigs. I just didn’t want to leave office without clearing the decks.’” Boren laughed and asked, “‘How long have you known this, Jim?’ He said, ‘About six months.’”44

  DONNING A CARDIGAN TO SELL A BLACK BOX

  On the morning of April 18, the very day the president was to address the nation on prime-time television, he was still holding meetings with his speechwriter and his chief economic and energy advisers. He had already complained that the plan was a “hodgepodge” and that the tax-and-rebate arrangements were particularly complex. After hearing the contentious arguments on how to allocate the new revenues, the president closed his eyes and said, “I see now why Nixon resigned.” Everyone laughed, but it was no laughing matter.45 To the president the plan still seemed a black box.

  At one point he had grilled Alm in Schlesinger’s absence for two hours, with tough questions on which he should have been fully briefed months before.46 His energy plan had a strong intellectual basis, was put together by a first-rate team, and was substantively defensible. But what it sorely lacked was a political dynamic that could be championed—a national consensus through coordinated communication and congressional outreach. Carter’s instinct in seeking a program with something in it for everybody was politically shrewd, but its execution certainly was not. As the program was rolled out in briefings and public presentations, the producers thought it short-changed them in favor of consumers, and the consumers felt exactly the opposite. This added up to a majority with a political instinct to pick apart the whole program.

  These political weaknesses were exacerbated by other priorities we had simultaneously thrown at Congress—economic stimulus, tax reform, welfare reform, hospital cost containment, and a list of local water projects he wanted to kill—that infuriated many of the congressional leaders we needed to pass the energy bill. This was simply more than Congress could possibly digest. But when its Democratic leaders almost begged the president to select his priorities, he replied that pressure groups and their congressional supporters would resent being put in a secondary place while Congress was trying to absorb the massive energy bill. At a Democratic leadership breakfast early in June, O’Neill warned that there were only so many weeks left in the session. He told the president he needed priorities for this term, and “You have four years to accomplish your goals.” Carter held firm, refusing to set priorities for fear of offending various interest groups.47

  As the president met to review the last draft of his speech with the vice president, James Fallows, his chief speechwriter, Ham, Jody, Rafshoon, and me, he joked that shortly, “Our energy policy will be in the Congress’s hands—and [Saudi] Prince Fahd’s.”48 There was much truth to that.

  Carter gave a fireside chat modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s radio addresses to rally the natio
n during the darkest days of the Great Depression. But while Roosevelt spoke in aristocratic cadences to inspire the confidence of a frightened people, Carter, using the contemporary, more intimate medium of television, presented himself as a plain person dressed in a beige cardigan near a flickering fireplace in the ground-floor library of the White House. Rosalynn came downstairs with what she considered a more presidential blazer, but her husband adamantly refused to cast off his sweater for the jacket.49

  When Roosevelt spoke, it was not from his fireside but to the homes of millions of ordinary Americans supposedly gathered around theirs, where they welcomed him as an honored visitor offering hope amid the depths of the Depression. But on television Carter’s speech came from a president sitting in the comfort of the White House delivering a warning call of energy conservation, higher prices, and sacrifice to an unsuspecting nation. One of the most difficult tasks for any president is calling the nation to arms against a long-term challenge when they could not see the storm clouds on the horizon to which he so ominously pointed, and enjoyed the lowest energy prices in the Western world.

  The speech was vintage Jimmy Carter, downbeat and almost apocalyptic, with a hint of hellfire by a preacher to his flock. He began with a line that few presidents have dared to adopt but typified his approach both to energy and governance: “Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem that is unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge that our country will face during our lifetime.” He urged a better balance between the nation’s insatiable demand for energy and its rapidly shrinking resources, and warned that many of his proposals would be unpopular, inconvenient, and demand sacrifice—indeed “the sacrifices will be painful—but so is every meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher prices and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.”

  Among those inconveniences would be lower thermostats to save fuel. Carter offered the public little benefit in exchange for sacrifice, only a warning that “the alternative may be national catastrophe,” such as renewed oil embargoes that would test the “character of the American people and the ability of the president and the Congress to govern this nation.” Instead of holding out hope—the essential currency of leadership—he doled out criticism of America as “the most wasteful nation on earth.”50

  As solutions Carter offered conservation as a cornerstone of his policy, plus burning more coal and developing solar power and other renewable energy sources. There was barely a word about increasing incentives to produce our most basic energy sources—oil and natural gas—except to say that “prices should generally reflect the true replacement cost of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.”

  The one sentence that captured the essence of his speech was: “This difficult effort will be the ‘moral equivalent of war,’ except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.” Carter’s energy program was ridiculed by the supply-side polemicists of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who referred to his key phrase “moral equivalent of war” by its anagram, MEOW. The clever slur caught on, and in his admirable but often humorless devotion to the public interest, Carter had to fight interest groups on both his left and right. I sometimes felt he actually liked warning his congregants to repent—here telling Americans to conserve energy and pay higher prices for it. More significantly, if energy reform really was a moral equivalent of war, we had not mobilized ourselves to fight it as a modern army by putting all the resources of the White House on energy as a priority.

  Between his televised speech and the one that followed two days later on April 20, to a Joint Session of Congress, I helped strengthen the language on natural-gas pricing in hopes of blunting the anger of Boren, Briscoe, and many of our political allies in the producer states. Carter told the legislators: “We want to work with the Congress to give gas producers an adequate incentive for exploration.” Still, the reality remained that Carter was proposing a nationwide price ceiling for all newly discovered gas, and that price would be tied to the price of domestic crude oil. Carter and Schlesinger briefed the cabinet, pledging that the program would slow the increase in energy demand from 2 to 5 percent and would finally belie the notion that oil was cheap and abundant.51

  Briefings were also held for the Democratic leadership, 50 members of Congress, and the White House staff. But the fact sheets were not ready for the press briefing, and combined with Schlesinger’s brusque manner, created a confused and unceremonious atmosphere for the launch of the president’s signature domestic program.

  A presidential address to a joint session of Congress in the mammoth chambers of the House of Representatives is a unique event.52 As I sat with Fran in the gallery, I felt a tingle down my spine as Jimmy Carter entered to address this rare assemblage for the first time. We tightly squeezed each other’s hands, reflecting on the incredible journey we had taken from his widely derided announcement for president in Atlanta a little over two years before. Most in the audience had at least a general idea of what the president was going to say, and indeed his speech was a reprise in many ways of his televised address to the nation two nights earlier. This meant he had to raise the threat level for inaction, and he engaged in what turned out to be some questionable assertions. Some were drawn from the flawed CIA report that warned the world would run out of oil by the end of the next decade; so he emphasized again: “Our first goal is conservation.” He pressed ahead, seeking a tax on gas guzzlers and the authority to impose an emergency gasoline tax if consumption exceeded our national goals, which turned out to be one of the most controversial proposals in his energy plan.

  We were catching flak even from friends like Representative Charles Vanik of Ohio, who called to warn me that his powerful tax-writing committee would reject the standby gasoline tax.53 However tough the younger Democrats might be on oil companies, they had no appetite for a higher gasoline tax that would be passed on to consumers. Doug Fraser, president of the UAW and our earliest union supporter in the Democratic primaries, met with members of the White House inner circle to complain about new auto-emission and fuel-efficiency standards, and then warned: “Don’t let the Republicans become the protectors of over one million American auto-related jobs.”54

  The president also repeated the less controversial proposals for encouraging home insulation, efficient appliances, and more flexible pricing by utilities, but then he dropped yet another political bomb—this one right in the backyard of Howard Baker, the Senate Republican minority leader, whose support for the package would be essential. Carter declared that he saw no need for a fast-breeder nuclear reactor on the Clinch River in Baker’s home state of Tennessee. As a nuclear engineer by training, Carter supported light-water reactors for electricity, and indeed wanted to streamline their licensing process. But a dangerous by-product of fast breeders is weapons-grade plutonium, and Carter opposed this particular reactor even as a demonstration project lest it encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He thus effectively killed commercial reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel in what almost became a deal breaker in gaining Republican support for the entire program.

  Campaign supporters of all stripes continued to weigh in. Cliff Finch, the Democratic governor of Mississippi, whose postmidnight call delivering his state for Carter sealed his election, called me to point out that a higher percentage of his state’s industries were powered by gas and oil than in New England, and converting their boilers to coal would raise utility bills and even bankrupt some businesses that could not afford the conversion. Reasoned criticism also came from Republicans. Governor Jim Thompson of Illinois, a tall, broad-shouldered, impressive man, told me he foresaw “alarming” losses from Carter’s fifty-five-mile-an-hour national speed limit, which would increase fuel efficiency and hold down consumption through higher gas prices. But he needed those gas tax revenues for highway maintenance.55

 
* * *

  Washington, of course, is a city of positive spin. That was what Jody Powell tried to do to protect his boss at the first press conference after the program’s grim rollout, and the gifted press secretary went on the offensive.56 He shifted his emphasis from the somber presidential call to arms and sacrifice, underscored that the plan would make average Americans better off, and argued that tax rebates would cushion the impact on consumers. The press had a field day pointing out the inconsistency of accentuating the positive while asking for sacrifice. But Jody’s tactics paid off. The headline over the Washington Post’s first story on the Tuesday morning after the fireside chat read, “Carter: Energy Outlook Grim,” and the article itself noted correctly that “President Carter is undertaking the most difficult of all exercises in democratic leadership. He is trying to persuade a large and rich nation to prepare for a crisis not yet entirely visible from the street level.” But the next day its front-page headline sent a different message: “Future Called Not So Bleak as Depicted.” By Saturday the Post’s front page literally spun around: “Energy Plan Now Pictured as Consumer Boon,” the paper headlined after a few days of briefings.57

  In major newspapers across the country the editorial judgment was generally positive, although breaking along ideological lines. The more liberal New York Times doubted that the incentives were sufficiently robust to help pull more energy from the ground, but it nevertheless applauded the president’s plan as tough and necessary. But this was not where the crucial votes lay on Capitol Hill.58