President Carter
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But the balance of this exceptional memo descended into a sort of collective psychoanalysis, ranging widely to cite Lasch’s book as well as the British economist Keynes, Harvard professor James Q. Wilson on the impact of lobbies on Congress, and James MacGregor Burns, another formidable political scientist. Burns made a distinction between traditional leadership that achieves results by trade-offs and compromises, and transformational leadership toward “higher levels of motivation and morality.” Transformational leadership, Caddell wrote, was what was needed now, “And that is your opportunity, Mr. President … a transforming leader, evolving into a great President who leaves an imprint as great as Washington’s, Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, Kennedy’s, or Roosevelt’s.”
Initially Rafshoon and Ham laughed all this off because they found it self-serving as well as impracticable: One suggestion would have had Carter drop in on average families without telling the Secret Service in advance. More “goofy stuff,” said Ham, was Caddell’s idea of having Carter announce he had left Washington but not tell the press where he was going. Ham told Rafshoon that once Carter spoke directly to Caddell it would be “the end of Pat, because he’s really gone too far.” They were wrong, because as Ham put it, Caddell was “almost a Rasputin, he was kind of in Carter’s head and in Rosalynn’s head.30
While Caddell was pursuing the president and first lady, I was coordinating the president’s nationwide energy speech to deal with the oil crisis, meeting in my office with Ham, Jody, Caddell, and Rick Hertzberg, the president’s chief speechwriter. When Ham asked, “Patrick, can’t we just tack some of your stuff at the end of the speech?” he reacted furiously: “Like Hell! You can’t do that.”31
The Carter White House was so compartmentalized that no one at the top was aware that Caddell had sent Carter a draft of his own proposed speech and his updated 107-page memo. Nor did Caddell have any idea that the president would follow his lead and cancel the energy speech. When he left my office with Hertzberg, Caddell was in despair, and as they walked across the driveway to the Executive Office Building, Hertzberg said: “My God, you’re not talking about an energy speech; you’re talking about a revolution.” To which Caddell replied: “Yes, you’ve got it; that’s what it’s about.”32
Carter took Caddell’s magnum opus with him to Camp David and arose early on Independence Day to read it. The president called it “one of the most brilliant analyses of sociological and political interrelationships I have ever seen. The more I read it along with Rosalynn, the more I became excited.”33 At 9:30 a.m. on July 4 the president called me from Camp David, said he was reading Caddell’s memo, and asked me to deliver the final draft of our energy speech by 1:00 p.m. We scrambled and got the speech to him on time, but with no inkling of what would soon happen.34
“I’M NOT GOING TO GIVE ANOTHER ENERGY SPEECH”
After Carter reviewed the last draft of the energy speech I sent him, he wanted a conference call with Rafshoon, Jody, and Ham, but Jody was unavailable, buying a watermelon for a July 4 barbecue. Carter spoke to Rafshoon while Hertzberg listened on an extension to hear the president say he did not want to give another energy speech. Hertzberg said Carter was “rather petulant [and] just didn’t damn well want to do it.”35 He made it clear that he had made his decision to cancel the nationwide energy speech after reading Caddell’s memo and our new draft speech.
Rafshoon told the president: “We’ll get together tonight and we’ll work on it some more.” Carter said: “No, no, it’s not the speech, there’s no reason to give this.” Rafshoon reminded him the speech had already been publicly announced for the next day. Carter replied brusquely: “Well, unschedule it.” Rafshoon said, “Well, it’s really not that easy.” Carter responded: “Just do it.” Rafshoon: “Can you give us a reason?” Carter: “Because the president doesn’t want to do it.” Still Rafshoon felt he needed to give the public a reason for the cancellation. Carter: “I’m not going to give another energy speech.” Rafshoon: “Well, what do we tell them? How can we cancel it?” Carter: “Tell them I’m not going to give a speech.” Rafshoon beseeched him for a reason: “Mr. President, we’ve got to say more than that.” Carter yet again said: “No, tell them I’m not going to give a speech.”36
At 4:00 p.m., while Fran, our boys Jay and Brian, and I were at a July 4 barbecue with friends, Rafshoon reached me to relay the president’s decision, and said he had been given no reason. I felt as if a firecracker had just exploded in my hands. Rafshoon did have his own reason: Carter’s ratings were down, and “if you talk too much about a problem, you get blamed for the problem, unless you have an immediate, bold solution”—and he saw nothing in our speech that offered such a solution. He had even felt skipping Hawaii was a bad idea, “because the American people really don’t give a damn if anybody takes vacations.” He added later: “Frankly, the way they felt about Jimmy Carter, they probably figured he could do less harm on the beach; yeah, he can’t fuck us anymore! He’s in Hawaii.”37
First I called Mondale, who said, “Carter is very tired and in a funky mood … I don’t understand him.” I then called Ham, Jody, Rafshoon, and Caddell, expressing my opposition to the abrupt cancellation of the speech, saying that no president had ever done so without warning, and arguing that it would look like a panicky, ill-considered decision.38
Rafshoon shared my view. As he put it, “Immediately the country thought, My God, he’s not making a speech. He must have cracked up.”39 Jody called Caddell and exclaimed: “What the hell have you done?” But the deed was done. Carter later told me he canceled the speech to “dramatize the issue.”40 Carter was betting his presidency on Caddell’s unproved thesis of a nationwide crisis of confidence and his grandiose prescription for solving it.
But now what? The Carters together began to improvise. As he put it to me: “From there we began to say, ‘Okay, what can we say?’ And Rosalynn and I had private discussions and it was mostly my decision, ‘Why don’t we bring in folks that will let us understand what is going on in this country? Why can’t we deal with what I considered to be a genuine threat to the security of our nation effectively? Why don’t people listen to my words about the Moral Equivalent of War, even [though] obviously I had the inclination to exaggerate things.”41
So the president and Rosalynn decided together to invite to Camp David experts from all walks of life to advise him on how to improve his standing with the American people. He also decided that he would give a speech after all, but a very different kind, and after that he wrote in his diary that he “felt a remarkable sense of relief and renewed confidence.”42 He then instructed Caddell to pass his memo and speech draft to the senior staff. Amazingly this was the first time anyone of high rank in the White House had seen it. Caddell’s audacity in going around us to the president without serious discussion of such radical ideas was matched only by the president’s decision to follow his advice without consulting anyone but his beloved and trusted wife.
Ripples from the episode, some dangerous, were not far off. If Caddell had wanted to create a sense of mystery, he certainly succeeded. The dollar began dropping like a rock, and money fled into the safe haven of gold, driving the price sky-high. Blumenthal tried unsuccessfully for 24 hours to reach the president at Camp David, and then called Vance and me to emphasize the urgent need for a statement to calm the financial markets.43 I passed this along to the president, but Blumenthal finally reached Carter only through his military aide. He authorized a Treasury statement, but Blumenthal was fed up: “I’m serious, I really have had it; I really want to go.” I told him he was too valuable to lose at this critical time, but he soon got his wish anyway.44
A New York Times–CBS poll the week after the cancellation found Carter’s approval rating had sunk to 26 percent,45 lower than Nixon’s during Watergate.46 Caddell later admitted to being “scared to death, because now I’m responsible for the collapse of the currency. I’m 29 years old, and I have these awful visions that I am now responsible for the collapse of
the Western world. I was terrified, just terrified.”47
When Mondale was finally able to read Caddell’s latest memo and draft speech, he asked me to come to his West Wing office. Gone were the serene, understated Norwegian demeanor and the joy in politics that he usually exuded. He was enraged and even vituperative that a 29-year-old wonder kid was peddling what he considered pop-culture Kool-Aid to the president and first lady based on pseudopsychology. Mondale had a commonsense answer to Carter’s problems and no hesitation in describing them in plain language. He called the president a “domestic recluse” and told me he needed to get out and talk with people to understand their real concerns.48
I agreed with Caddell that the American people were upset and anxious and that Carter needed to reestablish a personal rapport by emphasizing many of the broader themes he had articulated so well during the campaign. But Caddell failed to realize that the president of the United States has no alternative to governing, and that meant plunging into the political muck and making compromises to enact his legislative program, even with the help of special interests.
Mondale refused to swallow Caddell’s thesis that the president’s precipitous loss of public support was rooted in some mass psychosis. We both believed that the kind of speech Caddell was asking the president to make seemed to point to a loss of confidence by the people, instead of our own failure to address their serious concerns, ranging from their sagging standard of living to long and aggravating gas lines. Mondale was more direct: If we took Caddell’s approach and blamed them instead of ourselves, it would be the end of the administration.49 I thought Mondale was on the mark.
THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF THE ANTI-POLITICIAN
A showdown with Caddell quickly followed and turned into a contentious and debilitating debate on Carter’s leadership. On July 5 the president summoned Mondale, Jody, Ham, Rafshoon, Caddell, and me to join him and the First Lady at Camp David for what became the most ferocious, almost violent, meeting in which I participated during the entire administration, or in any administration since. We met around the large conference table where Israel and Egypt negotiated their peace accords. Mondale and I sat next to each other on one side of the table, and across from us sat Caddell, with Rosalynn on his left and Jody, Ham, and Rafshoon on his right, and the president at the head of the table listening intently to the heated debate. By now everyone had bought into many of Caddell’s ideas, except Mondale and me. Caddell was nervous, and Rosalynn gently patted him on the knee to calm him down.50
The president opened by explaining for the first time why he had canceled the energy speech. With blunt and raw emotion based on Caddell’s poll and lengthy analysis, and using some of the language directly from Caddell’s memorandum, he said that we were “irrelevant, and the people don’t listen to us.” He expressed a “sense of despair in the country that is not helped by passing programs.” So he canceled the speech, he explained, to create a sense of drama, as Caddell had advised. He had no objection to the quality of our draft speech on energy, “but it is more of the same—just programs.” He expressed concern over the direction of the country and exposed for the first time, at least to me and to Mondale, the nub of a plan: “I am inclined to stay up here for a while and then analyze where we are.” He went around the table and asked everyone’s opinion.
Rafshoon, his longtime media adviser, now played into the Caddell narrative: “You’ve become part of the Washington system. You were elected to kick ass and you haven’t.”51 I was bemused by this comment, because certainly official Washington did not feel Carter was at all part of their world. He never attended Georgetown social events, and almost never asked Washington insiders to the White House for a quiet chat or a social engagement. He had taken on the lions of Congress over their pet programs and disliked the traditional Washington backslapping and deal making that lubricate the system. Indeed, it seemed to me that he had tried mightily to maintain the kind of connection with people that had brought him to the White House through regular town hall meetings, radio call-in programs, and Saturday-morning meetings with the local and regional press outside the Washington–New York–Boston corridor. But an effective president cannot hover at 30,000 feet aboard Air Force One, far above the messy politics of governing.
I saw Carter up close virtually every working day, and I knew that he had an unusual view of politics—at least for a politician. He felt that after winning the election, politics was something that a president put aside and did not take up again until after his third year in office, when he would be preparing to seek the approval of the voters. In between, in Carter’s vision of the presidency, what mattered was “doing the right thing” and believing in a just reward upon returning to face the electorate. So when Rafshoon proposed a practice session for a major speech, Carter “would make [him] feel [he] was some kind of whore,” in Rafshoon’s purple prose, and then grudgingly concede: “All right I’ll do it for you, if you think that’s more important than the other things I’ve got to do.” This led Rafshoon to the point where he simply no longer suggested these sessions.52
Rafshoon later told a story of how Frank Moore finally persuaded the president to invite two powerful Democratic senators, Lloyd Bentsen of Texas and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, for a game of tennis on the White House court: “Carter comes down to the tennis court, finishes playing, and says, ‘Well, good-bye,’ and goes back into the residence, leaving them sitting there, expecting to be invited up for a drink.” When Moore raised this with Carter the next day, he replied: “‘You told me to play tennis with them. I played tennis with them.’” After he lost the election, he confided to Rafshoon that he preferred fishing and hunting, and “I guess I’m antisocial.”53 Rafshoon knew he couldn’t change those traits, but felt that Caddell’s ideas could break the dynamic of his political free fall, and perhaps reset him as the people’s president he had aimed to be in campaign mode.
Caddell then piled on, intoning with a fiery gaze that I could imagine on the face of the prophet Jeremiah decrying the misdeeds of his people. This gave Caddell the visage of someone more than twice his young years. As far back as December 1978, even before the gas lines, his polls had picked up massive pessimism among the American people. To him the fact that there was no positive movement after Carter’s Middle East successes meant that “something else was out there.” Caddell then waxed eloquent about the broader afflictions of the American body politic. I almost felt I was at a séance, not a serious meeting with the leader of the free world. Caddell divined that “when the country had gotten rich it turned away from its core values” of thrift, hard work, family, and a belief in the common good, citing Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of democracy in America in the early days of the American Republic. Then he turned to the president and first lady and told them that until six weeks before, he believed Carter would be reelected because he would stand above the other candidates, “but this has changed.”
I argued against an overreaction and urged that we place the president’s very real accomplishments in a context, so the American people did not see him as panicking. I also expressed concern that with such dramatic action as Caddell proposed, there would be greater expectations we could not fulfill, since there were no easy answers to the problems posed by energy or inflation, and certainly no quick fixes for his dire assessment of the psychological state of the American people.
If I thought I had been blunt, the vice president, unreconciled and angry, turned not only on Caddell but on Carter himself: “Mr. President, we got elected on the ground that we wanted a government as good as the people; now as I hear it, we want to tell them we need a people as good as the government; I don’t think that’s going to sell.… We are blaming the public, and there are plenty of reasons the public is upset.” Mondale brushed aside Caddell’s apocalyptic explanation of assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate, and said plainly that people “can’t get gas, interest rates are soaring, basic industry is disappearing; people can’t follow what�
�s going on anymore.… There’s plenty of reasons for the American people to want answers, without having their mental stability questioned. If we do that, I think we’re goners.”54
Mondale’s critique of Carter’s conduct in office came with a directness that I suspect no vice president before or since has ever used to his president: “You’re very tired and this is affecting your thinking.” He said that part of Carter’s problems with Congress and the public was a “style problem; you can’t uplift people.” And he also saw a problem with leadership. Carter’s own sketchy notes show that he listened carefully to his vice president: “(1) Get tough with Cabinet, W[hite] H[ouse], use a whip. (2) Top people not at conventions, etc. (3) People see me so preoccupied with foreign affairs. (4) Don’t withdraw, focus on domestic affairs. (5) Must seize energy issue. (6) President needs to speak to constituents: mayors, NAACP, education, labor.”55
Toward Caddell, Mondale was merciless. He was visibly upset, and his face became so red with anger that I feared for his health. Looking straight across the table at Caddell, Mondale said his memo “was the craziest goddamn thing I’ve ever read. There is not a psychiatric problem with America, but real problems with coping economically. The worker making $22,000 a year was slipping.” He then ripped into the sources of Caddell’s analysis—social scientists talking about theory rather than dealing with the harsh realities faced by ordinary people.
He did not believe that the American people were selfish, but that they wanted a better standard of living for themselves and their families and did not see their hard work paying off. Mondale was particularly incensed about Caddell’s suggestion of a new Constitutional Convention—the “worst idea I have ever heard”—which was being advanced by conservative Republicans to require a balanced federal budget.