President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  The stakes were so high that Carter did something he had never done before. He practiced his delivery in a jerry-built Oval Office mockup in the Camp David theater, where (appropriately for him) church services were held on Sundays. Rafshoon also arranged for a speech coach to improve his delivery. Carter’s normal cadence had an unusual singsong quality; he somehow managed to emphasize the wrong words in a sentence and accompany them with facial expressions, including a forced smile, that were unsynchronized with his rhetoric.70

  This time his speech was delivered flawlessly from his desk in the Oval Office with an intensity that matched the occasion. Framed by the American flag and the flag of the president of the United States, he spoke clearly, forcefully, and without even the trace of a smile, looking directly into the television cameras and thus into the homes of millions of Americans.71 With great nervousness, I joined the senior White House staff and cabinet in watching from the Roosevelt Room, directly across the hallway from the Oval Office.

  * * *

  Carter opened by recalling that when nominated he promised to be a “president who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams and who draws strength and his wisdom from you.” But he conceded that he had increasingly focused on “what the isolated world of Washington thinks or what the government should be doing, and less and less about our nation’s hopes, our dreams and our vision of the future.” He then explained that he had precipitously canceled his energy speech because it would have been the fifth time he had laid this urgent problem before the nation while sending his recommendations to Congress—and asked: “Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?”

  This was the lead into Caddell’s section, albeit diluted as Mondale and I had urged, so as not to lay the nation’s problems at the feet of the people rather than his own. He answered his own question by saying that the “true problems of our nation are much deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper than inflation or recession.” He needed the help of the American people, and that was why he reached out at Camp David to almost every segment of our society. He summarized some of their harsh criticisms as no president has done before or since, including having lost the message he delivered to the American people in his campaign, and specifically quoted Bill Clinton’s advice.

  Now came the Caddell line: a nearly invisible but fundamental threat to American democracy, which gave the speech its title: “Crisis of Confidence.” What followed was a passage that could have been lifted from Jimmy Carter’s Sunday-school classes in Plains and was at bottom a populist sermon to a “nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, [where] too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption [and are] no longer identified by what one does, but by what one owns.”

  He cited Caddell’s polls detailing the rise of pessimism about the future; traced the growing disrespect for government and the institutions of civil society ranging from churches to the news media back to the upheavals of the 1960s and Watergate, and criticized Congress in terms that could be applied to the present day: “Twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-funded special interests, [with] every extreme position defended to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and fair approach that demands a little sacrifice from everyone abandoned like an orphan.”

  And how should we deal with this profound crisis of confidence? First was to regain “faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation,” and then turn to “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values [and not] narrow interests, ending in chaos and immobility.” Next came the bridge I had urged as a compromise: “Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.”

  Then he focused on the enemy—OPEC; that allowed him to segue into the six-point energy program that had been lifted and condensed from our original speech. In a moving peroration, he reached out to his nationwide audience to help him develop and pass a new agenda for the 1980s and to “take our greatest resources—America’s people, America’s values, and America’s confidence.… Let your voice be heard to join hands, and to commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.”

  Even the doubters, myself high among them, were ecstatic. To my utter amazement Caddell and Carter had been right about its impact, and not only had I been wrong, so was even Rick Hertzberg, who wrote the speech.72 When the president walked into the Roosevelt Room afterward we all rose to give him enthusiastic applause. He glowed that night, having come out of a terribly difficult ordeal. While our reaction was essential to unify the administration, it was the public that mattered, and he had swung them back to his side.

  In one night Carter’s approval rating jumped 17 points as measured by the Gallup poll, the greatest gain ever recorded by a modern president in such a short time, except for a speech seeking a declaration of war. Newsweek stayed open beyond its Saturday deadline to cover the Sunday address, then put Carter on the cover with a halo. On television CBS’s normally skeptical Roger Mudd approved of the speech wholeheartedly: “A very strong one, very upbeat.”73 David Broder, dean of the capital’s political reporters, wrote in the Washington Post that “Jimmy Carter got his voice back tonight. He believed what he said.”74

  What was it about this most unusual presidential speech that drew such a positive response? I must admit that partly it was the mystery he created by canceling his energy speech, followed by the unprecedented, lengthy retreat at Camp David to hear critiques of his presidency and recommendations for changing course. Quite aside from Carter’s careful preparation for a decisive moment before the American people, the speech on the whole was positive, much more so than Caddell’s original hyperbolic draft. Instead Carter optimistically offered a way to overcome the very conditions he diagnosed. The speech touched people—partly because Carter, unusual for a politician and especially a president, criticized his own failings and partly because they thought the president had captured their concerns. Also, the American people still liked Jimmy Carter and wanted him to succeed. Although disappointed in his performance as president thus far, they believed in his honesty, intelligence, and integrity, and they respected his hard work.

  This came clear from some of the Caddell material urging common purpose and national confidence, as I accompanied the president on a short follow-up tour. The very next day, July 16, he spoke to an enthusiastic audience at the convention of the National Association of County Officials in Kansas City, Missouri. And then there was an acid test in Detroit, where he made one of his few addresses to a union audience, the Communications Workers of America. Its president, Glenn Watts, was one of the small number of labor leaders enthusiastically for Carter, and so were his members.

  In fact some of the Caddell material urging common purpose and national confidence that had been dropped from the televised address was restored in the Detroit speech.75 As I watched the rapturous reaction of the labor crowd in Cobo Hall, I said to myself that he had recaptured the magic connection with people from the 1976 campaign. Thunderous applause filled the huge auditorium, and the crowd literally sprang to its feet to cheer Carter. He had obviously touched a nerve I had not seen. Caddell had recognized something I had missed.76

  I was not the only senior White House staff person happily surprised by the positive reaction to the speech. One clear voice that turned Carter on to Caddell’s course after initial doubts was no less than that of Ham Jordan, the brilliant architect of Carter’s political success. In an eighty-five-page memo to the president written on July 16, the day after the speech, Ham conceded: “There is no question at the outset that I did largely ignore the
merit and brilliance of Pat Caddell’s memorandum and analysis. Pat had yelled ‘wolf’ so many times that I discounted his harsh analysis of our situation as well as his unconventional approach to our problems. However, after exposure to his work and time for reflection, there is no question that Pat’s original concept was sound and that many of his suggestions were and are valid.”

  Having just been informed by Carter he would be named chief of staff, Ham went on to advise his boss to shift his approach to the presidency and become a “leader of society.” He wrote: “You have agreed to lead the country instead of manage the government [and to have] greater discipline and accountability in the White House.” And then he laid the groundwork for what followed, by advising Carter that “the Cabinet changes are the litmus test.”77

  25

  RESIGNATIONS AND RESHUFFLING

  As fast as the public turned in the president’s favor, the tide turned just as quickly the other way, through his own unforced error. Ham had always been far more interested in imposing White House discipline on the cabinet than in Caddell’s high-flown themes. Now was his moment, setting in motion what had not been part of Caddell’s playbook. Ham felt that the president needed to fire some of his cabinet to show he was in control of his administration, and like a distant cloud, the threat had hung over the entire episode. As the first lady recalled: “Hamilton kept on saying, ‘If you don’t fire somebody, people are not going to think you’re doing anything about this meeting that you’ve had, calling up all these people up here [to Camp David]. You’ve got to get rid of them and you’ve got to fire them.’”1 Their prime candidates continued to be Califano, Blumenthal, and Schlesinger. In fact it was Rosalynn in her quiet voice who had sent the first and toughest message during the Camp David deliberations: “You should fire people who are disloyal or no good.”2

  It was no secret that she was thinking of Califano, who had his own powerful liberal connections in Washington and was fighting Carter’s plan to divest his agency of education, and make it a separate cabinet department. In my notes of that July 5 exchange, I observed that the “president was very subdued.”3 He disliked personal confrontations and was clearly upset by the prospect of firing several members of his cabinet, although one person did get the chop immediately. Carter kicked Caddell out of Camp David as a disruptive presence and refused to talk to him for several days, even though he had been a key architect of the president’s successful speech.4

  Originally the president was strongly opposed to a cabinet reshuffle,5 when Ham and Jody raised it during the battle over the speech. But he eventually felt it would show “vigor” if he followed his address with a cabinet shake-up.6 Now would begin what Jody later called a “bad idea” that “was the final act of the drama” and “turned a lot of people against the whole thing.”7 The president literally stepped on his winning lines.

  On July 17 the president unexpectedly joined our early-morning White House senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room, which turned out to be one of the most shocking in my four years in the administration. Gone was the triumphant, indeed magnanimous, mood of the week’s speeches. He was uncharacteristically blunt, even brutal, as he looked around sternly and said: “We have defects that need to be resolved. I have had time to contemplate these and gotten a lot of advice at Camp David. I heard about the need for a complete reassessment of how we function. I also heard a lot of criticism of the White House staff: that we lack cohesion, that there is too much fragmentation, that there is excessive sniping at the cabinet. There was also a serious mention of the cabinet.”

  He repeated to us a specific Camp David critique of himself: that he was too deeply involved in the mechanics of government and in legislation and should spend more time outside Washington. He then announced that he was appointing Ham as chief of staff “with extraordinary power over you and the persons who work under you to coordinate. Ham will not be a peer of yours as before. You will carry out Ham’s orders, and if he believes someone should be replaced he’ll talk with you; and if he says you’re gone or your assistants are gone then you are.”

  In all the years I had worked closely with him, I had never heard such a sharp tone. He also said he would make some cabinet changes, but that he had not decided how many. He added that “some are not loyal or effective, and some are damaged, as they have dealt with difficult issues.” It was not hard to guess whom he had in mind, and Carter then asked us to give Ham our assessments of the cabinet, just as he would be asking the members of the cabinet to give him their assessments of the White House staff. He hoped to finish this within a week or so.

  He then dropped a bombshell: “I may ask all of the cabinet for pro forma resignations,” adding that some might be put on probation and fired later if they did not change their conduct. With only eighteen months left in his term of office, Carter recognized that he was constrained by how deeply he could change his administration, but he wanted us on the staff to apply the same rigorous judgment to the work of our subordinates and to “do it quickly.”

  I was stunned by the threat of a mass cabinet resignation, and I was not the only staff member concerned. To my everlasting regret I did not question Carter, but after he made this startling announcement, he was gone in a flash, with no opportunity for comment. It was not clear how seriously he was considering such a dramatic action. If he wanted to fire a few people, he ought to do so without sowing confusion and doubt about those who remained. When the president left, I whispered to Anne Wexler that foreigners familiar with their own parliamentary system would think the whole government had fallen.

  Ham took over without entertaining any questions or comments. “We’ve had democracy, now we need organization,” he declared. He was also frank in saying that the president himself would have to make drastic changes in his own style of governance, but the key would be to protect the president from becoming bogged down in the details of governing. “Let us decide within the White House the disputes between agencies”—and make as many decisions as possible without involving Carter himself. “I will talk for the president to the cabinet.”

  Then he threw an air of uncertainty into all of us by announcing that personnel changes would soon be made within the White House itself. He handed out forms for us to evaluate all the people reporting to us, and asked us to return them by the end of the week, to “weed out disloyal or incompetent people.” The next three or four weeks, he said, would be “difficult and wrenching,” and the president would “be a different person than you knew in the past … the head of the country” and not just a manager.

  All this was a remarkable change for a Carter team that had run against Nixon’s centralization of power through his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. But it only convinced me that the problem was not the structure of the Nixon White House, but the lack of honesty and integrity among Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and their henchmen.

  We certainly needed to avoid having the president immersed in too much detail, but I spoke up and said he needed “to be both the head of government and the head of the country,” because that was what it meant to be president. To assert greater control, Ham said he now would also join each week’s foreign-policy breakfast and the economic breakfasts (I have no record that he ever attended any), and any other meetings on issues of importance at the time.8

  * * *

  Like an avenging angel, Carter moved almost immediately down the hall to the fateful cabinet meeting at 10:30 a.m. Ham, uncharacteristically dressed in a blue suit, shirt, and tie, was the only non-cabinet member present, except for the president himself. Blumenthal has the most detailed account, based on his own notes. Carter explained that he used his long absence at Camp David to review the status of his administration and make a new start that would involve changes in the cabinet, some of whom had been “disloyal … [and] not following the administration line.” He assured them that he would also take firm action against eight or ten on the White House staff, “whether from Georgia or not.” He informed them of Ham�
��s new job as chief of staff and his authority: All cabinet officers would report through him, and all decisions were to be cleared through his office.

  About 25 minutes into Carter’s talk on the challenges facing the nation, he threw out the hot potato of mass resignations. There is disagreement on exactly what happened next. Carter remembers Attorney General Bell recommending that all cabinet members should submit resignations, so the president could choose those who should leave. But Bell told me Vance offered everyone’s resignations, “as if orchestrated,” and he was “surprised.”9 Jody believed that the president had primed Vance to make the suggestion before the meeting,10 and Ham recollected Vance saying: “Maybe we should offer our resignations, so you’ll be in the posture of just accepting some resignations, like you’re just starting all over again.”11

  But Vance later told me firmly he had no advance warning and that “it came as a surprise, as far as I know, to everybody in the room.” Indeed, Vance noted that a president in effect always had everyone’s resignation in hand, and by asking his entire cabinet to do this at once, “people are going to think the government is falling apart.” He warned: “Don’t make a big thing of it, because it is going to be taken all out of proportion.”12