President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  Blumenthal also recalled that Vance spoke first, telling the president that everyone served at his pleasure; that he did not need to ask everyone to resign formally; that the mass resignation was not a good idea; and that he should simply ask for the individual resignations of those cabinet members he wished to depart.13

  What is clear is that the silence was stunning. The president ignored Vance’s advice, asked each one for written letters of resignation, and left the Cabinet Room. Ham handed out questionnaires for cabinet members to grade the effectiveness of their staff, after which the meeting—unlike any other in American history—ended.

  Califano remembered that as he, Vance, and Blumenthal left the Cabinet Room after they had submitted their resignations, he turned to Blumenthal and said: “Mike, you should call the president and tell him that all hell’s going to break loose.” Blumenthal laughed and said he was “the last guy to do it,” and Califano added, “I certainly was not the guy to do it.” Joe certainly called that one right.14

  Later that same day I met with the president, Ham, and Jody. The president told me Schlesinger would resign, to be replaced by deputy secretary of Defense, Charles Duncan. He also said he was “inclined” to fire Califano and Blumenthal, which I did not take as a final word.15

  The next four days were, simply put, like being in hell. I felt everything was unraveling. All the goodwill built up by the retreat to Camp David and the president’s speech seemed to be thrown away in a sophomoric effort to look tough. So, instead of a clean break with the past, the process was as messy as the back room of a neighborhood butcher.

  The next day I raised the issue of the firings in a small meeting with the president, Ham, and Jody in the Oval Office. I worked closely with and admired Schlesinger but realized he had clearly become a political liability in fighting the energy wars. But I argued strenuously that Carter should keep Califano and Blumenthal. Yes, Joe had his own agenda on issues like our proposal to hive off a separate Department of Education, but he was highly competent, as well as a symbol of reassurance to the liberal wing of the party. He was also in the midst of negotiating a national health care proposal with Senator Kennedy, along with me. I warned that if he was fired, “he’ll cut you up with his Washington connections.” The president responded, “I am being cut up anyway.”16 Califano was a marked man and had made two enemies that neither Mondale, his original champion, nor I could overcome. One was Rosalynn, who felt he was unhelpful on her mental health initiative and was hurting the president in North Carolina with his antismoking campaign.17 The other was Ham, who regarded Califano as disloyal and ineffective, despite his cherubic smile and broad Washington ties.

  Blumenthal was a harder case for Carter, but especially for me. I told Carter that no one worked more closely with him on a daily and even hourly basis, than I; that he was seen by the financial and business community as a symbol of anti-inflationary rectitude at a time of soaring inflation; and that his dismissal would upset the financial markets. I knew he did not suffer fools gladly, and was not the best consensus builder, but he had earned the respect of our senior economic officials. He had certainly hurt himself with persistent leaks from his press office throughout his tenure. As a childhood refugee from Germany, he had a native fear of runaway inflation and saw the threat in the United States before I and many others did. But he was also targeted by my Georgia colleagues, who wrongly held him responsible for Bert Lance’s resignation, because the damaging report on Lance’s banking practices came out of the office of the Treasury’s quasi-independent comptroller of the currency.

  In accepting his resignation, Carter summoned him, spent ten minutes praising his work at Treasury, and blamed friction with some of the White House staff. He concluded by wishing Blumenthal good luck in the future, and asked: “Can I count on your future advice? Will you be sure to come and see me when you’re in town.” Blumenthal’s last words were: “Anytime. I’ll come whenever you call.” That call never came.18

  And finally, Transportation Secretary Brock Adams walked out on his own. He disagreed on some presidential policies—airline deregulation and automobile mileage standards—but he had also brought in his own people to run the department. When Ham told him that from now on his deputy, like all others in the cabinet, had to be a White House appointee, Adams retorted: “Ham, for Christ’s sake, that’s what Nixon did; that’s a terrible idea. [Nixon aide Egil] Bud Crowe was indicted for it.” When Carter asked him to stay, Adams nevertheless insisted on his own deputy or he would tender his resignation. Carter sighed: “I guess I will have to accept it.” Adams said: “Well, that’s fine.”19 Actually it wasn’t. Tip O’Neill called to complain, and he was not the only Democratic congressman to come to the defense of Adams, a former representative from Washington State.

  I had argued with the president that the problem was not the cabinet but the White House staff, as the Washington Wise Men had advised him at Camp David, and that if he wanted to shake things up, he should start with his own staff, “every last one of us.” But the White House staff stayed essentially intact. The wrong heads rolled.

  In her report the night of the cabinet firings, Lesley Stahl of CBS-TV called them a “slaughterhouse, a purge” that took the glow off Carter’s speech in just a few short days.20 When the shock waves rolled over the White House, there was no lack of finger-pointing. Attorney General Bell, the most conservative member of the cabinet, was ready to resign and return to Atlanta anyway, and was angry that this made it look as if he had been fired, and blamed Vance.21

  Ham years later simply called the mass resignations a “bad idea.”22 Rafshoon said: “It was really a case of everybody being tired and panicked, and I think the biggest panicker was Caddell, and he had Rosalynn’s ear.”23 Rosalynn knew that Bell and Schlesinger were ready to leave, and she was gunning for Califano, but she nevertheless pleaded not guilty: “I think Hamilton was the one who argued that three people—it wouldn’t do for one, and it wouldn’t do for two … it has to be three to go or people wouldn’t think there was a change.” She added: “I was always skeptical about it.”24

  Caddell said it wasn’t him; he feared the firings would divert attention from the message of the speech. He claimed it was Ham, exuberant at the success of the speech, and as usual saw events through his own eyes: Caddell lamented that the firings “devastated” his plan to reposition the president.25 He certainly shook off any responsibility when his own grandiose term “malaise” made its way into the political vernacular via the media, even though it was never a part of Carter’s speech.

  If Carter had limited his cabinet changes to a few select members, he would have been seen as acting decisively following his spectacular rise in the polls. But what should have been a targeted effort to reorganize turned into a disastrous overreach, and everyone including Carter belatedly realized it. It certainly suited Carter’s temperament, but he later admitted to me ruefully that “it looked like an easy thing for me to do, but I didn’t realize that it was just going to be looked upon as a whole cabinet resigning. I was just not as wise as I should have been.”26

  * * *

  Next came the drive to impose discipline on the subcabinet appointees, the key officials in charge of the daily operations and much of the policy of their departments. Carter summoned some three hundred to the East Room of the White House. By the account of Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Trade Frank Weil, the president took off his jacket, neatly folded it, and placed it on the floor. Then using Ham’s script, he began: “I really have only one thing to say: ‘You guys are on my team, but too many of you act as if you’re on someone else’s team. If you don’t like what I’m doing, you can get out. So from now on, you either do it my way or you leave. Any questions?’”

  After polite comments from a couple of subcabinet officials, an unidentified voice came from the far corner of the large room: “Mr. President, with all due respect, I don’t think you understand the problem.” This anonymous official then
complained that he and his colleagues work tirelessly on issues, their recommendations are forwarded to the White House, and “then decisions are made that, with all due respect, sir, we don’t understand and we don’t agree with. We go on struggling because we want to help your administration do things right. And if we ever had a chance to talk with you, we might be able to help get things straightened out, with all due respect, sir.” He closed by saying: “For example, Mr. President, this is the first time I’ve ever been in the same room with you.”

  As the room fell silent, the president said, “That’s impossible. You’re my subcabinet. How many people in this room have never been in the same room with me?” Weil recalled that more than half raised their hand.27 In fact I found that the overwhelming percentage of subcabinet officers, with whom I regularly interacted more than any of Carter’s closest advisers, were loyal to the president and his agenda, and worked backbreaking hours to promote them. Fortunately, few beyond the dismissed cabinet members’ closest aides departed in the bloodletting, along with their bosses.

  Who planted the seed of this drama, and how did it grow into such a calamitous farce? Ham certainly was a major player. But according to his own admission, it was also Rafshoon, of all people, the media maven whose judgment was normally so sound about how the public would view the president’s actions and policies. He told me later: “You know Carter will never fire anybody unless he fires everybody. Maybe he should just fire them all and take back the ones he wants to keep. That caught on.”28 He added in another candid moment that “I was that fool who came up with that idea.… We didn’t realize the impact it would have publicly, and we didn’t realize how well the public would receive the speech. We stepped on that news by having the cabinet firings on Tuesday. We wiped it all out. And I regret it.”29

  * * *

  Quite aside from the uncertainty throughout the administration, Vance and I feared that the mass resignation of a cabinet would be thoroughly misunderstood by foreign leaders. Their own optic was not conditioned by the way the U.S. Constitution separated the legislative from the executive power. In Britain mass resignation is very rare and signals a fundamental change of policy or leadership, as it did when Winston Churchill was named prime minister in the dark wartime days of 1940. In most European nations, governments generally are composed of several parties in coalition, and a mass cabinet resignation would signal the withdrawal of one or several parties, bring down the government, and most likely lead to new elections or a restructured coalition.

  In less than a week the rave reception given to the speech began to recede. Quite apart from the collapsing poll numbers, it was possible to watch the tide going out right in the mailroom of the White House, where some of the veterans of this thankless job had worked since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. One of the women who had been there for decades said that never in their employment there had they seen such an immediate flood of positive mail after a speech—some 30,000 letters in the space of a few days. Normally there was a steady stream of letters or postcards of a paragraph or two (there was no e-mail in those days). Now they reported with great excitement how letters to the president were running five, six, even ten pages long, with the writers telling him how moved they were by his address. Caddell visited the mailroom and took a random sample of about one hundred letters to share with the president and Rosalynn. Many wrote that they had given up on Carter’s government, and now they believed in it again. But then the supervisor of the mailroom, with sadness in her voice, told Caddell: “Then he fired the cabinet, and he killed the mail.”30

  MONDALE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERS QUITTING

  Although no one outside his immediate staff knew it except me, one of the victims was almost Walter Mondale. He was so disillusioned by the White House antics that he seriously considered falling on his sword and resigning. Normally the vice president was an active and canny politician, more liberal in outlook than Carter. Even for someone of stolid Norwegian heritage, he had a wonderfully understated sense of humor. Often when I came to his office, he would put up his feet on his desk, pull out a cigar (which I never saw him smoke), and schmooze. He once imparted his clever personal secret for returning phone calls that he had to answer but did not want to: He would phone back during lunch hour, usually finding the original caller out of the office, whereupon he would check off the call as dutifully returned, without actually talking to someone he did not want to engage. At Camp David he had no such means of escape. The president tried in vain at Camp David to dissuade him from his warning against Caddell. “What a bizarre guy, my God!” Mondale told his chief of staff, Dick Moe, about Caddell.

  Mondale fled the parade of dignitaries to Camp David, leaving Moe to sit in as his proxy and telling him: “I’m not going back there.” Clearly Moe was the odd man out. At one point he walked into a staff discussion with Ham, Jody, and Rafshoon about seeking a number of cabinet resignations and remarked that that might look like a “Nixon-type thing.” The Carter staffers quickly changed the subject. The entire episode put a temporary strain on what had been a remarkably harmonious relationship between the reflective Moe and the newly empowered Jordan, and at one point they descended into a shouting match.31 The shake-up represented one of the few occasions that Mondale and his staff had been cut out of a key decision, a violation of his arrangement with Carter that had been honored until then and continued to be for the rest of the administration.

  Mondale was not totally blind to what was going on; he knew Califano was in danger and advised Carter that his liberal protégé should be disciplined for insubordination, but not fired. Carter replied: “Well, then, maybe that’s the way I’ll handle it.”32 It certainly was not. I believe what really enraged Mondale was being frozen out of the broader decision to ask the entire cabinet to submit resignations.

  After Carter’s nationwide speech, Mondale left Washington to travel the country making speeches to drum up public support for SALT II. He was in Memphis when I phoned to alert him that the president had asked for the resignation of the cabinet en masse, Califano included. He moved on to Nashville and was being interviewed by John Siegenthaler, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, when the phone rang. It was Califano, he recalled, “telling me that he had just been fired and that all hell was breaking loose.” This was how the vice president of the United States found out about the cabinet firings. For Mondale, it was the last straw: “The bottom line is it looked like a mass execution. It looked like a total pandemonium.” And when he arrived in Philadelphia, that is exactly what it was. Mondale recalled he faced “a screaming bunch of reporters who were going to kill me, and we just went from sugar to shit overnight. If we had just held steady, I think we might have pulled it around.”33

  When Mondale returned to Washington, he called me at home at 10:00 p.m. to express his distress. He confided that he was so discouraged by Carter’s acceptance of Caddell’s ideas at Camp David that he almost walked out, and he said he certainly could not defend the cabinet firings. He felt that Carter’s closest advisers were not “plugged into America and its institutions.” He was also hurt by Carter’s private jabs at him for speaking before labor and other national constituency groups, in the belief that a president “could somehow talk over these groups to reach the general public—when you can’t,” as Mondale told me.34

  Mondale asked me to join him for lunch at his favorite Chinese restaurant, the Moon Palace on Wisconsin Avenue, not far from his official residence. He said he could always get a table there, and when I sampled the awful food I understood why. Once again he poured out his heart about the clumsiness of the mass firings and what he saw as the vindictiveness of the inbred staff that surrounded Carter. But he went a serious step further and ended what little appetite I had left by telling me he was seriously considering resigning. The vice president had lost confidence in the president’s decision-making ability. It grated that the president had rejected his own political advice in favor of Caddell, whom Mondale considered a young neo
phyte making an amateur analysis of the nation’s psyche by studying himself in the mirror.

  He said that there was no question “we were dead in the ditch; we were in terrible shape; something had to be done,” and even the candid advice from outsiders at Camp David “was time well spent.” But the cabinet firings made him ready to throw in the towel: “My job in the administration had been to keep the progressive side of the party working with us, to avoid a big split; and I could see that falling apart.”35

  If I had believed that his only disagreement with the president had been over following Caddell’s line, I would have been less worried. But I had seen over the years an underlying fault line between Mondale’s political philosophy and Carter’s, which the most recent events had brought to a boil. Mondale was a traditional liberal, responsive to the major interest groups in the Democratic Party—labor, big-city mayors, farm groups, minority leaders, and the Jewish community. He was chosen as Carter’s running mate in significant part because of his support by those traditional liberal pillars of the national Democratic Party, balancing Jimmy Carter’s weakness with those groups, as a candidate from the South, with no comparable political underpinning. This was bound to create policy differences throughout the administration, with Mondale pressing for traditional Democratic social programs and Carter wary of increases in federal spending.

  Indeed, Carter’s top campaign staff felt that one reason his exaggerated 30-point lead over Ford almost totally evaporated was that after he became the Democratic Party’s nominee he was seen as a more traditional Democrat and lost his sense of freshness. The irony of his razor-thin victory over Ford was that everyone had a claim to it. While Carter could not have won by ignoring the Democratic Party machinery that turned out the vote in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, he could not also have swept every state in the Old Confederacy, except Virginia, if the voters there had simply seen him as another Hubert Humphrey.