On our way back to Plains for the Carters to cast their votes, we thought he would win because of a national impulse for change, and we could feel it coming, especially with the weight of a stagnant economy on Ford’s shoulders, as it would rest on Carter’s four years later.
We nervously awaited the judgment of tens of millions of our fellow Americans on election night at Atlanta’s downtown Omni Hotel. Fran had rented a large suite near the president’s, and we invited family and close friends. I was in no mood for chatter as the television networks began a long night of reporting the mixed results, with losses in some key states. The uncertainty lasted into the morning. We won the bellwether state of Ohio, which no Republican elected president has ever lost. Carter made calls throughout the night, one to Richard Daley, the Chicago mayor and political boss who had helped deliver Illinois for Jack Kennedy in 1960—by last-minute ballot stuffing, the Republicans believed. But Daley could not work his magic and told Carter that his state would go for Ford. As midnight came and went, we were still short of the decisive 270 electoral votes and needed Hawaii and Mississippi. We had no doubts about solidly Democratic Hawaii, but Mississippi was the most conservative state of the Old Confederacy, particularly on race. Jimmy and Rosalynn were nervously holding hands in front of the television in their hotel suite when a call came at 3:30 a.m. from the governor of Mississippi, Cliff Finch. He reported that the Palmetto State, the deepest of the Deep South, had gone for Carter by about twelve thousand votes, putting him over the top on electoral votes.
Carter has never been a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve in either triumph or tragedy. Like the submarine officer he had been, he was cool and controlled, and in victory he was as relieved as he was exhilarated. He and Rosalynn hugged each other and their children. He quickly strode out of his suite to greet his thrilled supporters, thank the American people for his victory, and then travel immediately to Plains, where hundreds of friends met him at 5:30 a.m.93
Fran and I had no such inhibitions. We hugged, kissed, and cried on each other’s shoulders. Two years of hard work had turned an impossible dream into a reality. We instinctively knew how profound a change this would make to our lives and those of our two boys, Jay and Brian, only six and three. Fran would make the biggest sacrifice. She had just been selected for the prestigious Leadership Atlanta program and was slated to be the next president of the Atlanta chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. But as she would throughout forty-five years of a wonderful marriage, she supported our move and would be my partner in the next great challenge ahead in the White House. But there was little time to savor the moment, because I was told to run down to the hotel ballroom to be on the podium when Carter made his victory statement.
For one last election, Carter had overturned Lyndon Johnson’s famous prediction that the Democrats would forever lose the South once he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Carter swept every Southern state of the Old Confederacy except Virginia, although those results reflected mostly Southern pride overcoming white racism. John Stennis, Mississippi’s ardent segregationist Democratic senator for almost thirty years, never forgot his grandfather’s story of Union troops at the end of the Civil War riding into town and being billeted in the courthouse and the schools “like an occupying army.” Reliving the moment of Carter’s election, Stennis said: “I wish my grandfather could see this now. A man from Georgia being president of the United States.”94 The election was one of the tightest in modern history. Carter won 297 electoral votes (23 states and the District of Columbia) to 240 for Ford (27 states). Except for Texas, a former slave state straddling South and West, Ford carried every Western state including California. Carter won the popular vote by one million of 81 million cast, although to the chagrin of the Ford campaign, a shift of only ten thousand votes in two states, Ohio and Hawaii, would have given him a victory in the Electoral College.95
But Carter was not even thinking about how narrow his victory was. Even then, at the pinnacle of his political life, he was already thinking of the complex task of organizing his presidency. We would rest a few days and then, as he put it, we would be “getting down to work.” We did not rest very long.
2
A PERILOUS TRANSITION
The United States is unique among the world’s democracies in the length of time provided by our Constitution for the transition from the outgoing to the incoming presidential administration. In parliamentary democracies the transfer of power is instantaneous, with the leader of the victorious opposition and shadow ministers ready to step into place. In the two and one-half months from election to inauguration, the president-elect and his team must choose key White House officials and hundreds of senior appointees for the cabinet and subcabinet; set a course for foreign policy; develop a domestic agenda and budget; and write an inaugural address summing up all this for the nation and the world. And this is happening when the president-elect and his team, giddy with victory but exhausted from the campaign, are under scrutiny as never before for clues about the new administration.
Transitions can be perilous if not handled well. The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in the early months of the Kennedy administration was an inheritance from the Eisenhower administration, and the new president was hesitant to stop or even check this doomed scheme lest he be accused of being soft on Communism. The road for the incoming Carter administration was especially difficult and laid the groundwork for many of its problems but also for its successes. It was during the transition that he determined to structure his White House without a chief of staff to set priorities among an overly ambitious set of initiatives on energy and water projects, and developed the $50 rebate he would soon abandon,1 all with only a skeleton crew, and without the expert interagency review that becomes routine when the president takes office.
Every major party candidate after their nomination receives CIA briefings, which I alone attended with Carter. Three were held at his modest ranch house in Plains during July and August, but after he won, the first top-secret briefing on November 19 was different. It was presented by CIA Director George H. W. Bush (later the first President Bush), and given the vast scope of the challenges ranging from missile placement to oil prices, I felt that the sun, moon, and stars had fallen on us all. On the surface the president-elect was the same Jimmy Carter in casual clothes and work boots, but the trappings of the presidency were all around. Secret Service officers were stationed inside his house and even in the surrounding woods. A makeshift gate and guardhouse were quickly erected to control access. During a break in the November briefing, Carter asked me to step outside. He confided that he was considering Brzezinski as his national security adviser and Vance as secretary of state, and asked my opinion. During the campaign I had worked with them on our foreign-policy task force, and I told him that either one would be an excellent choice—but not both, because they held diametrically opposing views on his chief foreign-policy challenge, the Soviet Union. But Vance and Brzezinski had recommended each other to Carter for their respective positions.2
Vance felt that negotiations were the best way of managing the complex relationship with Moscow. Brzezinski was more of a tough Cold Warrior, in part because of his family’s Polish background, but also his keen sense of history and the role of the United States in combating what was at the time an aggressive Soviet Union. Carter paused for a second and said, “I like hearing different opinions. I can handle it.” But their ideological differences were far more difficult to reconcile than he realized, and often gave a Janus-like quality to the administration’s stance toward the Soviet Union.
A different and more complex set of circumstances inherited from the campaign bedeviled the transition and, over time, the very nature of Carter’s governance. After the nomination seemed within his grasp, he did something that at one level was uniquely farsighted by setting up a transition planning staff headed by Jack Watson, a former marine and smart young partner in Kirbo’s law firm. About fifty bright young men and women set
to work formulating policy goals; they worked in secret, isolated from the campaign team, lest their existence leak out and make Carter appear overconfident of victory. Watson said he tried to stay in touch with Ham on the campaign trail, but “the last thing they were interested in was talking about policy planning or the transition period.”3
Three days after the election Watson delivered three large black binders to Plains full of recommendations, duplicating precisely what my campaign policy team had been doing for two years. From Watson’s perspective he did exactly what Carter wanted him to—begin planning ahead for victory, and it became one of the most painful experiences of his life.4
But from Ham’s perspective and mine, Watson had been setting up a government-in-waiting while the rest of us were trying to help Carter win the election. His briefing books made no attempt to examine the political dimension that is an essential element of democratic governance. Their attitude was that they were scholars of government who had studied the issues and understood the direction the Carter presidency should take, while we were political hacks. Our view was that we had won an improbable victory, and now they were carving up the pie. Neither side was right; policy and politics have to be integrated, and voters who had sent Carter to the White House expected that he would make good on his promises, or at least try. Harsh words were exchanged, and Jack felt that Ham dismissed his people as “pointy-headed intellectuals.”5
Carter further complicated the situation by naming Watson, not Jordan, to be transition director, with a two-million-dollar federal allocation and the responsibility of maintaining liaison with the outgoing Ford administration, organizing briefing teams for each cabinet department, and providing detailed recommendations for each incoming cabinet member. More than policy differences were at stake. In every presidential campaign the winning candidate’s staff members expect to be awarded important jobs in the new administration; after all, they are battle tested. When Carter was on the road, which was most of the time, his political operatives ran the campaign with a free hand. What was different this time was that two separate camps were competing, and the president-elect was not clearly defining their responsibilities. More strategic questions did not receive the attention they deserved.
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Congressional Democrats had unrealistic expectations about the first president from their own party in eight years. Many had been elected as “Watergate babies” in 1974 and 1976 and had never served in Congress with a Democratic president. Although Carter finally and belatedly intervened and told Watson to yield responsibility for presidential appointments to Ham, he did not resolve the split between the two camps. I had a great deal riding on the outcome, since Watson and I were in effect competing for the job I really wanted, chief White House domestic policy adviser. My hopes were not high because Watson was Kirbo’s protégé, but he inadvertently did me a favor by empire building, which was spotted by no less than Carter himself. He later told me that when he won the presidency, “all of a sudden we found that Jack had put together a set of decisions in which neither I, nor you nor Hamilton or others were involved.”6 Jordan cut Watson back to a staff of two, while I was given the leeway to hire a large number of able young people, and that gave Ham a counterweight to Watson’s ambitions.
I made a rookie mistake during the transition of telling a New York Times reporter, Martin Tolchin, that our legislative agenda would be “modest,” remembering President Kennedy’s adage that great initiatives cannot be built on slim electoral margins—earning me one of Carter’s only personal rebukes in our years together. In fact, at his direction we launched a veritable blizzard of “comprehensive” domestic reforms (a favorite Carter goal that I quickly came to loathe) in energy, welfare, taxes, water projects, hospital costs, along with a major economic stimulus package to jump-start the economy and fulfill his campaign promise to end the “Ford recession.” At the same time, he launched negotiations to turn over the Panama Canal by treaty, which numerous presidents before him had begun, but never completed because of the fierce politics involved; a Middle East peace process, which had stalled; arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union; and a radically reoriented American foreign policy, which made human rights a principal focus. What could not be imagined was how many of these would succeed in leaving a lasting imprint on American government, although not without struggles.
THE OUTSIDER MOVES IN
The new president’s broad vision was not put in the hands of a staff with broad government experience. In an overreaction to the excesses of Watergate and Nixon’s centralization of power, Carter initially decided not to have a chief of staff. He felt such a staff post implied a hierarchy among his top staff he wanted to avoid, but this placed enormous burdens on the president alone to coordinate and prioritize his agenda. He also filled the ranks of his senior White House staff with Georgians and campaign aides who had been with him during the long political campaign, myself included. All had one thing in common: Except for me, not one senior executive aide had ever before set foot in the White House, lived in Washington, or knew anything about the operations of the U.S. Congress or the massive federal government. Our homegrown, inexperienced team did not know its way around Washington and the city’s multiple power centers—Congress, interest groups, the press.
At one level this was an unfair criticism. Every new president brings with him the campaign team that has helped him across the finish line, proven loyalists whom he knows and trusts. Jack Kennedy brought in his “Boston Mafia,” LBJ his “Texas Mafia,” Nixon his Californians and longtime New York confidants, and Ford his congressional staff and senior campaign aides. The difference was that all these presidents had served in Congress, as had many of their aides. President Carter did not leaven the inexperience of his Georgia Mafia by adding a senior eminence, for example Bob Strauss, who knew where to find the hidden levers of power and how to use them. Even Ronald Reagan, a seasoned politician as governor of California and before that as head of Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild, helped make up for his lack of Washington experience by naming James A. Baker his chief of staff. This Princeton-educated Texan, a shrewd lawyer with great political skills and Washington experience at the Commerce Department, had managed the general election campaign of his chief rival for the Republican nomination, George H. W. Bush.
The only Georgia hand with the innate political talent to fill this void was Bert Lance, who eagerly courted the Washington establishment, but with a flamboyance that was alien to the ways of Washington’s buttoned-up society and fitted more comfortably into the freewheeling pattern of his banking behavior—which later brought him to grief. During the transition he made his rounds aboard a limousine emblazoned with American flags on its bumper and sporting license plates reading BERT in the front and LANCE in the rear.7
During the transition it is traditional as well as useful to meet with your outgoing counterpart. When I visited Ford’s domestic adviser, James Cannon, he sat me down in his West Wing office directly above the Oval Office, the office I would soon occupy, and pulled a bottle of expensive whiskey out of a small cabinet. I thought: How gracious of him to toast our victory! But Cannon had no intention of pouring a drink, only of teaching me a valuable lesson. The label read BOTTLED EXPRESSLY FOR JOHN EHRLICHMAN, Nixon’s domestic adviser, and Cannon pointed to it as an example of the abuse of the power I would soon inherit. He warned me never to forget that I was only a temporary occupant of my high office, that people would fawn over me, extend invitations for lunches and dinners and other social events, and try to influence me in every way. “Just remember,” he said, “those invitations are not to you as a person but to the office you hold, and that all the invitations will cease as soon as you leave your position.” This lesson in humility stayed with me, and I passed it on to my successor Martin Anderson, Ronald Reagan’s domestic adviser, along with that unopened bottle of booze.
Some of Carter’s key Georgia appointees performed their jobs superbly. Most of the White House pre
ss corps regarded Jody as a gifted press secretary.8 Watson did a fine job of working with state and local officials and as cabinet secretary. When Ham left the White House to run the 1980 campaign, Jack became the chief of staff and did an excellent job. We would all have been better off if Carter had appointed him at the start, because he had administrative abilities Ham knew he lacked. Frank Moore, by his own admission, had no experience with Congress, and only learned he would be the chief White House lobbyist days before the inauguration. He stumbled at first by not returning scores of telephone calls from the Hill because he was so understaffed. Later he was unfairly barred from the Capitol for days by House Speaker Tip O’Neill over the president’s failure to appoint his friend Robert Griffin to a government post, having to intervene with Tip’s wife, Millie, to get the ban lifted.9 While never a great congressional strategist, Frank had good political instincts, worked hard, built a strong staff of young aides who had worked in Congress, and helped to lead an unrecognized, sterling legislative record for the president.
President Carter Page 9