But nothing better demonstrated the Carter team’s ambivalence about Washington norms than its poster boys in the early months of the administration: Ham and Jody allowed themselves to appear on the front cover of Rolling Stone as “White House Whiz Kids.” Ham wore an open shirt and had a towel over his shoulder, and Jody had an open-collared shirt with his tie pulled down, both looking supremely confident.10 This was a violation of the long-held tradition that White House staff should not make themselves the story. At about the same time Time ran a cover story, “The President’s Boys,” where they were dressed in cartoon form as South Georgia bumpkins, with overalls and no shirts, holding fishing rods.11 Hugh Sidey, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, piled on by knocking Carter for wearing un-presidential brown wing-tip shoes. Ham later conceded that “mostly people laughed at us; this kind of confirmed the stereotype of the bumpkins from Georgia [who] don’t know how to behave in the Big Leagues.” But it also violated an informal code that key White House staff should be as invisible as possible, and made Ham vulnerable to attacks. Newsweek reported that at a dinner where Ham was seated next to the well-endowed wife of the Egyptian ambassador, he was said to have remarked: “I have always wanted to see the pyramids.” Everyone denied it, but Ham realized that once the story was in print, it did not matter whether it was true or false.12 Again, Ham was in the news in an unflattering way, even if not of his own making.
Ham was an enigma, who seemed to have a chip on his shoulder from the moment he entered the White House. I and many others felt privileged to work there, walking in the footsteps of American history. But he seemed disdainful of official Washington, sending a message by his behavior that said in effect: We beat you, and we’ll show you we don’t need to conform to your norms. During much of his first year, he came to work at the White House in an informal khaki shirt and trousers with brown high-top work boots, as if he had just come in from the fields in Georgia. He would often greet colleagues and visitors alike with his boots up on his long desk. Initially he had little interest in being involved in policy decisions and did not organize and preside over White House staff meetings.
Even though he carried the title Political Adviser to the President, he never in four years attended the weekly Democratic congressional leadership breakfasts to join in the discussions of legislative priorities and cultivate personal relationships with the lawmakers who held the fate of the president’s program in their hands. He intentionally refused to return congressional phone calls, even from the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, contending that he would have been interfering with Moore in his liaison job.
One mix-up that was not his fault, but that of Tip’s personal aide, Leo Diehl, over the Speaker’s tickets to the preinaugural gala at the Kennedy Center, prompted Tip to call Ham “Hannibal Jerkin.” This mistaken notion of keeping his distance demonstrated Jordan’s failure to appreciate his own importance. Members of Congress wanted to be able to say they had talked with the president’s top adviser. Hardly a day went by when I did not have multiple calls and meetings with members of Congress and their staffs, without which I could not have done my job.
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Presidents must constantly attend to the coalition that elected them. Only Ham could have made the determination of how our policies should be integrated into the president’s broader political agenda, the imperative of maintaining the support of his voters, and enlarging that number whenever possible. This left a gap that was never filled. When Ham finally calculated the political cost of a number of foreign-policy decisions, particularly when they touched Israel and the Arab states, he began attending the weekly foreign-policy breakfasts with the national security team. There he made important contributions. Indeed, when Ham put his mind to it, there was nothing he could not do. He superbly organized the strategy and a political war room to secure passage of the Panama Canal Treaty, and a controversial arms sale to Saudi Arabia. But his engagements were sporadic, at least until he was finally named chief of staff midway in the president’s term.
The worst of this diffident attitude of disengagement was that it would have been totally unnecessary if he and all of us had understood that Washington protocol sprang from a deep commitment to the power that underwrote it. Around the time of Carter’s election, I sent the president a new book by Stephen Hess, a former White House official in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and a Brookings Institution scholar of the presidency. It was titled Organizing the Presidency, but Carter did not internalize an important part of its message. As Hess told me later: “Carter and his people came to town with an inferiority complex. They didn’t realize that they could have taken over the town. They were it. When Reagan came in he had dinner with Kay Graham [owner of the Washington Post] and Lane Kirkland [president of the AFL-CIO]. All of these people here in Washington would have died to do that with Carter, when in the early stages of the administration you’re new and exciting and you’re the people that everybody wants to know about and meet. People around here are here to understand and to help the president. But Carter resisted that. He went to great lengths not to be captive of the establishment, when in fact he should have been the leader of the establishment, and used it for his purposes.”13 But Jody saw the other side of the coin, the resentment and suspicion of the Washington establishment against which Carter had campaigned: “‘They’re not us. They’re not our kind of folks. We’ll show them that this town is tougher than they think.’”14
This disparity of attitudes underscored a central dilemma of Carter’s presidency: maintaining his status as an outsider fighting for the common good against Washington’s entrenched interests, while he was simultaneously the ultimate insider as president trying to bend those interest groups and Congress to his will. Just after the election, Ham, its political mastermind, remarked only half-jokingly that if Vance and Brzezinski, two certified members of the establishment, were named to the top foreign-policy positions, the whole point of Carter’s insurgent, antiestablishment campaign would be undercut. Of course the president-elect did just that: How could the security of the United States be put in the hands of novices? Late in the administration, Jody was driving his Volkswagen Beetle past the imposing structure of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, with Pat Caddell as his passenger. Jody ruefully reflected, “Boy, we screwed up. We made a terrible mistake when we came to Washington. We should either have burned it down or we should have totally co-opted it—either dance or burn down the barn. But we should not have done what we did, which was to straddle.”15
Carter’s decision to surround himself with us Georgians was compounded by two other closely related decisions: to act as his own White House chief of staff and to organize a cabinet-style government, which empowered each cabinet officer to choose the department’s top officials and initiate its own legislative agenda. The loyalties of the subcabinet officials were first to the cabinet officials who hired them. At the same time we were fighting to hire more women and more minorities, and this policy did not always reach far enough into the departments.
With Carter’s aggressive agenda, he needed a powerful White House staff that would reach into the departments, ensuring that the president’s loyalists were strategically placed and would drive his program and not theirs. In the immediate post-Watergate era, a more decentralized structure seemed an understandable arrangement, but also turned out to be a disastrous one. After all, Carter had not won the White House on the promise of a specific set of policies but on an anti-Watergate message to end the excesses of Nixon and his inner circle. He understandably did not want his White House to resemble the Nixon administration’s centralized control by his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and his principal assistant for domestic policy, John Ehrlichman. During their reign, they were known around Washington as “the Germans,” with all the obvious implications of that derisive term in that more immediate post–World War II era. These concerns reached well beyond domestic policy and the Watergate crimes t
o Kissinger’s role as a national security adviser bypassing the State Department and, at Nixon’s direction, helping start a secret war by bombing Cambodia. The problem was not a faulty White House structure. It was that Kissinger was seen by his critics to be secretive, and that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the president himself were dishonest.
Carter’s instinct to denude the White House staff, elevate the cabinet, and serve as his own chief of staff was reinforced by a full day of briefings at Brookings that I had arranged during the campaign. Hess and his predominantly Democratic colleagues tried to explain why he could not run the federal government the way he had run his gubernatorial office. Hess impertinently asked how many people lived in Georgia. When Carter replied five million, Hess told him that five million people, equally divided between civilians and military, worked in the federal government, and that he could not hope to run it like the state of Georgia.16
Nevertheless Hess opposed a powerful chief, and recommended slimming down the staff to “scrape off the barnacles that had accumulated over the years” as it morphed into a bureaucracy itself and bred a distrust among the cabinet departments. He remembered the Eisenhower staff was so small that everyone could fit into the White House mess at lunchtime, while eight years later there had to be several sittings separating senior from junior staff. Moreover, while the Eisenhower staff was composed of people of proven accomplishment for whom public service meant a pay cut, in the Nixon era it was filled with political people working in the “the best jobs they had ever had in their lives.” The arc of growth, however, was bipartisan. Liberal presidents like Roosevelt felt the departmental bureaucracy was too conservative, and conservatives like Nixon found it too liberal, leading presidents to bypass the departments through their own loyal supporters, many of whom were barely qualified for White House assignments.
A quantum leap in size had indeed occurred during the Nixon presidency, and Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, had indeed amassed too much power relative to the cabinet. When Ford took office after the Nixon resignation, he initially instituted a “spokes of the wheel” White House structure, which had also been used by Kennedy, where four or five senior aides—the bicycle spokes—would report to the president at the hub. This was the model Hess recommended to President-elect Carter.
But for Ford it had led to a disastrous lack of coordination and was quickly abandoned for a traditional chief-of-staff model. After Ford’s defeat Chief of Staff Dick Cheney was given a going-away present at a staff roast—a mounted bicycle wheel with all the spokes except one busted, bent, gnarled, and twisted, with an inscription that read “The spokes on the wheel are a rare form of management artistry, invented by Gerald Ford and modified by Dick Cheney.” He left that on his desk for Ham Jordan when he took over the office after the inauguration, along with a note: “Dear Hamilton, beware the spokes of the wheel.”17 This is one piece of advice from Cheney we would have done well to follow.
But Ham knew Carter emphatically did not want one chief of staff, although he felt the new president needed “more than anything to have an organizer of information, controlling his schedule and stuff like that.” As it was, Ham admitted he “rarely had significant policy input on things.”18 Indeed Carter made clear he “didn’t want to have a homogenous group around me, all of whom felt the same way.”19 He got his wish.
The president said he asked Ham several times to take over as chief of staff, when he recognized the void without one, but each time Ham demurred.20 Even when he was formally installed as chief of staff later after Carter reshuffled his cabinet, Ham felt he never really had the chance to serve effectively because within weeks he was targeted with outlandishly false drug charges following a brief but ill-advised visit to the Studio 54 nightclub in New York. At most he felt he was “more of a coordinator; I wasn’t a Chief of Staff in a sense that you’d send domestic policy papers through me. You’d come to me when you had a problem that you wanted me to help you with politically or evaluate politically.”21 To his credit, recognizing his administrative shortcomings, he brought in Alonzo McDonald, managing director of the global consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, as his deputy and White House staff director. Frankly, the president would have been far better off with a chief of staff from the start.
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The cabinet that Carter chose was stronger, more experienced, and abler than most of the White House staff. For the three most important cabinet positions, he chose stars who would have been on the short list of any Democratic president. Vance had served in senior positions at State and Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal held a Ph.D. in economics, served as a key trade negotiator in the Kennedy administration, led a major American corporation, and had a quick wit and outgoing manner. Defense Secretary Harold Brown not only had served at the Pentagon in the last Democratic administrations but had been director of the Livermore National Laboratory and came into the cabinet as president of the California Institute of Technology. Carter appointed two respected congressmen to the cabinet, Bob Berglund at Agriculture and Brock Adams at Transportation. Joe Califano, the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was a dynamo who had served as domestic adviser to President Johnson, and the secretaries of labor and commerce, Ray Marshall and Juanita Kreps, were respected economists.
One of my personal favorites was Cecil Andrus at Interior, a true environmentalist and former governor of Idaho who understood the West. Patricia Harris, at Housing and Urban Development, was a well-known Washington lawyer, urban activist, and the first black woman ever named to the cabinet. Andrew Young, Carter’s top black supporter from Atlanta and the first black congressman elected from the Deep South since Reconstruction, was his UN ambassador, and Robert Strauss, who knew everyone there was to know in Washington, became his special trade representative. The only Georgian, other than Lance, with cabinet status, was Attorney General Griffin Bell, Carter’s personal friend, Atlanta lawyer, and a former federal court of appeals judge, as well as the most conservative member of the cabinet.
This was a diverse and pathbreaking cabinet by geography, gender, race, and experience. But precisely because his cabinet was composed of strong individuals, with their own agendas, this led to a dissonance and lack of a clear message and priorities, when combined with Carter’s refusal to allow strong White House Staff intervention. For example, Patricia Harris was given the lead in developing a comprehensive urban policy among several agencies. As feisty and turf conscious a cabinet officer as we had, she finally threw her hands up and asked me to take over the interagency process because the other departments would not follow her lead.
Only the White House, which had solely the president’s interest in mind, could accomplish that kind of job. James Baker, Reagan’s chief of staff, later told me: “Everybody likes cabinet government, particularly the cabinet. But the fact of the matter is, presidents are going to make their decisions on the advice of people they trust and have confidence in. And for the most part those are people who have been through the wars with them and been through the campaign, and they’re the people in the White House.”22 While Carter never saw the cabinet as a decision-making body, he gave them so much freedom to name their own top aides and to make policy within their orbits that the critical White House role of integrating and coordinating those decisions was compromised during much of the first year of the administration.
But he also left the door of the Oval Office wide open to the disagreements inevitable among such a high-powered group of appointees. At their first gathering with him in Georgia after the election, Carter announced to the incoming cabinet that he would be available to them “at all times,” and that he would be in his office by 6:00 a.m. every morning; that he liked to read, and would welcome receiving their memos. Blumenthal remembered thinking, I wonder whether he realizes what that means? He’s going to be inundated. He can’t really mean it. But he seems sincere.”23
“COUSIN CHEAP”
In contrast to this delegation of authority to the cabinet heads, Carter early on gained a reputation as a micromanager, a label that was only partly justified and from which he could have saved himself by appointing a chief of staff. He did bring in his cousin Hugh Carter to take a series of self-defeating actions in reducing the White House staff in size and influence, but without bothering to consult the staffers themselves. “Cousin Cheap,” as he was infelicitously dubbed by Jody, ordered a reduction of our already small head count by 30 percent from Ford’s level.24 This edict was easily subverted by eliminating clerks and employing the hoary bureaucratic shuffle of seconding people from federal agencies in order to keep them off the published White House payroll. But there were reductions nevertheless in crucial areas such as congressional liaison. The official head count was reduced from 560 to 485, on paper anyway.
But this was only the start. Hess, who had been appointed to assist Watson in the transition, got a call while watching a Washington Redskins football game on Sunday from Greg Schneiders, a top Carter aide, informing him that “the governor wants to know how to cut the White House motor pool.” Appalled that Carter was involving himself in such penny-pinching detail, Hess pointed out that these cars normally ferried staffers from the White House to Capitol Hill to lobby for the president’s programs, and to agencies spread across the city for discussions and oversight of their operations. He asked, “Do you want them to hitchhike? Catch a bus?”25
The motor pool remained, but the president-elect ended the door-to-door car service to pick up senior White House staff at home early in the morning and return them late at night. This was not a matter of losing prestige but of simple efficiency. Depending on how far a staffer lived from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, commuting in his or her own car took up to an hour or more a day, as it did for me, and distracted me from the essential tasks of following a steady flow of documents and returning innumerable phone calls that could not be performed at the wheel in the pre–cell phone era. The most ludicrous outcome occurred when gasoline lines emerged following the Iranian revolution and I had to wait in line for more than half an hour so I could drive to the White House and try to end the shortage (and doing a pretty inadequate job at that).
President Carter Page 10