On their way out, Mondale asked Moe to draft what became an eleven-page, double-spaced memorandum of their discussion with Carter, which Mondale signed and sent to the president-elect early in December of 1976 as the new administration was taking shape. This extraordinary document changed the nature of the office and remains Mondale’s principal legacy. The memo starts by remarking on the historic ambiguity, frustration, and even antagonism involved in the vice presidency, followed by Mondale’s pledge “to do everything possible to make this administration a success. I fully realize that my personal and political success is totally tied to yours and the achievements of your administration.” The concrete proposals that followed may seem like bureaucratic minutiae, but to anyone familiar with the way power is exercised in Washington, they were big and bold, and their legitimacy rested on the fact that he was the only other American public official elected nationwide. Furthermore, the argument for change was based on Mondale’s accurate observation that “the biggest single problem of our recent administrations has been the failure of the president to be exposed to independent analysis, not conditioned by what it is thought he wants to hear or often what others want him to hear.”
Mondale was not the first to remark on the difficulty of piercing the bubble of sycophancy that threatens to suffocate the judgment of any president, nor would he be the last. But he did not hesitate to voice critical opinions to Carter at their regular, private, weekly lunches, and, at times, to me. His key requests were designed to assure him that he had the facts necessary to make informed recommendations:
• Frequent and comprehensive intelligence briefings from the CIA and other intelligence agencies similar to those received by the president, with advance warning of the major issues to be discussed at meetings of the National Security and Domestic Councils, and other significant presidential advisory bodies. Mondale would also have his own “seasoned, experienced” representative on these groups, as well as in the office of the president’s press secretary and his legal counsel.
• A special relationship with other members of the executive branch. Carter would emphasize to his cabinet and other high officials that they were to be as responsive to him as to the president himself, which meant that Mondale’s voice would be taken as the president’s. “Access to you at a meeting at least once a week for thirty minutes to an hour.” This demand was quickly satisfied by regular weekly lunches attended only by the president and vice president.
• General functions would include troubleshooting as problems arose, and he singled out the politically radioactive issue of crime; arbitrating conflicts between government departments; and representing the president abroad not just as a ceremonial mourner but to give “a first-hand assessment of foreign leaders and situations.” He would also be a key contact with his former congressional colleagues, and provide advice on the best administration approach.
• Political action to help keep the administration on the offensive with the Democratic Party and with special constituencies, such as labor, as well as with mayors and governors. Mondale asked to take the lead on legislative proposals for campaign finance, voter registration, and laws governing political primaries. All that would help him strengthen his political base to run for the presidency (which he did in 1984 but was overwhelmed by Ronald Reagan).
Mondale later told me that he tried to be “the best assistant to the president I could be. I’m not an alternative to the president. I’m not a deputy president. There was only one president and his name was Carter. My job was to be as candid as I could. And then,… a decision having been made, unless I disagreed with it deeply, to implement it. And to bring my experience to bear as a troubleshooter within the administration and with the Congress; to be a spokesman nationally; to hold hands and seek the repair of hurt feelings; and generally to be the fireman around there—but not to get in the position where I was competing in a line function with anybody.” He also tried to use this power sparingly and diplomatically: “I often held my voice at meetings because I figured people would think it’s a signal [from the president], so I’d shut my mouth.”17
Carter agreed to all Mondale’s demands without change, and went a step further. On his own initiative Carter offered a West Wing office, which came as a complete surprise and turned out to be one of the most important reforms. Not until the Kennedy administration did any vice president even have a place next door in the Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), and the vice president’s titular office was in the Capitol almost a mile away. Mondale kept that space and in fact ended up with three offices: the magnificent, largely ceremonial one next to the White House; the one on the Senate side of the Capitol, essential for Mondale to keep alive his many contacts with Congress to lobby for administration programs; and the one in the West Wing.
Why was it so important for Mondale to shift his working base from the huge, chandeliered office in the Executive Office Building, with its historic desk engraved with the signature of every one of his predecessors, to the more modest West Wing office? Just as in real estate, “Location, location, location” is the watchword in politics and government; proximity to the president and his top aides is essential to be in the mix of all critical decisions. Mondale could swap rumors with the small handful of people right around the president, and he could walk down the hall to the Oval Office in a few seconds, rather than the few minutes it takes to cross West Executive Avenue, climb the stairs, and reach the president. As he quipped, “If you’re in the Executive Office Building, you might as well be in Baltimore!”18
Of course there was a downside to this proximity that was not at first evident: When the administration began unraveling in its last year, Mondale was caught up in it. He joked ruefully that the presidency was like a fire hydrant that everyone “could piss on”—and that included every disgruntled member of Congress and every political-interest group he would have to cultivate in continuing his political career.
But Mondale was comfortable in the “dinky little building” of our seat of presidential power and was wise enough not to overreach. Although Carter offered him any office he wanted, he passed up a prized corner office Ham occupied on one side, and Zbig Brzezinski on the other, and took a smaller, windowless office situated less than ten yards from the Roosevelt Room, the Cabinet Room, and the president’s own Oval Office. This modest placement gave rise to a comical quest. One day Mondale called Michael Berman, his legal counsel and political consigliere, about a bathroom that had been outside Henry Kissinger’s national security office. It had a coveted private commode and small washbasin that now opened only on the corner office that was occupied by Brzezinski. Mondale asked Berman to find out whether the bathroom had originally opened onto his new office. Had the door been moved by Kissinger? Berman was incredulous, but Mondale told him, “I’m serious.” Berman obtained the early-twentieth-century blueprints, and sure enough Mondale’s memory was correct: The bathroom door had been switched at about the time Kissinger was serving as Nixon’s national security adviser—Brzezinski’s distinguished predecessor. Having made this historical discovery, Berman gave Mondale the sound political advice that “there’s no way to change this bathroom back again!” So with the fate of the Western world hanging on the decision, for the next four years, the vice president of the United States had to content himself with using a bathroom in the hallway.19
Symbolic of the historic nature of the change in the vice presidency was a scene witnessed by Norman Sherman, Hubert Humphrey’s former press secretary. Berman observed his visitor’s startled appearance and asked what was wrong. Sherman said that he had just passed the secretaries of state and defense sitting on a couch in the small anteroom of Mondale’s office, waiting to confer with him. He exclaimed to Berman, “There is no time in Humphrey’s entire tenure as vice president that two people of the stature that are sitting on that couch waiting to see Mondale would ever have been sitting outside his office anywhe
re.”20 There could be no more visible evidence that, for the first time in the history of that once-demeaned office, Carter’s vice president had real clout.
It was underwritten by Carter assigning major tasks to Mondale from the start. His most historically important achievement was leading the U.S. delegation at the July 1979 UN Special Refugee Conference, where his stirring speech, written with his chief speechwriter, Martin Kaplan, evoked the 1938 Evian Conference, at which the world refused to liberalize immigration quotas for Jewish refugees. He said the “world will not forgive us if we fail” in saving Vietnamese and South Asian boat people. With Carter’s full backing, he got a reluctant Sixth Fleet to rescue them at sea, and got a number of countries, prodded by the United States, which took five hundred thousand onto our shores, to take tens of thousands of others.21 His staff took the lead on a key set of Carter initiatives on the reform of campaign finance, and later, Richard Moe, his chief of staff, was given the sensitive job of vetting candidates for chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Carter had in fact suggested that Mondale might serve as a de facto chief of staff, but Mondale declined, lest the administrative responsibility tie him down. Mondale jujitsued Carter into enhancing the vice president’s reach after the president declared he did not want competing presidential and vice presidential staffs, but one united staff for both. “I can’t be without a staff,” Mondale told Carter, so they agreed on two staffs, “effectively integrated.”22 Moe would remain Mondale’s chief of staff but was also given the title Assistant to the President, a rank equal to the top presidential aides, and Carter would also include him in the stream of advice from Ham, the president’s closest confidant. This had never happened before. As a result of Carter’s kumbaya vision of the White House, the vice president, a canny and experienced Washington hand, was able to place his own man, David Aaron, on Brzezinski’s staff as deputy national security adviser, and Bert Carp as one of my two deputies. This happened quickly and with stealth. In the first days of the administration Mondale called me and said he wanted Bert Carp, whom I had never met, to serve as deputy chief of my Domestic Policy Council. I told him I already had a talented deputy, David Rubenstein, whom I hired during the campaign. Mondale said gaily, “Stu, now you have two deputies!” What could I say?
In fact, I never regretted it. Carp expertly directed our two dozen Domestic Policy Staff members; oversaw drafts of the decision memoranda by coordinating the views of all departments and agencies; and, in the end, placed some of Mondale’s more liberal imprint on our domestic policy. Rubenstein worked with me to finalize decision memorandums we sent to the president, helped organize my schedule, and served as my eyes and ears in the West Wing and the cabinet departments. In his post–White House career he donated hundreds of millions to education, U.S. landmarks, and the arts from the fortune that he amassed later as cofounder of the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based multibillion-dollar investment fund.
Mondale’s weekly one-on-one lunch with the president when both were in Washington lasted an hour or more and established a tradition followed by all future presidents. Moe would propose talking points for Mondale, who would add or delete items and make marginal notes in advance as part of his own careful preparation.23 Moe regarded these lunches as probably the single most important element in their relationship because the two were able to speak frankly between themselves.24 As Mondale recounted, “The president was serious about it. I brought the agenda in. He would occasionally bring things up. I would raise the issues, and I’d say this is what I want to talk about. And he was very conscientious about that time. He never crowded me, and he always wanted to listen.”
These private lunches were important beyond discussing policy issues. Because the president was so hesitant to permit the open discussion of political considerations in cabinet and other meetings, Mondale used the lunches to talk politics. As he put it: “So when I was alone with him for those scheduled lunches everything was on the table that I wanted on the table, or that he wanted on the table.”25 Mondale found the lunches so valuable that he never risked ending them by disclosing what had passed between them. Carter often talked about his place in history or about how he had handled a problem. Mondale did not hold back his views, however painful. Once he told Carter that the Congress was “laughing at you up there. You’ve got to veto something fast. You’ve got to wake them up.” Carter replied, “Good, I’ll do it.” And he vetoed a congressional authorization to build the B-1 bomber, an aircraft of limited use that consistently ran over budget.
Carter also invited Mondale to the weekly White House foreign-policy breakfasts and made certain he was in the intelligence flow. “All the stuff that went into the president’s office I saw; I had all the secrets,” he said. Of course the president did not always accept Mondale’s political advice, which at times had an old-school liberal political quality, given that Carter was more conservative and had been elected on a promise to change the way government acted. For example, Carter envisioned establishing blue-ribbon panels of legal experts and eminent public figures to select the federal judges nominated by all presidents. Mondale said: “Mr. President, I don’t agree with that at all. I think the political process has done a very fine job picking judges, and I think you are going to get those special-interest corporate lawyers [to pick them instead].” In Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, Carter wanted to pick a Republican as well as a Democrat. Mondale said: “Forget it.” He did, but by Executive Order made all of his federal district court judicial appointments from a list provided by bipartisan panels of experts.
During the hours they spent alone in Blair House the day before the inauguration, Carter proposed to make Mondale the first vice president in the chain of command in the event of a military emergency during which the president might be disabled. That same night they signed the formal documents in a room at the Kennedy Center at a preinauguration concert. Mondale came very close to serving as acting president once, when the president had minor hemorrhoid surgery that entailed sedation. But it never happened.26 There was confusion in the White House when Ronald Reagan was shot by a deranged assassin and the then–vice president, George H. W. Bush, was in Texas for a speech, as Chief of Staff Alexander Haig proclaimed he was in charge. On the day of Osama bin Laden’s aerial assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney temporarily took power to far greater effect while President George W. Bush was in Florida and remained out of Washington for the rest of the day to avoid a second strike that never came.
Carter also shared one other accoutrement of power: He allowed Mondale to use Camp David on his own. When friends came to Washington, Mondale sometimes gave them an unforgettable treat. He would put them in a helicopter on the White House lawn and fly them to Camp David for an overnight stay. Needless to say, political friends were duly impressed.27 Such gracious behavior meant a great deal to the vice president, who was especially sensitive in view of Humphrey’s humiliations by LBJ and his staff. Before they were sworn in, Mondale told Carter: “My pride is very important to me; my dignity is very important to me. If you can help me protect that, I’ll do anything for you, but I will become a pipsqueak if I get pushed around, or if I have to go out and sell something I absolutely cannot sell.” There were occasional sharp disagreements, and “he’d get mad at me once in a while, and he’d get irritated and get short with me, but, hell, that’s got to happen.” But, said Mondale, “he never embarrassed me once [and] our relationship was unprecedented.”28
POLITICS AND THE PRESIDENCY (AS SEEN BY THE VICE PRESIDENT)
This remarkably intimate partnership gave Mondale a special insight into Jimmy Carter’s strengths and weaknesses as the nation’s chief executive; it was a more objective view than that of us Georgians, who had been with him longer. Despite Carter’s strong record of legislative accomplishment, Mondale felt that one of his great weaknesses was that “he was terrible at the public education role, and he had no confidence in himself.” While we were
all struggling to have Congress pass his energy legislation, Carter once told Mondale, “You know, nobody will listen to me.” Mondale immediately told him, “Mr. President, you cannot believe that; it will destroy you.” They jousted over the often-decisive role of presidential speeches, and while Mondale respected Carter’s diligence on substance, he faulted him on conveying it to the public.
The vice president saw up close what many of us did. Carter’s great strength was his willingness to tackle what seemed to be insurmountable challenges by dint of eighteen-hour days and self-discipline, and that somehow he could govern because he knew more about a subject than anybody else. “That was his management tool,” said Mondale. “He’d take all those mounds of paper and read all night, and he’d read everything. And the word got out, and people started dumping more, and he got tons of stuff. He would read it all. He loved to know what was going on.” Mondale saw the engineer in Carter, a man who thought that once the model policy was constructed and clearly displayed, it would carry its own weight and thus be clearly understood, “that intelligent people would add up the numbers—it wasn’t oratory.… He had contempt for orators,” telling Mondale, “Oh yeah, you and Humphrey like to speak; I don’t do that.”29
Mondale was a natural politician who loved being with others of his kind. He was a creature of Congress. The camaraderie, the political gossip, and the stories of battles won and lost were in his blood. Carter did not like politicians and felt uncomfortable with the normal byplay of political compromise as well as the give-and-take relationships between the president and Congress. That was why he brought his Georgia political sidekick Bert Lance to Washington. In some ways Mondale supplanted Lance and could accomplish things on the Hill better than Lance because of his long experience there. But he also found that when members felt they were in trouble, Carter would “not be there to help—even when they had been helping him. And when things really got bad, they weren’t with us.” He marveled that someone like Carter had gone so far in politics while distrusting “its personal side,” adding, “He thought that once you’re elected president, you’ve been spotted a certain advantage: you are commander in chief; you are the chief executive officer, and that required a certain respect and deference that he quickly found out that Congress had no intention of granting him.” Mondale loved politics, and believed in stressing the positive. But Mondale said it “would break your heart” when Carter would tell a joyful crowd celebrating his victory in creating a new Department of Education, “This thing won’t work as well as you think it will.”30
President Carter Page 13