It now was time to vote, and as each member came to cast his or her vote, John Dingell greeted them at one end of the chamber with his fierce visage; his formidable fist waved with his thumb emphatically down. At the opposite end stood Krueger, still hoping for more rapid deregulation, holding both arms aloft. The deregulation amendment failed, getting 199 votes to 227 in opposition, with 72 Southern and producer-state Democrats supporting it along with virtually every Republican. This was the first big test of O’Neill’s leadership as Speaker, but he did not crow over his victory. His lieutenants heaved a sigh of relief because passage would have dealt a psychologically catastrophic blow to the whole energy plan.
Carter pitched in, although he did throw some curveballs. On the one hand he gave a group of House members the ultimate presidential perk, opening Camp David to them and their wives for a weekend and ferrying them to the mountain retreat aboard his Marine One helicopter. But he could not put his prudishness above politics. Crossed off the guest list was Don Edwards, a liberal California member of the House Ways and Means Committee, then living with a woman who was not his wife. The couple later married, but not even Bill Cable, the White House lobbyist who attended the wedding, ever told him why he had been blackballed.21
To his credit, though, Carter could be forgiving to his enemies. Krueger later gave up his safe seat to challenge Republican Senator John Tower. The Texas Republicans created a sham Hispanic party to drain away votes, and Krueger lost by only five thousand votes out of two million cast. Carter invited him to the Oval Office, and said, “Bob, I know how you feel. But let me tell you, it’s a lot worse to lose to a man who chases blacks out of his restaurant with an ax handle [Lester Maddox, who defeated Carter in his first run for governor] than it is to lose by less than one percent to an 18-year Senate veteran.” Carter then appointed him special coordinator for Mexican affairs with ambassadorial rank, and Krueger played an important role in negotiating the importation of Mexican natural gas for the first time, another positive legacy of the Carter energy program.22
After the smoke cleared, the president, Schlesinger, and the Democratic leadership had accomplished something truly revolutionary through our normally incremental democratic process. The National Energy Act passed by a healthy 244–177 margin on August 5, 1977, only three and one-half months after the president’s energy plan was sent to Congress.
Carter had begun to set the United States on a different course on energy, from which the nation benefits to this day: incentives for home insulation and the first tax credits for solar and wind equipment; home inspections mandated for utilities to assess the cost and saving of energy conservation; federal energy efficiency standards for thirteen different kinds of appliances; $300 million to help pay for energy-conservation equipment in schools, hospitals, and government buildings; one uniform, national regulated market for natural gas; homeowners shielded from the immediate impact of rising prices by making industry absorb a disproportionate amount of the increase; minimum national standards for electricity rates to reflect their true costs; a gas-guzzler tax on autos averaging less than thirteen miles per gallon; a Crude Oil Equalization Tax on domestically produced oil, raising its wellhead price to world market levels, with the revenues rebated to taxpayers through lower income-tax withholding; and strong incentives for industries and utilities to shift to coal from natural gas or oil.23 (This was long before the threat of burning fossil fuels in causing global warning was widely recognized.)
While the Democratic leadership and the administration had won this decisive battle in the House, it turned into a Pyrrhic victory. The Senate later passed a Krueger-style bill decontrolling natural gas. We would have been far better off if we had we lost that fight to Krueger in the House, since the entire energy package would most likely have been passed promptly by the Senate. We thus would have paid our political debts to the oil-patch governors who helped elect Carter, and the whole energy plan would have gotten under way promptly. Instead, the Senate barons wrangled for home-state advantages, and a House-Senate Conference Committee fought for a year to reconcile differences on natural gas between the bills passed by the two chambers.
8
THE SENATE GRAVEYARD
If the United States were a parliamentary democracy, Jimmy Carter would have been seen as a hero for his accomplishments on energy during his first six months in office. His early mistakes would have been forgotten, and his image as a leader would have been burnished; his Gallup poll approval ratings were over 60 percent after this first hundred days, almost identical to Ronald Reagan’s, and higher than those of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and far higher than Donald Trump’s at a comparable time.1
But our Constitution created a federal system with two very distinct legislative bodies. The Founders envisioned the Senate as a more deliberative body, a brake on the instincts of the lower house, which presumably would be subject to the caprices of popular opinion, in part because of its members’ two-year terms and more localized districts. By contrast, each state elects two senators regardless of population, and senators take their prerogatives so seriously that many seem to act as if they are the plenipotentiary ambassadors of sovereign states. The Senate’s rules and prerogatives reflect that illusion. Its offices and staffs are much larger than those of the House, and many senior senators also have magnificently appointed hideaways in the Capitol itself. They are sensitive to the most minor slights from the White House, since at any given time a substantial number believe they should be president; many had actually tried and failed, and a handful had even been outrun by Jimmy Carter in the race for the White House. Even some who had not, felt they deserved to be sitting in the Oval Office far more than a one-term governor from Georgia who had never been part of their exclusive club. The makers of the Constitution succeeded, perhaps more than they might have wished, in creating not just a brake on the actions of the House, but a graveyard of hopes. This was the fate of the Carter energy bill, which had been moving like a freight train right on schedule through the House, but was stalled in the Senate for a year and almost emasculated.
The man whose task it was to steer the energy bill through the Senate was its majority leader, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat of humble origins and a deeply read autodidact who rose to the pinnacle of power out of the hills of his beloved West Virginia. He had flirted with the Ku Klux Klan early in his political career, but apologized and deeply regretted it. As the Carter energy package plopped into Byrd’s lap, Carter told a September cabinet meeting that Byrd’s “overt demonstration of leadership was absent.” I felt Carter was overly critical of the majority leader, who had far less power over the Senate than O’Neill over a compliant Democratic majority in the House. In any event, leadership essentially lay with the president himself.2
Byrd reminded me of a bantam rooster, with purposeful gait and swept-back hairdo. More important, he lacked O’Neill’s powers to package the bill and push it through an Ad Hoc Committee, and surely would have faced a revolt if he had tried. Personal egos, perceived slights, opaque Senate rules, Byrd’s inability to exercise discipline over the Senate’s unruly procedures and independent barons, all came together when the Senate considered the energy bill passed by the House. He shared O’Neill’s desire to help the president, but he lacked O’Neill’s charisma and his personal rapport with Carter. Byrd’s strength lay in his dogged mastery of the arcane procedures of the Senate he loved, but he could push the powerhouses of the Senate only so far. This was further complicated by our deferential attitude toward the Senate and Byrd’s sense of its prerogative in doing things in its own way. By his own admission the president did not lobby senators effectively and never met with the Senate committees involved with energy, as he had with the House, where O’Neill was his powerful ally in short-circuiting the parliamentary process.3
In significant part this failure arose from Schlesinger’s bizarre notion that Carter’s relationships with key senators was so negative that meeting with th
em would only make matters worse. He simply stopped scheduling such meetings for the president.4 This was not what I saw, however. He played tennis with Lloyd Bentsen, a key senator from the key oil state of Texas; dined with Russell Long, who chaired the Senate Finance Committee, and maintained cool if correct relations with Scoop Jackson, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. When the president asked to meet with senators on energy, and our White House congressional lobbyists pushed for them, Schlesinger would routinely say that the senators felt it best to wrangle among themselves. He was simply wrong, and his judgment was further aggravated by his unwarranted optimism about the bill’s prospects in the Senate.
So the Senate proceeded on its traditional path of dealing with the legislation by sending it to committees in piecemeal fashion. And it also happened that the two key chairmen could hardly have been worse choices for the administration. Jackson was short, solidly built, and universally known by his childhood nickname of “Scoop,” a Senate veteran with a straightforward speaking style, from his early experience as a hometown prosecutor. I believe he carried a political grudge against Carter, who whipped him in the 1976 primaries and then passed him over as his vice presidential choice. Domestically Scoop was a liberal New Dealer and environmentalist and in foreign affairs an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, paralleling his friend Jim Schlesinger, whom he had recommended to Carter and who therefore was in his debt. Jackson also represented a state where oil and gas prices were rarely front-burner issues because the Northwest had prospered on cheap hydroelectric power flowing from federally financed New Deal dams.
Russell Long, whose committee would consider all the tax measures in the energy program, was a different and far more colorful personality. He was born into politics as the son of the assassinated Louisiana governor Huey Long, the Depression-era demagogue fictionalized in Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel All the King’s Men. He told me the story of his father coming home late one night to the governor’s mansion so shaky from a night on the town that he collapsed in the foyer after struggling to fit his key in the door. Still young enough to hold on to “Mama’s apron strings,” Russell watched his mother with her arms folded, looking sternly at her husband for a full explanation. Without pause, the governor said, “Mama, I’ve completed my prepared remarks, and I will now take questions from the floor!”
Politics in Louisiana is a state of mind, and Huey’s son had mastered the game as few others had. He was no mossback conservative. There was a pinch of the populism of his storied father and a bit of the rascal of his uncle, Earl Long, who also served as governor of Louisiana with young Russell as his chief of staff, before abandoning government and politics as folderol and running off with a stripper—not an oil well, but a real one named Blaze Starr. One story Russell recounted was that in a bid for reelection, Uncle Earl made lavish promises of roads and bridges to the state’s local leaders if they delivered the vote. After he won, they returned to collect what they considered bills due, but were far beyond the state’s capacity to afford. Russell went into the governor’s office and asked in a quavering voice what he should say. The answer was quickly given, “Russell, tell them your uncle Earl lied!”
Jimmy Carter’s pure and principled version of governance simply did not exist in the same moral universe as Russell Long’s thoroughly transactional practice of politics, where there was a quid for every quo. Long made no secret of the fact that he served not only the people of Louisiana but the interests of its producers of oil and gas, and that deregulation of natural gas was an overriding priority. No senator held the fate of the president’s moral equivalent of war closer to his own chest than Long, through his committee’s oversight of taxation. And many of the president’s conservation incentives were tax-based.
I once asked Long, a peerless legislator and leader of his committee, what was the key to his success. He replied with an infectious wink, “I find out which way my troops are going and then I get in front of them.” By contrast with the stolid and deliberate Jackson, Long was gregarious, avuncular, effusive, and often talked or mumbled in riddles that others had a hard time deciphering. Fellow senators, the White House, and the press hung on every consciously ambiguous phrase. Chairman Long was such an engaging figure that he could be figuratively knifing you in the back while cupping his hand around your shoulder, chuckling and smiling. More important, unlike Jackson, Long spoke for the smaller, independent producers of the Gulf states, who commanded a phalanx of senators with more power in Congress on energy issues than the mistrusted majors.
During the climactic energy battle he viewed his fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter as a Southern liberal: “He did some good things that you couldn’t have done at an earlier stage and managed to survive it politically. For example, he put the picture of Martin Luther King up there in the State Capitol Building.” But what Long did not see in the president was either the interest or the ability to engage in the kind of political horse-trading that was his way of getting things done in Congress and anathema to Jimmy Carter, who felt if he made the right decisions for the country, the public and Congress would follow.
Long served under a number of presidents, and his model was one who would say to a senator, “‘If you’ll go as far as you can with me, I’ll do equally well by you, and there’s not much I wouldn’t do for you, providing it’s mutual.’ … [With] that kind of understanding, you can just get a lot of good men to really get out there and do battle for you.” At the same time, he made clear that a president has to understand that he can ask too much, at which point a senator has the right to say, “Mr. President, I can’t do that.” He expected to support a president when it was easy to do so, and on the very few occasions when the political cost of supporting a White House was too much for him, it was the president who would have to back away. He made himself sound like the most reasonable fellow, which in reality he was not when an issue touched his most treasured interests—incentives for his oil and gas industry and subsidies for his state’s sugar industry. On the contrary, he preferred to do deals.
When President John F. Kennedy’s trade bill was hung up in the Finance Committee and the administration was trying to stop a killer amendment proposed by the archconservative Harry Byrd of Virginia, Lyndon Johnson, then Kennedy’s vice president, approached Long and asked him innocently: “Are you trying to keep that military base open at Fort Polk [Louisiana]? If you do what I’ll tell you to do, you’ll get the base open.” Johnson then arranged an Oval Office meeting, advising the president in advance that both would benefit if “you help him with the military base, and he helps you where he can help you.” Long talked about the military base, and Kennedy about the need for Long’s support on the trade bill. But, recalled Long, “He wasn’t hearing me [and] President Kennedy said, ‘I don’t understand what this trade bill has got to do with that military base.’”
Long then lectured the young president in Politics 101: “I think the votes on the committee are equally divided, leaving me out of it, and if I vote with you on that bill, it’s going to come out the way you wanted it. And if I don’t vote with you, it’s going to come out the way Harry Byrd wants it.… All I want is Fort Polk to be open and kept open.” Long remembers that Kennedy definitely did not like that but said, “Oh, I see your point.” Long cast the decisive vote, and Fort Polk stayed open.
With Carter, no such transactional avenues were open, and the results were telling on the energy bill. Long felt that the president would have done far better if he had started off by saying, “‘I need your help, and I’ll do anything I can to help you, provided it’s mutual. Let me know what it is that you need; I’ll try to see that it works out to your advantage; that we can get it for you. By contrast, I’d like to be in the position to call you when I need you and it’s something you can do for me, and I’d hope you’d do it.’” But he found Carter was less willing to engage in such trades with Congress than any other president. It was not for lack of courting on the president’s part, with private meals a
nd a White House dinner including Carolyn Long and Rosalynn Carter.
But despite their shared Southern heritage, they might as well have been from different planets. As Long put it to me, “Frankly, the situation never got between us where I could really judge as to what extent he would be willing to do. I think he kind of liked to give the impression that he wasn’t going to make any deal of any sort.”5
But he never was given a chance to deal in the formative stages of the energy plan. Long was so frustrated at having been kept out of the loop that when Carter and Schlesinger were briefing members of Congress on the energy package before it was sent to Congress, Long rose to ask a question, and preceded it by announcing sarcastically, “I’m Russell Long, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.”6
Naturally one thinks of Lyndon Johnson, Long’s model and the legendary majority leader with a Texas-size ego and a checkbook to underwrite it, with campaign contributions from supporters for senators who voted his way. But Byrd was no LBJ. Treasury Secretary Blumenthal, the administration’s chief contact with Long, warned that the Senator was creating problems, and Carter passed that on to a Democratic leadership breakfast. Long wanted the wellhead tax revenues rebated to the energy companies; the president said he would agree to divert tax money for conservation—but not for the oil companies.7
* * *
Jackson’s Energy Committee meanwhile approved only slightly diluted versions of conservation and solar energy provisions, but natural-gas pricing, the key to the program, was stuck there in a split of 9 votes to 9. That meant the gas-deregulation provision would be sent to the Senate without a firm committee recommendation, opening the way either to reviving it by compromise or amending it to death. Byrd suggested adding enough provisions to spread around rebates for consumers and research to attract more liberal votes and set off a titanic Senate debate marked by blocking maneuvers worthy of the game of professional football.
President Carter Page 23