Carter had to continue walking a tightrope at the October 25 Democratic leadership breakfast, which this time included the opposing senators, Russell Long and Scoop Jackson, who quickly engaged in a dispute over energy taxes. Said Long: “Let’s get a bill to conference and not fight our battles on the Senator floor now.” Aware that getting a bill was a do-or-die test for Carter, Long, who also knew he held most of the high cards, promised not to sign on to a compromise that the president would veto, but that was more blather for show than substance. While Byrd confidently explained that the conference had been divided into two groups, one to deal only with taxes, Long refused to convene his tax group until he got what he wanted on natural gas—and that took almost another year. This high-wire act was also played out with congressional liberals.
The next day Toby Moffett and Bob Eckhardt led a delegation of proregulation, proconsumer liberal congressmen into the Cabinet Room. Emotionally overwrought and strident, Moffett warned the president that if “you cave in to Long, you will lose the House.”21 Put on the defensive, Carter told the liberals he shared their beliefs, and on the bill itself he promised, “I won’t betray you; I will tell you of all changes.” But in the end, to get any energy bill at all, he had to do just that and agree to a modified form of deregulation, despite all his efforts to deploy his cabinet and appeal over the heads of Congress.
Then some of the senior staff decided we needed to intensify the president’s meetings with business leaders, and we brought the idea to Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps. Schultze said it would be better to have him meet less frequently, but spend more time at the meetings, since he tended to “breeze in” for only half an hour and then leave. This prompted a broader criticism from Strauss, which could be extended to Carter’s entire approach to the presidency. He agreed that thirty minutes was not enough time and told us that he had failed to persuade him to spend a full hour with groups he brought in to sell the Tokyo Round agreement on international trade. Strauss said in frustration, “He needs to spend more time seeing people and less on learning the details of every issue.”22 This was blowing in the wind. Immersion in details, for better or worse, was Jimmy Carter’s modus operandi.
It was not that he was unable to move the government in the direction he wanted; he definitely could do that and had already done so with a number of bills. At a Democratic leadership breakfast on November 1, O’Neill ticked off these accomplishments. Tom Foley of Washington, an extraordinarily wise legislator who would later become Speaker, pleaded for “issues we can win on” so there would be a strong record going into the midterm elections. But Carter did not think that way: A dogged political campaigner, he separated politics from policy in the White House to pursue what he thought was the right policy and was always suspicious of the link between the two. And when he latched onto an issue like energy that he viewed with a moral dimension, he could be so tenacious that other priorities could fade from view and get stuck in a legislative logjam.23
One sad personal experience emphasized this as much as any success: a final appearance at the breakfast by one of the party’s most liberal, most outstanding, and one of Carter’s most supportive legislators, Hubert Humphrey, who was dying of cancer. Rising to the occasion, and mustering as much strength as his emaciated body allowed, he warned that the Republicans were going to try to create divisions between the Congress and the president on energy to “show we don’t know how to govern and can’t get anything done. Mr. President, you need to scare the daylights out of them.” His last words were to urge the president to continue to drive home to the American people the critical importance of the energy bill, or “we will be bankrupt from importing more and more foreign oil.” When he finished there was not a dry eye among those tough politicians.
As the meeting ended in the small White House dining room, I told him how proud I had been to work in his 1968 presidential campaign, and he replied in words that still resonate with me, “Stu, I always tell people you worked for me.” I choked up later when he called me shortly before he died to thank me again. His death also deprived Carter of a liberal champion who could have helped him counter Ted Kennedy’s eventual challenge.
More important, seeing that Humphrey’s days were numbered, Carter took the extraordinary step of inviting him to the Oval Office to sit in the president’s chair that he told him he deserved to occupy, and then flew with him on Marine One for a night at Camp David—something he had never had as LBJ’s vice president.
Then suddenly—and to his great credit—J. Bennett Johnston, the junior senator from Louisiana and the chairman of Jackson’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power, came forward with a natural-gas compromise. Although tough minded, moderate, and articulate, he was a most unlikely dealmaker as a representative of an oil and gas state—and even more so because he felt that Carter had repeatedly snubbed him.24 Johnston had chaired Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign in Louisiana because he wanted to see a Southerner in the White House, and his support was a factor in Carter narrowly carrying the state. But when Carter got to the White House, Johnston lamented he never reached out—did not invite Johnston to White House social occasions as Nixon had; never once contacted him on the energy bill; and even blocked Johnston’s nominee for U.S. attorney for Louisiana because someone spread a false rumor that the man had Mafia connections. Johnston was offended and later discovered that other Democrats suffered the same treatment, including Joe Biden, senator from Delaware and later vice president in the Obama administration, who had been one of the first to come out for Carter.25
But as a good Democrat and a public servant, Johnston tried to break the deadlock, using the leverage he was given by Scoop Jackson, who had put him in charge of the Senate energy conferees, because Jackson was more interested in military affairs as a member of the Armed Services Committee. With the Christmas recess looming, Johnston won the backing of a fellow Southern Democrat, Wendell Ford of Kentucky—a coal state—to propose a compromise that would decontrol natural-gas prices over six years. They called it their “Christmas Turkey,” which unfortunately is what it turned out to be. Left and right denounced it.
Then Scoop took his revenge on Johnston for upstaging him—and perhaps on Carter, too. Without explanation he bolted out of Washington for the Christmas break at his vacation house near Palm Springs, California, and refused to agree to the compromise in his absence. Schlesinger, with Scoop Jackson’s close friend Charles Curtis, head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in tow, to bolster his case, flew to see his mentor, who told him, “I am through trying to legislate about natural gas. We [will] never pass any natural gas legislation.”26 Schlesinger persuaded him to try again, and it worked, or so it seemed, because the conferees resumed their meetings in January; but the road was long and hard. Schlesinger believed the real reason that Jackson wrung the neck of Johnston’s Christmas turkey was a reporter’s account of a dismissive remark by Ham when he was asked about the Senate’s role in the energy bill: “Oh, we don’t care about Jackson, we licked his ass in [the primary in] Pennsylvania.”27 Ham never called to apologize for the remark or to deny it.
While these stories underscore the apolitical nature of the president’s approach, failure to attend to Johnson’s home-state needs or stroke Jackson’s towering ego could be traced to the White House political operation. It is not enough to be both visionary and right on policy; it is also important to operate in the hothouse of Washington politics, where small slights add up to big problems. Politics in general, and presidential politics in particular, is a contact sport. While there are times when a challenge must be met with a fight, it is also essential to build personal relationships with deft touches such as invitations to small dinners, drinks in the private White House quarters, birthday and anniversary phone calls, notes of thanks, tennis games on the White House court followed by locker-room time to schmooze, trips on Air Force One, and many other personal gestures whose principal value lies in the fact that they come from the President of the Unite
d States. These were few and far between in the Carter White House.
After the Christmas recess, the president called me on January 2528 and said Congressman John Dingell, the formidable Michigan Democrat whose principal interest was protecting the auto industry, had asked the White House to set up a “quick turnaround mechanism” to deal with compromises. Negotiations, it was said, were reaching a critical point, and Carter directed me and my staff to work with Schlesinger’s to produce answers to congressional questions within fifteen minutes. Schlesinger kept insisting that the president hold his fire with Congress so he could apply the prestige of his office only at the moment of compromise, when it would be necessary to sell a complete package to both houses. He thought that moment might be near when Scoop seemed to throw his weight behind phasing in natural-gas deregulation by 1985—but that was not soon enough for the Republicans.
Schlesinger assured the cabinet on February 7 that the latest compromise looked like it could win approval, but Scoop scuttled it yet again—this time by leaving on a trip to China. A frustrated Carter was forced to tell the Democratic leadership that “I am staying impatiently aloof” from the energy negotiations.29 It was hard to escape the conclusion that Scoop was trying to sabotage a deal, whether in anger at Carter or Long or simply because he had opposed deregulation of natural gas throughout his career and wanted to postpone the inevitable as long as possible. But, when nine senators agreed on a bipartisan compromise and presented it to their House colleagues on March 9, the man who blocked the deal was Dingell.
CARTER RECONSIDERS HIS APPROACH
The impasse prompted the president to reconsider the way he was governing. He announced at the March 13 cabinet meeting that he was contemplating holding the meetings every other Monday instead of every week, because “at times I get bored.”30 Vance agreed, and Brzezinski suggested choosing specific topics for certain cabinet sessions, but the president rejected this, preferring to discuss what was relevant that day. Housing Secretary Pat Harris suggested that instead of weekly meetings the president meet separately with each member of the cabinet, once each quarter. This seemed reasonable because, as I noted on my pad, “Cabinet Secretaries saw JC very little” anyway. Juanita Kreps made a telling criticism: She said she “shared his boredom [and] proposed less reporting of trivia and getting more direction of the priorities of the president.” There were also rumblings close to the top that would reverberate much later in an administration shake-up that seemed close to panic.
On the night of March 14,31 we had an unusual meeting at Jody Powell’s home, with only Jody and his wife, Nan, Ham Jordan and his wife, Nancy, and me and Fran. It lasted from 9:30 p.m. to midnight, and we discussed Ham’s plan to shake up the White House staff and the president’s desire to put the cabinet and agencies under tighter control to support his priorities, instead of their own narrow departmental goals. Clearly Carter’s original plan of decentralized cabinet government was not working; he had overreacted to the discredited model of the powerful Nixon White House and as a result was leading a government whose goals were too diffuse and results too uncertain, and without a chief of staff to try to develop a coherent theme. Earlier that same day Strauss had called me to urge that the administration bring in a few experienced Washington heavyweights from previous Democratic administrations. “People are turning Carter off and have no respect for him. I feel his presidency will be gone without action before the summer,” said Strauss.32
Carter himself shared Strauss’s worries. On Sunday and Monday, April 16, he held an extraordinary stocktaking with senior White House staff and the cabinet at Camp David. I doubt any president before or since has held such a frank and open assessment of his own presidency. Unsmiling, he began by making bullet points from a small notepad on his progress in international affairs and said he believed no previous president, including Franklin Roosevelt in the midst of the Depression, had “ever put forward a series of comprehensive efforts like we have: the Middle East, Panama, Africa, energy, urban policy, tax reform, water policy, Alaska lands, federal lands, irrigation supplies, national health insurance.” But he underscored that because “the country has shifted to a more conservative attitude, everything we do is contrary to people’s inclinations.”
Next came his own self-critique, rare in any president in front of his own appointees: White House decisions came too slowly; Washington experience was lacking; and staff did not communicate well. He then turned on his cabinet, listing a series of complaints—first that “at times you don’t support White House policy, when I make final decisions contrary to what you recommend.” And further, that he and the White House staff did not always receive advance notice of controversial decisions made by cabinet departments, and did not respond expeditiously to White House requests for action or comment. Finally, in as blunt an admission as I had ever heard him make, he pointed to the midterm elections in November and demanded that every one of them “bend over backwards to help Democrats—to the second mile. If we lose thirty-five votes in the Congress, we’ll be castrated.”
Then he turned the tables and asked the cabinet to critique his own performance. This was unique and rightly so, because the president should never allow his subordinates to criticize him in front of their peers. Schlesinger began by saying that from his experience with several presidents, “You spend more time on detail than any president in our history. I suggest you spend less time on detail, and use your time wisely.” I knew it was his governing style to be as well informed at any meeting as his interlocutors, but Schlesinger’s critique went further: It was really a plea for the president to spend more time thinking broadly about his ultimate goals and meeting with leaders of Congress and his own cabinet. Strauss was more direct and much rougher: “I’ve never seen an administration with so many people willing to speak negatively about it.” Meanwhile, he continued, Congress had been sent so many proposals that the president was “positioned in too many places where you’ll come out a loser.” Schultze, the top White House economic adviser who had earlier served as budget director to that relentless taskmaster Lyndon Johnson, told Carter he was “not tough enough on us.” Mondale also urged him to “act tougher.” Agriculture Secretary Bob Berglund said that presidents can govern from “two motivating factors, faith and fear,” and while Nixon used the latter, Carter had swung too far in the other direction and needed “to crack political heads.”
A common thread of criticism was the lack of a theme for the presidency, which made it harder to let the public know how many of Carter’s campaign promises he had actually achieved. Commerce Secretary Kreps said everything should be focused on creating jobs and cutting inflation. What was surprising was that only two participants used the opportunity to push their own agendas. Although Brzezinski spoke broadly, saying that the administration’s “historical profile is not clear,” he really meant that Carter did not take consistent positions, particularly toward the Soviet Union. The cabinet member with the strongest record in pressing his agenda and a press operation actively publicizing it was Joe Califano. He told Carter that while candid communication with the president was important, cabinet members “need friends whom we can call in rough times.” Carter eventually fired him.
Ham, to this day the best political mind I have ever encountered, was remarkably frank in front of the cabinet. “We’ve got an active Democratic president when the mood of the country is passive and nonpartisan. We don’t have an obvious and pressing agenda. The public consensus is that this president is not tough and we’re not managing well.”
I added my two cents: “We have tried too much, too fast, too comprehensively, in foreign and domestic affairs. Moving this way is contrary to the way Congress operates, and makes it difficult for the American people to understand our agenda.” I noted that he had a particularly difficult challenge because the American people “had voted for a better not a larger government,” and that the country was in a conservative mood. While he talked tough on inflation and spending, we were
negotiating an expensive national health care plan and other programs to satisfy Democratic constituency groups.
The president concluded with a Carteresque self-awareness that his domestic policy themes “are not clear in my mind.” He continued, “I feel like a referee between the cabinet and the White House staff. Ninety percent of the problems can be resolved by the staff knowing the cabinet better. Once I sign off on a policy, I expect you to carry it out.… I could see a deterioration of our esteem in the public eye, and I don’t disagree with the public. What has bothered me is a lack of cohesion and team spirit, which is almost inevitable. We have a damn good administration, a fine cabinet, a good staff. I wish you knew each other better.”33 He closed by stating, “I will try to be meaner.”
Shortly afterward he summarized the event by saying he had “frank and brutal talks” with his cabinet and White House Staff and admitting that “we were greenhorns when we came into office.”34 I believe that relations between the White House and the cabinet improved, but this was temporary and later provoked a much greater shake-up, again induced by the pervasive political hurdles in forming an energy policy with so many conflicting interests, and by the lack of an overarching theme for the Carter administration that was never solved.
A FINAL ATTEMPT TO FOIL THE SENATE GRAVEDIGGER
While Carter’s mode of governance, indeed his very election as president, represented at least partly a reaction against the Watergate scandals, Congress had been affected, too. In a post-Watergate paroxysm, House-Senate Conference Committee sessions were opened to the public. This sounds good in theory but in practice was highly counterproductive. Lawmakers are reluctant to make tough compromises in public instead of through the give-and-take that is usually possible only in private sessions, because it may involve sacrificing constituent interests to get to “yes.”
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