THEME AND FOUNDATIONS
Even as Carter compiled a substantial record of accomplishment in office, Caddell puzzled over the president’s diminishing support and concluded he had become captive of the same Washington interest groups he had run against. His surveys picked this up when special interests began blocking Carter’s legislative initiatives, particularly his comprehensive energy program, and reining in hospital costs, and he summarized them in a memorandum to the president in October of his first year in office. By the end of that year, Caddell’s polls were showing a widening gap between the president’s high personal popularity and the increasingly negative attitudes toward his performance in office. Caddell and Rafshoon jointly sent the president a letter to accompany a December 1977 poll, saying that the administration was headed for trouble. Caddell even suggested ordering the hundreds of presidential appointees to submit to an essay examination on the question: “What is the vision and purpose of the Carter Administration?” Then in mid-April 1978, Caddell and Rafshoon met at a sandwich shop in Georgetown just before going to see Rosalynn and presenting her with a memorandum for the president reporting further erosion of public support and urging Carter to return to his thematic campaign style.8
In response the president called his cabinet and White House staff together at Camp David on April 16–17, 1978, for a stocktaking.9 Nearly 20 pages of detailed typewritten minutes of the extraordinary session were taken by Carter’s personal secretary, Susan Clough.10 The principal topic was improving the administration’s political performance, and Carter was uncharacteristically blunt in his notes summarizing the frank discussions: “We had problems in the White House; leaks; slow in making many decisions; the lack of Washington experience; the cabinet felt they had inadequate access to me. It took too long to fill subcabinet vacancies. Needed to be more clear on our priorities and themes, particularly in presenting them to the press and the Congress. Need to spend more time cultivating public support and to hold down excessive public expectations. Some of the cabinet members don’t always support White House policy. They shared their concerns about leaks from within their departments. How slow it was to get Office of Personnel Management and OMB clearance [for appointments and budget decisions]; the need for more budget discipline.”
Carter nevertheless regarded the session as constructive.11 Two positive outcomes were the appointment of Anne Wexler, an experienced political veteran, to handle public outreach, and to bring in Rafshoon as the president’s media adviser. He accelerated Carter’s out-of-town trips, organized regular press briefings on Saturdays with regional and local press, and arranged more frequent appearances before the White House press corps to take credit for his legislative achievements. To his chagrin, Caddell, who thought he and Rafshoon would be brought onto the White House staff together, was not invited. The meeting also clarified the role of the White House staff in coordinating administration policy among departments, which empowered me to take more control over the domestic-policy process.
Thus the president ended his experiment with cabinet government, which had encouraged too many disparate voices for coherence in government. Genuine cabinet government cannot work as in Europe, where cabinet members are part of the elected parliament. In our presidential system, only the president and vice president are elected; the cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the president; and members of Congress are elected separately with their own local power base. But the underlying problems remained. The president still did not name a chief of staff, and the White House staff was still showing its inexperience.
Caddell’s personal ups and downs with Carter meanwhile mirrored the content of his polls and accompanying memos. By late 1978, when the glow of the Camp David Accords wore off, Caddell’s poll showed, in his own pungent words: “We were in deep shit [and] were headed for a very, very precipitous decline.” But his polls were picking up more than a drop in the president’s own popularity: They were showing “an alarming decline in confidence in the country, both in the political system and in people’s expectations for the future, never registered before in data that goes back to the 1940s.” In a nation literally founded on the future, he saw “more pessimists than optimists, which is unheard of in America.” This was accompanied, he said, by people being “much more hostile, much more greedy, much more short-term, and much more volatile.”12
To create a theme for the 1979 State of the Union address, Rafshoon, speechwriter Bob Rackleff, Caddell, and I titled the address “New Foundations.” In a January 22, 1979, memorandum to the White House Staff, Rafshoon explained that this would be a thematic speech about building a “new foundation for America’s future.” The goal, he wrote, was to “restore the confidence of our people by building a foundation for a balanced, stable economic growth; we must restore trust to the political process by building a new foundation for competent and compassionate government; we must maintain a stable peace in the world by building a new foundation based upon cooperation and diversity.” For an administration that had been groping for a unifying theme, this was a good one. Rafshoon admonished us not to retreat from it lest “six months from now people will say, ‘Remember that new foundation thing Carter tried? What ever happened to that?’ The theme will hold up in the long run if we stick with it.” He put those final words in italics.13 Even one of the administration’s toughest press critics, the conservative New York Times columnist (and former Nixon speechwriter) William Safire, applauded the theme as “fitting for this President, since the metaphor helps get across the idea of a return to fundamentals” and helped “pull the speech together.”14 More broadly, the press obliged and picked up this theme in its coverage of the address. But the slogan itself never caught on, in part because once the president enunciated this vision of the future, he failed to follow Rafshoon’s admonition, and backed away from using it.15
In April 1979 Caddell wrote another memo on continuing problems with the electorate, but said: “Carter got mad at me; he wouldn’t talk to me for a long time.” He eventually got out of the doghouse at the White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Carter took him over to meet Anwar el-Sadat: “This is my pollster; he’s the person who brings me the bad news—but he always tells the truth, and I love him anyway.” Then Carter laughed.16
Caddell continued getting around the president by going to Rosalynn. He had a two-hour breakfast with her in April 1979, pouring out his heart about how rising American pessimism was dragging down her husband. On Saturday, April 28, the first lady and her reluctant husband met with Caddell in the Oval Office to give him his day in court—and Jimmy Carter began to come under his spell.17
Earlier that day Caddell shared his latest memo with me, but perhaps knowing of my suspicions, did not emphasize the psychosocial themes of public alienation but rather the need for cabinet discipline, policy coherence, and someone on the White House staff to make many of the more routine decisions that fell to the president. The last was the easiest and was music to my ears. According to Carter, Ham Jordan had thrice refused the office of chief of staff 18 because he had little interest in specific policies, except insofar as they affected the president’s political standing. This time he accepted the job, doffing the work boots and khaki pants that were part of his rebellious anti-Washington streak in favor of a business suit and tie. Also, another Georgia loyalist, White House Counsel Bob Lipshutz, was replaced by superlawyer and Washington wise man Lloyd Cutler. They all did commendable work but still did not solve Carter’s deeper problems.
* * *
One Sunday evening in late May 1979, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were sipping drinks with Caddell and the Georgia Mafia on the Truman Balcony of the White House residence, overlooking our great national monuments. Caddell found the president in a “foul mood about everything, particularly about politics, about Washington, about the elites.”19 By that time the Carters and my Georgia colleagues had accepted Caddell’s thesis and begun to discuss implementing his ideas, es
pecially those on confronting the special interests and returning to the anti-Washington themes of the campaign.
When the president gave Caddell’s memo to Mondale, he exploded in anger, telling me Caddell was selling a “bunch of crap” taken from books he might have read in college, and dismissing Caddell’s analysis as “crazy,” a view shared by the vice president’s top staff.20 Caddell nevertheless pursued his prey relentlessly with a stream of articles, books, and notes to advance his arguments.
Mondale’s prescription to reverse Carter’s decline was to reach out to the Democratic constituency groups, who felt alienated from the president. I had a more prosaic explanation: Gasoline lines were spreading across the country, and rising prices of fuel and other necessities had reached deep into American pockets. Moreover, the trauma of passing his top-priority energy bill, combined with impressions of an overloaded agenda that was passed in an eviscerated form or not at all by his own overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, gave the president a bloody nose. A CBS/New York Times poll found that only 30 percent of Americans approved of Carter’s presidency, a level reached by no other president, not even Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate.21 The first lady called me on June 2 in great agitation to say that “the situation is desperate.” She told me, “We need to get a chief of staff,” suggesting former Florida governor Reubin Askew, who was set to become the president’s trade represenative. And she added bluntly, “We need to get rid of Schlesinger.”22 It was clear to me that Jim’s days were numbered.
Just before the president left for the G7 Tokyo summit in 1979, June 12 became an important day. First he met with his full economic and foreign-policy team, the vice president, and me, to prepare his positions for restraining OPEC oil imports and reducing pressures on spot prices. He then had a feisty meeting with his political advisers. He told us he was concerned that we were discouraged, and said: “I am not. We need to have a fighting attitude and be prepared for even worse news.” He demanded loyalty from us and our staffs and warned that “they should leave now if they can’t take it.” Using his favorite phrase about Kennedy, he said, “I don’t care if he runs, I will whip his ass.” And he now told us he was willing to make Ham White House chief of staff.23
That same evening Caddell organized a dinner in the private residence of the White House for the president to meet with some of the scholars Caddell had cited in his memo. For the first time it was decided to broaden the circle of White House staff to feed Caddell’s ideas into administration policy. Caddell invited about ten people, mainly sociologists and political scientists, including notable authors such as Daniel Bell of Harvard and Christopher Lasch, who had just written The Culture of Narcissism, a widely read book depicting America as a self-indulgent society, a concept Caddell had already sold to President and Mrs. Carter. When the distinguished dinner guests veered toward giving political advice, Jody Powell tartly steered them away: “You know, folks, we know how to get elected; but that isn’t what we’re interested in talking about.”
Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson’s former press secretary and now a respected presenter on public television, made the deepest impression with his elegy to the loss of community in America. The president wanted Moyers to see Caddell’s memoranda over the past eighteen months, and Moyers later called Caddell to tell him: “Never has anybody in the history of the United States ever been as blunt with the President as you have been with him in this series of writings.” So Caddell took what he realized was the biggest gamble in his young life to “refocus and redefine the administration back to what it had been, and not just moving a series of programs in the government.”24
On the way home from the Tokyo Summit, the Carters had scheduled a sentimental and much-needed vacation in Hawaii to relive a few of their happiest days as a young married couple when he was in the Navy. Both Caddell and I independently implored them to come home at once, fearful of the optics of the television news showing them lounging on the beach while Americans waited in lines at the gas pump and truckers blocked the highways because they were unable to obtain fuel. Gasoline prices had risen more than 50 percent in half a year. Caddell told the president to “come back right away or not come back at all.” I was less peremptory, but I was as blunt as any time during my four years in the White House; my urgent memo appealed to him to come home and deliver an energy speech.25
I wanted him to press for the energy policy recommendations we had spent months developing in grueling interagency meetings I coordinated. But Caddell believed that the American people had tuned out the president, and that yet another nationwide energy speech, his fifth in less than three years, would fall on deaf ears. I was armed to counter this with numbers from the pollster Louis Harris, who told me that only 35 percent of the public felt there was a serious energy shortage, but 70 percent supported our proposal for a windfall profits tax on the oil companies to be used for alternate energy projects in the United States, which would be a centerpiece of our new energy proposal.26
My memo recommended that after a short weekend at Camp David, he spend each day working on the energy crisis, caused by the shortfall in crude oil supplies from the Iranian revolution, which had led to panic buying of oil on the spot market. I emphasized that this was severely affecting our relationship with Congress, and that when Mondale briefed members on the Tokyo summit, we learned that they were literally afraid to go home over the recess, for fear of facing angry constituents over the lengthy gasoline lines. “Nothing which has occurred in the administration to date [has] added so much water to our ship. Nothing else has so frustrated, confused, angered the American people—or so targeted their distress at you personally,” I wrote. I then made a number of recommendations. I proposed that, upon landing from Japan, he deliver a tough statement we had drafted that would focus on the latest OPEC price increase as a “watershed event,” and use it to our advantage to support increased domestic production of all types of energy. We had to finger OPEC as an enemy, I warned, or we would not convince the public that anything had changed.
I suggested a full day of meetings with our energy advisers to ensure that we were all sending the same signals, and then a briefing for congressional leaders so that he would be seen publicly giving almost total attention to major energy problems. He would also announce a National Energy Mobilization Board to streamline the licensing of major energy projects on wartime schedules. To my lasting regret, I did not include Energy Secretary Schlesinger’s proposal to end gasoline lines by decontrolling gasoline prices in place of a clumsy government allocation system that prolonged the gasoline lines. But there was no consensus among our own or the outside economists we consulted, many of whom opposed it because it would spike already soaring inflation.
CADDELL’S END RUN
Two startling things happened after I sent this memorandum. The first, which never occurred at any other time during my four years in the White House, was that it was leaked to the Washington Post. Several Republicans attacked me for one phrase in a five-page, single-spaced memorandum: “to shift the cause for inflation and energy problems to OPEC”—as if I were avoiding our own contributions to these problems. The memo had extremely restricted circulation among senior White House staff, so I felt denuded and distrustful of my own colleagues and staff. Leaks are an essential part of official Washington life for officials who want to advance policies or simply to show that the leaker is an insider with access; still it was a painful experience to me. I never leaked and held those who did in disdain. I never discovered the source, but I was buoyed by a call from Representative Sid Yates, a Chicago Democrat, who said he thought the memo was “so good, I think it was consciously leaked” by someone in the White House.27
The second and more serious concern was that unbeknownst to me, the president, his wife, and the Jordan-Rafshoon-Powell triumvirate had a very different agenda, driven relentlessly by Caddell. The wunderkind had convinced them that the president had a more basic problem than gasoline lines and double-digit inflation:
a loss of confidence among the American public in its own personal, as well as the nation’s, future, magnified by a sense of Carter losing touch with the broad message that elected him, as he immersed himself in the petty details of governance. Caddell found that for the first time his surveys showed that Americans felt the future would not be better than what they had now.28
But if my leaked memorandum was tough and straightforward, Caddell’s was incendiary. In an April 23, 1979, memorandum titled “Of Crises and Opportunities,” he warned of frightening damage to the nation’s values. America, he wrote, was “a nation deep in crisis … a crisis of confidence marked by a dwindling faith in the future [and] growing real despair of elites and ordinary citizens alike as they struggle to articulate in concepts the malaise [my emphasis] which they themselves feel.” Caddell did not blame Carter, but concluded that the extraordinary personal pessimism about the future was the result of historical forces at work for twenty years and “threatens the stability of the country … large majorities believe it doesn’t matter who is elected.” This created a “psychological crisis of the first order.” And he had even consulted psychologists!29
I found this so hyperbolic, so historically reckless, that it passed the imagination. But it became the predicate for everything that would follow. Some of his observations were on target in citing the nation’s recent troubles, from Vietnam to the series of assassinations, the rise of single-issue groups, and what he called the special-interest state fueled by “mail, money, and lobbying.” He was also correct that Carter’s blizzard of legislative initiatives and foreign-policy challenges lacked an overarching theme that could be grasped by the public.
President Carter Page 81