Mondale understood this, worked within Carter’s ideological framework, and served as the front man facing the increasingly hostile Democratic barons. Precisely because Mondale was not relegated to the sidelines like his predecessors, he weighed-in to keep a modicum of peace with the liberal wing of the party, one reason he had been selected in the first place, by championing more spending for popular and effective social programs like Head Start, higher education, and job training.
I was stunned that Mondale was contemplating a resignation and told him that while I shared his concern about the cabinet firing, he could not simply walk away. He had been elected by the American people, and did not have a cabinet officer’s luxury of resigning over a policy issue. There was no constitutional precedent for a resignation, and it would have brought down the administration and, of course, ended his own political career. I emphasized that he must have known there would be decisions with which he would disagree when he accepted the nomination. This might be an extreme event, but he still had an obligation to support the president even though he had not been consulted. I said that together they had created the most powerful vice presidency in American history, and if he resigned, that would be the end of their accomplishment. He listened, but I was not certain if I made any headway.
I believed then, and I believe to this day, that Walter Mondale would never have pulled the trigger, and that he was merely venting his deep frustration. He confirmed this years later, saying he was “never going to quit Carter” and simply needed somebody to “blow smoke off of.”36 But at the time I could not be certain, nor could some of his closest aides. At the very least it showed the depth of his disillusionment, of which the president and his senior political staff were unaware—and might be even now.
Mondale told a few top aides that he was so “depressed he might quit,” and this was confirmed to me in talks with his senior staff—Dick Moe, his chief of staff; Michael Berman, his legal counsel;37 and Jim Johnson, his executive assistant, who spent more time with Mondale day and night than any other staff member.38 During that blue period Mondale would go home about four o’clock, change clothes, sit in the garden, return phone calls, and play tennis. Often it was just the two of them, Mondale and Johnson, and Jim remembered Mondale going “back and forth around the question of resignation versus not standing for reelection.” Berman had begun looking at legal options for resignation. But his most trusted aide, Dick Moe, told Mondale several times the whole idea was ridiculous.39 Nevertheless, said Johnson, it “was the musing of a man who felt deep distress about the situation he found himself in, with little influence over a ship that seemed to be rudderless.”
What finally got Mondale out of his deep funk? Johnson felt it was the likelihood of Ted Kennedy running against Carter for the Democratic nomination. The Caddell cycle had ended, and with the Kennedy challenge looming, Jim Johnson told me that Mondale felt a strong sense of loyalty to Carter and knew his resignation would be an unjustified gift to the Republicans.40
CARTER FINALLY REFOCUSES
The bookends to these extraordinary weeks came in two meetings. At an Oval Office staff meeting on August 3, Carter made a comment that spoke volumes about his approach to the presidency, his disdain for public exposure, and his ambivalence about presidential politics.41 Jody Powell asked him to allow Time to do a photo essay of a day in the life of the president, which would mean allowing a Time photographer to “hang around with you all week.” Then Frank Moore tried to persuade him to meet regularly with three to six senators at the White House. The president got visibly angry and told us “it would take too much time.” Three days later he had softened, but only barely. At a meeting of the cabinet and senior staff, he told everyone that “Frank wants me to see three or so senators regularly, and it sends chills down my spine to spend 30 hours of my time that way—but I’ll do it.”42
At the second meeting, which took place in the Blue Room, the appropriate color for this jarring period, Carter spoke with remarkable candor and introspection: “I went to Camp David with deep concerns about myself, my administration, and the country. I felt we were at a historic turning point with a lack of confidence in the future.” But he said that all those who gave him advice there “felt the press distorted facts [and] treat me as they do other institutions—they trivialize.” Carter felt that he had enumerated the nation’s problems well in the past and “had good solutions and a good batting average with Congress.” But, he admitted, “I haven’t been adequate in some areas and kept away from the people. Whenever we made decisions and worked together, we’ve prevailed.” He told us that the reason for the cabinet changes was that “we need to be united when decisions are made. I do not want subservience, but once I make decisions we need teamwork and this needs to be evident to the public. We have sent mixed signals, which has hurt with the Congress.”43
This series of totally unplanned and unscripted adventures over several weeks were more than a typical midcourse correction. Faced with the political gallows, the president was forced to change, and he did for the better. He appointed Ham as chief of staff, limited his focus to a few priorities such as energy and SALT II, reduced the mass of his reading material to spend more time on the road connecting with the heartland, and cut the number of Washington news conferences to meet more often with regional and local press.
STUDIO 54
Soon an ominous event occurred that diverted Ham’s attention just as he was getting into his new job as chief of staff. While the president and first lady were going down the Mississippi River aboard the Delta Queen on a much-derided meet-the-people cruise, the new attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, called with the stunning news that he had been required to order a preliminary FBI investigation of allegations that Ham had snorted cocaine at Studio 54, the celebrity disco in Manhattan. Jody was also being investigated, even though he had not even stepped inside the infamous drug-laced club. Ham admitted he had been at Studio 54 for about an hour, but strenuously (and accurately) denied using cocaine.44
Unfortunately Ham had become too easy a target, with his informal dress habits and an undeserved reputation as a fun-loving, party-going young man—when in fact he worked the same ridiculously long hours we all did at the White House.
The baseless cocaine charges, brought by dubious individuals, occupied months of his time, just as he was organizing his work as chief of staff. By his own admission Ham made a great mistake even entering Studio 54 while serving as chief of staff to the president of the United States.45 He was unaware that the club’s two owners were being investigated for tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. One of them, Steven Rubell, had hired as his lawyer the notorious Roy Cohn, former counsel and hatchet man for Senator Joseph McCarthy during his infamous anti-Communist hearings (he would also be the lawyer who introduced Donald J. Trump to politics in New York City).
Ham declared that Rubell and Cohn, along with Ian Schrager, Rubell’s nightclub partner, dreamed up the drug story. Cohn took it to the Justice Department to try to plea-bargain away the indictment on tax evasion, armed with a taped statement from a drug dealer who claimed he had provided cocaine to Jordan, and said Rubell would testify against both Ham and Jody in exchange for immunity, a clear effort to frame Jordan and save his client. There were a number of twists of fate. The National Cancer Institute doctor who treated Jordan’s cancer years later was also treating Roy Cohn for AIDS. Rubell and Schrager each served 13 months in prison, the former dying in 1989 and the latter eventually winning a pardon from President Obama.
Ham was the first person ever investigated under the 1977 Ethics Act that Carter championed as part of our post-Watergate reforms. Congress passed it with such a hair trigger to start an investigation that almost any allegation against a senior government official required the appointment of an independent counsel, with no provision for reimbursement of expenses.46 The investigation proved the allegations baseless. Ham was exonerated by a federal grand-jury vote of 24–0 against an indict
ment, but it cost him more than $1 million in legal fees, with only a government salary. Walter Cronkite later told Ham that the baseless cocaine charges were “the worst story he ever broadcast.”47
The Ethics Act was later amended, but the damage was done during a critical time in the Carter presidency, when Ham’s great talents were especially needed.48 It remained on the statute books until it was allowed to expire in 1999, after Kenneth Starr relentlessly pursued President Clinton while serving as a special prosecutor under the amended act.
* * *
Such well-intentioned attempts at promoting public morality demand a sense of proportion, whether the issue is grave or petty. I got humorously tangled up in Carter’s rule limiting gifts to federal officials to $25 shortly after an article in a business magazine reported that I had a penchant for Tootsie Rolls. I received a giant box of the candy from the Tootsie Roll company, which would have endeared me to my young sons for years. The White House counsel decreed that the gift breached the limit. I argued that the entire box was filled with penny candy that could not conceivably add up to a value of $25. As a compromise I proposed to dump half the candy in the box, just to be arithmetically certain. No, they insisted, under the ethics rules the full box of Tootsie Rolls had to be returned to the company. I accompanied it with a letter of thanks and an explanation of why I could not keep the gift. A few years later, in a story about the Tootsie Roll company, the CEO said I had tried to have it both ways, by making it seem I was following strict ethical standards, while the box that was received from the White House was completely empty. I still wonder which Secret Service agent took my Tootsie Rolls.
TENNIS, EVERYONE?
Stories of supposed White House mischief and maladroitness also made their way into the press at a sensitive preelection period when we should have been organizing for action. Instead, some of Carter’s most admirable personal qualities were turned into personal burdens. The most memorable resulted from the widely publicized saga of the White House tennis court, which was turned into an inaccurate caricature of a president who lacked vision, because of his immersion in trivial minutiae. There were two sides to Carter’s celebrated attention to detail, and one of them helped him immeasurably in negotiating the Camp David Accords, SALT II, the Alaska Lands Act, and much more. But this was turned on its head when his gifted chief speechwriter, James Fallows, focused on the less admirable aspect shortly after he abruptly quit at midterm. He joined the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a sensationalized piece that appeared in May 1979 under the title “The Passionless Presidency: The Trouble with Jimmy Carter’s Administration.”49
In fact, the president was far from passionless. If there was a problem, it was that he had too many conflicting passions, as evidenced by the range of thankless challenges he tackled. But the problem was less the ingratitude of a departed aide than the fact that his politically damaging account was wrong.
The irony is that it never would have happened at all, but for the president’s generosity in opening up his many personal presidential perks to members of his staff. He allowed senior aides and their families to use the White House tennis court, gymnasium, hair salon, and even Camp David. But nothing drew the president’s ire more than Fallows’s account of the way the court, which is nestled on the South Lawn, invisible from the street, was supposedly micromanaged by Carter himself. Carter told me: “He lied. He lied. I don’t know if he did it deliberately, but it was a lie. I am an average tennis player, and I played with Dr. Lukash [the White House physician] or with Brzezinski, or with Hamilton. I don’t think I ever played with Fallows.”
Part of the story is that when Rosalynn started taking tennis lessons, she would go out to play and regularly found staff members on the court. “Damn, when am I going to learn to play?” Rosalynn asked Jimmy.50
Fallows was an especially avid player and frequently used the court. (I am glad he had the time for such indulgences, courtesy of the president. I certainly did not!) Matters came to a head very early in the president’s term, when he ended a staff meeting at about 4:30 and left to get in a game of tennis. Ten minutes later he returned wearing tennis shorts and carrying his racket. The president explained to the others that “some OMB guys” were using the court. They all agreed it was not right for the president of the United States to be bumped by his own staff.51
Carter finally arranged to have his secretary, Susan Clough, check whether the court was clear so that the president would be spared the indignity of personally ordering off anyone in midgame. Susan emphatically told me that he never managed the tennis courts, and that out of politeness, if he drifted down to the court and saw someone playing, “he wouldn’t even finish getting there, he’d turn around and go back.” She managed the schedule, and later wrote a letter to the New York Times on June 22, 1986, explaining that “the responsibility for coordinating court requests was mine,” a point Fallows failed to mention.
In Carter’s early days in the White House, requests for court time were addressed to the president, most of which he never saw, but when he did, he routed them to Susan Clough, sometimes writing a note of approval.52 But Fallows’s requests were often sent directly to the president as part of covering notes transmitting his speech drafts, which Susan said would help explain why this direct access helped create “myriad problems with the speechwriters.” Carter, she said, might put a note on a returned draft either encouraging them to play or to use other facilities. Rex Scouten, the chief White House usher, confirmed that he managed the court with Susan, who forwarded names and proposed playing times to him to ensure that the court would be kept clear when the president and first lady wanted to play.53 Fallows’s botched account of the president as a detail freak followed Carter not just through the election, but for the rest of his life.54
THE KILLER RABBIT
Another grossly misread incident arising from Carter’s innocent recreational pursuits also helped unfairly trivialize his presidency, the affair of the “killer rabbit.” As the president remembered it, in the spring of 1979, he was fishing from a small boat in a one-acre pond not far from Plains.55 Growing up in rural Georgia, he was accustomed to seeing squirrels, foxes, and rabbits bound out of the woods and swim across the water. So he was not surprised when he heard hounds barking on the side of the pond and saw a “small bunny rabbit” running out of the woods into the pond, and swimming for its life. As the rabbit approached the boat, the president splashed a little water near it with his paddle, and the hunted animal swam to the other shore and ran away.
Back in the White House, the president enjoyed telling this down-home story to Jody Powell, who later shared it over a drink with Brooks Jackson, an Associated Press reporter. But Jody jokingly embellished it in the Southern manner, by suggesting that a large swamp rabbit, in distress or perhaps berserk, tried to take refuge in the presidential rowboat, thus posing a “mortal threat to the Carter presidency.”56 Jody later explained that he told it to many people because “I thought it was a funny goddamn story about this friggin’ rabbit.”57 Jackson thought so, too, and put it on the wire in lighthearted style. There was nothing funny about what happened next.
The Washington Post front-paged Jackson’s story in late August 1979, months after the incident, under the headline “Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President,” with a cartoon parody of the Jaws poster, labeled “Paws.”58 The implication was that the story showed up Carter as a weak president. With its usual high seriousness, the New York Times ran the story in its main news section, and it spread to the three main television networks like oil on water. Hugh Sidey of Time headlined his regular column on the presidency “Rabbits Have No Class.” The president tried to make light of it all by joking at a Labor Day picnic with already disaffected union leaders, “I believe in killer rabbits—and killer reporters. But a killer rabbit has never come after me and a killer reporter has.”59
Suddenly opponents jumped on the incident to belittle the president, linking it to everything that had gone wrong and
making it an uncomfortable metaphor for the Carter presidency. Jody wrote disparagingly years later: “As insightful columnists and congressional leaders later pointed out, none of this would have happened to the president if he had been sipping cocktails with them on the presidential yacht Sequoia like Presidents are supposed to do, instead of fishing in some godforsaken south Georgia swamp. But Carter had sold the Sequoia, and so being attacked by a rabbit was the least he deserved.”60
All this is also a lesson on the importance of avoiding irony or humorous exaggeration in the White House, when every word can become the focus of examination and ridicule, irrespective of political party. The following year, when Ronald Regan got his environmental chemistry backward and claimed that forests polluted the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, his press secretary, James Brady, joked with the traveling press as they flew over the Pacific Northwest and cried out: “Killer trees! Killer trees!” He almost lost his job.
STILL SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS
As so often happened, Carter summoned the inner strength and tenacity to pick himself up from his low point. The president ended up with a stronger cabinet, with stars like former Portland mayor Neil Goldschmidt (later governor of Oregon) as transportation secretary and Philip Klutznik, an American Jewish leader and prominent Chicago businessman, at Commerce. Carter also shaped a more experienced staff with the addition as White House counsel in October 1979 of Washington superlawyer Lloyd Cutler, who played a key role in the Iran hostage negotiations. But in typical Carter fashion, it was done in an inglorious way. He missed the chance to bring in an experienced Washington political hand like Bob Strauss into the White House and only slightly shuffled the White House staff cards he had brought with him from Georgia.
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