Men Behind a Front Runner

The pace of a presidential campaign is almost guaranteed to upset stomachs and strain marriages of the men closest to the candidates, and Jimmy Carter's top aides are not immune. They spend weeks away from their homes in the South, crisscrossing the nation and working 18-hour days under extreme pressure. Only rarely do they all get together with the candidate at his campaign headquarters in a modern office building on Atlanta's Peachtree Street. Usually they must confer with him by phone or on the run--in the brief privacy of an auto, an elevator or a motel room.

But the Carter aides are young and aggressive, and they relish the tension and excitement that builds with early success. As they demonstrated in New Hampshire last week, they are adept at blending the old and new in American politics. They drew heavily on the techniques first used there by Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and sharpened by George McGovern in 1972.

The Carter forces saturated the state with television, radio and newspaper advertisements. Hundreds of youthful volunteers were brought from other states, often at their own expense. They formed five-person squads and fanned out across the wintry landscape to canvass neighborhoods. Other volunteers manned banks of telephones to get the Carter message to still more New Hampshire Democrats. On election day the Carter staff tried to ensure that every pro-Carter voter was able to get to the polls on time.

For all this, Carter has relied heavily on four close aides since long before New Hampshire. They are:

HAMILTON JORDAN, 30, National Campaign Director. A plump native of Albany, Ga., Jordan wears denim jackets and open-necked shirts. He affects a good-ol'-boy manner but is a coolly professional political operative. In 1966, he was youth coordinator of Carter's first, unsuccessful campaign for Governor, then managed his winning gubernatorial drive in 1970 and became his executive secretary. Jordan describes himself as a late-blooming progressive. A cousin founded Koinonia (Greek for fellowship or communion), a biracial farm in southwestern Georgia that deeply offended Ku Klux Klan members and other white racists in the 1940s. Even so, Jordan as a teen-ager opposed the black civil rights movement, only to change his mind a few years later.

MORRIS DEES, 39, Finance Chairman. An elegant Southern millionaire, he is a widely known liberal attorney and civil rights activist (TIME, March 17). Dees and a partner founded a company that sold mail-order books; it was bought by the Los Angeles Times in 1969 for $6 million. In 1972 he used his direct-mail skills to raise $20 million for the McGovern campaign. Late last year he joined the Carter campaign. In five months, Dees nearly tripled the candidate's treasury, to more than $2 million.

In mid-February, he mailed appeals for money to about 1 million voters; he plans an even larger mailing after the Florida primary. In addition, he organizes countless cocktail parties, receptions and dinners--at up to $250 a person--sometimes with Carter in attendance. On Valentine's Day, Carter presided over a five-hour telethon in Georgia that featured Rock Stars Gregg Allman and James Brown, Actress Peggy Cass and Ballplayer Henry Aaron, and pulled in pledges of $325,000.

JODY POWELL, 32, Press Secretary. A southwestern Georgia farm boy, he was raised in Vienna (pronounced Vie-anna), not far from Carter's home town of Plains, and was headed for a military career until he was dismissed from the Air Force Academy for cribbing on a history exam in 1964. While working on a doctorate in political science at Georgia State University, he joined Carter as his driver in the 1970 campaign and later became press secretary. Powell spends much time these days replying to charges, often false, about Carter's past.

CHRIS BROWN, 27, New England Regional Coordinator. A native of Seattle and an expert on the mechanics of campaigning, he was a student organizer for McCarthy in 1968, and was an early co-chairman for McGovern in Seattle four years later. In 1974 he managed Jerry Apodaca's winning gubernatorial campaign in New Mexico. After briefly serving on Apodaca's staff, Brown joined Carter in 1975. Now that the electioneering is moving on to primaries beyond New England, Brown will probably run Carter's campaign in the Western states.

Carter also consults outside experts, from Atlanta Adman Gerald Rafshoon, who has handled his political advertising since 1966, to well-known scholars. On foreign policy he has been advised by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Charles Yost, former U.S. SALT Negotiator Paul Nitze and Columbia Government Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Law Professor Richard Gardner. On economic matters, Carter draws on moderate-to-liberal economists, including Joseph Pechman of the Brookings Institution; Albert Somers of the Conference Board, a group of business leaders and economists that makes analyses of U.S. economic policy; and M.I.T.'s Lester Thurow, who advised McGovern during the 1972 campaign.

But Carter is renowned among associates for following his instincts and often rejecting advice. Thus while some ideas for his campaign have come from his aides and outside advisers, the outlines of his strategy and positions are very much his own.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.