Sorry, but He's Busy Today

By Hugh Sidey

In the continuing effort to try to shoehorn a few more people and ideas into Jimmy Carter's days, Scheduler Tim Kraft's shop photocopied the President's schedules and laid them out for study. The visual impact was stunning--ranks of names, events, ceremonies. No wonder, they muttered, the planned 55-hour week for Carter had grown to 71 hours and, if the truth about his private time were known, probably 80 or more.

Carter had complained early on about the amount of paper he had to consume. His staff analyzed operations through his first six weeks and tried to improve things. But the study of the second six weeks showed only a small drop in the work load. Unscheduled consultations and pop-in appointments were taking up as much as 15% of the precious presidential day. Carter, it appeared, was the one who was being forced to adjust. He added four more regular weekly meetings to his schedule. He ordered his wake-up calls at 6 a.m. (instead of 6:30) to expand his hours for reading. An aide found some schedules from previous Administrations and marveled at the relative isolation Carter's predecessors enjoyed.

So last week when the New York Times strongly suggested in a front-page story by James Wooten that the President was closing his mind and not listening to dissent, there was a minor explosion from Press Secretary Jody Powell. For 20 minutes he lectured the world about the inaccuracies of the account. It sounded like somebody playing old White House tapes. John Kennedy blew up at the New York Herald Tribune, and canceled all 22 White House subscriptions to the newspaper They used to keep the bad clips from Ike to avoid eruptions of his barracks temper. L.B.J. thought the press was a giant conspiracy to portray him as "your corn-pone President." During Watergate, Ron Ziegler's press briefings often had a portion devoted to the sins of the Washington Post.

The fact is that the presidency has so many facets that its millions of viewers --and the world's press--can pick up just about any glint they want. Collections of these glimpses, such as Woolen's, can be accurate in detail but in the whole mosaic gravely exaggerate a President's traits while failing to consider inevitable forces of the office that require his resistance. Hardly had Powell's ire cooled than other columnists were citing certain parallels between Carter and Richard Nixon. Curiously, the Times profile of Carter as a man jealously clinging to his power, occasionally alone, resisting contradiction and eschewing political maneuver, is not at odds with part of the image he has built up during his public life. Carter has always been more technocrat than pol, a man who stayed out of back rooms, who said no to special interests, who reached a point when he did not want to argue longer. During the campaign these traits were billed as desirable contrasts to the old-boy Washington clubhouse atmosphere. But back then he never had to act.

In his new world, Carter, as the man who stops the buck, must say no to a lot of ideas--and people. "We probably turn down 95% of the requests from the outside," estimates one aide. Cabinet members and staff must also be restrained. Often events move swiftly and time simply runs out. Not everybody can be consulted'. It is easy for those left behind to believe that the President has walled himself away. Carter's inexperience and his wariness about Washington have heightened the feeling. In the end, isolation is an intellectual condition. By most measures Carter is now fighting a good battle against the forces that can drive an unresisting President into a cocoon. Carter's current economic counsel ranges from left (Joseph Pechman) to right (Arthur Burns), his aesthetic appetite from Mozart string quartets to African art, his reading from Erica Jong's How to Save Your Own Life to the works of Swiss Theologian Hans Kung, his movies from All the President's Men to Young Frankenstein, and his dining companions from John Shanklin, the electrician at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, to King Hussein.

But several times each day, Jimmy Carter must stop the memos, shut off the conversation,withdraw into himself and decide. No one else can be there. It is what we pay him to do.

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