Small Talk

"Thank you, Mr. President," says A.P.'s Frank Cormier, the senior White House correspondent, and that usually ends the presidential press conference. Or at least it used to. After last week's session, Jimmy Carter did not call it quits but continued to chat for another 15 minutes. It is customary for the President to hang around for a while and exchange small talk with reporters; this time, as the TV cameras continued to roll, Carter's small talk ballooned into something bigger: news.

To the reporters gathered around him, Carter talked about David Frost's Watergate interview with Richard Nixon. "I personally think that he did violate the law, that he committed impeachable offenses," said Carter. "But I think that he believes he didn't. He's rationalized in his own mind that he did all those things for the benefit of staff members and so forth, and that he didn't have any criminal intent." Asked if he had discussed the Nixon affair during his trip to London, the President said he had. Several of the summit participants had raised the matter and deplored the "resurrection of Watergate." Would Carter watch the second Nixon interview? No, said the President. "I've got other things to do."

Some reporters wished he had found other things to do right after the press conference; they had not been able to hear the remarks. "You've got to rein in your boy," Henry Bradsher of the Washington Star told a White House staffer. "These offhand conferences just won't do." It probably is a futile plea. Nobody has been able to rein in Jimmy Carter yet.

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