Carter: Man in Motion

He's going everywhere, doing everything--but he's also down in the polls

For weeks the Administration had seemed becalmed. As the Bert Lance affair dragged on through the dog days of summer, much of the White House's time and energy--too much--was deflected by the latest press accusation or the newest plan to save the beleaguered Budget Director. Now, with October's brisk breezes and brilliant hues, the man in the Oval Office seemed to emerge reinvigorated. Suddenly, Jimmy Carter was in motion again--launching initiatives, planning journeys, defending his programs, attacking their detractors. But motion does not always equal progress, and the President's whirling-dervish routine almost inevitably led to a number of stumbles, if not pratfalls.

At home, the energy program that sailed so smoothly through the House last August was being dismembered by a rambunctious Senate (see story page 10). The House and a great many other Americans were preparing to pounce on Carter's long-awaited tax reforms expected this week. On the foreign affairs front, the President approved a joint statement with the Soviet Union on the Middle East --and barely managed through the week to convince Jerusalem and American Jews that he was not betraying Israel (see cover story page 25). Meanwhile, he was catching heavy flak over his proposed Panama Canal treaties, both from a Senate committee and from conservative groups that describe the agreement as a "giveaway."

Carter's difficulties are clearly reflected in the latest polls. Last March a Harris survey gave the new President a resounding 75% rating on his ability to "inspire confidence." By late last month, that rating had plummeted to 50%. A nationwide NBC poll conducted last week was still more disapproving. A mere 46% of those questioned approved his performance, compared with 56% in June and 60% in February.

Characteristically, Carter tackled several controversial problems simultaneously when he flew up to New York City early in the week to address the U.N. and confer with a raft of world statesmen. His 35-minute U.N. speech was restrained and unexceptional, although he did announce--without explaining further --that Washington and Moscow "are within sight of a significant agreement" in the SALT talks. The U.S., he said, was "willing to go as far as possible" to limit or cut its nuclear weapons. "On a reciprocal basis," he went on, the U.S. could immediately "reduce them by 10% or 20%, even 50%."

White House spokesmen later conceded that they expected no swift Soviet response to Carter's statement. His objective, they let it be known, was simply to get on the U.N. record a position that his Administration has always espoused: its eagerness to eliminate the means to wage nuclear war. Carter's audience applauded only once, when he reaffirmed that the U.S. "will not use nuclear weapons except in self-defense." The next day, Carter returned to the U.N. to join Ambassador Andrew Young in signing two international human-rights covenants, one covering civil and political rights, the other economic, social and cultural rights.

Early on the second day of his visit, Carter sped off from the United Nations Plaza Hotel on Manhattan's elegant East Side toward the urban sinkhole of the South Bronx. With police helicopters hovering overhead, the presidential motorcade drove by block after block of devastated buildings, many of them burned to charred shells by arsonists. The President got out of his car twice to walk through the rubble with HUD Secretary Patricia Harris and New York's lame-duck mayor, Abraham Beame. "Let me walk about a block," he told his Secret Service agents at one point, and then he proceeded, in good campaign style, to shake hands with slumdwellers who crowded doorsteps and street corners. "How are you doing, Jimmy? What a surprise," said Ramon Rueda, deputy director of the People's Development Corporation, a community group responsible for renovating one of the buildings near by. "I particularly wanted to see how bad it is," Carter told Rueda. "We're proud of what you're doing."

The expedition provided a spontaneous display not only of the ruins but also of the needs and hopes of the American underclass. "Tell him we need money. Send us money!" people at street corners shouted as the caravan wound through often semideserted streets. "Give me a job, man, I need a job!" one person yelled. At his second stop, Carter told Mrs. Harris, "I would like to see what can be salvaged and what can't be salvaged, and take these buildings down and start turning it around."

Returning from New York, Carter reached Washington in time to see a Senate committee chew a few more morsels out of his energy program and add to his griefs over the Panama Canal treaties. Kansas Republican Robert Dole raised a modest storm by disclosing a confidential State Department cable quoting a Panamanian diplomat as saying that Panama could not "agree to the right of the U.S. to intervene" militarily after 1999. What's more, the diplomat vowed, U.S. warships could not "go to the head of the line" to transit the canal in case of an emergency. The cable, from the U.S. embassy in Panama to the State Department, predicted "increasing irritation" over differing interpretations of the wording of the treaty, which guarantees American warships the right "to transit the canal expeditiously" after 1999. To dampen senatorial wrath, the State Department late in the week said the U.S. and Panama would draft a statement clarifying the disputed provisions.

At the same time, the Administration showed its concern with war on a much wider scale by requesting $245 million in development funds for a mobile missile system and indicated that it would step up research on a satellite killer to counter Soviet advances in that sphere (see following story). The mobile missile, called M-X (for "missile experimental"), would replace the Minuteman in a decade; by then the Soviets would presumably have the means to wipe out the Minuteman's fixed underground silos. The MX, at a total cost of at least $40 billion, could be moved rapidly along tracks ten to twelve miles long to escape detection and attack.

With all the problems pressing in on him, Carter might well pause for breath. Instead, he plans to keep on moving--and even to accelerate his pace. At the end of next week he will leave on a grueling three-day jaunt touching down in five states. Enlarging on his South Bronx experience, he will begin the trip at a public forum with representatives of the urban poor from another troubled metropolis, Detroit. From there he will go to Iowa, Colorado and Nebraska, where farmers are grumbling about their declining incomes. Recalling the early days of his presidential campaign, Carter will spend one night in a private home in Des Moines before winding up in California.

Then, a month later, he will take off on a trip covering eight countries on four continents in eleven days--quite an itinerary for one who, a year ago, described presidential globetrotting as "mostly a waste of time and money."

Hectic though the President's activities were, he was showing no signs of tiring. Addressing Democratic National Committeemen in Washington at week's end, he grinned winningly and said: "I have enjoyed the controversy that has swirled around the White House since I have been in office." Carter's remarks on the energy package captured his underlying mood. Even if he could not have his way, he said, "I'll be back again next year." He sounded as if he meant it.

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