Packaging a New Carter

Jerry Rafshoon tries to reverse a popularity slide

Is a new Jimmy Carter emerging --tougher, demanding more of his staff, focusing more sharply on issues? Some recent evidence suggests that there is, despite the polls indicating that the public widely regards him as a weak leader. He acted unusually quickly to obtain the resignation of Adviser Peter Bourne when he became an embarrassment to the White House. He dramatically asserted presidential control over the scandal-tinged General Services Administration. And he has imposed a tighter rein on Cabinet officials.

Much of the credit (or blame) for this new Carter image belongs to Gerald Rafshoon, 44, the well-tailored, curly-haired, New York-born adman who has worked in every Carter campaign since 1966. After unofficially advising Carter since the Inauguration, he joined the White House's senior staff in July. As the $56,000-a-year Assistant to the President for Communications, Rafshoon has the job of improving the public's perception of his boss. He follows in the footsteps of such presidential image burnishers as Truman's Leonard Reinsch, Eisenhower's James Hagerty and Nixon's Herbert Klein.

Rafshoon believes one of Carter's problems is that he has not sufficiently followed his own political instincts. As a result, "too many people still feel that they do not know him. He has not made enough of an impression of who and what he really is." Rafshoon, therefore, has been trying to increase Carter's exposure in the press and on TV. When the President had his town meeting last month in West Berlin, for instance, Rafshoon arranged for live network coverage of it back in the U.S. After returning home, Carter held his first evening news conference in order to capture much of TV's prime-time audience. In the near future, Rafshoon plans a few televised presidential interviews. Carter and Rosalynn, meanwhile, have been holding intimate dinners at the White House for news executives, to give them a better feel for his personality and goals.

To overcome Carter's image as a weak leader, Rafshoon has been urging the President to assert more control over his Administration in public. Thus when U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young thoughtlessly equated U.S. treatment of civil rights activists with the Soviet Union's persecution of its dissidents, he was openly reprimanded by Carter. Similarly, in the wake of the Bourne episode, the President sternly lectured his staff that they would be fired if they broke the law by smoking marijuana or sniffing cocaine. Rafshoon has told Carter, who tends to be extremely loyal to his staff, that it is unwise to keep aides who are not performing well.

Another Rafshoon goal is ending the Administration's confusing zigzags and fuzziness on key issues. Says a White House aide: "Jerry is doing things that should have been done all along. He is concentrating the emphasis on a few major themes and goals." At Rafshoon's urging, the Administration on the domestic front has begun focusing mainly on energy, the economy and Government efficiency.

Rafshoon runs his eye, and sometimes his pencil, over the draft of every presidential speech of consequence. He also serves as a booking agent for Cabinet members and White House aides, phoning TV producers, mentioning who is available for interview shows and even suggesting timely topics. Once a booking is made, Rafshoon prepares a briefing paper for the official, setting forth the Administration's line on a number of questions that might be asked. Officials are not supposed to appear on television without being cleared by Rafshoon--something Midge Costanza did not do. Rafshoon abruptly canceled her scheduled appearance on a talk show, and the resulting furor triggered her resignation two weeks ago as a presidential adviser.

To head off contradictory policy statements, the White House has become much more rigorous in reviewing the prepared testimony of top officials before congressional committees. For example, White House aides who vetted Housing and Urban Development Secretary Patricia Harris' planned statements before the House Banking Committee last week felt that they were too critical of the Federal Reserve Board's policies. Lacking time to revise her remarks, she canceled the appearance.

"Such actions," reports TIME White House Correspondent Laurence Barrett, "partially muzzle what had once been proclaimed an open Administration. On the other hand, the White House has suffered extensively from too much contradictory talk from too many high officials. Though he quakes at the notion of becoming known as 'the Enforcer,' Rafshoon does perform that function to a limited extent, as he tries to get everyone marching in the same direction on sensitive questions."

Aware of his potentially controversial role, Rafshoon has been trying to keep his profile low. He is one of the most important members of Carter's inner circle and a close friend of the President's; Carter, in fact, often turns to the adman, who is more sophisticated than the native Georgians on the President's staff, for advice about movies to see and books to read. But despite this intimacy, Rafshoon is based not in the White House but across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, in the spacious quarters that were once Richard Nixon's hideaway study.

Describing himself as merely a White House "extra hand," Rafshoon insists: "I'm not an image maker. I consider myself a communicator, trying to help articulate the President's goals and themes." But he is obviously more than that and even comes close to living up to the inscription, taken from one of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic-strip characters, on a plaque given to him by his former advertising associates: SECRETARY OF SYMBOLISM.

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