Carter at the Crossroads
In the whole history of American politics, there had never been anything quite like it. As theater, it offered mystery, an aura of crisis, a high moral purpose and a dash of comedy. For six days an eclectic representation of the American Establishment--Governors, Cabinet members, bankers, insurance executives, professors of sociology, obscure local politicians and even a Greek Orthodox archbishop--gathered in groups in Washington. Marine helicopters ferried them to the mountaintop presidential retreat at Camp David. There Jimmy Carter, outfitted sometimes in blue jeans, at other times in snappy sport coats, pressed them for their ideas about energy, the economy, his own Administration, the national mood--and himself. Toward week's end, while aides were drafting the Sunday-night TV speech that he hoped would rally the nation, the President lent confusion to the proceedings by twice vanishing from his mountain by helicopter to confer with ordinary citizens. Thursday night he descended on the Carnegie, Pa., home of Machinist William Fisher and his wife Bette, and sipped lemonade with their friends on the back porch for 90 minutes. Friday morning he swooped into Martinsburg, W. Va., where he called on Marvin Porterfield, a retired Marine major and disabled veteran of World War II, his wife Ginny and 17 friends and neighbors.
Carter's declared purpose was to renew his contact with the American people, to discover their anxieties and to reassure them of the concern of their chosen leaders. "There has been a lost sense of trust," he told aides, "a loss of confidence in the future." Part of that concern, he inevitably learned, involved the President himself. For some time past, but more sharply this summer, the U.S. has been slipping into a morass of interrelated problems. One is the energy crisis, marked by its gas lines and soaring prices. One is the painful combination of inflation and economic stagnation. One is the widespread perception that Jimmy Carter has seemed unable to make a strong attack on either of the first two.
While the President was at Camp David, his economic advisers made it official: the U.S. is in an inflationary recession. National output, they predicted, will shrink 0.5% this year; prices nonetheless will climb 10.6%, and the number of jobless may grow by 1.3 million, to around 7 million late next year. The inflation is being fanned and the recession worsened by large OPEC oil price boosts that underscore the debilitating U.S. dependence on imported petroleum. Carter was earnestly aware, if the people of the U.S. were not yet, that the nation must find some way to start breaking that dependence if it is to have any chance for longterm, noninflationary economic growth.
But to make headway against these problems, the President realized he also must start overcoming his chief political weakness, his reputation for hesitancy and indecision. Two weeks ago, returning from the Tokyo summit to a nation exasperated by a siege of gas lines, he compounded his difficulties by first scheduling a major policy speech on energy, then abruptly canceling it without a word of explanation. The Camp David summit, which began 48 hours later, represented above all an attempt to start rebuilding an image of purposeful leadership.
In one way it succeeded; many guests came away with new respect and sympathy for Carter. In another it probably would prove unsuccessful: it was unlikely that any Carter speech could live up to the expectations that surrounded his appearance on Sunday night. Ironically, on CBS-TV, the speech pre-empted a segment of Moses--The Lawgiver, a series that depicts Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
Carter's Sunday-night goal was to appeal to the national sense of purpose and express confidence that the traditions of self-discipline and determination could solve even the most intractable problems.
His energy program, outlined on Sunday, was to be fleshed out in two Monday speeches, in Kansas City and Detroit. The most immediate improvement that Carter could mention on the energy front came in the form of news from abroad, that Saudi Arabia had agreed to increase its pumping of crude oil by 1 million bbl.
per day, to a new rate of 9.5 million bbl.
(Also announced late last week: a new $1.2 billion arms sale to the Saudis.) The additional Saudi oil would wipe out much of the shortage of crude in world markets, permit U.S. refineries to run faster (they in fact worked at 90% of capacity in early July, the best rate this year) and prevent the long gasoline lines of late June from reappearing this year. But the Saudi action emphasizes rather than relieves the U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and Carter himself fears that it might lessen the sense of crisis that could put the nation in a mood to take long-range action.
Though his decisions may lack high drama, Carter seemed to be settling on an ambitious series of energy measures.
He announced in advance, to the disappointment of some advisers, that he had "no intention" of lifting controls on gasoline prices because he thought the step would be too inflationary. Instead, his eventual program was expected to feature:
>Import quotas, effective immediately, flatly prohibiting the landing of more than 8.5 million bbl. per day--slightly more than now. That would fulfill a pledge Carter made at the Tokyo summit not to increase imports.
> Measures to force utilities to burn less oil. They would have to cut their use of oil 65% over the next decade, primarily by switching to coal.
> Formation of a "solar bank" to aid projects that would push the proportion of all U.S. energy supplied by solar power to 20% by the year 2000.
> Creation of an Energy Mobilization Board, similar to the old War Production Board, empowered to cut through the red tape that often strangles domestic energy projects. One possible example: clearing the way for a pipeline to carry Alaskan crude from California to Texas.
> Organization of a Government corporation to help bankroll production of synthetic fuels, such as oil or natural gas manufactured from coal or oil squeezed out of shale rock. Aim:
output of 2 million bbl. per day by 1990, at a cost, the President told one Camp David session, that might run as high as $120 billion.
> Enactment of new tax incentives to encourage pumping of oil and natural gas out of geologic formations that make the extraction of such fuels difficult.
> Encouragement of conservation. One proposal: requiring utilities to install insulation and other fuel-saving materials in customers' homes, for which the customer would pay only when he sold his home.
As a preliminary measure, while still at Camp David, the President ordered thermostats in nonresidential buildings--factories, office towers, stores, discos--set no lower than 78DEG F in summer and no higher than 65DEG F in winter.
> A demand to Congress for presidential authority to ration gasoline. A similar request was voted down in May, but Congress has since felt the wrath of the voters, and would likely grant such powers.
While all these ideas have merit, Congress, which long delayed Carter's energy plans, has now taken the initiative in pushing such measures as synthetic fuels. Carter declares that he does not want to compete against Congress on these issues, and he is still critical of the legislators for sitting on his earlier proposals. Nonetheless, he has a lot of catching up to do in satisfying voter demands for energy action.
That problem of national leadership, far more than any attempt to solicit new policy ideas or even test out presidential proposals on representatives of varied constituencies, was the purpose of the Camp David summit. In large part, the meetings were a quite deliberate -- and, aides acknowledged, very risky -- attempt to build suspense for the President's speech and energy program by focusing the nation's eyes on Camp David.
The attempt was undertaken in full knowledge that the failure would be all the more resounding if the speech and pro gram turned out to be weak.
The drama began on Wednesday, July 4, when Carter read the original energy speech that his aides had written. He judged it good, he said (though at least one White House insider openly called it terrible), but he decided, after talking to Rosalynn, that the nation would not pay attention. It would be just another energy talk, and he felt he had to speak to broader national concerns. Carter canceled the speech and, while reporters were trying to find out what on earth he was doing on the If mountain, summoned his senior staff to Camp David. He said later that he already had the idea of the summit in S mind, though at that point he had discussed it only with his wife.
The next day, Thursday, the " President, Rosalynn, Vice President Walter Mondale, Chief Aide Hamiloton Jordan, Press Secretary Jody Powell, Image Builder Gerald Rafshoon. Domestic Affairs Adviser Stuart Eizenstat and Pollster Patrick Caddell gathered around a table in the President's Aspen Lodge and drew up lists of people to invite to the summit. The lists were broken into broad headings--one was "religious and ethical leaders," later inevitably nicknamed "the God squad"--and organized day by day. Aides began phoning invitations Friday morning, and the first group, a hastily assembled collection of eight Governors, arrived for dinner that night. Eventually, 134 people were shuttled to the mountaintop.
They did not constitute a representative sample of national leadership. Many of the guests, even from private life, had close ties to Carter or to previous Democratic Administrations. Barbara Newell, president of Wellesley College, professed herself surprised to be invited. She should not have been taken aback; she is slated to be named by Carter as Under Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.
Hardly any Republicans were asked, a strange oversight for a President seeking to build a national consensus. No G.O.P. Representatives at all were included among the 18 Congressmen who were invited. Republicans blamed House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who retorted that the Congressmen had been selected by White House Aide Frank Moore. Huffed House G.O.P. Leader John Rhodes: "I'm not upset. It's his business whom he invites." In one or two cases, invitations appeared to be bartered for favors. Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, a sharp critic of Carter, was offered an invitation if he would join other Democrats in a Governors Conference resolution endorsing the President's renomination. Lamm a stained from the vote and 3 the summit.
Most of the guests gathered at the White House, from which vans whisked them to a makeshift helipad hard by the Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument for the flight to Camp David. Arriving there, they were met by Secret Service men and ushered to the Laurel Lodge, where Carter joined them for breakfast, lunch or dinner and long postmeal talks; one lasted five hours, until from routine (steak and fresh vegetables) to exotic ("ten-boy curry," an Indian dish so named because ten mess boys supposedly are required to serve it and its condiments).
To the relief of many visitors who had been reading about the President's exhaustion on his return from the Tokyo summit, Carter appeared relaxed and in good spirits. He jogged with guests in the mornings, joked with them at meals and conducted one evening session seated on the floor of the Aspen Lodge. Many guests were charmed by the President's informal, down-home hospitality.
Carter was serious, however, and surprisingly candid about his perception of the national mood. To one group he described it as a "malaise" of confusion, pessimism and distrust that had roots much deeper than gasoline lines or double-digit inflation. It began, he said, with the assassination of President Kennedy, deepened through Viet Nam and Watergate, and now caused Americans to distrust all institutions and leaders. He voiced deep distress about a poll that, he said, showed most Americans expecting less prosperous lives for their children than for themselves. (The reference was apparently to a Caddell poll done privately for the White House.) To a group of labor leaders and civic and government officials, Carter implied that the nation is in a moral decline. He lamented the numbers of unmarried people living together, and said he and Rosalynn rarely let Amy watch new movies because they are filled with four-letter words.
The President himself frequently brought up the widespread feeling that he must bear some of the blame for the national malaise, and even conceded that there might be something to it. Perhaps, he mused, he had unwittingly become too much a "head of Government" immersed in policy minutiae, too little a leader charting new directions. The President acknowledged that his steadily declining ratings in the opinion polls had persuaded him that he needed to take a new approach. He had been "pretty severely compromised," he said, and "one of the compromises that comes from a low standing in the polls is that people don't pay any attention to you, and the Congress doesn't pay any attention to you, and the Governors don't pay any attention to you."
Now the gas lines and economic whirlwinds have made Congress and the country receptive to a new beginning, but what should it be, where should he turn? He urged the guests to say whatever they thought, and not to spare him or his staff in their criticisms. At one evening session the staff even left the room, at the suggestion of Jordan, so that the discussion could be more uninhibited. Jordan at one joint "got torn apart," said one participant. Once opening remarks to each group were over, Carter listened far more han he talked.
The guests voiced comments ranging from the quite specific to the very general. Governor Hugh Carey of New York complained that heating oil was not getting through from refineries to jobbers in his state. Carter promised to look into the situation. Economist Walter Heller suggested a $25 billion tax cut, which he said would not be inflationary because it would only replace "the dollars OPEC is picking from our pockets." Carter did not commit himself, but there seemed to be a general sense that October would be soon enough to consider a tax cut.
Inevitably, there was a babble of conflicting suggestions (balance the budget to curb inflation, start public works programs to fight unemployment) and a good deal of general exhortation about the need for a strong hand on the national tiller. Democratic Senate Leader Robert Byrd thundered: "Mr. President, someone has said, 'Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.' Once the American people understand the problem and rally in support of leadership, there is no problem they can't overcome." Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso advised Carter to "go out on the stump and talk to the people the way you just talked to us." The President took it all cheerfully; several guests got an impression that he feels isolated in the White House.
Carter himself told several guests that he felt he had lost the touch with the country that he had developed during the 1976 campaign, and longed to get it back. He will change the way he conducts the presidency, he said. He will spend less time behind his desk poring over briefing papers, more traveling around the nation meeting people. He mused that he might try some other tactics, perhaps making a regular practice of "having seven or eight Governors in to spend the night with me at the White House and just talk over how we can cooperate and deal with the energy question, because I see the states as kind of 50 experiment stations."
Serious though the sessions were, they had lighter moments. Clark Clifford, 72, former Secretary of Defense and all-around troubleshooter for Democratic Presidents, tried to ride a bike for the first time in 60 years and fell on the seat of his pants. Said Clifford: "The last time I rode a bicycle, you reversed the pedals to stop. This time I reversed the pedals and it went faster. I bailed out."
Some of the humor contained good-natured barbs. At a session with journalists toward the end of the week, Carter encountered a long delay getting a gin-and-tonic for himself. "No authority around here," somebody muttered. Earlier, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine had told a story about a preacher offering an eloquent sermon during a drought. The congregation congratulated him, but one remarked: "A little rain would do us a hell of a lot more good." Muskie's point: the nation needs action rather than just speeches.
The summit produced some vivid phrasing too. Urban League Executive Director Vernon Jordan observed of Carter: "He's going to have to say the right prayer, preach the right sermon, sing the right hymn." The Rev. Jesse Jackson, another black leader, told reporters, "We have an energy crisis, an urban crisis, growing racial polarization, a moral crisis. You get all these together and you have a civilizational crisis." At another point, speaking to Carter directly about the vulnerability of the U.S. caused by oil imports, Jackson came up with a back-alley metaphor: "Mr. President, we've got our vital organs over the fence and our neighbors have the knife."
Carter's efforts to break through the isolation he had suddenly felt were behind the President's surprise visits to the Fishers and the Porterfields. Aides say those calls were planned at the same time as the summit itself; Carter wanted to sample the views of middle-class citizens after spending a week with the nation's elite. But the plans were kept so secret that the hosts had no idea how or why they were singled out. And the White House declined to say.
Both couples were approached by third parties and asked to assemble some friends for a talk on national issues. They were given the impression that their guest would be Pollster Caddell. Caddell did call on the Fishers to inform them that the President himself would be there in an hour; he handed Bette Fisher $100 to buy refreshments. She rushed to a delicatessen about ten miles away and bought mounds of cold cuts and cole slaw, but Carter and Rosalynn, who accompanied him on both trips, declined to eat anything; they settled for lemonade. Ginny Porterfield had prepared coffee and sweet rolls for the visitor from Washington and friends and neighbors, including two doctors, some farmers, retired schoolteachers and widows. But she and the major had no idea that the President was coming until Carter rather than Caddell walked through the door of their one-story yellow stucco house.
Indications are that Carter heard from the middle-class citizens pretty much the same things he had been listening to at Camp David. The Porter-fields and their group declined to talk about what was said, except that the discussion covered "what the people are worried about." William Fisher said, "We talked about a lot of things: the oil shortage, gas lines, SALT. I told him I thought the country was in a downhill spiral with respect to the economy, inflation and gasoline. He agreed with me.
He thinks the country's in a downhill spin too."
Another man sitting on Fisher's porch confirmed Carter's worry that his messages were not getting through to the people, that, as the President later told Camp David visitors, "they either turned off their television sets or went bowling." Fisher's friend told Carter that people had been concerned about his cancellation of his original speech, but Carter promptly asked, "Would you have listened if I had made the speech?" "He thought a long time," Carter recalled, "and he said, 'Well, I listened to your earlier speeches.' And I said, 'No, I want to know if you would have listened last Thursday night.' He said, 'Mr. President, I hate to answer you, but I promise you I'll listen to you on Sunday night.' " If the people did listen, would it mean that Carter can begin pulling the nation --and his own presidency--out of its "downhill spin"? Much of the discussion at Camp David focused on the need for changes in Carter's staff, and perhaps in the Cabinet. A reshuffling is coming, White House insiders said last week, but it probably will stop far short of what many summit guests urged and thought Carter would carry out.
Press Secretary Powell probably will be moved out of his present job, where he has been increasingly engaging in bad-tempered exchanges with reporters, and given broader duties supervising White House business. Says one senior aide: "We need someone to kick ass here."
That should be Hamilton Jordan's job, but he has neglected it, and domestic political tasks generally, to immerse himself in foreign policy. He has angered congressional leaders, whom he is supposed to keep in touch with and does not. Some advisers would like to see Jordan moved out of the White House entirely and assigned to run Carter's re-election campaign. Jordan has been resisting that, and the President is said to have decided on a completely different approach--naming Jordan, in effect, chief of staff. In that post, he will have to develop a greater talent for organization than any he has shown so far. Says one key Democrat of the impending staff shifts: "The very people who are the problem are going to be left in place."
Among Cabinet members, Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger came under the heaviest fire at Camp David. He has annoyed both the public and his Administration colleagues because of his abrasive manner, and most of Carter's aides would like the boss to fire him. Carter has been reluctant to do so, partly out of genuine loyalty, and to a lesser extent out of worry that Schlesinger, a Republican former Secretary of Defense and CIA director, might stump the country in opposition to the SALT II treaty. In frustration, the advisers settled some time ago on getting rid of Schlesinger's No. 2 man, John O'Leary, who submitted his resignation last week.
O'Leary scarcely makes a satisfactory scapegoat, so Schlesinger is still expected to depart soon, though just when is uncertain. White House aides are discussing assignments that could keep him in harness--ambassador to NATO, perhaps --and floating names of possible successors as Secretary of Energy. Among them:
John D. deButts, former chairman of AT&T; Dixy Lee Ray, Governor of Washington and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; Michael Dukakis, former Governor of Massachusetts; John Sawhill, president of New York University and onetime energy czar under Presidents Nixon and Ford; David Freeman, head of the TVA. Getting anyone of substance to take the job may be difficult. It is a thankless task at best, and its authority would be reduced by the creation of any form of Energy Mobilization Board.
Other members of the Cabinet were raked over the coals too. Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal was denigrated once again, and several visitors added a new target: HEW Secretary Joseph Califano. The guests told Carter that Califano seemed to be working for himself, was not enough of a team player and needed to be reined in. The President made no attempt to choke off the criticisms.
Personnel shifts conceivably might help give the nation a new sense of leadership. But they certainly cannot do the job alone, even if they were far more radical than any the President seems likely to undertake. A cohesive domestic policy is the prime requisite, and unfortunately all of Carter's options are risky. The budget-cutting and tight-money strategies thought necessary to restrain inflation were helping to bring on a recession even before OPEC'S latest oil gouge; an antirecession tax cut might indeed worsen inflation. In the energy field, nearly all strategies for increasing domestic fuel production are expensive and involve some environmental damage; production of synthetic fuels may be especially dirty. Rigorous conservation measures would entail changes in lifestyles that few U.S. citizens would suffer without protest.
Carter openly mulled over the harsh alternatives of gas rationing or price deregulation, and he had problems with both. His original request for stand-by authority to impose rationing failed in the House last spring partly because of disputes over whether to allot fuel by the number of cars, of drivers, or on the basis of past consumption. Carter insists he needs stand-by rationing authority. "Only when I get that authority can I develop a rationing plan," he told visitors. "I think it would take at least five or six months under the best of circumstances, once I get the authority, to go ahead and get the mechanisms involved, rationing stamps printed up..."
But he was adamant against price deregulation, which is favored by many economic experts, including his own Energy Secretary Schlesinger. "That would in effect be rationing by price," Carter said. "I am not going to do that. Every time you raise the price of gasoline by one cent it costs the American consumer roughly a billion dollars. And I know that the people who are most in need are quite often those who have to drive farthest to work and they are the ones who have the most wasteful automobiles, the '64 Oldsmobile that they can't afford to trade in for a brand new Honda."
If such choices are presented in the economist's jargon of trade-off--a bit less of this for a bit more of that--they can sound singularly deadening. But if trumpeted as calls to sacrifice, they can prove inspiring, as many Presidents have discovered in earlier crises. Clarion calls have not been Carter's forte in the past, however, and some of his supporters fear that once again he built expectations too high. Predicted Walter Heller just after his session at Camp David: "That speech is going to have to be a stem-winder, and Carter unfortunately is not a stem-winding speaker."
But regardless of how the most important speech of his presidency is ultimately assessed, Carter did take an inspirational step with his Camp David summit. True, not everybody came away from it inspired. Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and one of Carter's earliest labor supporters in 1976, returned grumbling that unionists might consider voting for a Republican in 1980. But the reaction of Connecticut Governor Grasso was more typical: she found Carter "upbeat and confident, just terribly impressive." At the minimum, most of the summit visitors were persuaded to give Carter the benefit of the doubt for a few days, as he struggled to devise a program and a way to sell it.
One problem at least the Presiden had surely solved as he prepared to go before the TV cameras. At Camp David he complained that he had been losing his audience. Some 80 million people had watched his first fireside chat on energy in 1977, he recalled, but only 30 million had tuned in for his fourth, last April That was scarcely the trouble Sunday night. However unorthodox his method Carter had seized the nation's attention He and his aides knew he had taken a gigantic gamble. If he failed to capitalize on this chance to assert his leadership, he would not get many more.
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