Trying To Show His Toughness

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

There is a deep sadness in Washington this week. Concern about Jimmy Carter and his Administration has gone beyond anger. The immediate shock of the graceless Cabinet changes will wear off, but doubts about the President will grow even larger and seep out across the world. Ultimately, they are doubts about America.

The presidency is a very personal office. Despite the best efforts of scholars to stuff it into pigeonholes and hang it up on graphs, the presidency takes on the moods of the man in the office. His purposes become policy by osmosis. His sense of urgency regulates the administrative speed. The food he likes shows up on menus at state dinners, and the Marine Band magically plays his favorite tunes. The very words he uses shape the language of his time in power.

The Jimmy Carter now at work behind the closed White House doors is not the Jimmy Carter we grew to know in the first 30 months of his presidency. It is true that he was from the beginning a somewhat elusive figure. But at the center there was a man of regular habits, kindly ways and comfortable personal characteristics. He did warn us last week that he was going to change "my life-style and my way of working." But the events of this week represent more than that.

This is a disorganized and sometimes insensitive Jimmy Carter, overreacting to demands for leadership in an effort to save himself, seemingly unable to look ahead and see how his actions will affect the country. This is an uncertain Jimmy Carter trying to show how tough he is. It is true that many influential voices pleaded with Carter to be more decisive. Given his dismal political prospects and his genuine personal distress over the national attitude, an environment for extreme action was created, to which Carter responded.

But his new Cabinet is less distinguished than his old one. It cannot possibly change the substance or the image of the Government in the time left to Carter. The new White House staff arrangements that invest the Georgians with more power than ever will do nothing so much as reinforce the President's own failings, which have come from his inexperience and his narrow background.

Every time in the past couple of decades that a President has felt compelled to demonstrate to the world how tough he was we have been dragged deeper into trouble. A major cause of the Viet Nam involvement was Jack Kennedy's concern about machismo, and then Lyndon Johnson's determination to show that Texans did not back away from fights.

The most devastating echo of all heard in the somber streets of the capital after the paper executions was the voice of Richard Nixon. The image of a closeted Jimmy Carter mercilessly cutting down his Cabinet officers was a little like the picture of Richard Nixon swearing into the hidden microphones.

The question arose whether Carter had yielded authority to Hamilton Jordan, Charles Kirbo and Jody Powell. Or had he harbored for months dark impulses to clean out his Cabinet, even while posing in an aura of human kindness? While the purge was going on, the President went out into the Rose Garden to meet with the Future Farmers of America. "Some things don't change," he said softly. "The fundamentals don't change -- love within a family, honesty, friendship among people, the desire for peace, respect for one another, the beauty of nature and genuine patriotism based on confidence in our country." In that appeal there seemed almost a public apology for what he had done.

There is a great mythology about how men change in the presidency. Harry Truman scoffed at any such notion. "After a certain age," Truman said, "it's hopeless to think people are going to change much." Jimmy Carter may be the one to prove Harry wrong, but the evidence at this moment is that Presidents who try to be what they are not create more chaos than they cure.

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