1977: United States

The Presidency

It was a year of presidential compromise, moderation, and decorum. And in a way it paid off. At the end of the year, Jimmy Carter had achieved one of his goals. He had proved—as he promised he would—that a president does not need to pretend to princely powers and that he can function in office without splitting the nation into bitterly opposed ideological camps or being suspected of corruption or tyrannical impulses. It was a victory for the moralist in Carter.

But for the engineer side of the president's character, the side that places high priority on efficiency and getting things done, it was probably a year of frustration. The programs to which Carter had given top priority—cutting unemployment, stimulating the economy without stimulating inflation, reorganizing the executive branch, reforming the tax and welfare systems, enacting a national health insurance program, and establishing a comprehensive energy program—either failed to materialize altogether, were barely sketched into legislation, bogged down for at least a year on Capitol Hill, or were criticized and altered in Congress.

Carter lost no time deflating the atmosphere that, during the Johnson and Nixon years, had been described by critics as the 'imperial presidency.' He had hardly moved into the White House before he reduced the executive limousine fleet by 40 percent. Office television sets and other perquisites were sharply cut back, and White House officials and top bureaucrats were encouraged to fly coach rather than first class on official trips. In his first television talk to the nation, a 'fireside chat' reminiscent of the Franklin Roosevelt era, Carter appeared in a sweater. He enrolled his daughter, Amy, in one of Washington's central-city public schools.

During his first two months in office, Carter averaged 1½ hours a week of live television exposure. In his effort to seem an approachable man of the people, he conducted two 'town hall meetings,' in Clinton, Mass., and Yazoo City, Miss., and held an unprecedented two-hour radio show in which he answered questions telephoned to the White House by 42 citizens. Telephone company officials said more than 9 million attempts were made to reach the president by phone. Critics accused Carter of approaching the problems of government in a shallow, symbol-minded fashion. Nonetheless, the symbolism won him an immediate high rating in public opinion polls. (His rating, like those of other recent presidents, later declined.)

After the preliminary flurry of public relations maneuvers, Carter's administration settled down to an unexceptional routine supervised by qualified but unexceptional officials. During his campaign he had promised to bring a fresh viewpoint to Washington. But the people he appointed to the cabinet were mostly battle-scarred bureaucrats and other establishment figures, many of whom had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It was essentially a conservative cabinet, made up of persons whose prior experience indicated they would be discreet team players.

In contrast to the prevailing practice in the Nixon White House, Carter's cabinet members could get into the Oval Office without fighting for an appointment, and they could criticize presidential policies—at least mildly—without fear of being fired. Nevertheless, Carter fell far short of establishing the cabinet form of government he had talked about before taking office. He had said he wanted regular written reports from cabinet members on everything they were doing, but after a few weeks he found himself swimming in thick memoranda and discarded the idea. The cabinet sessions themselves usually turned out to be too disjointed to assist decision-making, and Carter increasingly found himself, as his predecessors had, depending mostly on two or three of the most important department heads or on staff advisers for the data on which he based decisions.

Carter's views on economic issues were clearly indicated by his appointment of his longtime friend Thomas Bertram Lance to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Lance was assigned the task of serving as Carter's behind-the-scenes intermediary with the nation's business leaders. In private conferences he frequently assured them, 'Jimmy campaigns liberal but he governs conservative.'

This appraisal of Carter's economics was largely accurate. He proposed few changes from the programs that he had inherited from the Nixon and Ford administrations. Carter's energy program contained many proposals made by Ford, and his plan for welfare reform—which laid heavy emphasis on a guaranteed income and work incentives—was patterned to a large extent on the program proposed (without success) by Richard Nixon. Carter declined to create major new public job programs (although he did advocate and sign legislation to create more jobs under existing programs and ultimately endorsed, in modified form, the so-called Humphrey-Hawkins bill, to make it official federal policy to achieve specified low levels of unemployment). Many black leaders, whose ghetto constituents suffered a rate of unemployment that was twice the overall U.S. rate, accused Carter of reneging on campaign promises.

Contrary to expectations, Carter halted production of the costly B-1 bomber—an action that was highly popular with liberals and highly unpopular with conservatives—and declared that the national defense would instead be strengthened by the cruise missile. Otherwise, however, Carter's defense budget and defense projections looked much like those he had inherited from Gerald Ford. Although during his campaign Carter had promised to cut the defense budget by some $5 billion, it was not actually lowered. Defense Secretary Harold Brown explained that Carter had meant he would prevent that much potential waste by spending wisely, not that he would actually cut back the budget.

Although he held regular press conferences, Carter eventually became, like other recent presidents, remote from the press and the general public. He had come to Washington as something of a mystery, and he did little his first year in office to help analysts understand him.

James Wooten, a reporter for the New York Times who interviewed a number of Carter aides, described Carter in an article as a brooding and humorless taskmaster, tough on subordinates, who 'seems to be retreating more and more into the sanctuary of his little study.' White House press secretary Jody Powell called the profile 'totally inaccurate.' But a team of Wall Street Journal reporters, after interviewing dozens of people in and around the White House, came up with a similar presidential profile. It depicted Carter as cool, aloof, obsessed with showing that southerners can run the country, offended by the need to make political deals, restless in political bull sessions, and a demon for work. Like Wooten, the Journal team concluded that Carter tended to bury himself in the details of a problem rather than keep a broad overview, and that his main goal was simply to make the government work better.