Cabinet resignation call

Some years ago I was the MC, or head waiter, of a television series that offered a greatly varied menu, sometimes in the same week. We tried to televise everything, from how opera works to how the brain works, from Beethoven's notebooks to the birth of a bee.

There came a time at the beginning of an election year when we had a rather intriguing idea. What we'd do would be to go out in the country and find some young idealistic type who was running for Congress for the first time and film him in his home, knocking on doors, telling us what he hoped to do if and when he got to Washington and what sort of place he imagined Washington to be. And then we'd put the film on the shelf through the summer, wait maybe a year, come back to the young man after he'd been in Congress for a few months and have him compare what he'd imagined Washington to be with what he found there. 

The first problem of this engaging script was one which will have struck many of you already. How are you going to pick a man who's certain to win and so be able to complete the second half of the story? At that point we decided we'd better go for advice to a wise veteran and who better than the awesome Mr Sam. Sam Rayburn, the vigorous, old, bald-head of a Texan, who'd been elected and re-elected, I don't know how many times, from his district and who for many years had been the Speaker of the House. 

In the American system, the speaker is not a neutral umpire, a major domo simply. He is that but he's also the political leader of his party in the House. And he's, therefore, a very big man indeed whenever the president is of his party. The speaker is elected by the party having a majority in the House and that may or may not be the party whose man is in the White House. 

Anyway, Sam Rayburn was speaker at various times when the president was Roosevelt, Truman and now it was Eisenhower. I went to call on him. He was taken with our idea but right away he said we'd have to follow and film two men running for Congress. 'Of course,' I said, 'two men, one Democrat, one Republican running against each other so we'd be sure of getting a winner.' 'I mean,' he said, 'you're going to have to follow four men!' How so? 'Well,' he said, 'you can't just come out with one winner of one party, a Democrat, say. Mr McCormick,' he said, 'wouldn't like that.' Mr McCormick of Massachusetts was a Republican, the minority leader of the House. 'So!' Mr Sam said, as if it had been already decided, 'I'll give you the name of two youngsters who are likely to make it for us, for the Democrats, and you go to Mr McCormick and he'll give you the names of two likely winners from his party.' 

Mr Sam, you see, though a tenacious party leader and a loyal Democrat, a sworn Roosevelt man, didn't want us to propagate the idea that a typical, idealistic, young congressman was necessarily a Democrat or a Republican. 'That,' said Mr Sam, 'would be obnoxious, wouldn't it?' Mr Sam, however strong his political convictions, took great pride in the House as an institution. He would give his consent to our project and help us if we went out and spent several months filming the habits and hopes of four different men. 

Well, I went back to New York and the producer looked glum. This was going to run into money and pretty soon we decided the Rayburn plan was hopelessly expensive. So then we decided we'd get a good writer who knew his way around Washington and we'd hire a small cast of actors and we'd pick a hero of no identified party. We just wanted to show how an idealistic young man made his way to Washington and how different he found life as a congressman from the dream of being a congressman. In other words, we'd convert the idea into a television play. We even had a title,’ A Clean, Fresh Breeze'. We were sure that Sam Rayburn would greatly approve of this switch. 

So, I went back to Washington and again was received by the great man. I waxed, as the novelists used to say, enthusiastic about the new plan. I even mentioned the title, 'A Clean, Fresh Breeze'. He looked at me like a deeply disappointed headmaster, his long chin dropped, his eyes rolled balefully. 

He turned those baleful eyes on me. The House of Representatives, he said, was as fine a body of men as you could find. Once, an agent, a fine producer, had come from Hollywood and talked about a similar project and they allowed him to photograph the House interior and congressmen's offices and so on, so as to be able to reproduce them accurately on a Hollywood lot. 

'You know what,' said Mr Sam, 'they produced the goddamndest slander on this House. They made a hero of some upstart with highfalutin' ideas, came here to reform us, we were all corrupt or lazy stuffed shirts and good-for-nothings. I was so mad I was fit to be tied. No sir!' he said, walking to the door and opening it – I was being what is politely called 'shown out' – I was being given what is impolitely called the 'bum's rush.' 

Just before he bowed me out, he stopped and looked at me without a blink, 'Mr Cooke, sir,' he said, 'have you ever met any actors?' I allowed that I had known several but he scarcely heard me. 'Actors,' he said, 'they're terrible people. They fix their teeth to look snow white and they wear a scratch, (a scratch is Texas for a wig). No sir!' said Mr Sam, 'Good day to you, sir!' 

The film Mr Sam was talking about was one with Jimmy Stewart as the white knight hero, or what he'd called the 'highfalutin' upstart' – it was called 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington – and the brave simplicity of the name was meant to imply that an ordinary, decent, idealistic, young man went to Congress with every intention of being a clean, fresh breeze but was broken by the wicked or cynical veterans around him. Mr Sam, as he said, was fit to be tied. 

Well, this... this terrifying memory came back to me irresistibly this week when like thousands, perhaps millions, of other people I was first amazed by President Carter's Jimmy Stewart-type speech last Sunday and then bewildered by his extraordinary, indeed his unprecedented move in asking his entire Cabinet to resign, I decided that Mr Carter had gone to Washington. 'What,' people ask, 'do you make of him?' Which is a startling question for Americans to put to anybody about a president who's been in office nearly three years. 

He was a puzzle when he arrived and a refreshing one. He wanted, he said, to have a government open to the people. He even started a people's telephone call. He set aside three hours every Saturday for anybody, Americans anywhere, to put in a free call to the White House and tell the president what was on their minds. Now if you try and divide 220 million, the population of America, into three hours, you'll find that about 180 people can make a one-minute call. The idea was as naive and hilarious as any Jimmy Steward/Mr Smith thought up to change and purify Washington. The idea was abandoned. 

Mr Carter went on saying for a time that – and he implied, unlike his predecessors – he would be there to 'listen' to the people. As he'd said in his acceptance speech to the Democratic convention, he wanted a government as good as he knew the American people to be. 

Well, after one year, he admitted that all his mistakes had come from ignorance, ignorance of how the federal system works but, though making that handsome admission, he made it plain that he was going to cut the fat out of the government bureaucracy and reduce, for instance, the scandalous huge staff employed by the White House. So at the end of the first year, the White House staff was about one third bigger than it had been under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Whenever a problem seemed insoluble, Mr Carter created an agency. 

He found, I believe, a couple of weeks ago, that the energy problem was insoluble, or at least that the solutions offered to him by a half-dozen close advisers, including the staffs of the White House and the staff of the Department of Energy, were incompatible. So, at the last minute, you remember, he cancelled his fighting speech because he found himself fighting in several directions and he feared what he had to say would be useless and would contribute to his steady decline in public esteem. 

So now he goes off into the mountain to Camp David and thinks again. He came down from the mountain and, astonishingly, called for his Cabinet and a whole bunch of other officials to resign. This, I humbly suggest, tells us two things about Mr Carter. Or one thing and its corollary. He's still strangely ignorant of the American system. He doesn't seem to know that it is not a Cabinet system. The Cabinet has only an incidental say in the framing of legislation. Its members are not elected, they are not congressional veterans, they are old buddies or new buddies. They are consulted or not consulted. The federal budget is not the creation of the Secretary of the Treasury. I don't think one American in a hundred could tell you who he is. It's the president’s budget. The president is responsible for everything. If a Cabinet officer resigns on principle, if ten resign, the government doesn't fall. They are being simply cronies on the fringe of things. They're there just to put through what the president and his little band of staff cronies have decided. And so on and so on. 

So when the headlines read, 'Carter's Cabinet to Resign' there's no crisis of government. Though the request was damaging to Mr Carter's prestige abroad because, in most democracies, the Cabinet is the essential bodyguard of the system and its head. So this time Mr Carter depressed his allies while baffling his countrymen. 

The other thing about him, the corollary, of his not understanding how Washington works is that he's essentially an evangelist, an evangelist caught up in the machinery of government which is complex and seldom dramatic. Mr Carter is Mr Smith who wants government to be swift and just and improving to the character. Unlike Mr Sam Rayburn, he does not take his inspiration from the institutions. He finds them frustrating, infuriating. So, at last, he came out with a speech which bemoaned the self-indulgence of some Americans and their devotion to material things and he longed for the simple solution of sacrifice. But he didn't say 'You' are going to have to sacrifice now. No more 'one car, one commuter'. Sacrifice is something vague and general that we should all approve of. But he shrinks from saying how to make sacrifices, like rationing petrol. 

And in creating yet another government energy agency, in addition to the Department of Energy, he hopes it won't be a bureaucracy at all but a sort of moral engine calling all good men and true to repentance. In a word, Mr Carter, who has testified to the profound experience of being 'born again', has found that it has little effect on government. So he's gone through another agony of self-analysis and he's decided to be 're-born again'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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