First weeks of Carter presidency

The brutal winter eased up suddenly this week, though the forecast for the next two months suggests that it's only a lull in the long, unprecedented Arctic campaign. Still, the buried towns made the most of their present blessing. Chicago, this week, had its first day or night since December of above freezing temperatures and people went out in the streets, smiling and waving at each other in celebration, like a population of reformed Scrooges.

Well, it was possible for the first time this year to emerge from the blizzard of concern with such purely personal but important things as staying warm and, well, it was possible to sit back and look at, well, not so much the state of the nation – that's something that only some demigod looking down on us from Mars could do – as the state of the Carter presidency from the beginning to now. 

He's been there now for all of three weeks and is well launched on the third and last act of what you might call the presidential performance. In the past six months, I've more than hinted that for a successful presidential candidate, the performance runs to three acts or, if you like, say it's a cycle, a trilogy, of plays, and the first play is the election campaign and could be called 'Promises, promises.' The second play begins the day the man's elected, lasts until he's inaugurated and could be called 'The Honeymoon'. And the third play, which is going to go on for the next four years, begins on 20 January and my title for it is 'The Facts of Life'. I hasten to say that these are not cynical labels to be stuck in retrospect on the Carter presidency, but on all presidencies. 

Presidential campaigns, everybody agrees, are too long and exhausting. The appalling size of the country has much to do with it and what always happens – because the man cannot stop long enough in big and little places to elaborate thoughtfully on everything he'd like to do – what happens in these frantic one-hour safaris into mountains and deserts and cities and seaboards is that the man simply has to dramatise and oversimplify his policies, his promises, almost to the point of melodrama. 

Facing an audience of old folks in Florida living on scanty pensions, the best he can do is to tell them that he'll see they get more money. Or for, say, in Detroit, he has to promise the automobile workers that their wages will keep step with the cost of living. Out in drought-ridden California, he must say that he's grieved to see their blighted crops and sagging cattle and will see they get a price subsidy. Before a regiment of women he's going to see to it that there are more women in government. Before an audience of blacks, he'll never cease to look for the best blacks he can find to recruit for his administration, if only they'll vote him in. And so on, and so on. 

Meanwhile, the other fellow is doing the same and, first, they swear not to engage in personalities, then they bicker, then they deny and then they are shocked at the way one of them misrepresented the position of the other. And, at long last, on the first Tuesday in November, it's all over and one of them's elected on (this) hallelujah chorus of promises, half of which cannot possibly be kept, many of which are downright contradictory. 

But a new president does always suggest the prospect of change and movement. And in the second play, when he's in but not yet in the White House, he is allowed a honeymoon. We have no grounds yet to criticise him for what he hasn't done. He's powerless, but very popular. And in this second play we develop a lively interest in him and his family, getting to know his style in such things as manner, clothes, eating habits, sense of drama, sense of humour, if any. 

It wasn't really till Mr Carter began to bring his family into the picture that we realised what an astonishing American story his rise to power has been. A man who, a year ago, precious few Americans had heard of, standing on street corners here, there, everywhere, holding out a hand saying to passers-by 'I'm Jimmy Carter. I am running for president and I'd like for you to vote for me.' Talking to any body of people that would listen – to church groups, YMCAs, women's clubs, a ring of farmers. Starting so far behind, that when the Democrats had nine candidates in the running, the one name even the most knowing of us kept forgetting was this farmer from a minute town in Georgia. And now, there he is and between November and inauguration day, any American who runs and reads could be forgiven for thinking he was reading a regular comic strip called 'The Carters'. 

Just look over the cast of characters! It would certainly be as bizarre and engaging as Li'l Abner. First, there's Father Carter, peanut farmer and nuclear submarine commander – an artful and improbably combination for any comic-strip hero because you meld science fiction and appeal to rural America. He has a pretty wife, Rosalynn, with eyelashes like bees wings. They have an uninhibited daughter, Amy, with large round glasses and a habit of making faces at cameras. Also, Father Carter has a brother, a beefy, jolly owner of a petrol station who is a natural joker and is always shown carrying a six-pack of beer cans. 

Father Carter has his private troubles and he's surmounted them manfully. He has a son who was busted from the navy, 'Quite rightly,' the son says, on a marijuana charge. There's also a nephew in jail whose pleasure in seeing his uncle elected president is based on the hope that he'll get out of the Georgia jail into a nicer one in another state. Then there's Father Carter's mother, a splendid, spontaneous old lady of absolutely unflappable poise, with the typical Southern nickname of Miss Lillian. Father Carter has also a sister, an evangelist, a female Billy Graham, who is not to be put off by her brother's rise to glory to abandon her soul-saving mission. 

And in the White House, suddenly, is just not one Carter family, as there was one Roosevelt family, one Kennedy family, one Ford family. Even the grown boys have moved in with their children. There are three families living there. And, finally, our sheet anchor. In American folk law, there is the Carter's little dog and what is he called? He is called by the name of that dish, a porridge of coarsely ground maize, which is nectar to all Southerners and anathema to everybody else. The little dog's name is Grits. 

I enumerate the characters in this folk epic with all respect. To me, it's a triumphant achievement and shows that, as Will Rogers used to say, 'Any boy in America can get to be president' to which he added, 'In South America, every boy has got to be president.' 

Certainly, I can't think of another county, another democratic country where the choice of a president could be so completely open and so totally unpredictable. But, as I say, if somebody had sat down two years ago and made up this family and suggested it to a newspaper syndicate as the cast of characters for a newspaper comic strip, it would have been rejected out of hand as too wild an all-American fantasy. And yet, here is that family, not in the papers, but in the flesh, in the White House. 

And now the president has had three weeks of the third play, 'The Facts of Life'. First of all, he turned the thermostats down and people put their topcoats on at their desks and Mrs Carter, he said, was close to tears from the cold. If he let a literal breeze into the White House, he's already sent a fresh breeze blowing through many fixed traditions. You remember that Mr Nixon yearned for a little more pomp and dressed up a White House honour guard in white uniforms like courtiers in 'The Prisoner of Zenda'. Mr Carter scorns all such folderol and is acutely aware that after what has come to be known as the 'imperial' presidency, it was necessary not just to forget it but to replace it with something visibly more humble. 

He has abolished the custom of having a Marine band play 'Hail to the Chief' wherever the president goes. He's abolished official White House limousines for his aides and advisors. He gave his first fireside chat the other evening and appeared in a cardigan. Only the widow of the late Ernest Hemingway protested to the New York Times that she is not used to receiving a gentleman in her living room after dinner without a jacket. 

Beyond these small but significant gestures, he's done something not one president in a trainload has done – not in my time. Asked at his first press conference if he hadn't given Congress cause for complaint in not consulting his party leaders on appointments, he didn't prevaricate, he didn't, as the regular custom goes, chuckle and try to explain why you didn't understand the delicacy of his job. He did chuckle, but he simply said, yes, he'd given cause for complaint, 'We've made mistakes. I've learned in my first two and a half weeks why Abraham Lincoln and some of the older presidents almost went home when they first got to the White House. We are here to learn.' 

Well, it's refreshing to see how this simple acknowledgement of frailty gave the press actually more confidence in him than if he'd done what presidents always do: deny, carp, waffle. And that press conference – he'll give one every fortnight – showed that he already had at his command a vast range of digested information and shrewd judgement. More than anything he showed that, more than any previous president, he not only knows very much more about the intricacies of nuclear weapons but that he holds to his campaign belief in a drastic reduction of nuclear weapons as a better guarantee of security, of survival, than the present race between America and the Soviet Union to outstrip each other in nuclear technology. He's in for his first, big conflict here with the old Vietnam hawks and what has been called the new military intellectual complex. We're going to have to go into this in the weeks to come. 

So far, then, a man of considerable, simple dignity, surprising flashes of humour and a tough mind. So far, so very good.

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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