Carter reshuffles his team

So now, after all the upheaval in the government and the scolding of Congress as a body unresponsive to the people and the president’s firm declaration that the fight for his energy bill, postponed for almost two years, is the moral equivalent of war, he now tells the Congress he'll be quite happy if his energy bill is put off until the fall.

At a breakfast with some senators and congressmen of his own party, having handed them this reprieve, he was quick to warn them that his entire energy programme must be financed by what he calls 'a windfall profits tax' on the oil companies and that he won't stand for any monkeying around with it. 

Well, we'll go into that 'windfall profits tax', but not now. Not before I've checked with a posse of tax experts and confirmed or disapproved or disproved my suspicion that the windfall profits tax is not a profits tax at all but an excise tax. And, after all the rumblings and lava flow over the past two weeks, it's the rueful consensus of the Congress, Mr Carter's own party men as much as anybody, that his main purpose in scaring everybody about reorganising the government was to organise the team which will manage his next campaign for the 1980 election. 

His personal motives in doing this are still very obscure but I would be remiss if I didn’t report that there's a sinking feeling in Washington and around the country about the qualifications that the president has laid down, the qualifications for being a member of his new team. The main qualification, he says, is loyalty to him. Well, this reminds me, with no pleasure at all, of a scene in Washington exactly, as it happens, six years ago when a Senate committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, was looking into the amazing charge that between 1969 and 1970, President Nixon, while solemnly announcing that Cambodia was the territory of a neutral nation and so to be honoured, was actually secretly ordering over 3600 bombing missions over the sacred soil. 

An air force major who had, under orders from on top, the Pentagon, falsified the orders to make them look like bombing raids into North Vietnam, he was called before the committee. And when he told his awful story, a hawkish senator doubted the major's loyalty to the United States and the major came back with the snapping retort, 'Sir, I didn't take an oath to support the military, I took an oath to support the constitution.' And so, of course, did President Nixon when he was sworn in as president. But for several disreputable years, he surrounded himself with a small, compact team of cronies whose only vow was personal loyalty to Mr Nixon, whatever he did or thought. 

Well now, Mr Hamilton Jordan, the Georgia boy who managed Mr Carter's first and unsuccessful run for the governorship of Georgia, is elevated to a post that the constitution does not mention, that of chief of staff to the president. There is, of course, always one such man deeply embedded in the system, if not in the constitution, a man un-elected, usually unknown to the people, an old and dependable crony to whom the president turns in elation and despair, and in all the moods in between, for sympathy and advice. 

I mentioned last time that the Cabinet is allowed for in the constitution, but that it's a great pity the parliamentary word 'Cabinet' was ever picked up by the new republic. Since, whereas the Cabinet is vital to a parliamentary government, it is quite unimportant in the American system. It's a collection of friends who come zooming out of obscurity when it's first chosen. One or two strong men usually, if they're made secretary of state, can take on the functioning importance of a British foreign minister but that's due to their character or their president's ignorance of foreign affairs and not to any powers inherent in the office. I think I'll try and sharpen the difference between the Cabinet's power in both countries by telling you two contrasting anecdotes. 

A century, or maybe much more ago, I believe it was either Lord Melbourne or Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister. There was a Cabinet meeting about some burning issue and the debate in the Cabinet Room grew hot and bothered. There was so much wrangling, so much contention that finally the prime minister walked to the door and shut it. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'it doesn't matter what we agree on so long as we all agree.' 

Well, the other story is about Abraham Lincoln holding a Cabinet meeting when there was an early move during the Civil War to bring in conscription. You can imagine what a... what a tenuous hold on his office a prime minister would have if the whole Cabinet was against him and yet he tried to have his way in the Commons. He and his government would fall. Well, Lincoln, after a lot of argument around the table, said, 'We'll take a vote'. He nodded in turn to the men sitting there, 'Mr Stanton, Mr Seward, Mr Cameron' and the voices came back like a tolling bell. Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! He went right round the assembled cabinet and they were of one mind. And then Lincoln said, 'The nays, gentlemen, have it'. And that was that. 

In the United States, the effective Cabinet is what came to be called, in Theodore Roosevelt's time, the 'kitchen' Cabinet and this was nothing in any constitutional document, it was simply a happy, slang phrase that somebody'd coined. And it was applied to Teddy Roosevelt's cronies, reliable buddies that he'd known when he was police commissioner of New York and then governor and so on. They were the ones who were close to him every day. They were even required to meet him on the White House lawn before a working breakfast and toss a medicine ball at each other. Teddy Roosevelt was a great believer in what he called 'the strenuous life'. 

There's no rule or law which gives these pals power or takes it away, just as there is no rule or law which says the president must consult his Cabinet once a week or once a month, or ever. In fact, one of the absolutely dependable grouches in the memoirs of ex-Cabinet officers – officers they're called, not ministers – is the complaint that they got to see the president only at his pleasure and that in order to see him, if he wasn’t calling them, they had to arrange a meeting with another, anonymous grandee, the president’s so-called 'appointments secretary'. 

During the reign of John Kennedy, nobody could get to see the president except his wife. Not a Supreme Court justice, not a general or a governor, a senator, anybody, until they called an Irishman from Boston, an old buddy of Kennedy's, Ken O'Donnell, whose name Americans never knew till the day Kennedy died or, indeed, until the day the man himself died. 

And, similarly, when Woodrow Wilson thought there might be a chance of stopping the First World War after the first appalling three months of casualties, he didn't send his secretary of state to see the Kaiser and Lord Grey and Monsieur Clemenceau, he sent an old Texan, his closest friend who bore the courtesy title of 'colonel', Colonel House. 

In the early years of the new deal, the man Franklin Roosevelt called to his dinner table or a late-night confidential talk was an old newspaper man that he'd known when he was governor in Albany. And in the war years, the one man who had access to Roosevelt at all times of the night and day, was no senator, no Cabinet officer, but an unelected old social worker friend from Iowa. And when things went askew in the transatlantic calls between Roosevelt and Churchill, it was not the American ambassador in London who went to Churchill, Harry Hopkins was the man sent across the Atlantic. 

And when the founding conference of the United Nation seemed on the point of foundering in San Francisco because the Russians were against allowing freely elected Poles to represent their country and the wartime alliance of Russia, American and Britain appeared to be falling apart. I well remember how the conference staggered and stalled for a day or two, until the great news came in that Harry Hopkins, sent to Moscow by Truman, had saved the day after a long personal meeting with Stalin. 

Closer to our time, I remember one weary day in the presidency of John Kennedy and a sentence he confided to his mafia, or kitchen Cabinet at nightfall, which tells volumes about the way presidential government is run. On that morning, President Kennedy received a very unusual letter, a letter from his own vice president. This is about as rare as a husband's receiving a letter from his wife in the next room. The letter was from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson who, like every other man tapped by the incoming president to be vice president, thought he was going to be the second man in the country. 

He's never any such thing. The constitution puts him first in line of succession to the president, but that is all. His only other power, and it's more of a chore than a power, is to preside over the debates in the United States Senate. Otherwise, no matter what powers the president has promised him, he will get to attend the best funerals in Europe, Africa and Asia. How much do you hear these days of the man Mr Carter said would be his 'strong right arm'? Who is the vice president of the United States? Fritz Mondale. 

Well, this, er... this Johnson letter complained to the point of whimpering that he rarely got to see the president and wasn't consulted and he didn't know what was happening. Kennedy read the letter and sighed and said to his old Boston buddies, who saw him every day and knew everything, 'I'm sorry for old Lyndon but the thing about this job is the only people you can see are the people who see the overnight cables'.Nods of sad agreement from the really powerful henchmen, Larry O’Brien and Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell. 

Well, Mr Nixon had his Haldeman and now Mr Carter has his Hamilton Jordan pronounced 'Jerdan'. Thirty-four years old, ten years of intimacy with Jimmy Carter, no harm in his being senior crony but never did Colonel House or Harry Hopkins or Larry O’Brien do what Jordan did the first day – distribute a stack of questionnaires to the Cabinet and all the senior White House staff and demand, within 72 hours, completed forms to be returned. 

They were to mark their subordinates as to competence, punctuality, when did they get to work, personality traits and loyalty to the president. It's almost as if Watergate had never happened. And Jimmy Carter, alone, had discovered the secret of an effective administration. Not devotion to the constitution, but personal loyalty to the president and no backchat. 

Well, in this rather bewildering situation, there are congressmen, even Democrats, who would like to hear that some new appointee had sent back one of those loyalty forms unanswered, with a note saying, 'Sir, I didn't take an oath to support Jimmy Carter or Hamilton Jordan. I took an oath to support the constitution'.

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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