How Washington Works: What Every President Should Know

"I'll ream you ass out, you son of a bitch," Tip O'Neill told Hamilton Jordan shortly after Jimmy Carter's righthand man hit town--and that was before the President had even been sworn in. O'Neill, who functions as the Speaker of the House of Representatives when he isn't playing political proctologist, was angry and embarrassed because the seats he'd ordered for his family and friends for Carter's Inauguration Gala were in the back of the hall at the Kennedy Center. Jordan like the seats. For that, O'Neill, ever (pronounced Jerdin in Georgia) had cheekily offered to give the Tipster a $300 refund on his tickets if he didn't like the seats. For that, O'neill, ever the Boston pol (who can be just as colorful as those Southern son-of-the-soil types), hung the name on Jordan that is still used on the Potomac. Around the National Democratic Club, snuggled back down behind the House office buildings or wherever else lobbyists and legislators meet to drink, they still call him Hannibal Jerkin.

Washington operates like Hollywood. It's a city full of people who depend on front and face. They're only as powerful as they seem, so when public deference isn't paid to them, they worry; or, as Tip put it, "When a guy is Speaker of the House and he gets tickets like this, he figures there's a reason behind it."

On this occasion, the reason probably was that Hannibal was too full of himself. It often happens when the new President and entourage hit town. They think they've licked the world, elected their guy President; and the President thinks that way, too. One man in 223,000,000, but Washington greets Presidents the way the city of Rome has greeted conquerors for 3000 years. First they give him a parade, and then they begin to suck away his strength.

Those January inaugural days of glory are the most misleading. They put the President in the reviewing stand while the Army gives him a 21-cannon salute and the 50 states march, and it's better than Pasadena on Rose Bowl day. The new Caesar, the latest and the last of those who capture the city every four years, sits in his imperial chair and can't see the reality for the glory of the show. The next day, when he walks into the Oval Office and sees those rows of buttons on his desk, he'll press one--but it'll be months before he figures out that the wires have been snipped.

In Washington, the final decision is always made on the other end of the power alley, on top of Capitol Hill. Congress is a uniquely powerful legislative body. No other industrial democracy has granted its parliament and the members thereof the control the U. S. Congress enjoys, and any President who doesn't see that the city's abiding patterns of power are rooted in Congress' running the entire Government will leave office broken, personally and politically.

A few have understood, and one of those still chose to do battle. Woodrow Wilson considered the office of the President so inherently weak that he believed it should be abolished and replaced with the English prime-ministerial system. Nevertheless, he took on Congress over the question of America's joining the League of Nations after World War One; he lost his fight and left office crippled by stroke, half paralyzed in a drooling, paralytic bloody rage. Nixon got off lucky--he merely came down with phlebitis, though for a while it looked as though he might die of it.

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Long before a President realizes that the central problem facing every administration is how to handle Congress, Washington has got a piece of him without his even guessing that it's happened. That's because modern Presidents are skilled practitioners at getting elected, while Washington has a monopoly on the skills of governing.

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Successful Presidential candidates gather their teams about them. Jimmy Carter has his Georgia crackers, John Kennedy his "Irish Mafia," Warren Harding "the Ohio gang." The team is exquisitely able when it comes to election tactics, advancing a candidate, arranging for the balloons to drop onto the convention hall at the moment best calculated to cause goose-pimples and get the excited peasantry to shoot their Polaroids.

But with victory comes the problem of governing, something neither the President nor the hustling boys and girls who put him over the top have given much thought to--or have much competence in. Hannibal Jerkin would not work as Secretary of State, just as Jerry Ford learned that the dear dray horses he'd dragged through a dozen dreary Michigan campaigns had no talent to take over high places. For the most part, Ford served out his term relying on Nixon's appointees.

Washington controls the sources of skilled labor, Republican or Democratic, and not infrequently the same guy will work for either party. James Schlesinger served as the head of the Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon, then as Secretary of Defense under both Nixon and Ford, and next as Secretary of Energy under Carter. His career in high public office was suspended when Congress, angry over his department's misallocation of gasoline supplies, forced him out of office. But other men who date from the Nixon era, such as Deputy Energy Secretary John Sawhill, dot today's Government. Before Carter's election, Jordan said he'd throw in the towel if Cyrus Vance or Zbigniew Brzezinski were hired by the incoming Administration.

One of the first things that Presidents discover, however, is that they must appoint whoever Washington gives them. Most Americans don't realize it, but Presidents have barely met most of the men and women they pick for the topmost jobs--Cabinet positions--and for practical purposes, they have no idea at all who they're appointing to the critical sub-Cabinet posts. Under the European system, a premier's political party pretty well dictates who gets which top jobs, but our parties are too weak for that, so Presidents fall back on Washington's talent pool. These are the deluxe think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution or the American Enterprise Institute or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where establishment-certified talent is parked, sharpening its skills and waiting to be tapped.

Physically removed from the District of Columbia but functionally connected to Washington are organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, which has contributed Henry Kissinger and battalions of other personnel to the State Department. It is exceedingly difficult for any President even to locate, much less appoint, people outside that organized talent pool. That's the reason so many high Treasury officials come from a few firms such as Wall Street's Dillon, Reed, & Co.; or that Secretaries of Agriculture must come from the major agribusiness groupings; or that Federal judges have to be checked out by the American Bar Association. Carter made one attempt at the beginning of his term to appoint someone outside the Washington orthodox, and couldn't do it: He nominated John Kennedy's speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, a man suspected of peacenikian tendencies, to be the head of the CIA. The Senate, whose members interconnect and crisscross with Washington's talent-pool organizations, refused to confirm the appointment.

Outlanders romanticize Washington by imagining that the city is controlled by a few master fixers, superlobbyists with specific lists of goodies they want to land for their clients. There are a few, such as Harry Truman's old protégé Clark Clifford, a Missouri kid with an oily tongue and a clever brain. Washington legend has it that he once charged a corporate client $1,000,000 for one phone call. And in the oil industry, they still talk about Smokey Joe Califano, who functioned as Lyndon Johnson's political hit man. In amendments to energy bills before Congress in the early Seventies, Califano sneaked through legislation subsidizing small, inefficient "teakettle" oil refineries at a cost of many millions to the car-driving public. Durable as a J. C. Penney work shoe, Califano later appeared as Carter's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, where he immediately made news by putting a guy on the payroll as his private chef. Too arrogant and independent for the Carter family, Califano has since returned to the humble practice of law, at which he makes not less than half a million a year.

But above and beyond the superlobbyists are the policy lobbyists, who don't go to Washington to scarf up million-dollar bonbons; it's the general direction of Government they wish to guide and control. The most powerful of the policy lobbies is The Business Roundtable, membership in which is restricted to the chief executive officers of America's largest corporations. This year's chairman is Clifton C. Garvin, Jr., the boss man at Exxon.

Democratic Presidents since F.D.R. have done acrobatic tricks worthy of Kurt Thomas to show they're not antibusiness. None more than Carter. Du-Pont's Irving S. Shapiro, a former head of the Roundtable, has indicated that all his little group has had to do to get an appointment with this populist President is pick up the phone. In some of Carter's public utterances, he's been so obsequious he's demeaned himself, as with his speech to The Business Council a few years ago. With the chief operating officer of Ma Bell sitting in the chair, the President of the United States said that when he was but a small peanut of a businessman back in Plains, "You were the leaders in our nation that I looked to and admired. . . . [I] thank you very much for what you've contributed to our country. I hope that I can perform my job in such a way that will make you proud."

He may have made them proud, but he didn't make them grateful. After giving them everything they wanted, including their tax-deductible three-martini lunches, they said thank you by putting millions into Ronald Reagan's campaign.

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The latticework of control nullifying Presidential authority begins not with the lobbyists but with Congress, an institution Carter and his friends don't know how to work. Sometimes the fault has been monumental bad judgment, as when Frank Moore, El Presidente's chief lobbyist, told him he had to sign the retrogressive bill upping the Social Security tax on the hard-working majority--or else lose all respect in Congress. No sooner had Carter announced he would sign the bill that was to hurt (continued on page 218) How Washington Works (continued from page 198) his popularity so badly through the next several years than Moore turned around and told him it was politically safe to veto the measure after all. Hill people put the blame for Carter's Congressional bungling on his "zone men," the Presidential lobbyists assigned to the care, feeding and stroking of Congress-persons from different geographic zones.

Yes, the Chief Executive has to lobby, too. As far as Congress is concerned, he's just one more special-interest group. According to legend, Lyndon Johnson's lobbyists were incomparably good--and Carter's are plain lousy. "When L.B.J. was in the White House, the zone man always dropped by to see what he could do for you," says one Congressman who spans both eras. "So when the time came, you wanted to see what you could do for him."

Apart from telephone calls unan-swered, egos left unplacated, appointments broken, Carter also it a political Calvinist, a form of piety the boodle boys and gimme-gimme girls on the Hill don't share. The Georgia Baptist expects people to vote his way because it's right and, although the members of his party in Congress aren't opposed in principle to voting for what's right, they do it faster when there's something in it for them. House Majority Leader Jim Wright of Texas, who knows how much his colleagues do like their goodies, laments that the President "has an instinctive aversion to patronage."

Or, in the words of one of Wright's fellow members, the man "deals with issues on a vertical plane. He won't say to you, 'I need your vote on the Mideast arms sale, and therefore I will give you the dam you want in your district."' Worse, a blundering Carter, early in his Administration, tried land failed to cut hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dams, canals, irrigation projects and boondoggly water schemes on the preposterous--but tech-nically correct--grounds that they were useless. Congress never forgave him.

Even Presidents who do play swapsy for votes can't get around the reality that the guys who wrote the Constitution loaded the power balance in favor of Congress. It was the tyranny of kings, not the assininity of legislatures, that they were frightened of. Hence, they made sure that Congress controls the money, that it makes war, that it has the power to veto the Presidential appointments, that it goes halvesies with the White House on foreign policy and that, as Nixon can tell you, it'll sack a President who ignores Rayburn's rule. It was Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, who formulated the Washington dictum "To get along, go along."

For the past 80 years. Congress has been extending its power over the Executive branch. It has honeycombed the Government with boards, commissions, agencies and administrations run by people whose appointments it can veto but whom the President can't fire. Typically, they hold office for fixed terms, so they often are hanging on and on under a President of the opposite party. A member of the Federal Reserve Board appointed to a full term this year will still be clinging to office in 1994

More recently in its ongoing, bipartisan plot to take over the whole of the Government, Congress has come up with a new gimmick. It's passing laws that give it a veto power over the specific administrative decisions of Government agencies. In short, it has met, checkmated and defeated the Executive-branch bureaucracy, nominally under the direction of the President, with the world's first legislative bureaucracy. With thousands of employees and a budget of almost a billion and a quarter. Congress is so bureaucratized that one of the Senate's computers will even tell you what first names or nicknames to use in sending informal notes to the 99 gentlemen and one lady who make up that august body.

The degree to which Congress now performs nonlegislative chores can be seen by the ironic process of examining what rogue members get indicted for. Seldom is it for selling a vote on the floor; more often than not, the Congressmen are charged with rigging contracts, arranging grants or monkeying around with regulatory commissions--that is, taking bribes to do things that political-science courses tell us they have no power to do.

If you want to see part of the power grid at work, go down the street from the Cannon Office Building to the bar called Bullfeather's. The place is patronized by lobbyists, but only those from certain industries and geographic areas, by Congressional staff from the same areas and by higher-level departmental executives who administer programs also in the same industries and geographic areas. For the convenience of this group of unusual customers, the management has put in a phone at the bar so they can take care of emergencies such as unforeseen amendments to bills they're sheep-dogging through the perilous legislative process. One day last summer, someone accidentally poured a sticky liquor onto the phone's buttons. A crisis materialized and one of the lobbyists, panicked at being unable to call his buddy over in the bowels of the Department of the Interior, shorted the phone out by dousing it with soda water in an attempt to make the sticky instrument work.

Come suppertime, the boys and girls drift out of Bullfeather's to go to fund raisers. In an election year like this, a busy lobbyist may make five or six a night. Tickets run from $50 to $1000. With the legalization of corporate political contributions through company political-action committees, to which executives "voluntarily" give money that will be disbursed to candidates, lobbyists are beginning to conduct hearings just like Congresspeople. At those hearings--which, as you might imagine, don't get much publicity--a Congressman up for re-election or a person running for Congress from Lansing, Michigan, or San Mateo, California, appears before a group of Washington lobbyists with his campaign materials and his curriculum vitae--and pitches them as to why they should back him with money.

The power pattern is one of indescribable specialization and complexity. No one understands its extent, because no one can get to know the names of all the players, much less the games they play. Every industry, every interest and every concern is represented here. The lobbyists' yearbook contains 170 pages of small type listing the firms and organizations that care to let the public know they have Washington representation. Others operate unlisted through lawyers, of which the city has many thousands, not including the capital offices of the great regional firms such as Los Angeles' Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro; Chicago's Kirkland & Ellis; or New York's Sullivan & Cromwell. The latter is the firm that put together the legal and financial package enabling Teddy Roosevelt to build the Panama Canal.

What this means for a President is the discovery that while the power of the Federal Government has increased over the decades, the power of the White House to control it has not. So great is the penetration and capture of the departments and agencies that even Cabinet members join the other side. As John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic-affairs man, put it: "We only see them at the annual White House Christmas party; they go and marry the natives." In short, you send a woman over to run the Department of Education and six months later she comes back as the ambassador from Education to the White House. The Cabinet member or agency head who is supposed to be the President's agent, confidante and team ballplayer is turned around to become the chief spokesman to the President from a complex of industries, regions and interests.

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The realities of power in Washington as opposed to empty glory in the White House have produced three basic types of Presidents. The least interesting but often the ones who leave office the happiest are the go-with-the-flow boys, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Ford and Carter. Ford was delighted to follow whither his old Congressional buddies led.

Carter has learned from experience that you can't go with the flow if you don't know where the flow is going. With tax and economic policies, for example, instead of a direction and a flow, there's a whirlpool. On those topics, both political parties are divided within themselves--as are the academics and the business people. A President who tries to follow the flow under such circumstances will find, as Carter has, that the vortex will take him down the drain. But Carter has a sluggish flow detector, anyway: Entering office, as he did, when the country was sniffling with guilt over Vietnam, over Chile, over bribing foreign-government officials and 1001 other assorted skulduggeries, he told the world that henceforth America would not only talk ideals but also act on them. The new human-rights foreign policy was promulgated at the exact hour when the flow was reversing. If your timing is off, going with the flow looks to the people who answer public-opinion polls like flipping the flop. Instead of appearing to be the national leader taking America where she wants to go, a President who waits too long to reverse his field is marked off as unsteady, confused, naive and unsure of his purpose.

The two other types of Presidents are the manipulators, such as Truman, Kennedy and, above all, Johnson, and the rarer--only three in this century--but infinitely more exciting fighters: Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Nixon.

"Ah never trust a man unless Ah got his pecker in mah pocket," L.B.J. would say, and never has there been a better pecker picker. They'll still tell you how skillfully Johnson's legislative agents could work Congress, how the good boys were rewarded with exacts punctilio and the bad boys punished by having dams, canals, youth projects and other goodies denied. No one knew better than Johnson how to set up a White House staff to juice the last bit of leverage out of the Presidential office. Under him, it did seem to swell to imperial proportions, and Johnson, whether by intuition or by calculation, knew that acting like an emperor can sometimes get you obeyed like one.

The story circulated around Washing-ton for years--but never confirmed by the embarrassed objects of the alleged demonstration--is that L.B.J. would receive some of the city's most important power people naked, sitting on the crapper. That is supposed to have happened to Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon (he of the aforementioned Dillon, Reed) and Katharine Graham, chairman of the board of The Washington Post Co. L.B.J. believed that rubbing their noses in it was a good way to keep dangerous folks cowed and obedient. Mrs. Graham's paper continued to back his war to the point that its editor, J. Russell Wiggins, was rewarded with an appointment as American Ambassador to the UN. Johnson, as Ol' Foul Mouth himself might have put it, always mixed bonbons with the shit.

Behind his posturing, his barnyard egomania and his vindictive caprice, there was policy, the manipulation of forces to produce political consensus. Johnson the manipulator created light shows of glory and gold, but he understood the limits of his office as well as if not better than anyone who has held the job in recent times. That is why, whenever he moved, he did it not only with Congress backing him but with unofficial Washington--business, labor, the press, whoever and whatever--enlisted, too. No one was more adept at putting together a power parade than Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Look at the "controversial" civil rights and War on Poverty legislation of the Sixties and what leaps out is the near unanimity of support Johnson marshaled. In retrospect, he has been tagged with an arrogant indifference toward public opinion, but it wasn't so--not even concerning the issue that ruined him: Vietnam. "Men," he said, "worry about heart attacks. Women worry about cancer of the tit. But everybody worries about war and peace. Everything else is chickenshit."

He understood how people felt, but his understanding of the weakness of his office, his manipulative brilliance playing Washington power games, pushed him toward the war that has scarred our era. It's ironic that Franklin Roosevelt gained a seat in the American pantheon by pushing the country toward a war it didn't want: Johnson lost his chance of a seat by going into a war the country did want. Since history is used as a weapon in contemporary political debate, it's not surprising that the actual state of American public opinion prior to those two conflicts has been misrepresented. Until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, preponderant sentiment had been intensely antiwar. In an unheard of display of unity, major elements of the American left and right formed an alliance to keep us out. The reverse was true about the prospect of military intervention in Vietnam. In World War Two, antiwar demonstrations, which had been large and frequent, ended on December 7, 1941: with Vietnam, they began in 1965, only a year after we'd been engaged in large-scale fighting.

Manipulators, though, can't say no. The pressure on Johnson in the early Sixties was to save Vietnam and not "lose" it, as Truman had been accused of losing China. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the document giving Congressional authorization for war, was passed with only two dissenting votes. There were none in the House of Representatives. Only two nays, by Ernest Grucning of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, were cast in the Senate, both by men punished by the voters and retired to private life in the next election. Vietnam became Johnson's war when it went sour, and the politicians, the newspapers and other businessmen who wanted it were looking for someone to blame for a decision they had taken part in. If Johnson had opposed American participation in that war, his consensus probably would have been smashed long before he left office.

Roosevelt and Nixon never gave in to Washington. Instead of manipula-tively exploiting the Presidential office for what it was worth and then accepting the limitations, they fought to expand Presidential power and control. Not that they didn't employ the political arts. F.D.R. was the charm king, the master of shmoose. Nixon also tried to gain territory by small, awkward acts of ingratiation--such as the time Senator Charles Percy, the Illinois Republican, went to report to him on his findings after a trip abroad. At the end of the meeting. Nixon thanked Percy and, diving into the office drawer, came up with a pair of cuff links on which the Presidential seal was enameled.

"Thank you, Mr. President, but you gave me a pair of those cuff links the last time I was here."

A confused smile played on the Nixonian visage, and then, the light bulb over his head illuminating, he asked, "Well, do you have the tie tack?"

One of Carter's biggest failings is his insensitivity to Congressional courtesies. One very senior and very popular Western Democratic Senator was called to the White House three times, and no fewer than three times after the old man had taken himself down there, he was told that pressing business had come up and the appointment was canceled. Such fouled-up protocol is no way to treat a touchy, proud order of eccentric egomaniacs.

Complaints encompass not only such acts of gratuitous rudeness but also a spectrum of slights and snubs ranging from the trivial to the substantial. The people on the Hill are forever bitching that they can't get VIP White House tour passes, tickets they love to hand out to their visiting constituents because it makes them look like they have an in at the Casa Blanca. The grousing reaches levels of eloquence never attained in debate on foreign affairs when they do their laments about White House failure to let Congresspeople announce new public-works programs to be started in their districts. And the kvetching among the Democrats gets positively earsplitting on the subject of Carter's allowing Republicans to keep profitable morsels that by tradition belong to the party holding the Presidency. Normal people have never heard of some of them, but they include such juicy tidbits as Federal attorneyships that allow a lawyer to continue in private practice while being paid to foreclose on defaulted Government-issued mortgages. For each foreclosure, which consists of having a secretary take five minutes to type in the blank spaces on a boiler-plate form, Mr. Good Party Worker gets $1500. You get 30 or 40 of them a year, and there's your swimming pool, your Hawaiian vacation and orthodontia for your daughter.

Unhappily for him, Carter regards all such transactions in the same smarmy light as we civilians do. Such hauteur is doubtless good for his soul, but it's rotten for party building and party control and wonderfully bad for losing close votes on important issues that should have gone the other way.

Not that doling out minor perks and privileges will save you. Nixon did all that and still got himself impeached. But historians are going to find the reasons for Nixon's fall more complex and less obviously one-sided than our generation does. To some degree, they're going to look at it as a straight Washington power struggle over who shall rule.

It took them the better part of their first terms to learn it, but both Roosevelt and Nixon saw that chaos and divided authority made it impossible for the President to carry out his duties, and both men used many of the same tools to try to gain control. They used gunners, men such as F.D.R.'s Postmaster General Jim Farley and Nixon's Fred Malek, to knock out the insubordinates and replace them in the apparatus of Government with persons loyal and responsive to the boss. F.D.R. created the Executive Office of the President as an administrative tool; Nixon tried to do the same thing by restyling the old Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget, to make it an instrument that could prevail over the Cabinet Secretaries whose departments will procrastinate and prevaricate with the White House as though the President were one more impotent, enraged taxpayer.

On their second-term tries, these two men who were so similar and so dissimilar both scored unimaginable victories. In 1936, F.D.R. carried 46 out of 48 states: in 1972, Nixon bagged 49 out of 50. Both men used their victories to try to clip Congress and the power of particular interests.

Roosevelt's sweeping but intelligently crafted Government reorganization bill failed in the House, which was 75 percent Democratic, which just goes to show that in Washington the two important parties aren't Democrat and Republican but Congressional and Presidential. Thirty-six years later, Nixon would resurrect the Roosevelt reorganization plan almost intact and get the same treatment that the vastly more skillful politician, F.D.R., got.

Roosevelt comes down to us as jaunty, charming, eloquent and always poised, a dramatic figure in the antique admiral's naval cape he sometimes wore, the hated hero. Nixon is Quasimodo in the White House, hunched over, flipping his V-finger signs, cackling, talking to himself, conspiring to break the law in halting, unfinished sentence. The difference may be owing to the job that the Washington press corps did on Nixon and wasn't able to do on Roosevelt, though it gave the destruction of F.D.R. its best Sunday shot. Calling the President a "blood brother of Lenin," H. L. Mencken wrote. "I am advocating making him a king in order that we may behead him in case he goes too far beyond the limits of the endurable. A President, it appears, cannot be beheaded, but kings have been subjected to the operation from ancient times."

One of the ordeals politicians who are inclined to fight the powers that be hate is lunch at The Washington Post or The New York Times. The Nixon people found being squinted at over metaphorical teacups by a squinch-faced editorial board as irritating as did F.D.R., who once said, "About 15 years ago, I attended one of the famous luncheons in the French mahogany-carved sanctum of The New York Times. In that rarefied atmosphere of self-anointed scholars, I had the feeling of an uneducated worm under the microscope." That is the Harvard-educated, patrician Roosevelt speaking; how much worse for the lower middle class, nerdly Nixon nibbling sandwiches in those private media dining rooms.

An able Press Secretary can't save a President from the realities of overmatched power, but when the situation is touch and go, when things are teetering, he can give his boss an edge if he can sing a sweet song for the righteous grumpies scribbling notes in front of him. Standing in front of the White House press room's blue curtain one day, Jody Powell looked at the highly paid, romping miscreants who do the media's work and remarked. "Everybody has a cross to bear. I'm yours and you're mine." Powell is generally considered to be one of the best, the equal of L.B.J.'s Bill Moyers, Kennedy's Pierre Salinger and Eisenhower's Jim Hagerty.

"It sounds ridiculous, but charm is what does it," says a reporter for one of the nation's largest papers. "I know Jody lies and evades as much as the others, but he's likable and he's funny. When Ron Nessen took over as Ford's Press Secretary, a friend of mine standing next to me shook his head and whispered. 'He won't make it. He's too grim.' And Nessen didn't."

Carter himself is rather good at handling the media. He systematically invites its more important members to dinner and is adept at charming and impressing them. He may come across to you as a bumpkin, but everyone who has spent as much as an evening with him will say he has an impressive, if perhaps chaotic, amount of information about Government and politics in his cerebral main frame.

He's not like Nixon, who had his staff under orders to be nasty to the fourth estate. "Try to control it. stage everything," said H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's old Chief of Staff. "They'll hold back and the second you forget and scratch your ass--that's when they take the picture." Theodore Roosevelt, who had good press relations, warned his protègè and successor, William Howard Taft, never to let the newsies take a picture of him playing golf or doing anything that would lessen the dignity and distance a President needs in order to conduct the office successfully.

Carter has never understood that. The nation may enjoy seeing home movies of Uncle Hank swinging a baseball bat at the family picnic cum soft-ball game, but an effective President has to be just a bit formal and frightening. A TV clip of an exhausted Chief Executive of the United States, white from overexertion and being assisted from a marathon race, is precisely the kind of publicity a President can do without. There's no escaping self-revelation in that office. Whether you're a nerd or noble, your character will shine through. A paraplegic in a wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt was the epitome of power and grace in the Presidential office. All of us see James Earl Carter, Jr., with his Evelyn Wood speed reading, as an overachiever who gets the job done in scrambling, pawing, panting awkwardness.

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Of course, the Presidency may look quite different to its occupant than it does to us, but there must be times in each one's administration when he laments his utter lack of clout. Consider this story of a world leader and his dog as recounted by President Fumble-Bumble Jerry Ford.

About three o'clock . . . I was awakened from a sound sleep by a very wet kiss. I opened my eyes. Liberty was wagging her tail, and I knew what that [the italics belong to Liberty's master] meant. Groggily, I slipped on my robe and my slippers, took the elevator to the ground floor and walked outside. There I waited until Liberty was ready to return. We stepped inside again, and I pressed the button for the elevator. Nothing happened. Someone had just cut back the power. I figured, so I said, "Liberty, let's walk." I opened the door to my left, and we climbed the stairs to the second floor. At the top of the stairwell was a door that led to our family quarters. I turned the knob, but it was locked. . . . I must have walked up and down those stairs several times. This is ridiculous, I thought, so I started pounding on the walls.

There you have the quintessential Presidential metaphor--though Thomas Jefferson could have told Gerald Ford that Liberty is a bitch.

In the end, all Presidents leave office dead or disappointed. Even Good King Ike found the 18th hole of the long golf game of the Fifties something less than smooth putting. This marble city has its way with all of them; it is, after all, a city planned for Government and politics, nothing else. It is Brasilia North, the Western New Delhi, a city without any other occupation or preoccupation than to contend with its chief magistrate. If the capital had been allowed to remain in New York or Philadelphia, great metropolises populated by people who must spend their days in honest and useful work, there would have been an adoring populace to hail Presidents and support them on their field of action. From Henri IV to Charles de Gaulle, Paris has known how to uphold its greatest national leaders against lesser politicians, lawyers and functionaires, the sterile totality of Washington's population mix.

That is why this city has defeated the greatest and the worst men who have come to rule over it--why it has not yet met its master or its match.

"One of the first things Presidents discover is that they must appoint whoever Washington gives them."