Life Inside the Carter State Department

About three weeks into Jimmy Carter's first year in office, I ran into UN Ambassador Andrew Young as he and I were walking through the glass entry doors of the State Department one evening.

"How's it going, Andy?" I asked Young, whose support for candidate Carter had been one of the main reasons I joined his campaign.

"OK," he said, "but we've got to hurry. We only have about six months before this town and this building eat us up. There are more of them than there are of us."

We laughed and walked out into the night. We should have cried.

•

It didn't have to be that way.

Jimmy Carter came to the White House after winning both electoral and popular majorities.

(Remember?)A nation weary of cynicism, sick of the corruption of power in high places and anxious to believe again'in its own best instincts was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, ready to let him wrestle with the complex problems that faced America at home and abroad.

The new foreign-policy team, staffed with some younger "Democrats in Waiting" long eager to disprove Henry Kissinger's dark vision of world affairs and led by several men of considerable experience in Washington, had an agenda ready for immediate action. They hit the ground running and zipped several times around the policy track in the time it usually takes for one circuit. Carter initiatives abroad came in rapid succession: nuclear nonproliferation, human rights, conventional arms control, comprehensive Middle East talks, southern African negotiations, NATO revitalization, normalization of relations with Peking, deep cuts in the strategic arms of both the Soviet Union and the United States, South Korean troop withdrawal. Before three months had passed, observers could count more than a dozen fresh starts coming out of the State Department and the White House.

Yet, at the end of four years, the impression was widespread that American foreign policy was in total disarray. Once again the cry that "the Russians are coming" squalled across the land. "Inept" was one of the kinder adjectives applied to the President. The fact is that most of the problems had more to do with lousy execution than with bad initial policy:

• The President neither gutted his enemies nor won them over.

• His apparent lack of loyalty down, to all but the tiny handful of Georgians, was reciprocated and in some cases exceeded by the lack of loyalty up from many of his political appointees as well as the permanent bureaucracy. And too few paid any price for their lack of commitment to his policies.

• He treated consistency and coherent management with a disdain they didn't deserve and the people couldn't understand.

• The "collegiality" of chief advisors that he encouraged translated in practice into a Tower of Babel. The result was that the average American, as well as foreign ally and foe, was hopelessly confused about America's intentions and apprehensive about America's will.

And what were our intentions? There were three main strands to the new team's vision. The first was that most of the world's problems have their own unique causes. Nationalism, poverty, repression, economic interdependency, racism, the desire to settle old scores cannot be adequately understood, explained or countered by a demonology built on "the international Communist conspiracy." The Soviets merely capitalize on those tensions, exacerbate and exploit them and try to capture the movements they engender. Previous Administrations, we believed, had seen the red hand of Moscow or the visage of Fidel Castro behind every revolutionary movement. (Henry Kissinger, in another era, would have advised George III that the French were responsible for the American Revolution.)

President Carter's foreign-policy advisors, therefore, believed that the United States had allowed itself to become reactive rather than creative, conservative rather than risk taking, wedded to the status quo rather than committed to justice. The President and his people--most notably, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance--knew that the desire for independence was not a Communist plot but a natural instinct of man; the forces working for change in and among nations were not made in Moscow nearly as often as they were created in Zimbabwe or Nicaragua or wherever the dispossessed and the repressed demanded a better life. If our nation--whose revolution preceded all the other great ones that transformed the modern world--were to continue to be a world leader, it would have to rediscover its own basic principles and apply them to foreign policy.

That led inevitably to the second strand of the new Administration's foreign policy, which was support for global human rights. This meant reaffirming that we stood for human dignity as well as against Soviet tyranny. God knows that the idea of human rights as an integral part of foreign policy had few advocates in high places in Washington, then or now. For Kissingerites, it was--is--a naïve intrusion by the untutored upon the high designs of the practical world of Realpolitik. For other Foreign Service professionals, it is an obstacle to their usual way of doing business with host governments. Nor has there been excessive warmth about the policy in many other of the world's capitals. Too many governments depend on torture and martial law and arbitrary arrest and punishment to retain control of their populace. Not too strangely, however, the people of those countries understand why the policy is important.

The third main strand of the Carter foreign policy was the management of the U. S.-Soviet relationship. The President and Vance strongly believed that it was imperative to continue to build on the process of limiting strategic weaponry in both arsenals. A new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was the centerpiece, as, indeed, it had been for preceding Administrations, and became (with the Middle East peace process) the chief diplomatic obsession of the new Administration.

•

But we knew it was going to be a fight. That we had enemies was obvious to everyone. The President had whipped both the old liberal left, represented by Morris Udall, and the Cold Warriors, represented by Henry Jackson, during the 1976 primaries, and he had done it with a minimum of grace in victory. He had then taken on the Republicans, Kissinger no less than President Ford, with promises to bring morality back into foreign policy (in implicit contrast to a presumed Nixon-Ford-Kissinger immorality), and had won.

He came to Washington with a coterie that announced itself both unawed by and contemptuous of that town's most treasured conceit, which is that its permanent population of press, lobbyists and former notables is the corporate repository of the country's wisdom and vision. And he, through his chief lieutenants and through his own actions, all but stated publicly that he neither needed nor valued the views of Congress.

Too many who might have helped were shunned, the coldness of the deep freeze often seeming to be in direct proportion to years spent in Washington. Too few were brought in close. None was ever allowed as close as Hamilton Jordan, Carter's political strategist, or Jody Powell, his press secretary. Both were men of real ability. Both were stretched too thin to fill too many roles. Both suffered initially from knowing too little about the new arena and from not bothering to tolerate fools, real or imagined, gladly.

One remark attributed to Jordan says it all. He was asked, according to the story, how to pronounce his last name, which his family pronounces Jerdan and which most Northerners mispronounce. "You can call me Johrdan," he was quoted as saying. "My friends call me Jerdan."

Nor did the Carter troops bother to disguise the disdain with which they viewed the social life of Embassy Row and Georgetown, so dear to old-line Washingtonians, many of whom profess to believe that the real business of the capital is conducted between the hors d'oeuvres and the brandy. Jordan's well-publicized bouts with notoriety, whether as free spirit drinking it up with his campaign cronies or as a slightly more blithe spirit allegedly expounding upon diplomatic bosoms or expectorating Amaretto and cream, produced more publicity than they warranted precisely because he steered so clear of that protective cocoon in which Washington (continued on page 161) Carter State Department(continued from page 98) enfolds the powerful. It says something about the power of experience that eventually he decided a tie should be worn with a coat in public. (He also virtually stopped doing anything at all in public following the failed attempt by a miserable little con artist to tie him to the use of cocaine in a sleazy New York haunt of the glitterati he should have had enough sense to shun.)

But the inner circle's attitude aside, the bitterness with which Carter's enemies regarded his accession to power was apparent from the beginning. A few nights before the Inauguration, Robert Novak, a columnist and friendly acquaintance of mine for 15 years, invited me to a party at his home in the Maryland suburbs. In those days, being fresh out of Mississippi, I was still a little slow at catching Washington's atmosphere. But there was nothing subtle about the emanations from the crowd at Bob's. The term neoconservative is now much in fashion, but that euphemism is too bland to describe those present, who were largely the spear carriers for the garrison state in exile. Although, or perhaps because, they had not been able to win a political encounter within the Democratic Party in a decade, they were a vengeful set of losers. I was barely inside the door before Richard Perle, Scoop Jackson's dark princelet of staff hard-liners, made one thing perfectly clear. Since the new Administration had excluded from high position any of their number, they intended to punish--destroy is the word I remember--the new team whenever and wherever possible. They meant it, and they never let up, from the brutal though losing Senate floor fight over the confirmation of Paul Warnke as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to the unremitting campaign against SALT II.

What was true for the right wing of the Democratic Party, loosely assembled in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, was even truer of Henry Kissinger and his claque. For reasons that escaped the more combative of us, the President and Vance decided to play ball with Kissinger. From the beginning, we were told to treat him as a distinguished senior statesman, as though he could be counted on to accept our systematic repudiation of his foreign-policy assumptions in passive silence. They apparently believed that Kissinger's first interest was the well-being of the nation rather than the redemption of his reputation. He was brought in for regular briefings and consultations by Vance. He was needed by the Administration, or so the word went, for the Panama Canal fight, the ratification of SALT II and as a dike of sorts against a potential right-wing flood.

The result was that Kissinger, while being treated with kid gloves, poisoned the well, privately at first and quite publicly over the last 18 months. His salon remarks, his "extemporaneous" questioning of Carter policies in overseas meetings, were met with pained restraint. We had adequate access to enough material, in official memorandums, to keep him silent or at least defensive from beginning to end. He must have been surprised at first, then thankful and finally amused about our failure to use it. Small wonder that State Department professionals asked whether there was really a new broom and if it knew how to sweep. I hope no one in the White House or on the seventh floor of the State Department was surprised when Kissinger started lobbing his political nukes into our washrooms in 1979.

•

It is important to understand that Washington is a pushover for power. For every enemy, real or imagined, facing a new President, there are 100 persons who want nothing more than to be given a piece of the action. For every columnist who is going to be critical for ideological or policy reasons, there are six politically amoral ones who will respond to Presidential stroking with public purrs about Presidential performance. For every member of Congress who believes that his or her career can best be advanced by taking on the President of the United States in open combat, there are a dozen who find it more convenient to be pictured as the President's trusted right hand and chief architect of his legislative success.

And, in fairness to Carter, he understood all of that in theory. He invited in the commentators and columnists, the members of Congress and the private Pooh-Bahs of high standing in the permanent establishment for intimate chats and state dinners. With them, as with so many others, he left the vivid impression of an intelligent man in command of the facts and figures of his job.

What was always stunning was his virtually total recall, as I had several occasions to observe. In fact, I almost didn't get the job, thanks to that incredible Carter memory.

He had gone through Greenville, Mississippi, my home town, in October 1975, to address a Democratic Party rally. Afterward, as we drove to the airport, he asked me to join his campaign, as he had undoubtedly asked thousands of other people in his long march to the Presidency.

No thanks, I replied, I just can't leave the family newspaper. But by August 1976, I thought differently and went to work in his Atlanta headquarters. After the election, I was avidly soliciting a State Department job.

On the advice of several friends on the transition team, Vance recommended my possible appointment on numerous occasions. Each time, my name came back with what amounted to a blackball.

My name went over one last time, at the insistence of a good friend, who told me to stand by for a call from the President-elect. It came.

"Hodding, do you really want to come up here and work for me?" Carter asked.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Call Cy Vance," he said. "He may want to talk to you about a job."

That "blackball" had been his memory of my insistence 15 months before that I couldn't leave my newspaper.

Then there was the matter of our alleged family relationship. While he was still governor of Georgia, the American Society of Newspaper Editors held its annual convention in Atlanta. The governor gave a reception for the assembled editors, which I attended. We met for the first time in the receiving line and he immediately remarked, "I've always admired your father. Aren't we some kind of kin?"

"None that I'm aware of," I replied, and passed on down the line, the moment forgotten as quickly as it occurred.

Several years later, the President and Vance broke away briefly from the 1977 economic summit in London to attend a quickie meeting with President Assad of Syria in Geneva. I went along as the Secretary's spokesman aboard Air Force One; it was my first trip on the airborne White House.

As the plane was taxiing to the ramp in Geneva, I stood in the corridor outside the staff compartment immediately behind the President's private suite. He came out just before the plane rolled to a stop and noticed me standing there.

"You ready to claim kin yet, Hodding?" he laughed.

I half-dropped to one knee, looked up and said, "Whatever you say, it is, Mr. President."

He laughed again and said, "OK, Cousin," and "Cousin" it was every time he saw me from then on.

Touches such as that kept me a firmly committed Carter man for a long time. (continued on page 212)Carter State Department(continued from page 161) But they were not offered often enough to others, including those he courted in private sessions, and that, I believe, explains why he never had enough true believers to spread the Gospel according to Jimmy Carter. Putting it as simply as possible, the President gave too few people enough reason to think of themselves as Carterites. The circle around the President was tight when he came to Washington; it was virtually as tight four years later. Having no built-in Washington constituency accumulated over years of public life, having nothing like the permanent nucleus of faithful supporters claimed by a Hubert Humphrey, a Richard Nixon or a Teddy Kennedy, he and his inner circle never seemed to see the need to build one. Thus, when the time came to circle the wagons, there weren't enough wagons, and there were always too many observers remaining passive who should have been shoulder to shoulder with their President, firing away at the hostiles.

There were many who wished it were different, who were prepared to offer their full commitment. The problem was that what seemed to be required--all that seemed to be tolerable to the President and to his handful of lieutenants--was adherence to policy, no back talk and no sense of intimacy.

Mean, but not tough. That was the famous remark about Carter. Its truth was brought out in a particularly unpleasant fashion during a private meeting Carter held in February 1979 to excoriate many of us at the State Department for alleged leaks opposing his Iranian policy of the moment. The President threatened to fire the next person from whose bureau a significant leak seemed to have come. It was a stupid thing to say; it was even more stupid not to make good on the threat once it had been uttered. But no second shoe ever dropped. And whatever he might have thought of each of us individually, the way he addressed us collectively at that meeting was as if we were an opposition in hiding.

He gave credit to Vance, who was present, as the "greatest Secretary of State in history," then went into an increasing torrent of bitterness.

"I have a problem," he said. "You're the problem." We talked too much, he said, probably at those famous cocktail parties he was too busy to attend. It was time to work harder and talk less.

And then, suddenly, he pushed back his chair and stalked out, Jordan and Powell behind him. No chance for a response or a mea culpa; no chance for the establishment of a dialog with his appointees at State, almost half of whom had worked hard in his campaign.

It was therefore with more than a little irony that many of us received the news from his Camp David meeting with newly appointed Secretary of State Ed Muskie in the spring of 1980 that he regretted his lack of close contact with the department's assistant secretaries.

"They are all strangers to me," he was reported to have complained, and pledged more meetings in which they would be included. As far as some of us could tell, it was the first time he had thought about us at all since leaving us seething in our seats 16 months earlier.

Which is not to say that there weren't real reasons for White House suspicions about some of the people at State. Since the Georgia team had little built-in expertise on foreign affairs, it acquiesced in the appointment of some State Department officials who had more loyalty to their résumés than to Carter.

Moreover, the permanent bureaucracy at State has watched Presidents come and go and is not much moved by each new Administration's inevitable exercises in rediscovery of the obvious. As noted earlier, some of the older generation of diplomats openly didn't and don't believe in the efficacy or wisdom of such notions as campaigns for human rights or restraint in arms sales abroad. They have used arms as the sweetener with recalcitrant client states for so long that they see them as irreplaceable tools of the diplomatic trade. As for humanrights concerns, there are those at State who believe that torture is not something that gentlemen discuss, publicly or privately. They fully expected that most of the new initiatives would soon be dropped, and they did everything they could to see that the day of abandonment came sooner rather than later.

They weren't disciplined for their reluctance, mainly because the White House, in the spirit of the candidate's pledge to keep politics out of appointments, never got control of the machinery of the Government the candidate had been elected to run. At State, and everywhere else as well, the theory and practice of merit appointments beyond the crass world of politics has resulted in too few ties between office-holder, political or bureaucratic, and President. Indeed, the career Foreign Service obstructors of the new policies often made more converts among the appointees than the newcomers were able to convert to the President's policies. Too many voices were heard simultaneously, and too few were told to shut up.

•

Particularly troublesome was the ambition of the National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to become a major factor in the formulation and, more particularly, the articulation of the Administration's foreign policy. He apparently saw himself as another Kissinger. While he had neither Kissinger's intellect nor his political savvy, he did share one all-important asset: immediate access to the President. He used it in what became a single-minded pursuit of dominance in the foreign-policy arena. He added a press spokesman (a first at the National Security Council) and kept the staff at a swollen size despite the President's pledge to cut back substantially.

Brzezinski's main competitor was Vance, and here I must confess to little objectivity.

I had never met Cy Vance before I was offered the job as his press spokesman. It was a hell of a job, though hardly what I had expected when the President-elect announced my nomination shortly before his Inauguration.

In fact, I didn't know what to expect--of the job or of Vance--any more than he knew what to expect of me when I walked into the Spartan room he was using as a transitional office on the first floor of the State Department.

Thanks to a staph infection picked up in the Florida Keys during a New Year's break, my face looked like that of a man in the terminal stages of a particularly loathsome disease. Vance, on the other hand, looked exactly like my image of him: tall, gray-haired, with an almost cherubic red-cheeked face, and dressed in the stereotypical pinstriped uniform of a Wall Street lawyer. To be candid about it, my dress was almost identical; we Mississippi Deltans had learned a few things over the years.

His presence, then as in the worst days later, was calm, measured and low-key. We each went through the usual pleasantries, then got down to business. How did I see the job? he wanted to know. I don't remember exactly what I said, though I know I gargled something (he may have been calm, but I was nervous as a cat) about not being willing to lie for the Government.

That was fine, he said. Neither was he.

Then he moved quickly to his worry about the possible attraction of the job for a small-town editor.

"If you want this job because you think I'll be traveling a lot, forget it," he said. "I don't intend to be a globetrotting Secretary of State."

I assured him that foreign travel was the furthest thing from my mind (a white lie) and the interview concluded shortly thereafter. Some 450,000 miles of overseas and domestic travel later, he and I would laugh about that forecast.

During all those miles with him, I came to regard Cy Vance as one of the most decent, courageous and humane men American public life has seen. He knows the ins and outs of power in Washington, having served off and on there in a variety of Defense Department and special diplomatic posts over two decades, but he wouldn't fight dirty if his life depended on it. In many ways, his effectiveness in the Carter Administration's infighting was severely hampered precisely because he was instinctively so straight.

Vance is a man who believes that one public word is always better than a dozen, and that the admonition "Don't just stand there, do something." would usually be better reversed. That was heresy for a State Department press corps grown fat at Kissinger's copious table of ego and showmanship, allowing him to delude at least some of them into believing that they were vital partners in the diplomatic exercise. Many decided from the beginning that Vance was tailor-made for the role of loser in that unceasing Washington game of who's on top that passes for deep analysis of policy disputes.

In adversity, the Secretary was invariably a rock. At one point in the process leading up to the Camp David success, Egyptian President Sadat decided to make one of his dramatic gestures and abruptly pulled his negotiators out of a session with the Israelis and Americans in Jerusalem.

There was obvious consternation, with even the Egyptians professing shock. The lobby of the hotel where we were staying was a scene of pandemonium, with newsmen and cameras jostling to reach the departing Egyptians, then fastening on to anyone else who might be able to throw light on the debacle.

Through the middle of it marched Vance, publicly unperturbed and speaking of his certainty that the process would continue. We trailed while he led the way to a downstairs dining room, where a dinner had been laid on earlier in anticipation of far different circumstances. In the midst of our babbling about disaster, Vance counseled patience and restraint in public comment. This wasn't the end of the world, he remarked, simply a bump in the road.

The next morning, as though to drive home the point, he went out to the hotel's tennis court, where he was photographed hitting a high, hard one. That picture ran on front pages all over the world and carried its own message. If Cyrus Vance wasn't flustered, then all was not lost.

The President never publicly chose between Vance and Brzezinski, though he repeatedly asserted that he would or had made it clear that the Secretary of State was the chief foreign-policy spokesman for the Administration. More times than his close associates could remember, Vance would come back from a White House showdown buoyed by the President's assurance that he, Cy Vance, was the principal foreign-policy advisor.

Brzezinski, however, never accepted a defeat as final or a policy as decided if it did not please him. Like a rat terrier, he would shake himself off after a losing encounter and begin nipping at Vance's ankles, using his press spokesman and chief deputies as well as himself to tell the world that he had won or that only he, Zbigniew Brzezinski, hung tough in the national-security game as a foreignpolicy realist.

Vance would refuse to engage and would order his aides not to reply. Let a refutation of Brzezinski's view appear in the press, and loud, piercing shrieks emanated from the White House. Four, five and six times a day, Brzezinski would be on the phone to Vance, demanding that he find and fire the leakers who dared malign the President's advisor; the State Department cabal must be crushed and silenced; an attack on Brzezinski was the same as an attack on the President.

The Secretary would pound the table in the next staff meeting and once again insist that whoever was leaking must cease and desist.

It was difficult to know from afar why and how the President placed so much value on Brzezinski. A second-rate thinker in a field infested with poseurs and careerists, he has never let consistency get in the way of self-promotion or old theories impede new policy acrobatics. There was, for instance, the President's speech at Notre Dame in May 1977, which laid down what many of us believed and hoped were than main themes of his foreign policy. Brzezinski let it be widely understood that the key phrases were his own. Within the year, as concern with the Third World, arms control and human rights was ebbing in important quarters and fears about Soviet expansionism were growing, the word somehow began to get around that he had fought to the last against the fuzzy-minded sentiments voiced at Notre Dame. Those, the National Security leakers claimed, were the fruits of the guilt-ridden, post-Vietnam castrati at State. The messages would be relayed via well-placed leaks to major columnists and newspapers.

•

If there was the deadly serious business of the Brzezinski-Vance rivalry to confuse the American public, as well as overseas onlookers, there was also the additional factor of Andy Young. He could be, and usually was, a convincing advocate of the Administration's policy. He could be, and more than occasionally was, a public promoter of his own version of what that foreign policy should be. What is remarkable in retrospect about many of his most controversial remarks is how innocuous they look and sound in the context of the entire message he was delivering in a particular interview or speech. What was absolutely to be expected, however, was that the on-the-record one-liners would be seized upon by a press trained to recognize a hot lead when it sees one and by politicians eager to prove that the Administration's incompetence and confusion knew no limits or depths.

Thus, there were the policies officially pronounced by Vance on behalf of the Administration, the ones improvised by Young from time to time and the ones pushed hard through backgrounder and leak by Brzezinski and his courtiers. If, early on, the President had made it clear--by deed as well as word--that dissent had to stop once policy decisions were made, he could have avoided the public perception that the Administration was hopelessly incapable of making up its mind. There is nothing--not in access, not in paper flow, not in the delegation of formal rights and responsibilities--that dictates that the National Security Advisor will rule and the Secretary of State will merely reign, or that the Ambassador to the UN shall function without reins. Any President can curb his Security Advisor, or his UN Ambassador, and crown a Secretary of State with meaningful power. As recent a President as Gerald Ford did it, with a deft assist from the object of his largess. But to do so, the President must choose, announce his decision and discipline those who flout it. Jimmy Carter never made it stick.

Ultimately, what was most harmful to the Administration's standing at home and abroad was the President's almost willful inconsistency. He made policy decisions one by one and put them forth as though they had no relationship one to the other. He would choose the Vance position one month and the Brzezinski position the next. He could send State Department officials out to sell the neutron bomb to our European allies, then publicly decide against its production while they were still out selling. Much the same thing happened with the Olympic-boycott decision, announced shortly after our allies had been told it wasn't in the cards.

Coupled with that was a tendency to overstate and Oversell. Three examples come to mind: In his inaugural address, Carter spoke of a day when there would be no nuclear weapons; he termed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the "most serious threat to world peace" since World War Two; in between, he could hail dictators and democrats alike as "my good friends."

Sometimes he was on both sides of the same issue in one speech, as in his address at Annapolis in June 1978. There, it was widely believed he took speech drafts offered by the State Department and by the National Security Council and simply pasted half of one to half of the other. The result was predictably all over the lot, offering the Soviet Union the mailed fist and the dove's coo simultaneously. It was hard to know what Moscow made of it, but most home-grown analysts were seriously befuddled.

Certainly, there were difficult issues and changing conditions to which the President had to react on a continuous basis. The seizure of American embassy personnel as hostages by Iranian militants and the official sanctioning of that action by what passed for an Iranian government had no precedent. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan marked the first time they had used their own troops outside Eastern Europe since World War Two.

There was also the reality that the old foreign-policy consensus had long since vanished in America, the victim of Watergate and Vietnam. The President had to construct a different majority coalition for each initiative and issue. Those who believed we should be activist in our involvement in the Middle East looked with suspicion on similar involvement in South Africa. One-issue groups plagued the foreign-policy process no less than the domestic. Each tinhorn despot had his defenders on Capitol Hill.

But those were conditions that candidate Carter had recognized and capitalized upon and that President Carter knew he had to face. To describe them is not to excuse the failure to deal with them in a way that would produce clarity and understanding. Instead, adhocracy gone mad seemed too often to be the order of the day, with policy careening from crisis to crisis with no more certain guide than the decisions of the moment. The foreign-policy approaches so painstakingly developed before and during the transition from successful candidacy to the Presidency were abandoned or temporarily shelved with regularity.

What exactly was the Administration position on "linkage," the concept that Soviet actions in one sphere would affect our relations in others? How did we stand on Israeli control of all of Jerusalem? When did we believe that the use of force was necessary and justified? What status quo was or was not acceptable when it came to Soviet troops in Cuba?

Well-informed people could argue with great conviction on all sides of those issues. The Administration at one time or another seemed to be advocating different sides on many of them. The result was that hawks and doves, Arabists and passionate Zionists, sphere-of-influence advocates and devotees of a new world economic order all had occasional reason to believe that they and the Administration saw things from opposing positions.

The inner council was not disposed to deal with such criticism. As they saw it, the President was fully aware of all the facts and was deciding accordingly. The best thing for a supporter to do was to get on board and stay there.

Looking back now, I suppose I did have an early hint of what was to come. During my two-month tour at Carter campaign headquarters in Atlanta in 1976, I quickly became appalled by what I felt was the disorganization that permeated the campaign. I wasn't alone; many of the longtime Carter loyalists felt it even more acutely. At the request of one of those who seemed to be close to Carter, I wrote a blind memo that began, "This place is an administrative nightmare," and went on from there to offer a few modest pages of sure-fire remedies, based on my vast campaign experience as a low-level flack in the Lyndon Johnson campaign 12 years earlier. The response was instructive. The memo was shown to Charles Kirbo, Carter's friend, advisor and lawyer. His reaction was paraphrased to me as, "The disloyal s.o.b. who wrote this should be fired."

•

And so the President came to the great political test of 1980 with a dissipated mandate and a widespread image as a bumbler at home and abroad. Many of the brave initiatives of 1977 had run one by one to dust. The political enemies he thought he had routed in (concluded on page 218) Carter State Department (continued from page 215) 1976 were in the ascendancy in Washington and in the country.

All of us are well advised to beware of instant history, of overnight analysis of recent events. But there is one clear point that can be made. The buck does stop in the Oval Office. The dysfunctional discord between the State Department and the National Security Council, the confusion of Americans and foreigners about our policies, was finally the responsibility of the President. He is the one person in the Executive branch who can adopt and present an integrated world view to which he can demand allegiance from his appointees and summon support from the people. A responsive, responsible system is possible only when the President offers comprehensible, consistent leadership. Despite good intentions and good ideas, that is what was lacking for much of the period between 1977 and 1980.

As for my role in all this, I didn't take the job with any expectation that it would be particularly visible, nor was it for several years. While Vance had approved my recommendation in 1977 that the briefing room be opened to television cameras for the first time, there was no rush by the networks to saturate the airwaves with my words of wisdom.

That is, until the day our people were seized in Iran. Then, as unexpectedly as the taking of the hostages itself, that briefing room became a major focus of press attention and I became a minor celebrity.

(Exactly what that meant in reality is best illustrated by a street encounter with a well-dressed man in Washington in early 1980. "You're Hodding Carter, aren't you?" he asked. I modestly confessed, waiting for praise.

"My wife and I think you're the coldest fish we've ever seen," he said, and walked on. So much for fame.)

It is worth noting that a press spokesman is not always the best possible source for news. Put another way, he isn't always the first to know; sometimes he is among the last.

In April 1980, I was scheduled to give a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers' Association Convention in Hawaii. On the Monday night before leaving, I had an end-of-day meeting with Vance. Was there anything to watch out for? I asked.

"No," he said, then paused for a moment. "When are you going to speak?"

"Wednesday," I said.

"That's OK," he replied; "just be careful."

Always careful, I gave my defense of the Carter Administration's foreign policy that Wednesday in Honolulu, then answered questions. All went well until the last one.

"OK, Hodding, you've made the case for no military action in Iran up until now," said a publisher, "but just how will we know that the time for military moves has come?"

As best I remember, I replied, "Don't worry, you'll know, but the time hasn't come yet."

I flew back to the mainland Thursday night. Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant shook me awake with a sympathetic, "Oh, Mr. Carter, I'm so sorry about the raid."

"What raid?" said the premier spokesman for American foreign policy.

"Oh, God, I think you had better talk to the captain," she answered.

And so it was that I found out what Vance had obliquely warned me about on Monday. Jody Powell had just announced the failure of the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran.

Implicit in that announcement was also an unavoidable recognition of the failure of Vance, as well. A picture on the front page of the Washington Star, snapped as he went into the basement entrance of the West Wing of the White House to resubmit the resignation he had offered the President before the raid, told it all. Sick with a sudden bout of gout, leaning heavily on a cane, his face drawn and somber, he walked toward the meeting he dreaded but felt he had to keep with the President. Equally grim-faced, I walked behind him and waited in Powell's office while Vance conferred with the President in the Oval Office.

Then it was over and he spoke briefly with Jody about the best way to handle his appearance before the diplomatic press corps back at State.

He pulled it off beautifully. Minus the cane, though limping slightly, he went into that glaringly lit briefing room and read his six-paragraph statement of resignation in a clear, steady voice.

There were tears in my eyes as he concluded:

"As you know, I could not support the difficult decision taken by the President on the rescue operation in Iran. I there fore submitted my resignation to the President last week. I have told the President that I continue to support fully his policies on other foreign-policy issues. I have assured him that he can count on my support.... He will always have my deepest respect and affection."

What about your associates? someone yelled out. "I hope that everyone in the department will stay ... and I'm going to tell them that," Vance said, and walked out.

Two months later, I also left, convinced that my effectiveness had ended with his departure. Much as I admired Muskie, I was even more convinced that, effective or not, I just didn't have the heart for the job anymore.

"For reasons that escaped ... us, the President and Vance decided to play ball with Kissinger."

"The President threatened to fire the next person from whose bureau a significant leak seemed to have come."