One morning in the first week of October, several of Jimmy Carter’s top political advisors picked up their telephones and asked to be connected to prominent reporters and editors around Washington. As each waited for the voice at the other end, rage—genuine or calculated for the occasion—boiled toward the surface. The Carter staffers were fed […]
Jimmy Carter
Posted inJune 1980
Stand By the Non-Event of the Year
It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your facilitators are?
Posted inMagazine
Kennedy’s Woman Problem—Women’s Kennedy Problem
The intelligent woman’s guide to the touchiest issue of the 1980 campaign.
Posted inMagazine
The President and the Press
Midway through the summer, as news of President Carter’s cabinet changes was shaking up the town, I talked with a reporter who once covered the Carter White House. “The problem with these people,” he told me, “is that they don’t know any history. Don’t they remember who the last president was who fired his whole […]
Posted inMagazine
Why Carter Fails: Taking the Politics Out of Government
Last summer and fall, President Carter undertook to learn the federal tax system. He had promised during his campaign that he would reform taxes, and the public had responded to that promise. Because he is very strongly a man of his word, the President now was determined to deliver to the American people what he […]
Posted inMagazine
Survival Networks: Staying in Washington
In 1962 Coates Redmon was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and not a bit happy about it. Her husband Hayes was teaching Russian history at the Air Force Academy, which was a good step in his career; but she hated the military in general and the Academy particularly. There were many other things she would rather […]
Posted inMagazine
Jordan, Georgia, and the Establishment
The aide was in Washington for a special occasion: the signing, amid much pomp and circumstance, of the Panama Canal treaty last December. The course of the day’s events eventually led him to the White House ballroom to hear President Carter make a speech, and there the aide found himself standing next to the President’s top assistant, […]
Posted inMagazine
Bert Lance, the Press, and Company Planes
Quick: why did Bert Lance resign? If that question is hard to answer in specific terms, it’s no surprise—Lance left less for any specific misdeed than because the Washington tide had somehow turned against him. That’s why all attempts at precise, logical explanation of his demise have ended up in this hopelessly twisted fashion: he […]
Posted inMagazine
Success In America
We’re a nation obsessed with success and how it is achieved—with good reason, because the possibility of success is what fuels so many of us. So central is the notion of success to the way we operate and think of ourselves that it explains a lot about our society. The path to the top is a reflection of the nature of America, and in turn helps shape […]
Posted inMagazine
How to Get a Job In the New Administration
Despite all his grand statements about an unprecedented talent search, it was no surprise that Jimmy Carter, in his first few appointments, ignored America’s vast residue of talent and its equally vast residue of hyperactive fortune-seekers and chose Jody Powell,, then Thomas Lance, then Cyrus Vance. The first two showed that the best way to […]
