Kati Marton (39 page)

Even Carter’s attempts to have fun were often marred by his sanctimony. When, during the fall of 1976, a group of high-powered businessmen and academics traveled to Plains to “get the measure of the man,” Carter admonished them, “Now, we’re not going to talk world affairs. We’re here to clog dance!” He then proceeded to instruct the astonished luminaries in that fine southern art. “We’d come a long way to hear his ideas on issues,” Robin Duke recalled. “Carter wanted to show us how uninterested he was in talking to a group of heavy hitters. It was another missed opportunity.”

Not even Rosalynn was spared his steely blend of arrogance and piety. She wanted to make mental health her primary focus, like she had as the governor’s wife. But when the president was presented with a $1 million budget for a mental health commission that she would chair, he balked, even though the sum was well below prior budgets for presidential commissions. Under great duress, he approved $100,000 in emergency funding for mental health. Nor would he allow her to have as large a staff as her predecessor, Betty Ford. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. “Everybody always wants more staff,” he told her, “and that’s why the federal government gets so overloaded.” “But I’m not
anybody,”
she pleaded, “I’m your wife!” She loved him and forgave him. Others in Washington would not.

As honorary chair of the President’s Mental Health Commission, Rosalynn testified before Congress and helped to draft legislation for a $47 million increase in funds for research in mental health. “But she did not understand how Washington works,” Richard Beattie, general counsel to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, recalled. When her mental health bill seemed to languish in Congress, she blamed Joe Califano, the secretary of HEW. “She wanted to know why this wasn’t happening. If the first lady proposes legislation, she thought the secretary of HEW should damn well get it passed. She got more and more incensed. I was in the room a number of times when she expressed
bewilderment and frustration that it wasn’t happening. It was easy for her to believe Califano was the problem. She had a notion that he was part of the Kennedy team. She had seen him hanging out with Teddy Kennedy; she didn’t think his first loyalty was to Carter. Joe was too much of an insider.” When Carter fired Califano in 1979, many people, including Beattie, knew of the first lady’s displeasure with him. “I saw private notes between Carter and Califano, so I knew what was going on, and it didn’t seem to me that the president was that unhappy with Joe. Rosalynn was an important factor in Califano’s firing by the president. No doubt about it.” There were, to be sure, other reasons for Califano’s forced departure, most notably his opposition to Carter’s plan to create a separate Department of Education.

Nor did the Carters understand the Washington media’s enormous influence in translating the presidency to the nation. “Image,” Rosalynn wrote, “became a nuisance that wouldn’t go away. I thought that if I were working productively and accomplishing something worthwhile, the image would take care of itself.” When Rosalynn held her first news conference in the East Room to announce her Mental Health Commission, “I found not one word about the commission or the press conference [in the
Washington Post
]. There wasn’t anything and I was crushed,” she recalled.

“She wanted to be covered the way any member of her husband’s administration would be covered,”
Washington Post
reporter Donnie Radcliffe noted. “She didn’t want to be in the women’s pages. She didn’t want to be identified with tea parties and fashion stories.” Robin Duke attributes the Carters’ problems to their combination of naïveté and insecurity. “They were both so guarded, so suspicious of people they called the ‘socially prominent.’ I think Rosalynn was frightened of us. The presidency is not a loner’s game. You have to reach out. It’s the only way you find out what people are thinking, how you’re coming across. The magic of a good president is openness. The Carters were not open.”

Nor did they attempt to win over the entrenched Washington culture, the lobbyists, the pundits, the wise men and socialites who are the capital’s permanent ruling class. The Carters did not like to socialize. “We are from Plains, Georgia,” Rosalynn said years later, “and we don’t like that sort of thing. We work all day, so we didn’t want to have to go
out at night.” But Washington expects newcomers, even those who reside in the White House, to play according to
its
rules. The president and the first lady may be at the top of the social and political hierarchy, but they are nevertheless expected to acknowledge and socialize with others who matter politically. The Carters stubbornly declined to play that game. They were happiest when there were just the two of them. “The Carters don’t have friends,” Stuart Eizenstadt, the president’s chief adviser on domestic policy, noted, “they have each other.”

Without expending time or energy in the requisite seduction of the town’s elite, Rosalynn expected Washington to take her as seriously as her husband did. After all, they had been partners in all his previous ventures. When she talked fertilizer prices with southeast Georgia farmers, they knew she understood their business. But she did not penetrate the arcane rules governing Washington’s social and political culture. “She made no attempt to ingratiate herself with Washington—‘the cave dwellers’ or the Georgetown set,” Donnie Radcliffe recalled. “These people had been preaching to presidents and first ladies for two centuries on how to be successful. They still do. Rosalynn’s lack of a light touch as much as anything may have been one of her weaknesses. She didn’t have much humor. If she could have loosened up a bit, and shown us her playful side …”

Would a playful couple from Plains, Georgia, have made the passage from peanut farming to the White House in a decade? Of course they were earnest, single-minded and driven; those were the very qualities that got them there. They were not about to change now, even if they could have. Rosalynn’s White House aide, Paul Costello, recalled the moment he finally “got” Rosalynn. “We were en route to San Francisco aboard a DC-9 military aircraft. It was the end of a very long day. It was about 1
A.M.
Mrs. Carter and I were in the front cabin. Everybody was asleep—her chief of staff, the stewards, the press in the back. I suddenly woke up and there was Mrs. Carter with her glasses on, under a penlight, studying Spanish. That relentless striving epitomized her character. There she was, just disciplined to the core.”

Those who recognized Rosalynn’s role in Jimmy’s life, like National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, were better able to push their agendas and ideas. Those who mistook her low-key style and absence of
a personal agenda as lack of influence, paid the price. “If Rosalynn didn’t like you,” historian Douglas Brinkley noted, “you started with a near fatal handicap. She was less tolerant than Jimmy. And very protective of him. She would often say to the president, ‘Oh, he’s not really a friend of yours, he just wants something from you.’” She frequently sat in on policy sessions, quietly taking notes. “Carter often relied on Rosalynn’s notes as the record of events,” Brinkley recalled. Rosalynn frequently interrupted the president at White House dinners, to clarify a point he was making.

In June 1978, Rosalynn set off on a seven-nation tour of Latin America and the Caribbean. It would be an exaggeration to regard this foreign policy as marriage therapy, but it certainly had an element of that. Jimmy knew that Rosalynn was happiest playing a part in their shared enterprise. “I have found,” he told the
New York Times,
“that the more that she and I can share responsibilities, with her being in an unofficial position and me in an official position, then that tends to strengthen the personal kind of relationship between husband and wife.”

Rosalynn prepared for her first plunge into serious diplomacy with all of her customary application, poring over enormous volumes of briefing books. “I was
determined
to be taken seriously,” Rosalynn said, noting, “There was more than a little discomfort at the State Department, and on the Hill. I remember Congressman Dante Fascell coming in to a meeting and saying, ‘Well, Latins are macho, they hate gringos and they hate gringos’ wives. What else do you want to know?’ That was their attitude.”

Fortified by her husband’s iron faith in her, Rosalynn set off. In Brazil, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru, she bypassed the traditional first lady’s circuit of orphanages and ladies’ lunches and held substantial, one-on-one talks with heads of state. “I am closer to the President of the United States than any person in the world,” Rosalynn chided reporters who questioned her role as presidential envoy.

Her diplomatic mission was her husband’s gesture of love, respect and trust, but it provoked a backlash against activist first ladies that lasted many years. Her two immediate successors would be more cautious about asserting their influence, and when Hillary Clinton trod even more visible terrain, the debate erupted again, even more violently. Rosalynn
had assumed a role for which many felt she lacked credentials, a role not in keeping with her previous image as the supportive, traditional helpmate to the president. Campaigning for her husband, she had defined herself as his wife. Now she raised the age-old issue of the proper role of the unelected—and thus unaccountable—family member of elected officials.

“The question raised by [Mrs. Carter’s] Latin American trip,” Meg Greenfield wrote in
Newsweek,
“is not whether Rosalynn Carter is capable of serving as an agent of her husband’s government, but rather whether she should.” The
New York Times
was even more blunt. “The unspoken question behind many appraisals of Rosalynn Carter’s journey to seven Latin and Caribbean nations has been ‘Who elected her?’… We think Mrs. Carter’s boast in Latin America that she was ‘closer than anyone’ to the President was unseemly and unnecessarily defensive. For her … the question should be not just who she is, but how well-equipped to handle a Presidential errand.”

Rosalynn brushed off the critics. “What irritates me is that people in our country expect women to work now, but when the first lady tries to do something, she is criticized for it. It’s ridiculous, but it’s a way to get at the president.” She knew she had the full backing of the only person whose judgment really mattered to her. Their staffs were in awe of the closeness between the Carters, and their perfect pitch in communicating with each other, almost as if they were one person inhabiting two bodies.

But in the eyes of the media and the public, Rosalynn did not have independent credentials for the role she was now claiming. She was seen as the president’s wife, the first lady. To Jimmy, she was his most influential and forceful adviser, and she deserved a more public role. No previous president’s schedule had lunch with his wife as a weekly ritual. The president would ask, “Well, Rosie, what’s on your agenda this week?” Rosalynn would consult her manila folder. And for approximately one hour their worlds merged, and again it was just Rosie and Jimmy working in common enterprise. Only now, instead of discussing the price of a pound of peanuts, the Carters talked about political appointments, normalizing relations with China, the Middle East and dealing with the Panama Canal problem. Nor did many other presidents retreat to Camp David accompanied only by their wives.

AS ALWAYS
, despite the Carters’ closeness, there was a limit to how much Jimmy heeded Rosalynn’s counsel. One bone of contention between the Carters was Jimmy’s unwillingness to do the
political,
as opposed to the
right,
thing. Perhaps as proof of his moral purity, Carter seemed almost deliberately to embrace unpopular decisions. A speechwriter of his, Hedrick Hertzberg, recalled, “We used to joke that it was no accident that the man’s initials were J.C.” Such was his disdain for political showmanship that Carter succeeded in undermining his own achievements. One day he was scheduled to announce he was eliminating several thousand pages of federal regulations, Hertzberg remembered.

It was a losing battle for his politically more astute wife. “His standard answer when I talked about political expediency was … ‘I’ll never do anything to hurt my country.’”

During his second week in office, wearing a cardigan sweater, Carter announced on national television the need for the country to conserve energy. A severe winter had overtaxed supplies of natural gas and oil, creating an energy crisis. He admonished Americans to turn their thermostats down to sixty-five degrees during the day and fifty-five at night. In the White House, he went even further. “I couldn’t believe it,” Rosalynn recalled. “I had been freezing ever since we moved in. My offices were so cold I couldn’t concentrate, and my staff was typing with gloves on. Even upstairs we were only comfortable if we were all wrapped up …. I pleaded with Jimmy to set the thermostat at sixty-eight degrees, but it didn’t do any good.”