Who is patrick caddell

He had that sense and so that was where the reinforcement came. It was leaked in the spring, for some reasons inside. It was an effort to really do an overview, which the President was very fond of at the time it was written, about why we had been elected and what it meant. The thesis can best be described in this way. Usually people are in office not by accident, but because they in fact meet some need of the public.

A President tends to be either the leader of the government or the leader of the society. There are very few Presidents you could point to historically who could fulfill both roles well. Franklin Roosevelt was an exception to that.

But I think if you went through and used that rough rule of thumb, you would see John Kennedy was most successful because he was viewed as a leader of society, which was why I think he suffered so much in retrospect in terms of his accomplishments or lack thereof as a leader of the government. Lyndon Johnson was the exact opposite.

LBJ was much more the efficient implementer of programs, and running the executive branch and what have you, and much less of the other.

It seemed to me that Carter was elected in fact to lead the society. That that was the mandate that people had given him.

He was to make things better, not just in a governmental sense, but in a general psychological leadership sense. He was also supposed to run the government, but it was the secondary concern. That switch in roles was going to be very difficult for the public to accept.

My own personal feeling, and I articulated this through most of the time, was that much of what we suffered in terms of disappointment with the public during the first several years of the administration sprung from that lost contact with our mandate. Did Carter offer you a position in the administration before the inauguration? If not, did he indicate to you that he wanted a continuing relationship, and what were his thought about what that ought to be?

We met in Plains a couple of weeks after the election. I went down and spent several hours with him. He is the one that insisted at that point that he wanted me to stay involved with him, to always deal with him directly, to try to continue that relationship that we had had in the country and to keep in touch.

He was already very concerned about losing touch with that. He really wanted me to be involved as much as I chose to be involved, and neither of us had any idea what the hell that was about. They generally presumed it, and it was almost unspoken. He and I laid that out then and I assumed he had translated that, so no one ever asked.

About your relationship with the President, and that of the President with the society at large, did either you or the President have any models for that? Was it ever mentioned that this kind of personal advice to the President could be had from somebody on the outside who had worked for some other President?

Was it also ever discussed in general, as apart from Wilson seeking to go to the country on the League of Nations, whether a President had been able to lead the society as a whole successfully? It intensifies incremental movements rather than long-term strategic movements and thinking. We had not discussed whether it had worked or not. I had lunch with some Washington reporters, an off-the-record lunch at the City Club when it still existed, in which we were discussing, in early January, what my role was going to be.

They all said that had never been successful. Nobody had ever been in my role. You were either inside in the flow or you were outside and not in the flow. I thought they were overstating the situation. I would think less so later. I often missed much of the decision-making going on. We never really discussed the difficulties of trying to maintain that, first of all, because we had no perception of what the job would actually be like.

None of us really understood—none of us had any experience with it—what the White House would be like, what the pressures would be like, what the day-to-day reality of being in an administration would be like.

So we could blithely make these statements without any reference to that. Now, in terms of leading the country, the problem we had from the very beginning seemed to me that we never did come to grips with that. It really was affected in the staffing of the administration. The President came to Washington as the President-elect several times in the transition and stayed at Blair House just before his inauguration.

He was meeting with the transition teams about what we were going to do about the economy. We had a meeting in Plains of the economists. There was a particular discussion that took place. Most of these people had now been appointed to slots in the administration or in the White House. They discussed what the agenda issues and problems were coming up and the President had asked me to participate.

The President got very angry in the discussion. People were pushing him in the areas that he had not thought about and was not interested in. It almost seemed to him to be a series of individual agendas that people had been storing up for a number of years that they wanted to get exercised without any master plan.

They are now top priority items that we must do. The fear in late was that the man was going to be uncompromising, tough, and it was really a question of whether he could get along with anybody. Later, the perception was the entire opposite. But that was the perception coming in. And it was reflected that morning. He was very angry at the discussion. Carter has certain physical attributes that show themselves when he starts to get angry and one of them is you can see tension in his face in his veins and his neck, and he was very upset by what was happening.

I could see all during the meeting these people were digging themselves in deeper and deeper and deeper and they were really not cognizant of that. At the end of the hour the President really exploded. The President-elect exploded. He and I had a discussion afterward. I said I thought it was a frightening situation because what seemed to be lacking was any sense on the part of the people who were now being brought into the government of why Jimmy Carter had been elected. The bulk of these people were Democratic activists who had been waiting to come to power in any Democratic administration; in fact, they would have been swatted in with almost any Democratic administration elected.

I only bring that up because it was vividly burned into my consciousness at the time, and he and I had a conversation about it afterward. We ran into that difficulty right away, which was one of the hard practicalities of staffing the government. It was not a very expansive group, and did not expand very much even in the general election for which there was a lot of criticism. That group shared a basic sense of why we had been elected, but it was not something we attempted to educate anybody else on.

Were they departmental people, Congress people? No, no. In fact, in the meeting neither Hamilton nor Jody nor Gerry. I was the only person from the campaign core that was in the meeting, and I was self-invited. The people who were there were essentially people who had headed the transition teams.

They were already slotted for department jobs or White House slots. They were the programmatic people who had been working through the transition both before the campaign, and particularly intensively after the election. Could you say just one more word on the content of this unique personal relation. I have a friend who—we all had him as a friend—who was called down a week or two after the election and he had 20 or 30 items to discuss with the President.

On the basis of his long experience, he thought there ought to be somebody in the administration who would keep the President from making a fool of himself, a wait-a-minute man. My question to you therefore is: was yours that role, a cautionary role or counseling role, or was it an idea role of new horizons and new things to do, or was it some combination? It was probably some combination.

I had some responsibility on the political end for raising caution flags to warn against doing things that were going to be destructive, and later to be concerned about the day-to-day specifics, or the drive to do something without any long-term perspective of the impact or perception of that on his consistency with other long-term efforts.

But initially it was, and most of the time it was, a combination idea and cautionary role. The cautionary part was grounded in politics.

One of the luxuries that I always had in this relationship was unlike most of the people who were in the administration and involved in substance. The real problem of this administration in the beginning was a separation of its substance and its politics. If anything in the beginning pointed to what would be a problem, and it flowed from the President and from the personalities of those involved, it was to separate the political decision-making and perspectives from the substantive perspectives.

The political people, or Hamilton, Jody, their staffs, and people related to them, were not deeply involved or interested in the substantive discussions on what his economic policy was going to be. Hamilton, for instance, never really had, and would I think openly admit, that he never really had an interest.

The substantive people were not responsible for our political fortunes. I view politics, by the way, not simply in reelection. There was a need to blend the two together, to understand your politics as an expression of your ability to maintain support, and to educate the country and keep it with you. This was important as a political lever to move your policies through. There was a natural and immediate conflict that took place there as well, creating what I would call a huge vacuum.

There was no one who really had a strong foot in each camp. The reason that I could, from the outside, offer ideas or suggestions or be as outrageous as I chose to be in terms of direction or substance or as a gadfly was because no one could question that I was in a political sense, that I lived in the real world.

Nobody could argue that I just had my head in the clouds. I obviously had been through that, I had proven that I was as tough politically as anybody else and could accomplish as much politically when it really got down to it. That is what always blocked up the substantive people. Substantive people, no matter how able they were inside the White House, rarely were ever in the councils of political decision-making because they never came with the credentials or the respect as political thinkers.

In some cases, that was a well-deserved understanding. The negative side of that was that there was never an effort to educate or to really mix those together. It is, I think, one of the dangers that overtakes people. Why was it in that campaign that Jimmy Carter was the only one articulating those themes? Stylistically, it was in a sense religion and Southern Baptism. When I did my thesis work at Harvard on southern politics, what I really ended up landing in was the middle of the influence of Southern Baptism on the politics in the region.

Once you got there, at least for what it was worth, it seemed to me you could get in there and unravel a lot of things that related to style. In a sense, Carter was out of that stylistic milieu of being a Southern Baptist, that kind of rhetoric, that kind of belief in relating to a long purpose and goodliness to politics. That was helpful. That was uniquely southern. Carter was the first one who was really thinking it through as it related to a national political set of circumstances.

But clearly he was best equipped because of his background in that cultural background. He was at ease at being able to talk about these things because he came from a background where that was understandable and acceptable.

Moving from the campaign into the Presidency, you noted that you had frequent and increasing conversations with him about the fact that he was isolated, that he had lost some touch with the country by the nature of the Presidency. Did he react defensively? Did he show surprise? Did he want to know what he should know? What was the reaction? It depended on the time and the incident. But oftentimes it would bother him a great deal. During the course of this Presidency I wrote a series of memos, for which I became internally noted.

It was a series of four or five really long memos at various points in the administration. Usually they ran anywhere from 40, 50, 60, to 70 pages for him in terms of what I thought was happening and why.

And each time, one of those popped up and had an impact, at least in the short term. It usually came when we were not doing well, so there was a real concern anyway.

It was coming at the right opportunity and he would focus on it. The first real summit meeting staff meeting took place in April of , when Carter was going to change the way he did business. It really came in response to a long memo that I wrote at the time in which I made some very strong suggestions and quite graphic language that I thought the President was on his way to being a failure and the reasons for it.

That certainly got some response from him. You mentioned also that there were times when you were in the doghouse with him. Did he ever get mad at you because of what you told him, or about how he was doing or how the country perceived him? And rightfully so.

I always felt that somebody should be for whatever the risk was, and I had nothing at stake. It seemed to me, after watching the White House operating and watching people go into the Oval Office and not tell the President what they all felt, that somebody ought to be willing to throw all caution to the wind and be somewhat more candid with the President.

I felt that we had a particular relationship that protected me from the long-term dangers of that, which it did. And here I am hammering him. Sometimes we would get into strained situations. That was most evident in the fall of , and in the first couple of months of , in fact. You had almost a premonition during the transition of the danger of the President losing touch.

Was this a view unique to you? Were there others among the political advisors who perceived things the same way? There were some general concerns by some of the political people. Never, I think, as strongly felt or at least as conceptualized as I tended to do in that memo.

The thesis of that memo was accepted by the political people. There was a general consensus, and the President certainly agreed with it. I argued that we did not have a mandate, that one of the things that was unique was that he was a post-Watergate President.

We were the first post-Watergate President elected. Looking at survey data, the automatic benefit that came from being elected was the halo effect that took place from election. The Presidential popularity that seemed to exist with past President-elects was not happening to Jimmy Carter.

And this, by the way, also followed with Reagan. I now have a long set of theories. I think something has changed with the Presidency that puts Presidents in an extraordinarily difficult situation of being able to maintain a public base. The first glimpse of it is in that inability to be given that benefit of the doubt or that brand of euphoria. It seemed to me that by January the numbers still were not moving, and that we were going to have to somehow build our own honeymoon.

We would have a natural honeymoon coming up that we would have to somehow build that expansion of real popularity that seemed to be in suspension. This is when we got into this. The day the energy speech is given, we walk away from this. Those first efforts at the fireside chat, the sweater, the walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, the radio show we did, the town meeting in Clinton and so forth, all those were thought out and recommended in that memo basically, except for the walk, which was his idea.

Jody and Hamilton, we all agreed that we needed to do these things. We needed to build up that support; we needed to relate to why we had been elected. My feeling was that we essentially had to buy time. We did not know what we were really going to do substantively and that we needed to expand and reassure people and build our own honeymoon and that was in fact extremely successful. Now we faced enormous criticism.

Later it would seem to me that that was one of the real dangers. We had listened to the criticism right in front of us without regard to the success we were having out in the country.

This was not just to improve our popularity but in fact to assure people that they felt comfortable that he was going in the right direction and so forth. He was getting through as a leader. We never know for sure, but there are some suspicions of what happened.

As with most things, it was leaked with a purpose, which was to in fact put us in a more defensive posture in the sense of these things we were doing. But what happened the day the energy speech would be given is a real departure point, in my mind. From that moment on, for the next year or so, Carter would never again do those things or use those tools that he had so effectively brought to bear in his first couple of months in the Presidency.

They would totally disappear from the table. And they would disappear because in fact we went to substance with a vengeance. I mean we literally went from one extreme to the other extreme. It was not a blending. And that goes back to the inherent division between who was running which agendas. You made a statement earlier that seemed to suggest this dilemma or problem about how to maintain public support so that your policies could move forward was in part the difference between leading the country and doing the business of governing.

What means did you have in mind? What means did you advise? What did the President think about? I was saying here are some things we can do. I think there was general agreement on the part of the political people by the end of the administration. Hindsight is very helpful, experience is a great teacher. One of the problems that we had and one of the advantages we had the day he was elected was that the city of Washington was terrified of him.

Remember, he had not been the first choice of his party. Most of the institutional leaders of his party originally opposed him. I was in Washington two days after the election, and I felt like I was in Paris. The day before the Wehrmacht arrived. A Democratic city should have been in euphoria over the coming of a Democratic administration.

I was speaking to a consultants group. All the consultants at the end of every election get together. The mood I found was very different, very apprehensive and it was that he was an outsider, he was totally unknown. Remember he had gotten elected by stomping all over the Congress, basically, for which there was real resentment, and the city of Washington.

And yet, he was now the President of the United States. It seemed to me that this would affect our relations with Congress. It seemed to me we never made a decision of how to come in and deal with them. You can see the institutional operations. Do you come in and attempt to? We never thought it through. Jody and I would discuss this later on, this being a real problem we had not thought through when we began the Presidency. Should we have come in and gotten very tough from the very beginning and drew the line and just used that advantage that we had, which was a fear about him, and drive the thing?

Or should we have come in and attempted to coop the city, to coop the power structures of the party and the Congress? What we ended up doing, as we all later agreed, is that we did it in—and pardon the expression—a half ass fashion.

We did a little bit of this and little bit of that. But we never had a strategic idea of, look we must come in and take charge, or we must come in and make allies of these institutional leaders.

So we would get into the situation of the President getting with the Congress and congressional leaders and promising cooperation, almost giving the store away from Day One trying to convince them that he was going to work with him. We were really working against ourselves in that way. Is it fair to say that the problem was dimly perceived as to how you got hold of Washington, but not sufficiently, clearly perceived or anticipated as to a definite strategy for dealing with the problem?

It was never perceived as enough of a problem to have a coherent strategy. But we were so busy filling the government at that point. And there was this vague feeling that it may not be such a problem because after all we won the election. Look if we can win this election and become President there is nothing we cannot do. You just believe that all things will bend to your desire or to your needs. It was that sense of confidence that you need, but I think in retrospect, we agreed it was a little naive.

And it was. It was an incredible achievement. Nobody had ever done what Jimmy Carter had done in terms of being elected President, so there was no reason to assume that merely running the government should be a problem. There was some initial concern about the appointments for instance.

A lot of problems were over appointments. There was a great discussion at the time because there was a lot of bitterness on the part of the campaign people, as there was in the Reagan administration, over not being given positions and positions going to people who had not been involved in the campaign.

Reagan has some advantage in this actually because this is an ideological base to the people who share his ideology. Hamilton was irate at the time, as was Jim King, who was doing the personnel direction. We could not get our cabinet people and our other people to give any help at all placing our political people. Understand my problem, we were angry because we had a lot of people beating us over the head who had worked for us and were friends of ours and who deserved, we felt, to be in the government.

What we were not saying at the time, and it was again only dimly seen, was in my letter at that time. It goes back to this. A lot of what would later happen in the administration would be the proverbial closing the barnyard door after the horse is gone, trying to reestablish control of the appointments processes and the political appointees. We allowed department heads to make their own appointments basically.

We lost control of the departments. You say we. The President indicated, consistent with many of the statements he made, the importance of the cabinet and cabinet responsibility and the notion of allowing a fairly free hand on appointees. He was out making these statements about how grand this was that we had never really thought through the implications for actually governing.

When we did, we were already too late. In the view of some of the people in the White House, they ran with their departments without regard to the President. So the roots of the firings go all the way back to that period in January and February. Let me see if I can highlight the question by comparison.

We have an unpublished manuscript on Lincoln. Here was a President who spoke about the unjustified and unnecessary war; at the same time, he was trying to raise an army. Most of you were against me. Most of you had different ideas about the issue that is most important, slavery. Carter seems, with all the belief and trusting of the people and with all the humility, anything but detached as you describe this anger.

In trying to understand him as a leader, is there a different quality, is there a lack of this Lincolnesque detachment that the biographer writes about? I think so. How much of it is Jimmy Carter and how much of it is that now this is a very different office than it was a century ago? You have to make that decision. The problem you get swamped in is one of the things that always concerned me and others who were with the President.

I never got any understanding when he would ever have time to reflect on anything or to be detached, even if that was his instinct. He had spent two years on the campaign trail, literally going day and night as hard as he could possibly work. There was not a lot of time for reflection. Of course we suffered from it because when we had made all these commitments, no one had had time to really reflect about coming to Washington and being the government.

He had changed in the office, and I did not personally think for the better. But you have to understand I was sometimes hysterical in these times. Remember the transition planning that Jack Watson headed up, which caused an enormous problem the day after the election. President, this is crazy. But none of us had the time or the experience to make those kinds of reflections. We were desperately concerned every day with getting elected.

Having gotten elected, the President woke up and realized that the whole world had really fallen on him. The President began to become much more cautious in a lot of his own appointments, in a lot of his own actions. He was different from what he had intended to do partly because that force and the battering of demands that were going on at the same time were out there. You make this appointment to do this foreign policy, what are you going to do about the economy the minute you get here, and so on.

All during the transition, you could still see the flares where Carter would not want to go along. For example, we had the meeting with the economists at the pond house in November, which became an all-day session most noted for the fact that the President did not serve anything except water.

Those of us who been through the campaign understood that ahead of time. But we had all these people who were on display, if you will. The President was extremely interested in these discussions.

I again invited myself and did a lot of work on consumer studies, so I had a real interest in the economy and consumer behavior and attitudes. I was very intrigued by what happened. We had a consensus meeting in which everybody spoke to the President, all summed up by Charlie Schultze. This went on for six hours. His attention never wavered, which I could not understand. Bert Lance and I were in the back ready to fall asleep. And at the end of the meeting I remember everybody left and the President asked me what I thought.

What did you think? The economy seems to be falling apart at this point. These were the stimulus packages for December. In December, by the time we had made a decision to go with the stimulus package because we had consulted everybody in Congress, all of whom agreed to do it, it was clear that we were not in a recession, that things were not as bad as they had said, that the indications I had been seeing before had turned out to be exactly right.

Charlie got up and gave an explanation that was degrees different than the consensus we had had a month before about the economy. I thought Stu was going to fall off his chair, because Stu and I were the only two people at this meeting with the cabinet who had been at the meeting, other than Charlie and some of the participants.

I was there to brief the cabinet on why we had been elected and had stayed through this discussion. That was his own gut instinct; this was not followed. He would get beaten down. He got beaten down in December by his own people, in a sense who said that he must do this. And we ended up doing it and got in the embarrassing position of having to withdraw the thing by spring.

I had argued in December, for what it was worth. The thing I was writing about most was inflation. There some were some people in Treasury, as I now find at the end of the administration, who had in fact argued a strategy that we in fact sit very tight on inflation.

We ought to protect ourselves and work slowly, because then we would be able to point to progress, but protect our flank on this inflation thing. Those kinds of discussions never came up for strategic discussion about administration policy.

It was a united front. And I know because I was in the middle of that conversation saying, look at this consumer data, this does not show the consumers are sluggish. But that model of what happened to the President began to repeat itself time and time and time again. I would really like to ask him a question. I thought I would wait until he got them out of the way. In the campaign, when Jimmy Carter did not want to do something, come hell or high water, he would not do it.

The fight we had with him on ethnic purity, to get him to retract the statement about ethnic purity was just incredible. It stands as a marked contrast to some of the earlier actions that took place. We had 72 hours in which everything that all of us had, including his wife, was thrown into that fight right to the end of the line until Andy Young finally convinced him he was going to have to do something about it.

That was a relatively easy matter. Contrast that with following his instincts. All through the campaign he would follow his instincts when he decided he was right. He could really be a tough taskmaster that way. He would listen to advice and make his own decisions.

We begin to see a different pattern start to emerge, when he would just get weighted down with all this advice. Part of it is the character of the President, and part of it is the inexperience of being President-elect. And another part of it is the lack of long-term strategy, not coming in with a sense of what our problems are going to be, what we are going to face right away, and so on.

We were doing it all in a relatively ad hoc fashion. Well, the major reason is that I wanted to go back to my business. I had things I wanted to do with that. It was essentially a personal decision. I wanted to get to things I wanted to do. Was your degree of involvement or level of involvement sporadic or rather constant? It was sporadic. You had to be careful or you could just work daily and end up being sucked into doing all sorts of things that were not very important or really meaningful that would take away from all the other things that you had to do.

I would say it tended to be more sporadic involvement. Was it a sort of two-way street? Well, no. It was very informal. Then he defined what he wanted me to continue, which is more of a reassurance.

In retrospect, I wish we had, but it was just an understanding. All he was reaffirming was something I perceived already and that most other people perceived. He rarely paid attention to what we were doing on the surveys. We were always being attacked for doing surveys, which we did not do as often as I would have liked.

It was as though he had left that behind. It was a curiosity, but he rarely asked about that unless he had some particular thing. There were a couple of times involving things overseas when he was very interested in my finding out from source material what was involved in public opinion.

But rarely did he show much interest in the polls himself, until Did you do polling for other units in the White House with poll results tied into what Anne Wexler was doing? When we would do a survey, or when there was a need for something usually.

Various people had inputs in things they were interested in finding out or had some relevance to what they were doing. So if we were conducting a survey, we would try to include as many areas as we could that people were interested in.

I would end up having to referee, giving them what we could do and the cost of what we could handle. Generally it was at my discretion. Well, Hamilton and I would decide. Outbreak Additional Crew. Air Force One Additional Crew.

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