JIMMY'S MIXED SIGNALS

"I want the American people to understand my character, my weaknesses, the kind of person lam. " --Jimmy Carter

Stumping the country for some 21 months now, Candidate Carter has revealed a great deal about himself. At times he has been extraordinarily --even embarrassingly--candid about his personal views on subjects ranging from religion to lust. Yet many of Carter's strong supporters still regard him as an;enigma, a kind of populist Hamlet whose cross-purposes and mixed signals have so jammed the nation's sen sory network that little more than static has emerged at the receiving end. A line from a Kris Kristofferson song might well have been written about Carter's multifaceted personality: "He's a walking contradiction/ Partly truth and partly fiction."

American voters have come to expect simpler images--and simpler answers--from their politicians than Carter provides. A candidate who tries to appeal to Playboy readers on one hand (see following story) and to evangelicals on the other, who promises tax reform but says he does not know enough yet to provide details, who talks both to God and Rock Superstar Gregg Allman, violates all the unwritten political norms. By appealing to such differing constituencies, he has magnified the uncertainties about his character and positions. Those doubts could cost him an election that seemed to be his for the taking a couple of months ago.

Most politicians cultivate an appearance of ordinariness in the belief that doing so wins elections. Carter can play that game too, especially when he is at home in Plains, pitching softball, draining ponds and filleting bass. But he is hardly ordinary. He is complex, a sometimes lonely and introspective man who has spent much of his life attempting to balance contending forces: parents who were political opposites, the Old South and the New, the various factions of the Democratic Party.

To win in 1976, he has an obvious need to demonstrate that he is no mere regional candidate. He seeks approval from voters of almost every conceivable description and, in the process, often ventures into a political wilderness. He quotes Kierkegaard ("Every man is an exception") and Dylan Thomas ("Great is the hand that holds dominion over/ man by a scribbled name"). He discusses his attitudes on death and "ethnic purity," analyzes the biblical injunction against adultery and admits he has been "tempted to judge other people without charity since I was a small child."

He does not so much say different things to different audiences as emphasize different aspects of his background. Before naval construction workers in Groton, Conn., he stresses his years in the Navy and his belief in "a strong, muscular defense." Before the B'nai B'rith in Washington, he notes that he and other Baptists consider the creation of Israel to be "the fulfillment of biblical prophecy." Speaking to farmers in Des Moines, he reminds them that he too is a farmer and urges an end to grain embargoes.

Even when he has no natural ties to an audience, Carter can be a kind of political chameleon, adopting the hue of whatever group he may be addressing. That tendency has led to some of the worst moments of his campaign, to the sometimes valid charge that he is "fuzzy" or a "flip-flopper." But Carter sees his blurred political image as an asset. "Insofar as my political campaign has been successful," he said during a speech last June, "it is because I have learned from our people and have accurately reflected their concerns, their frustration and their desires."

But the polls indicate that Carter may have projected too many different images of his personality for his own good. People are confused. They wonder how he can conceivably achieve a rapport with so many disparate personalities. He has committed so many gaffes in the opening weeks of the campaign that many have begun to wonder about his competence. The voters seem to want to trust him, but they are not certain why they should. By comparison, Gerald Ford is a far less complicated person and ma"kes far fewer demands on the voters' psychoanalytical abilities.

Sometimes Carter gives the impression that he is trying to explain his personality to himself, and not only to the public. Asked by a reporter to describe his relationship with his father, he replied in a way that reflected the social and political ambivalence that characterized the Carter household when Jimmy was a boy. After a long pause, he said, "My father was very strict with me. But I loved him." With eerie precision, Carter also recalls that between the ages of four and 15, he was whipped six times by his father.

Carter is an amalgam of the three main influences in his life. He is the conservative businessman and farmer that his father would have liked; the ambitious achiever and compassionate social liberal that his mother encouraged; the tough, disciplined taskmaster that his Navy boss, Admiral Hyman Rickover, was and is. Carter borrowed qualities from all three people and developed a grab-bag political personality that offers something for almost everyone.

It was as a boy in Plains, Ga., that he developed an interest in politics and a tendency toward populism, which his mother's side of the family favored. In his revealing autobiography Why Not the Best?, Carter made his family's economic situation sound worse than it was during the 1930s. "My life on the farm during the Great Depression," he wrote, "more nearly resembled farm life of fully 2,000 years ago than farm life today." That says less about the facts than about Carter's penchant for overstatement, which has caused him some embarrassment on the campaign trail. Actually, during the Depression the Carters lived in a fairly comfortable house--although, like most rural Southerners in those days, they had no running water or electricity. In any case, Carter was born into a striving family that cherished the Horatio Alger tradition, Dixie-style. He learned early to be optimistic about his and the nation's future.

The conservative side of Carter's nature springs from his father's upbringing. Mr. Earl, as he was called, was a demanding father and an avowed segregationist, but he was also noted for his generosity in giving money and gifts to local blacks. (One thing the gregarious Mr. Earl was not able to teach Jimmy, however, was to relax and have fun for its own sake.) While Mr. Earl did not read books or allow blacks beyond his back door, Miss Lillian, his wife, compensated on both counts. She taught Jimmy to respect the rights of blacks, and beyond that to be concerned about them. She also encouraged him to read voraciously--as did Miss Julia Coleman, superintendent of the all-white school Jimmy attended. When Carter was only twelve, she insisted that he read War and Peace.

Carter's childhood dream of attending the Naval Academy was disturbed by his fear that he might not be able to pass the physical, because of the malocclusion of his teeth and his slight case of flat feet. Typically, and no doubt fruitlessly, he rolled his fallen arches over Coke bottles for some time before his first physical in hope of correcting nature's error. A Congressman got him his appointment to the academy in 1942.

After he earned his commission in 1946, Carter found Navy life less than fulfilling. His acceptance into the submarine program changed all that. In the first place, he loved the macho tradition of life aboard subs. He has always enjoyed the company of more outgoing, hard-living, salty-tongued men. Most of his closest advisers today fit that description, as did many of the men with whom he served on submarines. The spartan life aboard a submarine--the absence of many diversions--also appealed to Carter's love of work and problem solving in splendid isolation.

But the best part was meeting and working for Rickover, the man who more than any other, except for Carter's father, had the greatest impact on his life. Rickover did more than merely select Carter for the atomic submarine program. The admiral --then a captain--set harsh standards, which Carter has been trying to meet ever since, and which he attempted to set for his own subordinates when he entered politics.

Wrote Carter about Rickover in Why Not the Best?: "He was unbelievably hard-working and competent, and he demanded total dedication from his subordinates. We feared and respected him and strove to please him ... The absence of a comment was his compliment; he never hesitated to criticize severely if a job were not done as well as he believed it could be done. He expected the maximum from us." Carter deals with his own aides in a more humane way, even managing an occasional commendation. But the fact that the Rickover manner impresses him suggests that he is still susceptible to military notions of self-control and obedience.

In Carter's adult life there have been two major crises. The first came in 1953 when his father died of cancer. Carter and Wife Rosalynn reluctantly decided that they would have to give up the Navy and return home so that he could take over the family's rapidly declining business. Both Jimmy and Rosalynn had been encouraged as young people to set their sights beyond Plains. Now they were forced to give up their relatively so phisticated life in the North, and Jimmy had to abandon his ambition of becoming Chief of Naval Operations.

Still, Rickover would have been pleased by the grit and dedication they showed when they returned home. Living at first with their three young children in a public housing project in Plains, Carter and his wife worked full time--and then some. She kept the books while he managed the peanut farm and warehouse business, and attended classes in modern agriculture techniques. Within ten years the business was thriving, and they could once again set their sights beyond Plains.

By then Carter had already begun to dabble in local politics--and like it. Because the Carters had long been one of the two most prominent families in Plains, it was only natural that Jimmy Carter would win a seat on the school board. But now he felt himself ready for much bigger things. He had plans for his state and, presumably, the country. He ran for the state senate in 1962, and after proving election fraud, ultimately won. Then he ran for Governor in 1966 and placed a disappointing third in the Democratic primary. That first major defeat of his adult life led to his second crisis. Winning had become everything.

Carter was profoundly depressed in the wake of his defeat. As he told Journalist Bill Moyers, using the awkward phrasing that sometimes creeps into his speech: "Everything I did [afterward] was not gratifying." He had begun to question the premises of his life. Though he had not been raised in an intensely religious environment, he had until then considered himself a devout Christian. But he found even that premise doubtful.

The familiar story of how Carter soon after was "born again" as a result of this episode illustrates not only the depth of his religious feeling, but the way in which he has been able to reconcile his faith with his political career. The rebirth occurred partly as a result of a conversation he had with his evangelist sister Ruth Stapleton during a walk in the woods near his Plains home in 1967. She recalls that he cried during the conversation, though he has no such recollection. He describes the conversation this way: "Ruth asked me if I would give up anything for Christ, if I would give up my life and possessions--everything. I said 1 would. Then she asked me if I would be willing to give up politics. I thought a long time and had to admit that I would not."

But the realization that he loved politics more than Christ jarred him into a reassessment of his basic values and some time later led him to be born again.

This is a common experience among evangelicals, and simply means that one has accepted Christ as one's "personal savior"; in return, one's sins are forgiven. Thus Carter's sins--"pride" and a desire to "use people" for his own political gain--had been forgiven, he believes, because he had faced them and admitted the truth of his own nature.

Thus enlightened, and after spending much of the following year "witnessing for Christ" in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Carter was able to resume his political career. He ran for Governor again in 1970, won that election, and two years later began planning his presidential campaign. He was no longer plagued by doubts. His gubernatorial victory and spiritual rebirth gave him the fortification he needed to storm the twin citadels of Washington and the "special interests." He was content that what he was doing was not inherently sinful--indeed, that it probably met with God's approval.

While the spiritual underpinning of Carter's candidacy is a major factor in his success, there is nothing in his public or private life that suggests he is a religious fanatic. As Governor, he maintained a strict separation of church and state, even canceling a series of official prayer breakfasts in the statehouse, which had been started by an earlier Governor. Moreover, while his religion may help sustain him over the long political haul (he says he sometimes prays as often as 25 times a day), the most important factors in his rise have been his intelligence and his toughness.

It was through intelligence, not faith, that Carter and his young campaign manager Hamilton Jordan analyzed this year's lineup of primaries and devised a meticulous, prescient plan for using them to win the nomination. And it was intelligence, of course, that enabled Carter to grasp the intricacies of many, though certainly not all, national issues while simultaneously campaigning around the country.

Carter has also shown himself to be a man of good political instincts --not only in the tactical but in the philosophical sense. He is genuinely moved by the plight of society's underdogs and is never more eloquent or compelling than when he talks about their problems. Lately his instincts have failed him, as when he granted the Playboy interview.

In the end, as Carter says, the blame or credit for the way he conducts his campaign must fall on Carter himself. He is a loner. He is not a man with a large circle of intimate friends and advisers. Among the very few people in whom he places anything like total confidence are Jordan, Press Secretary Jody Powell, Media Adviser Gerald Rafshoon, Administrative Aide Greg Schneiders, unpaid Adviser Charles Kirbo and, of course, Rosalynn. On the issues, he reaches out for opinions and advice from a remarkably broad and diverse group of people. For example, his coterie of economists ranges from those on the fairly far left to the middling conservative; when they get together with Carter they present their differing views. But he does most of the synthesizing that results in his policy positions.

As Governor, this tendency to keep his own counsel, to run his own show, occasionally caused him to take uncompromising stands that threatened to undermine the goals he wanted to accomplish. He almost lost his battle to reorganize the Georgia government when his all-or-nothing stance irritated the state legislators. Only at virtually the last minute did he heed the advice of friends and agree to compromise on several relatively minor points. A troubling question is, if he is elected President, wheth er Carter would follow expert advice in making his decisions.

Carter's critics have occasionally tried to draw parallels between his personality and Richard Nixon's. There are superficial similarities: strong ambition, a tight little circle of close advisers, a tendency to prefer solitude for his decision making. But there are profound differences. Carter has a far more balanced personality. His interests and reading extend beyond the limited world of history and politics. His sense of self and pride in his roots are stronger than Nixon's. So are his feelings of compassion and the ease with which he deals with people. Moreover, Carter tends to use his ambition as a means to an end; for Nixon, ambition often seemed to be an end in itself. Indeed, Carter may have more character traits in common with Jerry Ford than with Richard Nixon.

The beginning and end of Carter's political personality is self-confidence. It has been one of his most important strengths and, if it gives way to arrogance, could become one of his worst weaknesses. Confidence led him to pursue his seemingly impossible dream. As he once told his sister Ruth: "Honey, I can either will myself to sleep until 10:30 a.m. and get my ass beat, or I can will myself to get up at 6 a.m. and become President."

One blustery day last February, Carter was campaigning in Nashua, N.H., when he encountered a man leaning against a wall. Carter introduced himself, and the man grudgingly shook hands. "I know who you are," the man growled. "But I'm not going to vote for you. I'm voting for Birch Bayh. He's for the workingman." Carter hardly missed a beat. He patted the man on the arm. "Fine," he said. "Good luck to you."

But the Bayh supporter, nurturing a good deal of private anger, wanted the last word. "I don't wish you good luck," he yelled after the candidate. "I don't want you to win." Carter was in full stride, leaning into the cold New Hampshire wind, shoulders hunched, face down. "I know you don't," he whispered to no one but himself. "But I shall."

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