TRYING TO BE ONE OF THE BOYS

In the Democratic cloakroom just off the Senate floor, Hubert Humphrey cracked, "Segretti did it. It had to be one of the dirty-trick guys.'' Los Angeles Times Cartoonist Paul Conrad lost not a second in sketching a lascivious Jimmy Carter fantasizing over the Statue of Liberty--undraped. A Californian just back from a trip winked at his wife and announced: "I've got that Jimmy Carter feeling."

The implausible linkage of Jimmy Carter to lechery stemmed from some afterthought views on sexual mores that the candidate expressed in a wide-ranging interview that will appear in the November Playboy. The result of five hours of interviews given over a three-month period to Writer Robert Scheer, the Playboy article quotes Carter on such substantive topics as U.S. intervention in foreign countries, multinational corporations and the Mayaguez incident. But none of these created a stir.*

What riveted the public, in the wink of an eye, was Carter's use of the words "screw" and "shack up" while making a candid, purposeless admission that like other humans, he harbors lustful thoughts. With that, the Democratic nominee opened himself to titillating ridicule, bluenose outrage and serious questions about his judgment: should a presidential candidate choose a public forum where he will share attention with busty "Miss November" and a blurb heralding "Much More Sex in Cinema"? The cover promotion for the Carter story: "Now, the Real Jimmy Carter on Politics, Religion, the Press and Sex in an Incredible Playboy Interview."

Incredible indeed. In discussing sex at all. Carter was attempting to assure Playboy's presumably hedonistic readers that his own preference for marital fidelity has not given him a holier-than-they attitude. "We are taught not to judge other people," Carter said of his Southern Baptist upbringing. Then, in a rambling response to a suggestion that he might be a "rigid, unbending President," Carter declared: "What Christ taught about most was pride, that one person should never think he was better than anybody else." That should have been sufficient, but Carter continued: "I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, 'I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.*

"I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do--and I have done it --and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock."

Carter followed this curious intermingling of pulpit and locker-room language with, "Christ says don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife." The comments came after the interview apparently had ended and Carter was standing at the doorway of his home, seemingly unable to shut either the door or his mouth.

Carter's resort to undeaconlike idiom was perhaps best explained in a subsequent Sunday New York Times Magazine article by Norman Mailer--in which Carter used a still raunchier expression. Quoting Carter as saying, "I don't care if people say " Mailer wrote, "And he actually said the famous four-letter word that the Times has not printed in the 125 years of its publishing life." (For what else the Times and other papers did not publish, see PRESS.) Analyzed Mailer: "It was said from duty, from the quiet decent demands of duty, as if he, too, had to present his credentials to that part of the 20th century personified by his interviewer."

A more serious question--why Carter felt obliged to bare more than anyone needs to know about what goes on in his mind and heart--puzzled even his supporters. So did the fact that he spent more time with Scheer, a former editor of the left-leaning Ramparts magazine (who had previously done a Playboy interview with California Governor Jerry Brown that had impressed the Carter camp) than with any other journalist. As Columnist Mary McGrory suggested, the conversation "should have been off the record with God, not one taped with Playboy."

Reaction was swift and varied --from both Carter backers, who were dismayed despite efforts to rationalize what he had done, and foes. Observed Georgia Democratic Chairwoman Marjorie Thurman, a Carter opponent in state politics: "Bad, bad, bad." South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings expressed hope that "when he becomes President, he'll quit talking about adultery."

Dr. William Wolf of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said, "It sounds to me like good theology and good honest human experience brought together." The candidate's own pastor, the Rev. Bruce Edwards of Plains (Ga.) Baptist Church, noted, "I have no particular objections to it ... but I would have used other words to describe the same thing."

Editor Gerard Sherry of San Francisco's Catholic Monitor said, "I think he was trying to explain Christian ideas on promiscuity. If anything, he showed himself much less arrogant than Ford. Ford said [in a Ladies' Home Journal interview] his daughter would never have an affair. That was pretty dumb. Carter was being truthful with all due humility." The reaction that most intrigued California Pollster Mervin Field was expressed by his 16-year-old daughter Melanie as she watched television news accounts with her father. When the Carter-Playboy story was concluded, Melanie asked: "Dad, is Jimmy Carter a weirdo?"

"There was nothing to be gained," said Senate Acting Democratic Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia, pondering why Carter granted the interview in the first place. Commented Robert Bailey, 47, a bakery operator from Freemont, Calif.: "I'm a Baptist myself, and for a Bible-totin' Baptist to say those things--well, they were crude. I don't see why he had to reveal all his deep, inner thoughts--to make a national confession. It certainly doesn't make you a great man to do it."

Privately, a Bay Area radio commentator joked: "The fact Carter thinks about it but doesn't do anything just goes to show he isn't a man of action." But ridicule is as menacing to a candidate as outright condemnation, and Carter appears to be reaping his share of it without having persuaded the Playboy readership that he is anything but square. As one observer put it, "If you are not one of the boys--and Carter is not --then do not try to be." Rosalynn Carter's own reaction to what her husband had said somehow emphasized this point. Her husband, she proclaimed, had her "complete trust."

Carter advisers were concerned over the political fallout, but they should also worry about their own efficiency. Playboy insists that it agreed to allow the candidate or his aides to review the unedited transcripts of the taped interview--to correct factual errors, they maintain, but other interviewees have been allowed to make substantial changes. The Carter camp never asked for the transcripts, says Playboy Assistant Managing Editor Barry Golson. He also insists that he made several calls to Press Secretary Jody Powell to arrange for him to review the transcripts, but that Powell never returned the calls. Journalists familiar with Powell's operation question this; Powell is not that difficult to reach. But there is no question that he was derelict in not pursuing the matter; in the crush of his campaign duties, he apparently just forgot to check back.

When the leers and sneers subside, it may prove to be a quite different element of the Playboy article that has the most serious political consequences. In the interview's final passage, Carter links Lyndon Johnson with Richard Nixon in "lying, cheating and distorting the truth."

TIME has learned that Nixon himself phoned Lady Bird Johnson to express his dismay at the candidate's gratuitous slap at her late husband, an action reminiscent of less serious barbs Carter has hurled in the past at Humphrey, George Wallace and Edward Kennedy. Carter quickly called Mrs. Johnson to emphasize that he admired her husband and had spoken favorably of him elsewhere in the interview, but did not apologize, according to intimates of L.B.J.'s widow. Lady Bird described herself through an aide as "hurt and perplexed." The timing could hardly have been worse. Rosalynn Carter was scheduled to make campaign appearances with Lady Bird in Texas while her husband's L.B.J. remark was still on the air and in the headlines. Though Lady Bird was cool, she met Rosalynn in San Antonio and conducted her through the Johnson Library in Austin without so much as a mention of Playboy. At week's end, during an airport press conference in Houston, Carter tried to mollify L.B.J. admirers by explaining away his remarks as "an unfortunate juxtaposition of those two names [Johnson and Nixon] in the Playboy article that "grossly misrepresents" his feelings about Johnson. Pressed by reporters, he conceded that the "juxtaposition" was his, not Playboy's. Said he: "It was a mistake and I have apologized for it."

*Equally ignored was the startling revelation by Carter's campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, in a companion Playboy article by Scheer, that two top foreign policy advisers to Carter are not being considered for major appointments if the Democrat wins in November. Jordan is quoted as saying: "If after the Inauguration you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit. But that's not going to happen. You're going to see new faces, new ideas. The Government is going to be run by people you have never heard of." The statement suggests considerable political naivete: why embarrass such men as Vance and Brzezinski, advisers to Kennedy and Johnson and experts on whom Carter is leaning for advice?

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