How Jimmy's Staff Operates

At first they seemed to be in over their heads--way over. Jimmy Carter's aides and assistants ignored the barons on Capitol Hill. They irked newsmen, bureaucrats and other supplicants by letting their phones jingle unanswered. Mail piled up. Key sub-Cabinet posts went unfilled for weeks, and ambassadorial appointments have only just begun to trickle out. Meanwhile, the White House staff that Carter had promised to slash by 30% has grown by nearly 30%, to 655 names.

But now, at least to hear Carter staffers tell it, the new team's teething days are about over. Admits one top White House aide: "There was great confusion in the beginning--and it lasted longer 'than most people thought was appropriate." Much of the confusion has been ironed out--with the help of all those added staffers and simply more time to get on top of the job. Meanwhile, a backlog of 314,000 unanswered letters has been cleared up, and the extra staff helps to handle the mail load, which averages 75,000 letters a week.

Moving Jordan. The Eisenhower and Nixon staffs had pyramidal organizations, with one or two men controlling access to the President. Carter's aides describe their setup as a wheel: the President is the hub and his top assistants are the spokes--equally positioned, in theory, to feed the boss with information and advice from many quarters. The reality is somewhat different.

The spoke that is longest and strongest of all is clearly Hamilton Jordan, 32. the breezy, feet-up Georgian who was Carter's executive secretary in his gubernatorial days and is now boss of "political coordination" in the White House. Referring to the longtime Georgia confidant who has helped him out on particularly knotty problems, Carter calls Jordan "My West Wing Charles Kirbo." In fact, Jordan's responsibilities are just about what he chooses to make them. Chuckles a colleague: "Power groups in the Carter White House. Hamilton is the power group."

The assistant most trusted and respected by Carter, Jordan has completed the time-consuming task of leading the talent search for high-level appointees. Now he is moving forcefully into policy decisions. Other aides say that Jordan, sorry that he had not got himself more deeply involved in the decision making on Carter's minimum-wage proposal last month, eagerly responded to Carter's call to join the energy-program deliberations. When Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal and Economics Adviser Charles Schultze wanted to express doubts about part of the plan, they sent a tough memo to Carter. But it was Jordan, disturbed by the mounting dissension over the plan, who actually went to Carter and got him to schedule a broad, top-level discussion of it.

Jordan still resists being pegged as Carter's chief of staff, either in name or in fact. Says a Jordan intimate: "Hamilton doesn't like the kind of stuff a chief of staff has to deal with, all those intramural problems and the paper flow." Jordan himself says that he has no desire to get in the way of Carter's contact with Cabinet officers and other staffers. The West Wing troops, he believes, must "function as a staff should --that is, to support Carter and monitor things that are going on in the Federal Government, and to help him develop and manage his programs."

Besides Jordan, there are five other holdovers from Carter's days in Georgia who are members of the senior staff --spokes in Jimmy's wheel--and have ready access to the President. Press Secretary Jody Powell, 33, is probably in touch with Carter more frequently than anyone else, including Jordan. As one colleague describes the emerging West Wing pecking order: "There's Hamilton and Jody, and then there are the others." Powell was one of the eight aides and Cabinet members Carter called in last week to discuss whether he should drop the $50 rebate.

Jack Watson Jr., 38, is both Cabinet secretary and Carter's Assistant for Intergovernmental Affairs--his formal link to the Department Secretaries as well as to Governors and important mayors. Watson describes himself as a "flow point" for Carter; he is responsible for routing all messages between Cabinet members and the President. Cabinet chiefs can go directly to Carter, of course. "But," says Watson, "as a practical matter, they find it helpful to pass those verbal communications on to me for transmission to him. They're very solicitous of the President's time."

Robert Lipshutz, 55, the Counsel to the President, remains Carter's senior aide (the average age of the other top assistants is 37), and he presides over the daily 8 a.m. staff meeting. But his influence on policy has not broadened beyond relatively narrow legal areas, such as deciding the conflict-of-interest problems for Carter's appointees and advising the commutation of G. Gordon Liddy's Watergate sentence. A rapidly rising member of the Carter staff is Domestic Policy Assistant Stuart E. Eizenstat, 34. Although quiet and self-effacing, he has gained the respect of his colleagues for his grasp of complex issues. Carter too has taken notice. Said he, after the Administration's meetings on the energy program: "Stu has been very impressive in these meetings. He's really impressed me with his ideas and his understandings."

Rising Stars. Congressional Liaison Frank Moore, 41, seems to be recovering from his shaky start in his sensitive position. Moore's staff has been beefed up, and complaints about poor communication with Capitol Hill are diminishing. In any case, Jordan says that most of the criticism unfairly focused on Moore: "A number of us on the White House staff contributed to his problems by mistakes in our own areas."

So far, the least influential of the seven staffers who make up the Carter inner circle seems to be Midge Costanza, 44, the former vice mayor of Rochester. She is the group's only female, the only ethnic and the only non-Georgian. One White House watcher wisecracks: "They had hoped she might be handicapped too." Costanza's job: to deal, as she says, with "organized America," meaning special-interest groups such as senior citizens and gay organizations. Costanza is much more liberal than Carter on most issues, and thus far has not had much impact on policy.

Below the group of seven--and, of course, Vice President Walter Mondale, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Schlesinger and Budget Chief Bert Lance--is the "junior varsity." These are the dozen or so lesser aides who keep the White House whirring and the senior seven free to concentrate on their own functions.

On this level, the rising stars tend to be Jordan aides. His chief deputy, Landon Butler, 35, is a key operative for the Georgia cadre and is organized labor's West Wing contact. Another Jordan man is Richard Hutcheson, 25, a former campaign aide, who oversees the paper flow into Carter's In box. Senior staffers send their memos--held to two pages, when possible--to Hutcheson for delivery to Carter. But juniors with ideas they want Carter to consider must send their notes to their own senior staffer first; if he passes a memo, it then goes on to Hutcheson. If he deems it unworthy of a showing to Carter, Hutcheson may ask for a revision. While he claims to try hard not to do violence to other staffers' ideas, he has gained a reputation for abrasiveness. Lately, he has been holding regular discussions with eight to ten other j.v. staffers on the "longerrange picture." Says he: "People have to know what's coming up."

Fewer Knives. Some critics, observing the Georgians' fierce loyalty to their boss, have suggested that Carter could be creating his own imperial presidency; he is surrounded by a palace guard that, despite its relentless informality, is a palace guard nonetheless. That does not seem likely. Reports TIME Correspondent Bonnie Angelo: "There is within the Carter White House less jockeying and fewer glinting knives in the back than is usual in a place where power can be determined by how close you sit to the Oval Office. The Carter staff is more relaxed and more approachable than any other White House group in recent years. Their chief flaw is not some latent imperial instincts but their lack of Washington savvy. Their total experience in government lies in their years with Carter; they are not yes men by any means, but they bring no new insights, no sensitivities honed under different pressures."

Eventually, the President's aides will gain that missing Capitol experience. Along the way, of course, they could also succumb to a special Washington vice. Says Angelo: "Thus far, the Carter staff has not demonstrated a thirst for power --but power, after all, can be an acquired taste."

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