The Persistent Perils of Inner-Circle Vision

By Hugh Sidey

Jimmy Carter's White House staff came to town devoted to opening up the Government to the rest of the country, and it turns out that they arrived seriously hobbled by their own isolation.

They cannot see Bert Lance as having violated their code, if not the law. They cannot perceive that their insistence erodes trust, hurting the presidency and thus the nation. They have drawn the wagons in a circle and have so far placed Carter's pride and the feelings of their old friend Bert before the good of the country. It is selfishness and arrogance of a sort. In a sound presidency, there is only one final measure of action: Is it in the national interest? Bert Lance no longer is because he played too loose with money.

It is not new for a President's staff to be blinkered by regional prejudice and shortsightedness. We have lived through Kennedy's Boston Mafia, who calculated that all problems were rooted in politics and could be solved by a deal. A few of the staff members who came along with L.B.J. left the impression that if they were defied, the offender's tax records or FBI dossier would end up in Johnson's nighttime reading. We barely survived the season of California narrowness; around Nixon's White House, anyone who did not act, think, look and smell like a U.S.C. fraternity man was considered a candidate for the enemies list.

A few weeks ago top White House Aide Hamilton Jordan was asked if he was sure Bert was the model budget man Carter thought him to be. Jordan nearly choked on his bottle of Tab. He looked at the questioner as if his own mother had been insulted. After all, Bert was one of them. They knew him. A special guy.

What Jordan and Carter's other top aides apparently did not sense was that in the evil city of Washington, the scrutiny of high officials is so intense that even mothers sometimes turn out to have done things their own sons never suspected. Governors, Senators and highway commissioners can do a lot of things that look horrible only when the doers are elevated to the White House level, where symbolism, as Carter himself recognizes, is often more important than substance.

Jody Powell, the other principal staff strategist in the Lance affair, turned out to have some of the Machiavellian instincts of Nixon's Ziegler--and about the same skill --when he tried to send newsmen chasing after Chuck Percy on a provably false charge. Surely there have been times in the past when presidential press secretaries have called up newsmen and suggested they check out rumors of wrong-doing by Senators. But that sort of thing is probably done less in reality than in the Washington novels.

White House staff problems, of course, are presidential problems. The men and women working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are only as good as their boss allows them to be. Yet there are levels of competence and honor that each person controls. Watergate cried out for one bright young man to remember his Boy Scout oath and walk out of the White House. None did. The Carter crew have better hearts and souls. But if there is one duty of a staffer, it is to spot trouble far off and, if necessary, make unpleasant noises to convince the President of the danger. None did.

The lack of enthusiasm for White House work occasionally expressed by some of the staff may be more playacting than real. And yet there has always been around the Carter camp the thin feeling that they are doing the country a great favor to come to work at the White House. That is a state of mind that tends to dull the nerve ends.

Some time back, one of those old Washington mastodons so roundly attacked by the Carter campaigners made a few phone calls in the capital and out over the nation. By his count, the Democrats in Congress were near panic and a majority of Carter's own Cabinet was against Lance. Funny thing, he sighed, only the White House seemed unknowing.

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