The American Vice Presidency (74 page)

On Mondale’s arrival in Atlanta, Hamilton Jordan met him, and Mondale asked him how Carter had reacted to the memo, a copy of which he had sent to Jordan. “Oh, the memo,” Carter’s right-hand man said. “Just double-space it and he’ll agree to everything.” And so it was. Mondale remembered that Carter told him, “I want you to be in the chain of command—a vice president with the power to act in the president’s place,” and gave Mondale his own office in the White House, a break in precedent.
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A major difference between Humphrey’s experience with LBJ and Mondale’s with Carter was Carter himself, who was above delivering the sort of deep personal humiliations that Johnson had routinely dealt to subordinates.

In anticipation of assuming the presidential powers of war and peace, Carter included Mondale in all preinauguration briefings. “It was obvious to me that in a nuclear exchange, the President might well be incapacitated, and the Vice President, as the new Commander in Chief, had to be fully qualified to assume his duties,” Carter wrote later.
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Mondale also was the first vice president to be sent the highly classified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), including the latest foreign-policy intelligence.

During the transition, he was assigned to prepare an action agenda for the first months of the Carter administration, and about three weeks before its inauguration, each member of Carter’s new cabinet was given a twenty-nine-page memo of Carter’s weekly schedule through the approaching March, prepared by Mondale.
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Unlike most past cases, Mondale’s staff
was totally integrated with Carter’s, an indication of the shared agenda they had, rather than Mondale being given specific side assignments like those that had often been shunted to past vice presidents.

Mondale himself was placed entirely in the loop for receiving all policy papers going to the president, and he usually saw Carter on a daily basis. A regularly scheduled lunch meeting between the two was a staple of their weekly calendars. Mondale also functioned as a sort of long-range traffic cop for issues to be taken up by the president in an orderly fashion, including foreign travel for each of them.

At the outset, Mondale insisted that he not be given the direction of any agency, such as the Domestic Council, which had bogged down Rockefeller, or any major area of responsibility beyond the agenda setting. When Carter proposed that he serve as his White House chief of staff or take on dealing with Africa as his special task, Mondale begged off, successfully making the case that he could better serve as a generalist and senior adviser without portfolio.
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Nor did he want to be caught in bureaucratic wrangling with cabinet heads working the same side of the issues street. With Carter new to Washington and many Georgians with little experience there given key White House positions, Mondale’s direct general counsel was much needed, as seen almost at once.

One matter not included in the early cabinet meeting, and hence not subject to comment by the cabinet, was a sudden decision by Carter less than a month in office to veto federal funding for some eighteen water projects, mostly in the western states. They were pet projects of senior members of the House and Senate and often tagged as pork-barrel handouts. Carter added insult to injury by failing to consult with or notify the affected legislators in advance, to Mondale’s chagrin. But Carter was determined to tackle inflation and balance the federal budget by the conclusion of his term.

Mondale finally alerted Carter to the political as well as the budgetary aspects of the issue, advising that he veto the most egregious pork-barrel items and yield on the others in the interest of party peace. But newcomer Carter dug in his heels. “Eventually we rounded up enough votes to sustain a veto,” Mondale wrote later, “but House Speaker Tip O’Neill called the president and proposed a compromise—to suspend the projects rather than cancel them. Carter agreed, but that only infuriated several members of
Congress who, at some risk to their congressional friendships, had promised to support us. In the end, a year later, Carter finally did sign a bill cancelling several of the projects on his list. So we won a little on the merits, but we lost a lot on the politics.”
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Mondale’s influence had its first major test in helping shape a major affirmative action case before the Supreme Court. A young white student from Minnesota named Allan Bakke alleged he had been denied admission to the University of California medical school in deference to less-qualified black students. Carter’s attorney general and old Georgia friend, Griffin Bell, had his staff produce a draft in support of Bakke that would run contrary to Carter’s own general support of affirmative action. Mondale weighed in with Carter, asking him, “Why do we need this fight now? The administration is already battling with its liberal allies. Why provoke them more and turn away from our campaign promise to promote affirmative action?”
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Mondale’s intercession eventually helped bring the brief into line with Carter’s commitment to this critical civil rights principle.
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Mondale concluded early in his new job, “Many of the lawmakers I called the old whales, the powerful veteran committee chairmen [of his own party], had little interest in seeing us succeed. They were profoundly skeptical of this Democratic outsider, and they were scheming right from the start to find ways of testing and diminishing him. They were almost as happy with a Republican president as a Democratic president because the big point was getting their own way.”
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Carter had hoped to kick off his administration with an economic stimulus bill composed of a jobs program, public works spending, and an individual tax rebate of fifty dollars as symbolic evidence that the Democrats felt the public’s pain. But as the economy began to show an uptick, Carter scrapped the rebate to the severe distress of many congressional leaders. The actions disturbed Mondale as well while he sought to run interference for the Georgian newcomer.

Mondale used his weekly private lunches with Carter to alert him to the political elements of some of his plans that may have eluded him. “I had hoped I might help Carter navigate these shoals, or at least avoid collisions with our friends,” he wrote later. “I spent a lot of time up on the Hill with senators and members of the House picking up information that I would bring to the president.” He said of their private lunches: “[They]
proved to be one of our most valuable ideas—just the two of us, no staff, no fixed agenda, totally honest. I often used those lunches for politics because Carter didn’t like to bring politics into our meetings with cabinet officials and agency staff. This was my chance to tell him what I was hearing and how I interpreted it.”
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Mondale, however, found himself in the administration of a man who led with more head and less heart than Mondale did. Carter’s agenda was the captive of his justifiable concern over the restraints imposed by federal debt and inflation, at the cost of diminished social programs that Mondale favored. Speaking as a traditional liberal, Mondale said of his personal challenge dealing with Carter: “I tried to keep our constituency together by forcing [the liberals] to confront the inflation issue, and I fought within the administration to prevent unnecessary budget cuts. It was a tough job for an old progressive like me.”
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Reviewing their administration in a memo to Carter after their first seven months, Mondale wrote, “I think it is important that I devote more time to strengthening our relationship with those constituencies [of the old Democratic coalition] and persuading them that our interests and theirs are inextricably tied together.”
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The matter came to a head in mid-1978 at a party conference in Memphis at which Mondale’s good friend Ted Kennedy called on the Democrats to “sail against the wind” of economic restraints in support of their old social agenda. Mondale defended Carter’s anti-inflation worries, in a prelude to the inevitable clash to come in Kennedy’s decision to challenge Carter’s bid for reelection in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries.

Before then, however, Carter orchestrated the one foreign-policy achievement that would crown his otherwise troubled presidency—the 1978 personal peace negotiations refereed by him between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin at Camp David, Maryland, which ended in their historic peace treaty. Mondale played an unobtrusive role as an ice-breaker in separate private talks with Sadat and Begin in advance of their meeting at Camp David and as an encourager to each of them once there. Carter wrote of the vice president later in his memoir: “Mondale handled everything possible for me in Washington, and took a helicopter up to Camp David whenever he could get away at night or on weekends.”
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Carter included Mondale in most major meetings and often used his
vice president as an intermediary with each of the visiting principals. Carter meanwhile tenaciously urged them not to waste the opportunity he had afforded them, and he eventually succeeded.
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The next year, Mondale also played a key role with the State Department specialist Richard Holbrooke in getting Carter to agree to take a leading part in a multination rescue of Southeast Asian boat people—refugees fleeing the war-torn region by sea.
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Overshadowing both these foreign-affairs achievements, however, were two episodes that most seriously damaged the Carter presidency. The first came in the late summer of 1978, when Carter made the domestic decision that caused the worst breach in his relationship with Mondale. With Middle East oil prices soaring and a severe energy crisis plaguing the country, the president planned a major speech on it, then abruptly canceled it and summoned a host of outside kibitzers to Camp David to counsel him on what do to. For twelve days, the energy experts and various political leaders trooped to the Maryland hideaway for seminars that seemed only to underscore Carter’s indecision. The president’s pollster, Patrick Caddell, weighed in with data suggesting that the American people had lost confidence in their president, and Carter decided he had to make a speech addressing that conclusion.

Mondale wrote later of Caddell’s notion: “He argued that the public was having a sort of psychological breakdown after several bad years in American politics. He thought Americans simply couldn’t grapple with the gravity of a challenge as severe as an international energy crisis. Caddell proposed that Carter speak to the public about this failure of will and urge them to buckle up and deal with it.” But, Mondale wrote, “I thought that was a dead end.” Referring to psychological texts Caddell had brought with him, Mondale told him, “Pat, I’ve read all those books and they don’t have a damn thing to do with the price of energy or the next election.”
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Of the internal staff debate that ensued with the president, Mondale wrote later, “By late afternoon I was pretty upset, and probably for the only time, I broke with Carter.… I said I don’t believe this problem is in people’s heads.… These are real problems. People can’t get gas. Their paychecks are getting smaller. They’re worrying about their heating bills.” Further, Mondale told Carter, “You can’t blame the American people for the problems they face. We were elected to be a government as good as the people, yet now we’re proposing to say that we need a people as good as
the government. You can’t sell that.” Mondale wrote later, “I probably got a little angry as I finished my case, something I can’t remember ever happening with Carter and me, and I probably made an ass of myself. But I was afraid that this would be the end of our administration.”
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Carter took Mondale for a walk to cool him down, but in the end the president delivered a crisis-in-confidence address that immediately was dubbed his “malaise speech,” although he never used that word. It left an impression of incompetence and confusion that hung over Carter and his administration long afterward.

Mondale was also distressed by a Carter decision at Camp David to shake up his cabinet, calling for the resignations of all members and accepting five, apparently in an effort to show toughness and strength. Mondale wrote later, “I think our administration never recovered from that week. Congress was caught by surprise. Wall Street was rattled. The general public seemed flummoxed. The Republicans said Americans weren’t depressed about America, they were frustrated with us.”
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Even more damaging in public opinion was the storming by Iranian student radicals of the American Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and the taking of 101 American diplomats and other personnel as hostages. The attack came shortly after Carter had reluctantly agreed to admit the ailing and exiled shah of Iran to the United States for medical treatment, a decision in which Mondale had concurred. For the next 444 days, the hostages were held under the most humiliating circumstances, an episode made infinitely worse for Carter when a helicopter rescue mission ordered by him was badly botched in the Arabian desert, leaving eight dead among the American forces.

On top of all this woe came Ted Kennedy’s decision to challenge Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination. The development was particularly trying for Mondale because he and Kennedy were good friends, and they shared most of their party’s liberal positions and aspirations. In Carter’s diary on June 29, 1979, he wrote, “I had lunch with Fritz. He thought my comment concerning ‘whipping Kennedy’s ass’ was ill-advised. His is kind of a lonely voice. Some of my staff members say it was the best thing for morale around the White House since the Willie Nelson concert.”
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Mondale was particularly chagrined at Carter’s decision early in the election year to stay off the campaign trail and conduct what was called a
“Rose Garden strategy” of focusing on the national and international crises, leaving to Mondale the role of chief campaign surrogate. Carter did, however, agree to join Kennedy and a third candidate, Governor Jerry Brown of California, in a debate sponsored by the
Des Moines Register
, scheduled for the first week of the election year.