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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."