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.