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In public, Adams professed that he had not decided whether to stay. First, he said, he had to reassess the new setup at the White House and the Administration's commitment to "mass transportation and moving Detroit toward a fuel-efficient automobile." When Powell showed Carter a news account of Adams' comments, the President turned livid. He icily instructed Powell to tell reporters that "I haven't had a chance yet to talk to Secretary Adams, but I will in the very near future." Adams showed up at the White House Friday morning but did not wait to be fired. Said the plain-spoken Adams afterward: "I made clear my position. I quit... A Cabinet officer must work directly for the President−not for the White House staff." Butchman and Bracy also resigned.
As the week wore on, Carter acted as if a great weight had been lifted off him. Looking out of a White House window on Thursday evening, he spotted some people pressed up against the iron fence along Pennsylvania Avenue. In his shirtsleeves the President went out to see them. As the crowd broke into a verse of one of his favorite hymns, Amazing Grace, Carter climbed the fence to greet them. Friday afternoon, at a two-minute press conference, an unsmiling Carter defended his Cabinet changes as being "all constructive" and said that there would be no further firings. He added: "I need the full support of the American people in the future."
By the weekend, the shaken capital was still groping for a satisfactory explanation of Carter's approach to the firings. His top aides insisted that his mass Cabinet changes, like the Camp David summit, was Carter's way of getting back to the unconventional political style that had worked so well for him during the 1976 election. And so was his attack on the Washington establishment as an "island." Said an aide: "Our biggest mistake has been to operate too traditionally. Policies and programs are not enough. We knew it. We based our campaign on that. But when we got in, we ignored it."
With his ratings plunging in the polls and the 1980 campaign almost upon him, Carter decided to return to his roots. His decision was fortified in part by Caddell's own polls. They reported that Americans had lost confidence in the future, and that it did not matter who was President because the country was spinning out of control. Carter decided to charge back into the national consciousness, said the aide, figuring that "a challenge like energy can be used to pull ourselves together"−both as an Administration and as a nation. The first step was taken Sunday night, when Carter acknowledged the problems and appealed for support. But Carter almost surely misjudged the next step.
He thought that by acting quickly and swiftly dismissing the officials who displeased him, he could project a decisive, take-charge image. Said Hamilton Jordan: "He felt it was better to do it without hesitation so there would not be a cloud of uncertainty and apprehension over some departments for weeks and weeks." Instead, the President's unprecedented purge, and the degree of political motivation that seemed to be involved, raised still more questions about his own leadership instincts. ∎