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> Brock Adams, the stubborn Secretary of Transportation. Carter has not yet settled on his successor, but his job will be filled temporarily by still another Southerner, W. Graham Claytor Jr., who was president of the Southern Railway Company until his appointment as Navy Secretary in 1977.
> Griffin Bell, the affable Attorney General, who for months had sought permission from his old friend Carter to return home to Georgia. Bell's wife gleefully told a friend in the Senate: "It's the best news I've had since coming to Washington." Griffin's proposed successor is his own choice: Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti.
By week's end Carter had not yet accepted any resignations from his White House staff, but he had in one single stroke, a promotion, drastically restructured it. New powers and the title Chief of Staff went to his top aide, 34-year-old Hamilton Jordan. The change eliminated the last vestiges of Carter's experiment with "Cabinet government" and a staff that he used to compare to the "spokes of the wheel," with himself at the hub. His original intention had been to give associates easy access to the Oval Office. Soon after the election, Press Secretary Jody Powell announced that Carter thought "it was not in his interest to have a single chief of staff," a title that had special political significance because the memory of Nixon Aide H.R. Haldeman was so fresh in the public mind. But the loose arrangement, almost inevitably, caused confusion. Jordan, a shrewd but erratic and disorganized executive, will settle all but the most serious disputes. He will also screen from Carter all but the most important decisions and the most essential visitors. Said a White House official bluntly: "This is the week that Hamilton Jordan took over."
There was widespread doubt in both the Administration and the Congress that Jordan was the right man for the job. One of his first acts was hardly encouraging. He distributed stacks of 30-question evaluation forms to Cabinet members, with instructions that they grade their high-ranking subordinates according to ability, performance and loyalty to the Administration. The forms were to be returned to him on Friday, so that he could begin deciding who at the sub-Cabinet level should be ousted.
Most of the departments tried to make the deadline, but there were three notable exceptions: Blumenthal said he would not fill out the forms. Adams said that he was ripping up his. Califano left his forms for his successor, Pat Harris. Said he: "I'm perfectly happy to evaluate people, but not on the basis of what time they go to work."