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For many of those who look for the best in him, Carter remains an ineffective President, one who has only partly followed the traditional pattern of growing in the job. He too often seems as uncertain as when he first took office: an immensely dedicated, well-meaning, decent man who is not comfortable with the power of the presidency. Says a former top official in Washington: "He really doesn't like power and doesn't know how to use it."
An idealist, Carter tends to think that if a policy is right, it will somehow prevail. A proper moral stance, he seems to believe, is at least half the battle. He thus remains relatively indifferent to strategy, to making sure that all the pieces are in place and all the proper personalities consulted, that all the predictable consequences of an action indeed have been predicted. He tends to react rather than anticipate, to race from one crisis to the next, always hoping for the best. He often fails to see how one event is related to another in a binding chain of circumstances that a President must always keep in mind. And when an action is heralded by the White House, it too often does not take place. For example, to signal U.S. determination to the Soviets, he called for the draft registration of young Americans, men and women alike. Last week Congress banned the registration of women, and the registration of men was in doubt. Some signal.
Carter compounds the confusion by dividing authority among too many people, a presidential tendency that he has carried far. His economic advisers have never been very logically organized. Last week he bypassed Treasury Secretary G. William Miller and put Vice President Walter Mondale in charge of an economic review. But Mondale is not particularly well informed on the subject and has been spending most of his time campaigning for the President. Carter has split foreign policy between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Brzezinski. Until recently, whoever got in the last word often influenced Carter's decision. But Vance has declined in favor, partly because Carter seems to regard him as too mild and conciliatory toward the Soviets. Yet Brzezinski has not assumed power, for Carter mistrusts his emotionalism and theatricality. No one fills the policy void, and decisions have to be made under pressure, sometimes by men in a state of late-night exhaustion. Defense Secretary Harold Brown is regarded as a skilled technocrat but cautious to a fault on policymaking. CIA Director Stansfield Turner makes a very limited contribution. Adding to the disarray, Carter has repeatedly replaced his chief emissary to the Middle East. After Vance came Robert Strauss, who was soon succeeded by Sol Linowitz in a role in which continuity is of great importance.
Continuity indeed is vital in all international relations. U.S, lack of consistency is a chief complaint of such puzzled allies as Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany, who went to Washington last week to convey some of his grievances. Says William Kintner, former U.S. Ambassador to Thailand and now a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania: "It sounds as if Carter never heard of the basic axiom that the art of diplomacy is consistency. His is a policy of flip-flops and zigzags."
Some of the U.S. Administration's most notable flip-flops: