Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. Jimmy Carter: Impact and Legacy.
Breadcrumb U. Robert A. Jimmy Carter Essays Life in Brief. Life Before the Presidency. Campaigns and Elections. Domestic Affairs. Foreign Affairs. Life After the Presidency.
Family Life. The American Franchise. Carter is an activist. He wants to do things. Yet his campaign statements should have warned us that save for the human rights thrust in foreign policy, his passion in government is for how things are done, rather than what should be done.
He believes that if the process is good the product will be good. In other words, if he sets up a procedure for making policy that is open, comprehensive his favorite word , and involves good people, whatever comes out of this pipeline will be acceptable within certain budgetary limits.
A concern for process is not a bad thing. Some past presidents made a fetish of chaos in policy development, often resulting in proposals that had not been fully explored. But process is only a tool for getting from here to there—it is not a substitute for substance. And good processes can produce conflicting, competing and confusing programs.
When a president lacks an overriding design for what he wants government to do, his department chiefs are forced to prepare presidential options in a vacuum.
Political executives and high level civil servants prefer to be loyal to a president. When direction is not present, they will go into business for themselves. The Carter presidency cannot be described—as was sometimes true of past administrations—in terms of White House loyalists versus cabinet department disloyalists.
Today neither White House staff nor cabinet officials have been given the predictive capacity that they must have to do their jobs properly.
A subordinate—even on the cabinet level—has to be able to plan on the basis of some past pattern. Take government reorganization policy.
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