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Johnson and Carter administrations
Q: Was that a different kind of conscience than, for example, the Johnson administration's Great Society conscience?
MR. COSTLE: Different how? President Johnson really believed he could wipe out poverty, that equality of opportunity was the gift of the constitutional framers, and that we had to make good on that. This meant public education. It meant picking up people who need help out of poverty. This was conscience. This was a belief that a great nation took care of the poorest among us.
Q: So are you saying that during the Carter administration, perhaps, some people believed that government couldn't do all things, that it had to be more surgical, selective? You mentioned that you were an advance man for President Johnson, right out of college. How would you characterize the next Democratic administration, the Carter administration? Was there a character difference between the two?
MR. COSTLE: I believe the character of any administration, to some extent, reflects the character of the President. He sets the tone. Lyndon Johnson was a larger-than-life person. I've yet to meet a man who was more compelling in person, in a small group, than he was. You could see the skills he had acquired as majority leader, maybe the greatest majority leader ever, in terms of working his will and the President's will on the Senate.
Curiously, on a television screen, he was flat and two-dimensional; you did not get that sense of the power and strength of the man. Of course, he had flaws; he was human. But he brought some very bright people into office with him: Bill Moyers, Joe Califano, and many others. When Johnson decided to create his Great Society, these people didn't have a Domestic Policy Council or OMB policy apparatus designed to do the forward-looking. They basically dusted off a number of ideas that were already on cabinet shelves. They devised several innovations, the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity) and the Community Action Program, Legal Services, etc., ideas that had a lasting and often controversial impact. I would certainly never argue that Lyndon Johnson had no soul; rather, his interests lay in a different area.
I would characterize President Carter as having a real belief that government could be effective and efficient and fair, that it could be run by moral people with integrity, that the people's business was very important, and that the public deserved a government that was above reproach. There were very few times during Carter's four years that there was even a hint of scandal or self-dealing. The closest incident came early, when questions were raised about Bert Lance's banking dealings in Georgia. The Reagan administration, in contrast, brought in the most sleazy people since Harding's time. Officials were indicted, went to jail, or were thrown out. They largely had no sense of appropriate ethics for government, for public administration.
President Carter, on the contrary, had a highly refined sense of the ethics of public administration. Remember that he ran, largely, against the perceived corruption of the Nixon administration. It was President Ford's pardon of Nixon that probably tilted the 1976 election. By then, people were convinced that Nixon had perpetrated an abuse of power. Nixon admitted it by resigning, in effect to avoid impeachment. Carter was absolutely determined that that would never happen in his administration. He deliberately sought out people that shared his moral and ethical standards for public policy.
But even while his officials widely subscribed to this post-Watergate mindset, politics -- in the sense of executive/legislative branch tensions -- flourished. Ironically, I remember telling my staff while I was at CBO -- well before I joined the transition -- that I hoped that the new President understood that Congress, even though it had a Democratic majority, was not necessarily his friend. No one rode in on his coat tails, and the glue that had once held Congress together, in terms of a well-established seniority system and powerful committee chairmen, no longer existed. It had been blown asunder by the Watergate crisis and post-Watergate voters. Tip O'Neill, as House Speaker, was going to have to scramble for every vote; he could no longer rely on twenty senior members to get the House's work done. For that reason, the new President was going to have to go to the people, to distinguish between himself and Congress. He didn't draw that distinction clearly enough, to my mind.
I think that President Clinton has made much the same mistake. It's understandable, and forgivable, because he is told -- as a Democratic President coming to town with a Democratic Congress -- together you can do the public's business. But today in Congress it's every man and woman for themselves. Party loyalty has broken down; there's little party identification.