DOWN TO THE 'SHORT LISTS'

"It's getting serious now," said a top aide last week as Jimmy Carter neared the final stages of his great talent hunt. But the President-elect did nothing to end the guessing game about who would get which job in his Administration. He shared his thoughts with only a tight circle of advisers, notably Hamilton Jordan and Vice President-elect Walter Mondale. Not even his closest aides could be certain which way Carter would go in the end. As one of the President-elect's confidants said, only half-jokingly: "Carter's doing just about everything. Maybe we should give back the $2 million transition money to the Government."

Carter is expected to fill several top-level posts this week, and to complete his Cabinetmaking by Christmas (with perhaps one or two exceptions). Meanwhile, the expectant capital hums with reports about the probable choices for high posts (see profiles). Some smug veterans of past Administrations speculated that Carter had already settled on his team and was prolonging the suspense to make news. This appeared not to be the case. At week's end he did not seem to have made up his mind about anyone other than the two Cabinet-level nominees already announced: Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State and Atlanta Banker Thomas Bertram Lance as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Through the week Carter kept up a hectic pace. He flew to Atlanta and Washington, conferred with scores of businessmen, Congressmen, northeastern Governors; the future Commander in Chief also called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and toured the national military command center. On appointments, however, he remained intentionally slow and methodical. While flying on a chartered Boeing 727 from Atlanta to Washington, he told TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud: "These may be the most important two months of my first term. I'm anxious to get people into their jobs so that they take responsibility from me that I don't need to have. Right now I'm the Secretary of the Treasury, I'm the Secretary of Defense, I'm the Secretary of Commerce, and all the paper work that would normally go to them comes to me.

I am very eager to get them in place so that I can be free to set overall policy."

By and large, the names being bandied about for Carters Cabinet pleased the President-elect's supporters. Inevitably, they displeased some, who feared that Carter was reneging on his campaign's populist themes and promises to bring new faces to the Government's highest levels. Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader, for one, announced that his honeymoon with Carter might come to a premature end because Carter was paying too much attention to "corporate interests" and not enough to consumer representatives.

Nader called the people being considered for Carter's Cabinet "conservatives with high integrity [who will] follow the wrong policies straight instead of crooked." Judging from the candidates the Georgian is considering for various posts, he warned, the Treasury Department may become "a plantation for bankers" while the Defense Department may be staffed by "traditional in-house advocates" and Commerce with "completely Main Line" people. Nader told TIME that he had to speak out now rather than later if he was to have any impact on Carter. In fact, Nader has not given up on the President-elect. Perhaps, he said, Carter is merely trying to reassure big businessmen, "keeping them calm until he gets into office."

Carter did not suffer the criticism in silence. "I don't feel constrained to sit down and consult with Ralph Nader when I appoint a Secretary of State," said he--although that is hardly the appointment Nader worried about. Carter added that he would consult Nader and others, as promised, on appointments in the consumer area.

Carter also had to contend with criticism from another front.

Feminists Gloria Steinem and Frances ("Sissy") Farenthold protested that he was not giving prominent consideration to activists like New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug. Steinem is pushing Bella for Secretary of Transportation. Gesturing to draw attention to her long flowing hair and trim black jeans, Steinem sighed: "I hope they don't pick people who look like us and think like them--that's the worst possible combination." She was particularly incensed by the possibility that Carter might reappoint Harvard's John Dunlop, who quit the Ford Administration as Labor Secretary last January. He has outraged feminists by opposing the use of federal contracts as levers to force private companies to hire and promote more women and blacks.

Later in the week, however, Steinem was cheered when she learned that Carter's "short lists" of Cabinet candidates included a number of women supported by feminists: Federal Judge Shirley Hufstedler of Los Angeles for Attorney General; Eleanor Holmes Norton, the black chairman of New York City's human rights commission; and California Labor Organizer Aileen Hernandez for Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare or head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Carter was finding secrecy increasingly hard to come by.

Late Sunday, for instance, he phoned the White House switchboard with the list of people he wanted to interview in Atlanta: "Tell them to call me." The indefatigable operator reached Washington Lawyer Joseph Califano, who was a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, in the midst of a Georgetown dinner party. The bash included, in addition to Fritz and Joan Mondale, Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham and a platoon of Washington journalists, among them Roger Mudd of CBS, Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times, and TIME'S Jerrold Schecter--hardly a crowd designed for secrecy. Nobody bought Califano's white lie that he had been talking to his wife, and when he got off the phone, one guest shouted: "He's just been offered the regional HUD job in Mississippi!" By next morning, the word was all over official Washington that Califano was a candidate for Secretary of Commerce, HEW or Housing and Urban Development.

He was only one of eight possible Cabinet-level nominees interviewed by Carter on Tuesday and Wednesday in the highceilinged, book-lined study of the red-brick Georgia Governor's mansion. At the beginning of each session, Carter was usually joined by Mondale, plus Advisers Hamilton Jordan and Charles Kirbo. But after 45 minutes or so, Carter and the person he was interviewing were left alone.

About 100 yards from the mansion, some 20 journalists stood in the rain and near-freezing temperatures, vainly trying to glean scraps of information. The first candidate to arrive was black Washington Lawyer Patricia Roberts Harris, whom Carter is believed to be considering for Secretary of HEW or HUD. When she realized that the shivering people at the iron gate were reporters, she exclaimed: "Oh, if I'd known it was you, I wouldn't have stopped!" Then she rolled up her window and sped off. When Mondale departed, a Secret Service bodyguard thumbed his nose at the reporters.

Among the others summoned by Carter were four possible candidates for Defense Secretary: Caltech President Harold Brown, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Bendix Corp. Chairman Michael Blumenthal and Washington Lawyer Paul Warnke. Carter also interviewed Columbia Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who may become his national security adviser; Washington State Representative Brock Adams, a possible Transportation Secretary; former IBM Corp. Vice President Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, a possible Commerce, HUD or HEW Secretary; and black Georgia Representative Andrew Young, who insists that he wants to stay in Congress.

When Carter left the mansion, he summed up the interviews as involving "good people, good advice, good folks." Later, en route to Washington, he was a bit more forthcoming. For one thing, he indicated that he has given up trying to persuade Young to join the Administration. Said Carter: "It's a shame. He's the best elected official I've ever met." Carter also said that his Secretary of Agriculture would "likely" come from the Midwest and his Secretary of the Interior from the West. This increased speculation that Minnesota Representative Bob Bergland would head Agriculture and Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus, Interior.

In Washington, Carter continued his interviewing at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

He talked with black Texas Representative Barbara Jordan, a long-shot possibility for Ambassador to the United Nations or Attorney General, and the Brookings Institution's Charles Schultze, who was Lyndon Johnson's Budget Director and is a candidate for Treasury Secretary or some other high post.

In addition to narrowing his choices for top appointments.

Carter spent much of his three days in Washington in policy sessions. One was with 15 prominent businessmen, including Coca-Cola Co. Chairman J. Paul Austin and Xerox Corp. Chairman C. Peter McColough. who are possible appointees to high posts in the Administration. The businessmen urged that the economy be stimulated by means of a tax cut (see ECONOMY AND BUSINESS). Carter advisers feared that a permanent instead of a temporary cut would lead to problems in paying for new programs like national health insurance and making good on Carter's campaign pledge to balance the budget by the end of 1980.

Nor was that the only pledge that Carter might be hard put to fulfill. In November, Carter promised to reduce the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points, indicating a jobless rate of about 6.4% by the end of next year. Last week, however, OMB Director-designate Lance said the goal would be "very, very difficult" to meet because the unemployment rate has risen to 8.1%. Some analysts are now talking of a 7.1% jobless rate by the end of 1977, but Carter later said he was sticking to his original promise. Concerning another pledge, Carter has not decided whether to broaden the blanket pardon that he promised to give during his first week in office to the 4,500 draft evaders of the Viet Nam War era. Carter is considering also pardoning 5,000 deserters and 85,000 former servicemen who went AWOL during the same period.

Decisions on those matters would come later. For now, Cabinetmaking has top priority, and when Carter flew back to Plains at week's end, he aimed to rest and to think some more about the jobs he hopes to fill in the weeks ahead.

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