America Gets On the Party Line

The questions kept coming through the long Saturday afternoon, cogent and corny, pungent and piquant. Some dealt with matters as personal as the cost of spectacles, a burial site, a veteran's benefits denied; others with issues of national debate and world policy.

Joseph Willman of Sterling Heights, Mich., wanted to know what the President would do if Uganda's Idi Amin detained Americans. (Answer: Keep cool.) Pete Belloni of Denver asked if there would soon be a 25-c--a-gal. tax on gasoline. (No.) Mark Fendrick of Brooklyn wondered if his baseball team, the Yankees, would be allowed to play an exhibition game in Communist Cuba. (Perhaps.) Phyllis Dupere of Rehoboth, Mass., asked if Jimmy Carter would be willing to sign on for a space-shuttle mission. (He's "probably too old to do that," but Amy might some day.)

So went the nation's first dial-a-President radio program, for which more than 9 million calls were attempted as Americans whirled their fingers numb in the hope of asking Jimmy Carter what he was going to do--or for a chance to tell him what he ought to be doing.

The setting was the Oval Office, where Carter sat in a pale orange wingback chair, facing two old-fashioned stand-up microphones and a television screen showing the names of his invisible inquisitors. Behind him, the presidential desk was bare, save for a few mementos and Harry Truman's THE BUCK STOPS HERE plaque.

As the calls, 42 of which reached the Oval Office, poured in from around the country, the President sipped tea and took notes. "This is a learning process rather than a teaching process," he had said when asked about the note pad. Opposite him in a matching pale orange chair was CBS Anchorman Walter Cronkite, an avuncular master of ceremonies who was hardly needed, so smoothly and knowledgeably did the President field the questions and set the gentle tone that graced the day. Even the high hard pitches drew nothing from the President but the desire to inform. Why are Son Chip and his family living on the taxpayers' money in the White House? "All personal expenses are paid for out of my own pocket," said the President, disclaiming any "mooching off the American taxpayers." How come married couples pay higher tax rates than singles? What about the Ottawa Indians' land-claim payments, a Kentuckian asked.

On several occasions, Carter showed a disarming willingness to use an unassailable answer: "I don't know." He always promised to find out and get back to the caller. "I liked it," the President observed at the end of the grilling. "The questions that came in from people all over the country are the kind that you would never get in press conferences. The news people would never raise them, like the Ottawa Indian question."

The answers did not contain any headline-caliber disclosures about new policy initiatives. The closest Carter came was the mention that he was thinking about sailing on an atomic submarine with Admiral Hyman Rickover in a few weeks, and that Idi Amin "was constantly giving me assurance, through cables, that the Americans would not be hurt." Nor did Carter scale any Everests of inspired rhetoric, but there was lots of sweet reason for even the testiest of callers. When an indignant Ronald Fouse of Centerville, Ga., complained that Carter planned to "pardon junkies and deserters" in the armed forces, Carter quipped, "I thought I might get a friendlier question from Georgia."

The President impressed some of his colleagues in the radio call-in business. "A sensational job, honest and forthright," said New York's irreverent Don Imus of WNBC. But what he needs to do, suggested Imus, is change the name from Ask President Carter to "something more commercial, like James Earl the Pearl." Said Bill Ballance of Los Angeles' KABC: "Honesty throbbed in his voice, and there was none of his icy piety. He came through like a champion." Most of the President's interlocutors seemed similarly pleased. Though Gerald Anderson of Denver was not mollified when Carter disavowed responsibility for the recent congressional pay raise ("I should have asked him didn't he have the power to stop it," Anderson said later), Walter Lipman of Spring Valley, N.Y., accepted Carter's assertion that drug-law enforcement was not a waste of taxpayers' money. Said Lipman: "His answer was quite good and fair."

That Carter should have fared so well is no real surprise. He is not a stranger to the opportunities and perils of the phone-in circuit. He used that forum dozens of times as Georgia Governor, and did well with it last year on the campaign trail. Nor are CBS and Ma Bell neophytes at call-in shows. CBS News President Richard S. Salant proposed Ask President Carter in a telegram to the President in January, and Carter aides liked the idea. The network picked up the show's roughly $60,000 cost (not counting Cronkite's estimated $1,400-a-day salary, more than double Carter's).

The telephone company activated a special 900 area code for the toll-free calls and supervised the resulting traffic from the firm's futuristic new Long Lines headquarters in Bedminster, NJ. Calls from the nation's 16,000 exchanges were funneled electronically through ten regional switching centers and into room 431 of the Executive Office Building, where 32 CBS staffers checked the identities of successful callers and transferred them across the way to the White House. There was a 6 1/2-sec. taped delay to catch any obscenities before they could go out over the more than 260 radio stations that carried the program (it was also filmed for television), and CBS News Vice President Emerson Stone kept his finger poised over the black and silver wipe-out button. He never had to use it.

The afternoon was not totally without mishap. Carter had to ask listeners to be certain they were dialing the 900 area code, because one Otto Flaig of Milwaukee had complained about receiving an avalanche of misdialed calls. "His answers were probably better than mine," said Carter. And the Rev. James Baker, 56, of Ridgeland, S.C., suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after talking to Carter about consumer protection.

In sum, Ask President Carter was a public relations triumph in Carter's campaign to bring the presidency to the people. As John Melfi of Johnson City, N.Y., put it shortly after Carter politely blunted Melfi's criticism of U.S. foreign aid spending: "It seemed like I was talking to somebody next door. He is so down to earth."

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