Adversary Relationship

Carter's stand-in flops as a stand-up comic

The $35 prix fixe seemed a bit steep, but the menu sounded impressive enough--breast of capon cordon bleu, pommes rissolees, bombe glacee--and the comic booked for the evening was strictly top banane: Jimmy Carter. For the first time in the 64 years that the White House Correspondents' Association has been inviting Presidents to its annual all-in-fun dinner, however, the incumbent did not show or send his wife or his Vice President to fill in.

Much of the White House press corps has grown increasingly unimpressed with Carter's abilities. But his studied absence was regarded as something less than a diplomatic bombe. Said the Chicago Tribune's Aldo Beckman, president of the Correspondents' Association: "It is a terrible mistake for us to take ourselves so seriously that we think that the President of the U.S. has to come to our dinner."

Carter missed the event, Press Secretary Jody Powell was quoted as saying by an officer of the 700-member group, because he "is near the point of exhaustion, he's very tired." The President and Mrs. Carter chose instead to spend the weekend at Camp David. Vice President Walter Mondale was on an eleven-day trip to five foreign countries. One Carter associate who did attend, Gerald Rafshoon, said raffishly: "Why, I just don't understand why the President wouldn't want to be in the sun, resting, playing tennis and relaxing when he could be here."

Carter was represented on the Washington Hilton podium by Powell, who speaks for the President daily to much the same audience for considerably less than $35 a head. (Surely a fresher face was in order, some correspondents may have felt.) In his monologue, drafted by Presidential Gagsmith Jerry Doolittle, Powell quickly took the offensive. "President Carter wanted very much to be here tonight," he began. "After all, he seldom has the occasion to dine with an institution held in lower esteem than ..." He did not finish the sentence, but went on: "He, of course, wanted me to express his regrets.

Unfortunately, time does not permit me to say all the things that are regrettable about the White House correspondents."

Powell should have quit while he was behind. He tried a tasteless crack about a William Safire column "saying that Bob Strauss has been inflation czar for three days and nothing was any cheaper. Bob said that wasn't true," reported Powell, who went on to quote Strauss as asking: "What about the Pulitzer Prize?" (Safire had just won one.) "I like that, Jody," one listener shot back, and Powell riposted bitterly: "Well, then, that's the first thing this Administration has done that you've liked." Powell also mock apologized for attacking what he called "the imperial press," but said it so sarcastically that the audience grew almost palpably uncomfortable. When he said, "In conclusion," the group burst into derisive applause.

Like others present, Columnist Mary McGrory found Powell's performance "excessive." Said she: "Most of the people were embarrassed and looking at the floor. There isn't any hatred toward this Administration, but a feeling of disappointment." Indeed, Carter's absence may not have troubled his assembled Boswells much, but the performance of his stand-in made a few correspondents wonder if the siege mentality in the White House might be even more pronounced than they thought.

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