Carter vs. Corporations

Suspicions of anything big lead to a lot of lip shooting

It started with some intoxicating cracks about "three-martini lunches" and grew into bigger shots at "excessive profits," "massive rip-offs" and "guideline violations." Jimmy Carter's relations with Big Business, never warm or close, have become even cooler and more distant as the President and his lieutenants have poured out inflammatory business-bashing rhetoric. The assaults are particularly troubling because they come at a time when the nation can ill afford more divisiveness. "Every big businessman is wondering when it will be his turn," says Forrest Rettgers, chief lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers. "Carter is shooting at oil now, but who will be next?"

White House quarrels with business have centered on three main issues:

> Oil. Starting two years ago, Carter's charges of "kickbacks" and "rip-offs of the American people" spread alarm far beyond the targeted oil companies. Says Irving Shapiro, chairman of Du Pont: "I regret that the President seems to have been taken in by the argument that the oil industry should be made a public villain. I have to speculate that [Media Adviser] Gerald Rafshoon told him there are votes in doing it."

> Profits. In March, Alfred Kahn, the Administration's chief inflation fighter, and White House Aide Hamilton Jordan hit sensitive nerves in boardrooms by assailing "excessive" profits. Says Bell & Howell Chairman Donald Frey: "On one hand, the President urges business to invest to create jobs and combat inflation, and on the other, he attacks profits. He knows that most profits go into investment and not to fat cats."

> Guidelines. Executives have been warily watching the Administration carry on a virtual witch hunt to find and name violators of the anti-inflation price guidelines. Staff members of the Council on Wage and Price Stability have said for weeks that they have been under orders to find someone--anyone--who is breaking the guidelines. Notes Jack Carlson, chief economist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: "The wage and price control program has been a failure, and they're looking for someone to blame."

Although Carter himself is an affluent entrepreneur (his peanut business gave him a personal net worth of $800,000 in 1977), he is uneasy with big corporate executives. He rarely meets with them, and when he does, the mood is often strained. "The President," explains one Cabinet officer, "doesn't like anything big. He is not comfortable with Big Labor, Big Business or the Big Press."

One of the most recent meetings between the President and a group of corporate chiefs was in March, and it went poorly. General Electric Chairman Reginald Jones, General Motors Chairman Thomas Murphy and Du Pont's Shapiro, among others, were brought to the White House with what they thought was a promise of a long session with Carter to get at basic issues. At the last minute, the ground rules were changed, and all the business leaders got was a 15-min. "photo opportunity" for the TV cameras and a brief lecture from the President on the need to support the guidelines and restrain profits.

Since Bert Lance left, the White House has suffered by not having any top ambassador to business. Robert Strauss got close to the job for a while, but then was sidetracked into foreign trade and Middle East policy. Businessmen consider Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal to be too wounded by sniping from the White House's Georgia Mafia to be an effective envoy. Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps is the Cabinet's best bridge between the White House and business, but, says Jack Carlson, "she heads a weak Cabinet department and does not have the clout."

Top managers commonly charge that middle-level White House staffers responsible for business relations do sloppy, second-rate work. Big Business's formal contact at the White House is Stephen Selig, 36, whose main credentials seem to be that he plays tennis with Presidential Adviser Jordan and that his father, a wealthy Atlanta real estate developer, was a longtime supporter of Carter's. Corporate leaders have had a hard time taking him seriously since his first meeting with them, when Selig turned up at an exclusive Washington club wearing a leisure suit and no tie.

Selig admits that the Administration's relations with business got off to a bad start, but insists that they have become better.

On the brighter side, businessmen note that they have fairly easy access to Carter's aides, if not the President himself. For example, after they made clear their stern opposition to Senator Edward Kennedy's bill that would ban conglomerate mergers, they were gratified that the President pointedly did not endorse it. In addition, business people are pleased that Anne Wexler, an assistant to the President, seems to be assuming more responsibility for corporate relations, and they are taking many of their problems to her. Wexler says that business, like all lobbying groups, will never get all that it wants, and she contends that executives have been "a little supersensitive" about Carter's "rip-off' charges.

The President, she explains with unintended irony, "was trying to hammer a point home. It wasn't anything personal, as they say in The Godfather."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.