No ‘Bombshells’ Expected as Documents Become Public : Carter Papers Reveal Passion for Detail

Six years after President Jimmy Carter left office, the first 6 million pages of his White House papers were made available to the public Wednesday, but archivists here warned against expecting any “bombshells” in the documents.

From a handwritten note to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance asking about the status of Soviet dissidents to a series of drafts in preparation for his first fireside chat where Carter penciled in his own calculations, the papers portray a President who passionately tried to keep up with the details of governance but often appeared to be a prisoner of events rather than a master of them.

“It was an era of wrenching, traumatic events, and I think Carter was always being forced to chase after them instead of setting his own agenda,” said Bob McMath, a history professor at Georgia Tech. “So much of the story of the Carter presidency is of a man who tried to do everything, but never really reached a culmination with any of them.”

Little Held Back

This initial release covers about one-fifth of the more than 27 million pages of White House documents amassed during Carter’s four-year tenure. The papers, largely covering domestic issues, are being opened up with record speed. Much of the foreign policy material on such matters as the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt and the year-long Iranian hostage that consumed the final year of Carter’s presidency remain classified or will be unavailable for years. But Carter is holding back very little of his personal papers from research scholars.

“This is a very private man opening up to the public,” said Don Schewe, director of the Jimmy Carter Library. “We have closed very little material. Probably 99.9% of what we have is going to be eventually available.”

Archivists who have been sifting through the material for five years say the White House papers show few contradictions between Carter’s public pose and his private actions. And they demonstrate that Carter engaged in remarkably little subterfuge.

“So far we haven’t discovered many things we wanted to conceal,” Carter said at a brief ceremony Tuesday night opening the library. “I think this will give people access to the inner workings of our government that is indeed unprecedented.”

‘Amazing Record of Openness’

And Schewe, who heads a staff of 26 responsible for aiding researchers in chronicling Carter’s presidency, commented: “If there are any bombshells, they slipped past us unnoticed. It’s an amazing record of openness and nonduplicity.”

Carter’s total 27-million page collection would fill a row of five-drawer filing cabinets 2 1/2 miles long. Among the papers released Wednesday, researchers will find documents ranging from the most trivial to issues of significant historic importance.

One handwritten note, dated Feb. 7, 1977, from Carter to Secretary of State Vance demonstrated his early concern about human rights.

“To Cy--Any Soviet action on the dissident list you gave (Soviet Ambassador Anatoly) Dobrynin? J” And Carter added a postscript that already showed his obsession with the minutiae of office: “To what degree are we not complying with Helsinki basket III?”

Long Briefing Papers

Much of the file is filled with documents prepared by White House staff members, letters and memos from other top officials and long briefing papers Carter was given in preparation for meetings and policy decisions.

Early in his term, a memo from media adviser Jerry Rafshoon conveyed the early optimism of Carter’s now-dimly remembered initial months: “Right now we are basking in the afterglow of wonderful media saturation,” Rafshoon wrote. “The inaugural walk . . . the speech . . . the gala (especially the gala) . . . the pardon . . . the thermostats. Your ratings could not be any higher than right now.”

But Carter was soon bogged down in bureaucratic reorganization to create the Energy and Education departments and was overcome by events, including those beyond any President’s control, from the breakdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to the Mt. St. Helens explosion. His daily log shows that Carter went jogging for 24 minutes just before flying by helicopter over Mt. St. Helens and that he attended a violin recital by his daughter, Amy, after visiting Three Mile Island.

Looming ominously over the Carter years was the escalation of inflation, which all his programs and reshufflings proved powerless to prevent until after he left office, when the tight money policy followed by the Federal Reserve chairman he appointed in 1979, Paul A. Volcker, finally helped bring the price spiral to a halt.

Fruitless Search

A long letter from Carter to an ordinary citizen shows the President warning of the difficulty of bringing inflation under control, while memos from aides such as chief economic adviser Charles Schultze and domestic policy chief Stuart Eizenstadt seized hopefully on each downtick in the monthly inflation figures.

By 1980, however, his staff was searching fruitlessly for a way for Carter to appear in control, proposing the “unusual act” of a series of talks on inflation that “would win the President credit for using the ‘bully pulpit’ to educate the electorate.”

But perhaps most revealing of all is the evidence from Carter’s personal files that he often failed to make contact with outsiders. When top officials or important lawmakers telephoned or even when Carter tried to reach someone else, for page after page the log notes: “The call was not completed.”