A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (25 page)

After having to address several natural disasters, I realized that there were a multitude of federal agencies responsible for dealing with the emergencies in local communities, and no effective way to coordinate their efforts. In June 1978 I sent a reorganization plan to Congress to bring together the key groups that provided weather information, federal housing assistance, crime control, insurance, and many other federal, state, and local services. About a year later this process was completed by my Executive Order, with a guarantee from me that the new Federal Emergency Management Agency would have a director who was competent and
experienced, and would have complete control over the disaster area, and that the agency would be adequately funded. The new agency would also have the authority to coordinate efforts of our military services, including National Guard units if necessary. Except for a failure following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 along the Gulf Coast, when none of these guarantees were honored, FEMA has performed superbly as envisioned.

S
ome of the major issues I had to address while in the White House have continued to confront my successors, because I failed in my efforts to resolve them, because later presidents had different priorities or yielded to political pressures that I resisted, or because circumstances have changed with the passage of time.

The key issue of illicit drugs is still hotly debated. During the first year and a half of my administration, Dr. Peter Bourne served as my White House adviser on health issues and director of the Office of Drug Abuse Policy. I considered him my drug czar, after he had filled a similar position for me in Georgia, and he helped me make my first and most definitive analysis of the complicated subject. One option was and is to reduce drug supply at the source with action by military forces and by spraying coca or marijuana plants or poppies with herbicide, combined with imprisonment of those who possess or use narcotics. Another choice is to offer alternative farming income to producers of coca and poppies, emphasize the dangers of drug use, and provide treatment for drug users who become addicted. Peter and I were strong supporters of the latter approach, and in August 1977 I called for decriminalization (not legalization) of marijuana and
treatment options for addicts as an alternative to prison. My statement was well received, but my successors have taken the opposite approach. Our government has spent many billions of dollars since then in a counterproductive effort to reduce international trade in narcotics. Military action against producers and aerial poisoning of crops have often resulted in drug wars, enhanced production of narcotics, and increased demand for them. Punishment of drug users is emphasized, instead of treatment for addicts. Strong moves have evolved in Europe and Latin America to correct this mistake, but the U.S. government is a major obstacle to reform.

A sad corollary has been that the number of incarcerated people in our country has skyrocketed. The proportion of imprisoned Americans was about the same in 1980 as in 1940 (about one in one thousand), but since then the number has increased more than sixfold. Since the Anti–Drug Abuse Act was passed in 1986, our penal population has increased from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, and in just five years the imprisonment of African-American women in state prisons for drug offenses increased by 828 percent! Combining drug policy with a much more punitive attitude toward law violators, America now has a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country, with only feeble efforts being made to concentrate on preparing inmates for successful return to a normal role in society. There are more than 3,200 Americans imprisoned for life who have never committed any crime of violence.

As president I was concerned about how fragmented the various intelligence agencies were. We could count at least nine, and it seemed that there was very little communication or coordination among them or across the inherent barriers between the departments of State, Defense, and Commerce, and the CIA. I wanted to bring in the most forceful and competent leader I could find and get him and the Congress to cooperate on putting all the agencies under one coordinator. I chose Admiral Stansfield Turner, who was my most outstanding classmate at the Naval Academy. He had
been a good athlete, the top commander of the brigade of midshipmen, and later a Rhodes Scholar, captain of a cruiser, and president of the Naval War College. I consulted with Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, and he regretted losing Stan from the top military leadership but agreed that he would be an outstanding CIA director.

When I made one of my visits to CIA headquarters, I asked the heads of all other existing intelligence agencies to attend the meeting. The director of intelligence in the Defense Department said that they welcomed Stan as their “titular” head, and I replied that he would have
full
authority over all the agencies and would report directly to me. As predicted, we had tremendous opposition from the agencies concerned and especially from congressional committees that had “claimed” responsibility for the various agencies, but we accomplished our consolidation objective. Stan joined National Security Adviser Zbig Brzezinski and Fritz Mondale regularly in our high-level discussions.

Although sometimes neglectful of diplomatic niceties, Stan accomplished the goals I set for him with skill and political courage. Unfortunately, the intelligence agencies again have become much more fragmented, isolated, and competitive with each other and have resisted every effort for streamlining and coordination. According to an exhaustive
Washington Post
investigation published in 2010, there are more than three thousand government organizations and private companies in about ten thousand locations working on homeland security and intelligence, with an estimated 854,000 people holding top secret clearance! And this largely uncoordinated array is still growing.

Another challenge was to balance the need for intelligence about foreign threats to our security and the Fourth Amendment guarantees of the privacy of American citizens. I was concerned before becoming president by the revelations of the Frank Church Senate committee in 1975 and 1976 that President Richard Nixon and other top government officials were spying illegally on Americans and that the CIA had been involved in plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

During my presidential campaign, I had promised to bring an end to the abuse of citizen privacy in the name of national security. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was proposed with great fanfare on May 18, 1977. We supported it through debates in Congress for a year and a half, and I signed it into law on October 25, 1978. Its main purpose was to protect the privacy of American citizens, requiring probable cause that a target was engaged in spying or other clandestine activities, to be determined by a specially constituted court composed of seven federal district judges, each from a different circuit and selected by the chief justice.

This strict limit on privacy violation remained in force until President George W. Bush began violating and then advocating amending the law to permit increasingly intrusive wiretapping with minimal judicial oversight. In effect, it is now permissible to collect information about every phone call made, every letter posted, and every e-mail exchanged between American citizens. The law restricts the disclosure of the content of some of these exchanges unless the FISA court approves, but news reports reveal that during the past ten years these judges rarely if ever decline a request submitted by the intelligence agencies. The senior judge can issue approvals or directives without informing the other ten judges.

A
New York Times
article by Eric Lichtblau on July 6, 2013, reports: “The court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions. The eleven-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court.”

I doubt that even the few remaining legal restraints are always honored. I assume that all my communications are monitored by government agencies. When I want to send a private message, perhaps to foreign leaders through their embassies in Washington, I use a personal envoy or type a letter and send it through the U.S. Postal Service. I learned recently
that postal clerks make photographs of envelopes and send them to the National Security Agency. There has been a dramatic and largely unnecessary intrusion into personal privacy, more than in Western European countries. Congressional oversight is minimal, with any member having access to the secret legislation being sworn never to reveal it or discuss it with news media or other members. This is just one of many violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions that have occurred since the tragic 9/11 attack of 2001. Others have included lifetime incarceration without trial; torture at Guantánamo, in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, or in “dark sites” in foreign countries; and assassination by drone attacks, even of American citizens.

Surprising to me, it was people with whom I felt most friendly and whom I attempted to help who caused the most trouble, no matter what we accomplished. I had more women in my cabinet and at other high levels than any predecessor, and appointed more female federal judges than all previous presidents combined. I approved an extension of time for consideration of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and Rosalynn and I made hundreds of phone calls to doubtful state legislators to support the ERA. It had one simple provision: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” It was defeated by opposition from women, led by Phyllis Schlafly, who maintained that creating equality for women would restrict the laws that protected them. She began her many speeches by thanking her husband for giving her permission to speak. Despite our best efforts, leaders of women’s organizations were the most demanding and unappreciative. In 1979 the president of the National Organization for Women threatened to chain herself to the fence around the White House. I believe the issue was my disagreement about abortion rights.

Fritz Mondale and I also did everything possible to improve the status of working people, but union leaders were never satisfied. There was a
serious nationwide coal strike early in my term, and I resolved it by taking a balanced approach rather than endorsing all the coal workers’ demands. These are two of many diary entries on other labor disputes:

“4/77 Had a luncheon with labor leaders. I thought they were excessively rude and abusive. . . . I’m not sure that I’ll meet with any more of them in a group like this. Might let Fritz handle it.”

“4/78 I met later with George Meany and gave him hell because in almost every instance when we’ve supported the AFL-CIO agenda successfully, he’s taken all the credit for success. He spends half his time kicking me and the Democratic Congress in the teeth, and repeatedly comes back for help on additional programs.”

We had a harmonious relationship after Lane Kirkland became president of the AFL-CIO, and I had overwhelming endorsements from labor unions in my 1980 campaign. I understand better now that the leaders of almost all organizations are expected to pocket what they have achieved, take as much credit as possible for progress, and then demand everything left on their always-expanding agendas.

There has been a dramatic change since I left office in the political influence of special interest groups, primarily because of the massive infusion of money into political campaigns. The tragic ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
in 2010 removed restrictions on campaign contributions by corporations, labor unions, and other associations. When I ran for president against Gerald Ford in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, we financed our general election campaigns from public funds derived from individual taxpayers who allotted one dollar each from their income tax payments—without any private contributions. The amount spent was about $26 million.

Having abandoned public financing, in 2012 each of the major candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, spent more than $1 billion. Much of the funding came from super-PACs that enjoyed their new privileges under the
Citizens United
ruling. United Press International reported in January 2015 that the Koch brothers and their associates will contribute $889 million to Republican presidential hopefuls and other candidates who share their conservative-libertarian views. This amount is almost as
much as the entire budget of either major political party, and may increase before election time. Democratic candidates will attempt to match these funds.

It is not yet possible to assess the influence that this “legal bribery” has as government officials make decisions about taxation, government regulation, and other privileges and restraints.

Many politically moderate Christians, including me, consider ourselves to be evangelicals, but the term has become increasingly equated with the religious right or the Moral Majority. Neither Jerry Ford nor I appealed directly to religious groups during the 1976 campaign, except that I continued my appearances at a number of African-American churches. It was estimated that Ford received about 55 percent of the votes from “evangelical” Christians, but we attributed this to his being better known than I among religious leaders.