Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency

New York: Putnam, 1982. First? Edition. First? Printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. 24 cm, 431 pages, illustrations, index, DJ worn, soiled, and edge tears/chips. Includes Introduction, as well as a chronological narrative that covers the final year of the Carter Administration. Contains 15 black and white photographs between pages 160 and 161. Index. William Hamilton McWhorter Jordan (September 21, 1944 - May 20, 2008) was an American politician who served as Chief of Staff to President of the United States Jimmy Carter. In 1970, at the age of 26, Jordan ran Jimmy Carter's successful gubernatorial campaign, which included a Democratic primary election fight against former Governor Carl Sanders and a less eventful general election against the Republican Hal Suit. While serving as Governor Carter's executive assistant, Jordan wrote a lengthy memorandum detailing a strategy for winning the 1976 Democratic Primary. Years later, Jordan's memo served as the "game plan" for Carter's 1976 presidential bid. Jordan was a key advisor and strategist for Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign and during Carter's administration, serving as White House Chief of Staff in 1979-1980 (Carter, who took office in 1977, had previously not seen the need formally to appoint an aide to such a post). Jordan played a powerful role in the formulation of election strategies and government policies. In 1976 Jordan's youth and casual style gave him a media reputation as a fun-loving, partying, unsophisticated "good ole boy." This turned into a problem during the last year of the Carter administration, when Jordan became a lightning rod for critics of the president across the political spectrum. The author was White House chief of staff under Jimmy Carter. The author, as staff chief to President Carter, was "point man" (his phrase) for secret negotiations with the Shah of Iran and with Iranian contacts over the American hostages. This account is valuable not so much for precise events recounted as for what it reveals of the frustrations endured and the incapacity displayed by the Administration in dealing with an intractable situation. No one, the author least of all, emerges in a favorable light in this candid book. Derived from a Kirkus review: The story of the secret negotiations for the hostages' release, which occupies three-fourths of the book, is consistent with Pierre Salinger's earlier account. The hostage crisis itself--insistent, intractable--looks not-so-different from the inside as from the outside. Yet this minutely detailed reconstruction of sleepless nights and clutching-at-straws, of Presidential uncertainty and staff freewheeling, is as remarkable a chronicle as any to come out of those much-exposed precincts. By his accounting, it was Jordan, Carter's "political hack" and controversial chief of staff, who asked Panama's president Torrijos, a buddy from the Canal negotiations, to take in the Shah when no one else would have him; who told the Shah just that, to prevail upon him to go; who tried and failed to persuade medical-lion Michael DeBakey to urge the Shah to stay in Panama for surgery, lest the delicate negotiations break down; and who then--"my campaign against the Shah's coming [back] to the States"--reconciled Carter to the Shah's going, at Sadat's invitation, to Egypt. But first Carter would have to talk to Anwar--who assured him. (It was also Jordan, as you may have read, who had the Shah's plane stopped in the Azores--a usurpation of authority which, we're blandly told, caused Carter to become "livid.") This is self-flagellation--Jordan was "largely responsible" for the quagmire "Rose Garden strategy," "point man" for the futile negotiations, "a strong advocate" of the disastrous rescue mission--but it is also self-exoneration. Jordan speaks of himself only as innocent of all those outrageous charges and, somehow, a "political liability." As for Carter, he's given to exaggeration, like a small-town boy--hence the "meanness" rap. And nobody, it would seem, minded losing the election--about which, as it happens, Jordan has relatively little to say beyond disclosing the Kennedy demand for financial aid. But there is so much going on most of the time--such a sense of world politics on a tempo--that other lacks just don't matter.