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Jimmy Carter: Advisers
Bound by campaign promises and his own ideology, Carter made a concerted effort to assign minorities and women to his cabinet. Additionally, Carter filled a substantial fraction of the domestic positions friends that later became known by some as the "Georgia Mafia." But not only did the president make some savvy political appointments and surround himself with trusted advisors from his days in Georgia, he was also aware of his greatest weakness: foreign policy. As a governor, Carter obviously had not had the opportunity to gain any experience in one of the most crucial areas that a chief executive must deal with. As such, Carter chose his top foreign policy advisors wisely. His most important appointments were Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Vance, among the first selection of Carter's to be announced, was the deputy secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson. Although Vance was eminently qualified for the position, conflict arose because Vance found his advice taking a backseat to that of other cabinet members and the president's own inclinations. Although Carter admitted his ignorance about many foreign policy issues, he was still determined to take charge of the nation's foreign policy. Vance's best hope in influencing the president's decisions, therefore, would be to control the information and advice the president received about the state of the world. This job, however, was given to Brzezinski. Indeed, Carter's first scheduled meeting each day was with the national security advisor. From the beginning, Vance felt he was sidelined in the decision making process. Although Vance's exclusion was a point of friction between the two men, Carter's exlusion of the secretary had nothing to do with Vance. Carter had held a deep-seated suspicion of the State Department for some years. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Carter viewed Henry Kissinger's and the State Department's maneuvers as foolish and arrogant. The president was convinced that the State Department has almost intrinsically against his position of human rights first. After Carter became president, he projected these feelings in large part on Vance. As a result, the Secretary of State was relegated to being a diplomat and rarely had a significant effect on foreign policy. In fact, Vance once threatened to resign is he did not become "more than a figurehead." Carter and Vance came into conflict most often when confronted with the Middle East, which is ironic considering Carter's primary reason for selecting Vance in the first place was because the former deputy secretary of defense firmly believed that peace in the Middle East was possible. Although the two collided on other issues, the watershed event was the president's decision to attempt to free American hostages in Iran using military force. When Carter first made the decision that the hostages must be brought home in April of 1980, Vance made it clear that he was opposed to any attempts to rescue the hostages because of the danger presented to those Americans inside the embassy. Carter overrode Vance's objections, however, and proceeded with a plan to free the hostages. Just eleven days after the decision was reached to attempt a rescue mission, Vance resigned in protest. The fact that the rescue failed abysmally and cost the lives of several US service men probably did little to raise Vance's spirits. Brzezinski, on the other hand, was brought specifically to be an idea man, rather than a negotiator. Carter believed that Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia University and former director of the Trilateral Commission, could keep him appraised of international affairs and help him to grasp the interrelationships of the nations of the world. While Vance himself was actually fairly compatible with Carter on many key foreign policy issues, Brzezinski was virtually Carter's opposite. Indeed, Brzezinski once commented that the only difference between himself and Kissinger, the man whose views Carter so stridently opposed, was that one was a product of Harvard and the other Yale. The national security advisor feared that the rest of world (namely the Soviet Union) saw American power as retreating after the withdraw from Vietnam. To combat this, Brezinski felt that US military presence abroad should be increased while maintaining a hard-line foreign policy towards the Soviets that Brezinski believed could result in a collapse of the Russian infrastructure during Carter's presidency. Indeed, Brezinski was of the opinion that Carter's main focus, human rights, was counter-productive as it would come across to the Soviets as "unenforceable nonsense." Ultimately, Carter felt that the differing views of the direction US foreign policy should take held by Vance and Brezinski were productive, as long as the debates didn't interfere with the human rights agenda. Actually, the president found it difficult to argue with either individual. Carter admired Vance for his political skills and Brezinski for his wealth of ideas. And since Carter used the two men for different purposes, he never felt the desire to reconcile their views.
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