JIMMY CARTER JIMMY CARTERA FUNNY STORY or HOW PRESIDENTS GET HOODWINKED BY THEIR VERY OWN STAFF!
THIS IS A TRUE STORY AND I SWEAR TO IT. I AM NOT ABOUT TO IDENTIFY THE PERSON INVOLVED IN THIS STORY BUT ASSURE YOU THAT I AM AS INTIMATE WITH THAT PERSON AS ANYONE CAN BE AND WHAT I AM ABOUT TO TELL YOU IS ABSOLUTELY AND COMPLETELY TRUE.
IT MAKES YOU LAUGH EXCEPT WHEN YOU WANT TO CRY BECAUSE IT COMPLETELY AND HONESTLY PORTRAYS HOW PRESIDENT'S ARE TOO FREQUENTLY THE MOST MISINFORMED MEN IN THE U.S.A.!
The person I am talking about was an Aide in the White House during the tenure of Jimmy Carter. His boss was assigned the responsibility of digesting and encapsulating what the media wrote and said about Jimmy Carter, as President.
Every day, early in the morning, the President had this digest put on his desk and it was the first thing the President read in the morning. It took precedence over all other matters except for pressing emergencies and it never but never went unread!The most important White House member (he was equal to cabinet rank) who had been assigned the task by the President soon found that he had far more important things to do than read newspapers and watch television and he tired of his task.
This cabinet officer decided to assign the entire task to someone else and he finally made a decision regarding whom was going to do the summary. He instructed the White House aide on the task and monitored the summary for several weeks until he became satisfied that it was being done properly.
He notified the White House aide that he did not have to submit it for approval before it went to the President. The White House aide was, therefore, instructed to write up the summary and put it directly on the desk of the President and that was that. The White House aide did not give copies to anyone and when he did they ignored it.
What the cabinet officer did not know was that the White House aide who was now in charge of writing the news summary detested
the President and had no respect for him at all! He thought the President was the worst possible political hack and could not understand how he got elected President. He decided that he was going to fix the President of the United States.
Slowly but surely, day after day and over a period of several months he began to alter the order of the news summary. In order to disguise what he was doing he also changed the format of the summary including the type faces. He had even gotten to the point where he would personally present the news summary to the President. In fact the President called the Aide by his first name!
What he was doing was putting all the bad news up front in the summary and relegating all the good news to the last pages of the summary.
He was continuously on the lookout for bad news and when he summarized that kind of news it would always take more space than normal. After awhile the news summary was nothing except a summary of the bad news abut the President and what favorable news there might be was relegated to the last page in the summary. A typical summary ran to about 20 normal sized pages and there might be nineteen page of unfavorable news and one page of favorable news.
After months of this type of summarizing the President decided he did not need the summary anymore and it was abandoned as a formal document.
These are the backgrounds of prominent people I have known. The backgrounds may be incomplete or they may be wrong. I am working from memory and the backgrounds I give you are from my personal (not book) knowledge. This is their backgrounds as I knew them. I have not checked out the details and the backgrounds are incomplete but they do jell with my knowledge of them and my experiences with them.
