Nation: Packaging a New Carter

(2 of 2)

Rafshoon runs his eye, and sometimes his pencil, over the draft of every presidential speech of consequence. He also serves as a booking agent for Cabinet members and White House aides, phoning TV producers, mentioning who is available for interview shows and even suggesting timely topics. Once a booking is made, Rafshoon prepares a briefing paper for the official, setting forth the Administration's line on a number of questions that might be asked. Officials are not supposed to appear on television without being cleared by Rafshoon—something Midge Costanza did not do. Rafshoon abruptly canceled her scheduled appearance on a talk show, and the resulting furor triggered her resignation two weeks ago as a presidential adviser.

To head off contradictory policy statements, the White House has become much more rigorous in reviewing the prepared testimony of top officials before congressional committees. For example, White House aides who vetted Housing and Urban Development Secretary Patricia Harris' planned statements before the House Banking Committee last week felt that they were too critical of the Federal Reserve Board's policies. Lacking time to revise her remarks, she canceled the appearance.

"Such actions," reports TIME White House Correspondent Laurence Barrett, "partially muzzle what had once been proclaimed an open Administration. On the other hand, the White House has suffered extensively from too much contradictory talk from too many high officials. Though he quakes at the notion of becoming known as 'the Enforcer,' Rafshoon does perform that function to a limited extent, as he tries to get everyone marching in the same direction on sensitive questions."

Aware of his potentially controversial role, Rafshoon has been trying to keep his profile low. He is one of the most important members of Carter's inner circle and a close friend of the President's; Carter, in fact, often turns to the adman, who is more sophisticated than the native Georgians on the President's staff, for advice about movies to see and books to read. But despite this intimacy, Rafshoon is based not in the White House but across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, in the spacious quarters that were once Richard Nixon's hideaway study.

Describing himself as merely a White House "extra hand," Rafshoon insists: "I'm not an image maker. I consider myself a communicator, trying to help articulate the President's goals and themes." But he is obviously more than that and even comes close to living up to the inscription, taken from one of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic-strip characters, on a plaque given to him by his former advertising associates: SECRETARY OF SYMBOLISM.