Press: Some closing words from Jody

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Powell's reflections on four years of truth and tears

Jody Powell has been one of the most popular and trusted presidential press secretaries ever to match wits and wisecracks with the White House press corps. Last week, while a cheery fire crackled in his spacious West Wing office, a philosophical Powell sat down with TIME Correspondent Johanna McGeary to reflect on the job he will soon leave and on his performance in it.

He still dresses in the gray three-piece suits and plain white shirts he favored for official appearances, but his desk is no longer piled high with scrawl-covered yellow legal pads, news clips, letters, schedules and unanswered telephone messages. With little of substance left to do in his remaining days at the White House, Jody Powell is troubled by a vague sense of failure. Says he: "I don't feel at all satisfied with what I've done. To start with, we lost the election."

Powell admits that "nobody who has ever worked for a President has felt that President was treated fairly by the press." In Powell's view, the man in the White House is inevitably locked in a tumultuous, adversarial relationship with the reporters who cover him. "I don't know whose fault it is, but it's a problem that has to be looked at," he says. "It would be simple if you could say the problem is that reporters are a bunch of jerks, or don't like Southern Democrats or whatever. That is not the nature of the problem. It goes to the whole issue of the way our system treats the President." Which, he seems to be saying, is badly.

The press secretary is frank to admit his own mistakes. "I allowed myself to be too personally involved in the Bert Lance thing because of my affection for Bert," says he. That affection led him to the worst blunder of his White House tenure. When Republican Senator Charles Percy criticized Lance, the former Budget Director accused of financial improprieties, Powell leaked a tale that Percy had regularly flown on a corporate jet belonging to Bell & Howell, which he once headed. The jet, as it turned out, did not exist. Powell also claimed that Percy had failed to repay bank loans; Percy produced a canceled check in refutation. Says Powell: "I did not make things better. I may have made them worse."

Powell has no remorse for misleading the press about the Carter Administration's intentions toward Iran just before the hostage rescue attempt last April. "Keeping the secret was too important," he explains. One of few press aides ever to be numbered among a President's closest advisers, Powell feels that dual role enhanced his credibility, even when he was untruthful. Says he: "Folks would rather know I knew full well what was involved than deal with someone who didn't even know if he was telling the truth."

The secretary's most embarrassing moment? His overwrought, 33-page denial of a report in 1978 that White House Aide Hamilton Jordan had spit his Amaretto-and-cream at a woman in a Georgetown bar. Says Powell: "I should have handled that better. At least I should have typed it single space."