Memories of the Carter Administration

John Updike wrote a work of fiction entitled Memoirs of the Ford Administration about who remembers what now but the title was there to evoke boredom in the seventies, I suppose. Certainly not about such expansive matters of state as evoked by such titles as War and Peace, the Ford Administration conjured up a guy in a plaid jacket and a big smile from Michigan, a football player who was Nixon's successor when he resigned, a nice guy and not much more than that whose slogans like "Whip Inflation now" simply did not work.
Now, of course, Bernanke is worried about not enough inflation. Not enough inflation because the genii who work as government economists are too slow on the draw to detect stagflation. By the time they manage to do so, Bernanke's inflationary policies, if they are cranked up and in full force, should prove disastrous.
What a country. To give so much power to the likes of Paul Volcker and Bernanke is like giving the Wizard of Oz the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and not expecting all hell to break out loose.
Now back to the Carter Administration. Ah, how I remember the Carter Administration so very well. Uh, Huh. The Carter Administration brought us the likes of Joe Duffy and the former dentist's wife, now Duffy’s, Anne Wexler who had funded Rolling Stone, a political team that led to oblivion, the various anti-war Baptist preachers who accompanied Carter and Joe Duffy including one guy named "BJ" (I am not making this up) who came to toil at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Then there was Kay somebody (everybody has forgotten her last name) known to have built empires during her stay as the home furnishings editor at The Washington Star, which was a fun paper. There was Duncan Spencer, who was recruited by her and acted as a sort of major domo for a while and there were various other characters in the culture agency to bore all.
There was one Glenn Marcus who worked as a gopher in the grants office later to work at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and to produce the film to be released at the unveiling of the World War II memorial and, of all people. a holdover from the Nixon Years, a person in the Research Grants Office named Marion Blakey, a very nice Southern woman with a great smile who later became head of the National Transportation Safety Board and later the FAA itself. They said she was a great administrator. I think she had a great smile.
Then there was Diana McLellan of the Ear gossip column and a woman I met later named Vicki Bagley who was married to Smith Bagley, the Chief of Protocol and later started Washington Life magazine.
The entire thing was rather more interesting than today because a lot of  people were on Quaaludes and all kinds of drugs and there was no such thing as 12 step attitudes about drugs and booze even in Hollywood, apparently, as shown by the film starring Bill Murray shot in 1980, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The most interesting thing that happened was when some doctor in the White House wrote someone a prescription for Quaaludes that she gave to yet another person to fill and a pharmacist busted them. Out went the doctor from the White House.
I knew guys at DOD who bragged about doing cocaine and the piece de resistance was a really sleazy drug dealer who claimed to have a $15,000 line of credit with the bank whose name I cannot recall. Wonder what happened to him? He used to supply very high officials.
The Carter Administration was famous for Jimmy Carter of peanut farm fame. He was actually heir to a peanut warehouse so technically a warehouseman. He had a wife named Rosalyn and a manner that was detail oriented to a fault which would now be better described as "wonkish." Carter was wonkish when it was unfashionable to be a wonk. No one even knew what a wonk was then.
Dredging up old memories makes me so very nostalgic but some very liberal economists have no fond memories of Carter. I can't recall his name right now but it was not Krugman although I was reading his stuff and Lester C. Thurow and Robert Kuttner. Maybe it was Robert Kuttner. In fact, I think it was Robert Kuttner indeed. More on his books later.