Word: paranoia
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Carter's blatant politicking while in office has sown the seeds of paranoia, a tension of the type he claimed he would dispel. Who knows what U.S. foreign policy is exactly? Is the Georgia clan running the country? More conspiratorially, some have wondered if Carter deliberately induced the recession knowing the slump would tail off and conditions would be "improving" around election time. Perhaps that scheme seems ridiculous, but such is the psychological atmosphere--and it only represents relativistic politics taken to a logical extreme...
What does this all mean? Well, it means there are people here waiting for you, waiting with a passion--for what is not exactly clear. Now is the time to get paranoid, so that when you get here, you are so numb from paranoia that you can be yourself. Have some jokes prepared--popular ones this year are likely to be, "Hey, did you hear Julius Caesar's in our class?" or, "Hey, I just saw a piece of graffiti saying `Napoleon Bonaparte '84.'" Don't bother memorizing your SAT score; just tell anyone rude enough to ask that...
...leadership-have much to do with each other? Some of their characteristics are similar-the winning American grin, the air of decent good guy. In both, the voter senses a remarkably steady emotional grip, a self-confidence; both inspire loyalty. In neither have Americans detected those dark glints of paranoia and compulsion that eventually repelled them in some Presidents after...
...time, Joe McCarthy was loose, with all the blackbirds of his paranoia. When Ike federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate the schools of Little Rock, the country had an ugly glimpse of things to come. If we think of the '50s now as the last golden age, a period of moral poise, they seemed at the time very different. Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1955: "We have entered the Age of Despondency, with the Age of Desperation just around the corner." Someone is always saying that; it is almost always true...
...atmosphere is hardly comparable to the paranoia in the Nixon White House, where the telephones of some officials suspected of leaking were secretly tapped. Says a State Department official: "Carter believes fiercely in the chain of command: once policy is set it has to be followed down the line." Still, Carter's preoccupation with leaks has worsened the already low morale in the State Department. Says a former official: "The message is, 'I don't trust you,' and it is damn hard to work for someone on those terms...