There's Lust In His Heart, A Door Knob In His Back

IN business, they call it the "door knob conversation." You've been negotiating all day. You turn to go. Then, just as your hand touches the door knob, you turn and say, "So, we agree on $100,000, right?" There is an equivalent in journalism when you interview the candidate. He's parried all your best shots with canned responses. You realize you've got 57 minutes of taped boilerplate about the candidate's relation to the American dream.

The press secretary or the candidate himself looks at his watch and says, "I guess that just about wraps it up." You nod and say nothing. You don't turn off the tape recorder. You pick it up and walk to the door. At the door knob, you say, "You know, just the other day, your opponent was saying what a crook you are. Don't you think . . . " At this moment, the candidate, flushed and happy with having survived the hour, laughs derisively and says, "My opponent says that? Why, he's so dumb it's a miracle he gets his pants on in the morning. If he hadn't married that hatchet-faced witch Gloria, he'd never have made it out of the county assessor's office." Your tape recorder keeps turning, and bingo, you have a beautiful five minutes on tape, and it's all on the record.

The most famous door knob conversation in political history occurred in August of 1976, when candidate Jimmy Carter, shortly after the New York Democratic Convention and comfortably ahead of Gerald Ford in the polls, was winding up an interview with two men from Playboy. The press aide said their time was up. They walked to the door of Carter's house in Plains, Ga., and said goodbye. Then, one of the Playboy men asked, "Do you feel you've reassured people with this interview, people who are uneasy about your religious beliefs, who wonder if you're going to make a rigid, unbending president?"

It was the perfect door knob question. People were uneasy about Carter, the born-again Baptist. Carter responded in an ecstasy of door knob garrulity and nearly talked himself into losing the presidency:

"Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something God recognizes I will do, and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock. Christ says, Don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. . . .

"I don't inject these beliefs in my answers to your secular questions," Carter wound up, "but I don't think I would ever take on the same frames of mind that Nixon or Johnson did - lying, cheating and distorting the truth."

When Playboy released the interview, about three weeks before the election, the phrase "lust in my heart" took the nation by storm. So did the ancillary remarks about "shacking up" and "screwing" and the cracks about LBJ and Nixon.

For 20 years, Jimmy Carter has been brooding about this door knob conversation, and now he's had his say on the matter in a couple of pages of a new book, "Living Faith," just published by Times Books. Carter asserts that the door knob conversation was off the record and the Playboy interviewer had surreptitiously restarted his recorder. In other words, he attacked the ethics of door knobbing. The interviewer was Robert Scheer, from Playboy's team of Scheer and Barry Golson.

When I first saw the charge that Scheer had "surreptitiously" interviewed someone, I burst out laughing. I saw a good deal of Scheer in the 1976 campaign. He was paranoid about losing some vital statement because of a tape malfunction and carried a big Sony professional recorder, with a mike like a mini-sound-boom. He had two other recorders, plus headphones and winking red lights to alert him to any technical hitch. To say you were "surreptitiously" recorded by Scheer would be like claiming you were "set up" by being lured into a phone booth by a naked Kim Basinger in front of 20 photographers.

But did Scheer and Golson delude Carter into believing that all these tape recorders were off during the door knob exchange? Golson, who asked the all-important final question as they all stood in the door, wrote in a New York Times op ed around then, "Scheer and I both felt he was speaking to us personally in those opening moments, but as he continued, it struck us that we were hearing a fresh, impromptu declaration of what his religion really meant to him. A minute or two into it, we interrupted and got his agreement to keep taping the conversation."

"My memory," Scheer told me last week, "is that we were trying to squeeze in every last moment before the next guy went in. You never turn off the tape machine, you talk up to the last second. I believe I had three machines going at once. There was nothing surreptitious."

Scheer called Carter last week to question his account. Carter faxed back a letter, asserting that he'd never meant to challenge either "your integrity or the accuracy of your reporting." He said that "surreptitious" was "an unfortunate choice of a word." He said that he had never meant to "impugn your integrity" but that there could be an "honest difference of opinion." In other words, he's not giving up on the "surreptitious" charge. A man who's nearly been door-knobbed out of the presidency doesn't forgive easily.

(Copyright, 1996, Creators Syndicate, Inc.)

Alexander Cockburn's column appears Thursday on editorial pages of The Times.