Then he accepted a snack—a tamale—before the cameras, not knowing that before you bit into one you were supposed to strip off the corn-leaf husk. That was the lead story the next day. Poor Jerry Ford.
THE NEXT BIG DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY was in Pennsylvania on April 27; the Republicans were not contesting it. The Supreme Court’s Buckley opinion had cut off the flow of more than a million dollars in federal matching funds owed the candidates until Congress passed and the president signed a new campaign finance law. On April 22 all of the candidates except the president filed suit on First Amendment grounds arguing that the cutoff violated the First Amendment rights of citizens who’d checked the box on their tax returns to contribute to the federal election fund. The cutoff had already almost finished Morris Udall—about whom the campaign reporters had penned the ditty “Second Place Mo” after his third second-place finish, in Wisconsin, and who in Pennsylvania cut back his television ad expenditures from $150,000 to $85,000 and chopped his radio commercials altogether. The Gallup poll had Carter and the noncandidate Humphrey tied at 31 percent nationwide among Democrats, with Wallace at 13, Scoop Jackson at 6, and Udall at 5. “Where I can get known, I do well,” Udall told reporters, desperately, shaking hands at a Fisher body plant in Pittsburgh.
Scoop Jackson had high hopes for the Keystone State, where the old-line union locals that favored both Jackson and Humphrey were powerful. He had won the New York primary handily on April 6—though the effect was severely attenuated by the fact that he’d predicted “a landslide,” and that the media interpreted it as an endorsement of the politics of Hubert Humphrey. (Second Place Mo had finished . . . second.) Humphrey, Jackson, Udall, and Carter had shared the stage in New York City at a conference of mayors just before the primary there, and Humphrey had stolen the show. Pennsylvania was shaping up as a battle for the “lunch-bucket” voters: those white ethnic building-trade and factory workers who had proved so susceptible to right-wing populist appeals—like the guy who starred in a Nixon campaign commercial in 1972, sitting high up on a construction girder eating his lunch, listening with grave concern as the voice-over instructed him how George McGovern’s economic plans “would make forty-seven percent of the people in the United States eligible for welfare” and stick him with the bill. And the voters that same year who had given George Wallace his overwhelming primary victories in Michigan and Maryland that year over the issue of forced busing.
Jimmy Carter, for his part, changed his commercials. Hearing from pollsters that undecided voters found him vague on the issues, his team had an announcer tack introductions onto the existing spots—things like, “Jimmy Carter on the issue of health care,” and “Jimmy Carter on the issue of unemployment”—and then a conclusion in which the same voice said, “If you think about this critical issue the way Jimmy Carter does, then vote for him.”
Then Carter, tied with a candidate who wasn’t even running for president, made his play for the lunch-bucket voters and ended up with the first serious gaffe of his campaign.
It came just before the voting in Wisconsin, and just as a new poll came out that had him ahead of Ford in a head-to-head matchup. He was quoted, deep within a New York Daily News story on April 2 concerning government policies to finance construction of low-income housing in middle-class neighborhoods, as saying: “I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force racial integration on a neighborhood by government action. But I would not permit discrimination against a family moving into the neighborhood.” A CBS reporter asked him, “What did you mean by ethnic purity?” He answered, “I have nothing against a community that’s made up of people who are Polish, Czechoslovakians, French-Canadians, or blacks who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhood. This is a natural inclination on the part of people. . . . I don’t think government ought to deliberately break down an ethnically oriented community deliberately by interjecting into it a member of another race. To me, this is contrary to the best interests of the community.” Asked to clarify by reporters in Indiana, which voted on May 4, Carter was convoluted: “I’m not trying to say I want to maintain with any kind of government interference the ethnic purity of neighborhoods. What I say is the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood, simply to establish that intrusion.”
It was the words “ethnic purity” upon which the critics pounced. They threatened to blunt a key component of his appeal. Carter had a favorite story he liked to tell for black audiences—and white ones who were proud of their own racial enlightenment. It involved the time Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” fought Max Schmeling, Hitler’s champion, for the heavyweight title in 1938. The twenty-five black families of Archery, Georgia, asked his father, “Mr. Earl,” if they could listen to the fight, and he agreed—setting the radio on the windowsill, outside which the congregation gathered. Louis prevailed in a single round. The black listeners made not a sound—saving their whoops and hollers until they were over the railroad tracks and almost out of earshot. Jimmy Carter, went the message, understood segregation. He understood the damage it did to communities, to human decency, to men’s souls—segregator and segregated both. As an adult, he had taken serious personal and professional risks to fight to end it. But now, as the Democratic front-runner, a surprise favorite of black voters, he was on the record saying something that sounded like it had come from the mouth of a Klansman.
Seventeen members of the Congressional Black Caucus denounced him, including Andrew Young of Georgia, one of his leading supporters. Scoop Jackson weighed in on ABC’s Issues and Answers: “It raises the question of his judgment.” It was an opportunistic move, for Jackson had the machine of the racist mayor Frank Rizzo organizing for him in Philadelphia. Jackson asked, “Do we want a man as president who has to go around apologizing for the things he has said?” (Jackson’s campaign ally Rizzo, on the other hand, had said the previous year during his reelection campaign, “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”) Lester Maddox, who had beaten Carter for governor in 1966 and was famous for chasing blacks off his property with an ax handle after passage of the Civil Rights Act, said he welcomed “the new segregationist term” and offered to lend Carter an ax handle.
Carter made a half apology at a news conference on April 8 in Philadelphia: “I do want to apologize to all those who have been concerned about the unfortunate use of the term ‘ethnic purity,’ ” he said. “I would make sure that anyone who wanted to move into a neighborhood would have the right to do it.” He added, though, that he stood behind the general thought. As he put it in a second apology, “I should have said something like ‘ethnic personality,’ ” but he still opposed the “arbitrary use of federal force” to change the ethnic character of neighborhoods.
Here was the signature Carter straddle. As Udall complained, “That add-on is characteristic of his approach. On an amazing number of issues Jimmy meets himself going through that revolving door.” But the same straddle was made by the president—who responded to a question about Carter’s gaffe by saying that “an ethnic heritage is a great treasure,” and adding, “I don’t think that federal action should be used to destroy that ethnic treasure.” Ford also wondered “whether that remark will have any impact on the support that he has heretofore gotten in the black communities of the various states.” Carter cleverly responded to that by elevating himself to the status of Ford’s presumptive opponent: “I am happy to have aroused the interest and the opposition of the President. . . . I guess now he’s joined the ‘Stop Carter’ movement. But what he should know from me is that I am going to stop him in November.”
On the defensive? Not so much. Instead he displayed another signature political skill: turning adversity into advantage. At a press conference in Philadelphia, he held up a newspaper with the headline “STOP-CARTER ALLIANCE IS FORMED.” He replied, “I’m not going to yield anything to the political bosses. . . . I am letting the voters know that I belong
to them. . . . I have never predicated my campaign on endorsements.” He then traveled to Detroit (Michigan’s primary was on May 18), speaking next to the city’s black mayor, Coleman Young—who had endorsed him. And then before thousands in Atlanta at a rally with Daddy King, who had endorsed him, too, assuring the audience, “I love him and believe in him.” Meanwhile, the Associated Press story about Carter’s serial apologies appeared in many papers beside another AP piece about how the federal government’s welfare costs increased 21.4 percent in a single year, adding to the rolls 266,000 families, 11.3 million individuals, and running up a $24.8 billion bill all told.
You might be a voter panicked to think that hordes of black welfare recipients might soon crowd you out of a neighborhood whose, um, “ethnic personality” you cherished. Or you might be one who revered Martin Luther King. Either way, if you were a Pennsylvanian, you might well have voted for James Earl Carter. His victory there was called on TV “overwhelming” within three hours after the polls closed. He got twice as many delegates as Scoop.
Two days later, Jackson announced he wouldn’t be campaigning in Indiana—it looked like the end of the road. It was also the deadline for entering the New Jersey primary, held on June 8. This was the last chance to enter a primary for the year, and a poll in New Jersey showed the Minnesotan ahead of the Georgian by forty-six points. Humphrey had asked the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party to gather signatures to get him on the ballot. At a news conference on April 11 he said, “If I’m a candidate I’ll win. Make no mistake about that . . . should my party need me at the convention, I would consider it an honor to serve the party. . . . I’m ready.” But on April 29 Humphrey stepped up to the press conference microphones for a statement so eagerly anticipated that the networks cut into the soap operas to broadcast it. It was anticlimactic: “I shall not seek it; I shall not compete for it; I shall not search for it; I shall not scramble for it,” he said of the possibility he might actively campaign for the presidency. “One thing I don’t need at my stage of life is to be ridiculous.” He joked that he hadn’t thought about a “brokered convention”—one in which no candidate got a majority on the first ballot, and bosses began horse-trading the delegates they controlled in exchange for favors; the Democrats hadn’t had one since 1952—“since eleven A.M.”
But he also said, not joking: “I’m around.”
GERALD FORD WAS IN HOUSTON saying Carter “has not dealt with the hard decisions of the Oval Office”—as if Carter were already the nominee. Texas, for the Republicans, was shaping up as slash-and-burn. Ronald Reagan had not dealt with the hard decisions of the Oval Office, either. And Gerald Ford did not intend to let Texans forget it.
For his part, Reagan had to turn up the volume. Bereft of matching funds, he was still practically broke. He had pulled out of Wisconsin two weeks before the April 6 primary, claiming he was preparing for his March 31 televised speech. But he had actually stopped traveling to save money, which banks would no longer loan him—fearing repercussions from the White House, John Sears claimed, though it’s just as likely would-be creditors just feared they would never get their money back. Reagan made only one trip in the two weeks before April 6, slaying them at a party fund-raiser in Virginia (he revised a favorite old story about the man who got read a letter informing him he would no longer be getting Social Security payments because he was dead, this time around adding that a sympathetic bureaucrat who learned about the mistake sent him seven hundred dollars for “funeral expenses” to tide him over). And in fact that March 31 broadcast almost hadn’t come about at all. First, the networks wouldn’t sell him the time. Then, when NBC changed its mind, the campaign didn’t have the money—until a conservative banker from Houston came through with an emergency $100,000 loan.
Privation, though, and the president’s insults—and receptive foot-stomping Texan audiences—turned out to concentrate Reagan’s mind beautifully. Ford hadn’t even opened his campaign at the Alamo when Reagan claimed he’d seen a transcript of some obscure testimony from the State Department’s negotiator in Panama, Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker, to the Panama Canal Subcommittee of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which Reagan said laid out the administration’s intention to “give away” the canal. He would say that the Panama Canal Zone was “sovereign U.S. territory, every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase.”
He would say it, and the Texas foot-stomping would commence; it was something to behold.
Even though it was not true.
The 1904 treaty granted the United States not sovereignty but “rights, power, and authority” there “as if it were the sovereign of the territory,” a crucial distinction: if a baby was born to a foreigner in Alaska or Louisiana, that child would be an American citizen, certainly not the case for Panamanians who gave birth in the Zone.
Tell that, though, to a foot-stomping Texan. You might get stomped upon yourself.
It had to be excruciating for Jerry Ford. But running against Ronald Reagan for anything must have been excruciating for those who wished to honor truth. There was that tourist paddle wheeler the Delta Queen, ordered by meddlesome Washington bureaucrats to be fire-proofed, when it had “never had a fire,” though she had actually caught fire shortly before he said this. Or the time, at a 1975 roundtable at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, when he said that the Food and Drug Administration was killing Americans: “I think something more than 40,000 tuberculars alone have died in this country who conceivably could have been saved by a drug that has been widely used the past few years through Europe.” In fact the drug, rifampin, had been on the market since 1971—and the FDA had approved it even before the manufacturer submitted the application. And the number of people who died of tuberculosis was less than 28,000 in the decade when he spoke. As it happened, this contradicted what Reagan said on the radio that summer in a rant against socialist medicine. He quoted Teddy Kennedy as saying that medical costs were increasing while quality was declining. Reagan said, “He’s talking about the country in which . . . tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and many other diseases have disappeared in our lifetime.”
He had a favorite bowdlerization of a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The American people won’t make a mistake if they’re given all the facts.” Surely Gerald Ford wished that this were actually so. Didn’t Mark Twain once say something about how a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has time to lace up its shoes?
In Texas, the lies wore cowboy boots. Reagan would say, “We should end those negotiations and tell them we bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it,” and the stomping would start up anew. The “we built it” part was a new addition, playing to generations of heroic schoolboy tales about beating back the swamps and jungles in the interest of progress, but that wasn’t quite accurate, either: Panamanians and other contract laborers were the ones who overwhelmingly wielded the tools. Although at that, Ford was telling a half-truth about Panama, too: that America “will never give up its right to the canal.” But the testimony to the Fisheries Committee flushed out by Reagan had Ambassador Bunker admitting that his negotiating directive was to offer to yield the Canal Zone “after a period of time” and the canal itself “over a longer period of time.” And on April 16, after Reagan pounded him in Texas for three days straight on the subject, the president admitted that, yes, negotiations could lead to eventual Panamanian control, but only after another “thirty to fifty years.” But that failure to write a new treaty could lead to further rioting in Panama and perhaps elsewhere in Latin American—which, of course, only played into Reagan’s charge that Ford was letting America be pushed around by tinhorn dictators.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
Late in March the Ford campaign had defied a letter from a Reagan campaign lawyer to the FEC charging that since the secretary of state was “using his high office for the express purpose of a ca
mpaign platform to promote the Ford candidacy,” Kissinger’s travels should be charged against Ford’s campaign spending limit. And the campaign staff sent Kissinger to Dallas for a series of speeches to answer Reagan. Kissinger said America and Russia were in a position of “rough equilibrium” on nuclear arms, and that “nothing we could have done would have prevented it,” and “nothing we can do now will make it disappear”—not exactly stirring stuff. Then Ford’s own new campaign manager, Rogers Morton, predicted, without warning his boss, that Kissinger would soon be fired. The president was forced in an April 13 press conference to affirm that “Secretary Kissinger has been one of the finest, if not the finest, Secretary of State this country has ever had”—not the sort of thing that played well in Texas.
On April 17, Ford’s press secretary, Ron Nessen, the first to come to the job from TV instead of print media, did something the White House thought frightfully clever, in order to dispel the president’s klutz image: Nessen hosted Saturday Night Live. After members of the “Dead String Quartet” opened the show by keeling over, Nessen’s monologue nearly had the audience doing the same; after Dan Aykroyd’s pitch for the Super Bass-o-Matic ’76 (a blender: “Wow,” exclaimed Laraine Newman, drinking down a blended beverage, “that’s terrific bass!”), Nessen fell flat playing beside Chevy Chase as the president and a stuffed dog depicting the presidential pooch Liberty. After John Belushi played a lieutenant colonel puffing a joint as an inducement to recruiting today’s counterculture youth, and a video cameo from the real-life Gerald Ford appropriating Chevy Chase’s tagline (“Good evening, I’m Gerald Ford, and you’re not”), Nessen sat embarrassed through a Weekend Update gag in which the pronunciation-impaired Miss Emily Litella (Gilda Radner) railed against “all this fuss I’ve been hearing about the 1976 presidential erection.” At one point he was booed. The exercise was a bomb—not least in Texas, where marijuana-scented parodies of America’s military honor were not exactly appreciated.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 92