The speech was almost denied TV coverage by a threatened work action by a union of the electrical contractor. After the speech, the hundreds of blue balloons released in celebration touched the newly installed ceiling lights and promptly exploded. It was a metaphor for the forthcoming general election and his presidency.75
THE GENERAL ELECTION
Ironically, this triumphant, nearly unimaginable nomination by an enthusiastic party marked the high point of what was almost his undoing in the general election. Carter began with a thirty-point lead over Gerald Ford in the polls, and while that surely was unrealistically high, it never should have shrunk to under 1 percent on election night. The Republican Party was as divided as the Democrats were united, a role reversal for our chronically feuding political coalition, as upstart California governor Ronald Reagan came within a hairbreadth of winning the GOP nomination. Ford almost gave the election away by pardoning Richard Nixon.
Our own mistakes contributed mightily to Ford almost pulling off a startling comeback. Carter delivered tough personal attacks against Ford as a weak leader and “just a quiescent extension of the policies of Nixon,” which backfired against a president widely seen as decent and honest. It also was dissonant with a challenger preaching his own brand of political honesty, national healing, and social unity. Another of Carter’s political eccentricities was delivering tough messages to audiences that did not want to hear them. When he vowed to pardon Vietnam draft evaders in a speech at the national convention of the American Legion—of all places—he was soundly booed. These helped him lose 10 points in the polls.76
At bottom, as Jordan succinctly put it, “We had spent four years figuring out how to win the nomination, and given very little thought to the general election.”77 Substantively, by the time Carter had won his arduous primary campaign, he was a different kind of candidate—no longer the outsider, the insurgent, the antiestablishment populist with the promise of healing the nation’s wounds. Now he was the candidate of the Democratic Party, with all its embedded interest groups and outspoken liberal advocates. Ham Jordan, who knew him best, said that “all of a sudden he went from being this kind of loner who was out there fighting and scrapping, the little guy against the system and the status quo, to wearing the mantle of his party, and neither he nor we in his entourage were emotionally prepared for the role of the establishment candidate, where at a minimum it is essential to look at the political consequences before making a leap of conscience.”78
Traditionally, Republican presidential candidates run to the right in the primaries and move to the center in the general election to capture independent voters, while Democratic candidates do precisely the opposite—run to the left in the primaries to win the liberal activists and then move to the center in the general election to satisfy the uncertain voters seeking continuity and stability. But Carter had run in the center for the primaries and then moved to the left after his nomination, in hopes of uniting the party and energizing it behind him. He looked more like a traditional than a New Democrat, taking on some of the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party.
In that era it was difficult if not impossible for a Democrat to win the presidency without the big labor unions mobilizing thousands of field-workers to organize on the ground, especially to help turn out the voters on Election Day. Carter realized he was working from an unusual position: “Before the nomination I was kind of a lonely farmer, Southerner, decent, honest, who needed the individual help of voters. Afterward, I was the establishment, I was the Democratic Party in the people’s mind, and I was never comfortable with that.” As he moved from state to state, he remembered often sharing the stage with local candidates where “I would be wrapped with these unsavory politicians who were running for governor, running for Congress, that I didn’t really like.” He also had a set of personal priorities that many found puzzling: “People never did understand me and still don’t, because I had kind of a dichotomy in my life.”79 Along with his profound commitment to racial equality, he was at heart a populist of a rural, self-improvement variety favoring federal aid to education and special programs such as vocational and job training for the poor and hard-pressed workers.
THE DEBATES
Preparing Carter for three presidential debates, the first in sixteen years since the first and decisive Kennedy-Nixon debate, may have been my biggest campaign challenge—and his, too. A trained engineer, experienced businessman, and seasoned administrator whose strong point was the mastery of detail would be squaring off against an incumbent president who had spent a quarter of a century in Congress, and who was experienced in targeting the heart of an issue and finding the weak point of his opponent’s argument with the force of the college football player that Gerald Ford had once been. At least that was how it might be handicapped, and our small policy group felt undermanned and under severe pressure.
I was in charge of preparing the briefing papers and made the mistake of presenting Carter at his home in Plains with a book more than four inches thick, with detailed background materials, suggested answers for likely questions, and attack lines against Ford, in the hope that we would refine the material during practice sessions. Instead he circled typographical errors and grammatical mistakes, as if he were my elementary school teacher, a practice he continued with memos in the White House.
To help me in Atlanta with the mammoth project, I sought out Ted Van Dyk, Hubert Humphrey’s talented aide with whom I worked in the 1968 campaign. Together we compiled the book, working seven days a week for two weeks, sleeping three or four hours a night. One Sunday morning I arrived to find a note from Ted: “I am sorry I cannot continue to work for Carter. Now that I know in detail his positions, he is too conservative for me to support.”
Van Dyk was not the only one who deserted us because Carter could not satisfy the party’s liberal wing. Robert Shrum, a gifted but intense speechwriter, joined the staff in the last weeks of the campaign. Handed a wire-service report that Ford was going to veto a Democratic bill raising spending for a popular social program, Shrum dashed off a strong condemnation for Carter to issue at the next campaign stop, and then handed it to me. I warned him that Carter would likely not agree to such a statement and probably felt closer to Ford on the issue, but I gave the draft to Carter anyway. He read it quickly and wrote “No. JC.” Shrum was aghast: How could any Democratic presidential nominee agree with Ford? He declared that he could not work for a candidate with such a conservative fiscal position. I urged him not to judge Carter, whom he barely knew, on the basis of this one issue. But at the next stop Shrum left the plane in a huff. He had lasted nine days.80
The economy and domestic issues were the focus of the first of three presidential debates between Ford and Carter in Philadelphia on September 23, 1976.
Even when the most trusted members of the inner circle—Ham, Jody, and Rafshoon—joined me to urge him to prepare through a mock debate, he absolutely refused. This says much about his own supreme confidence (bordering on hubris) in his own intelligence, but not about his adaptability to a major-league debating stage, where he needed to reach out to voters with a wide spectrum of political views. He told me he found it “kind of artificial, and on the issues I felt at ease, I didn’t see how practice could have made me deal with the human thing.” He also later explained: “I never have been at ease with set speeches or with memorized text. I really like the question-and-answer format, and even at the White House press conferences, I like to speak from a few notes, and the more I’m embedded in an element of rigidity, the more uncomfortable I feel.”81 It was an early sign of his preference for the details of any issue as the route to resolving it. His sharp intellect, his ability to absorb and understand mountains of difficult material, made him feel that he knew better than anyone what he wanted to say and made him stubborn in rejecting advice with which he disagreed. But he paid a price.
I got only a few minutes to go over salient points I thought he should make. One was that prices were rising faster th
an paychecks, and that real earnings were less than they had been when Nixon took office. Predictably one of Carter’s first questions was a softball. Frank Reynolds of ABC-TV noted that he had made job creation a top priority during the campaign and asked: “Governor, can you say in specific terms what your first step would be next January if you are elected, to achieve this?” Carter stumbled over what should have been the incumbent’s weakest point on the economy. Instead of batting it back and knocking it out of the park, his answer was so unfocused that it made me cringe, as I heard him roll out a list of employment, housing, public works, research, taxation, and other eye-glazing proposals. He asserted that they would push down the adult unemployment rate to 3 percent by the end of his first term and balance the federal budget. Four years later when he was preparing for his 1980 debate with Reagan, Carter made a rare admission of vulnerability, that “the worst 20 minutes of my life was the first 20 minutes of the first debate with Ford.”82
Carter was saved by a remarkable electronic fluke that knocked out the audio transmission and forced a twenty-seven-minute delay, as both candidates stood motionless at their lecterns, like wooden statues. He recovered by attacking Ford for increasing unemployment by 50 percent and doubling the number of small-business bankruptcies. Carter’s most effective line was countering Ford’s assertion that he had learned how to match unemployment with inflation. Carter fired back: “That’s right. We’ve got the highest inflation we’ve had in twenty-five years right now … and the highest unemployment we’ve had under Mr. Ford’s administration since the Great Depression.”83 Little could we imagine that wicked trade-off would only get worse after Carter was elected. But he turned in only a mediocre performance, with polls showing a slight debate advantage for Ford, in what should have been Carter’s strong suit. I did not do much better, as my nationwide TV debut as the designated postdebate “talking head” was marred when my glasses broke, requiring masking tape to put them back together; my horrified mother was concerned I had been in an accident.
Nevertheless, for the second debate, on foreign policy, he refused to practice, not even on the long flight aboard Peanut One to San Francisco. The most we could do was persuade him to allow Brzezinski and representative Les Aspin of Wisconsin, a defense expert, to spend an hour with him in his hotel room reviewing his positions, but—heaven forbid!—not to practice answering possible questions.
That debate turned out to be a decisive event in the campaign, although not because of any detailed mastery by Carter, but a historic blunder by Ford. There had been great controversy about whether the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with Moscow meant that somehow the Ford administration was acquiescent about Eastern Europe being part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Ford apparently had that in mind when Max Frankel of the New York Times, one of the panelists, asked whether the Soviet Union was gaining the advantage in a number of areas in the world. He ended the question by declaring: “We’ve recognized the permanent Communist regime in East Germany. We’ve virtually signed in Helsinki an agreement that the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.” Ford’s answer not only lost him the debate, it helped him lose the presidency. He replied, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Astonished, Frankel said, “I’m sorry. Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence, occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it is a Communist zone, whereas on our side of the line, the Italians and the French are still flirting with the possibilities?” Ford dug himself more deeply into a hole by replying: “I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous, it has its own territorial integrity, and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
In my notes I wrote and underlined “Poles don’t consider themselves dominated,” and drew a big arrow in the margin to remind me to focus on this with the press after the debate, in what is called the spin room. After all, what were Soviet troops doing in those satellite countries if not ensuring that their rulers followed Moscow’s orders? But I did not need to wait. Carter immediately pounced on the advantage, offsetting Ford’s supposed foreign-policy expertise and appealing to the ethnic vote in key states. He declared: “I would like to see Mr. Ford convince the Polish-Americans and the Czech-Americans and the Hungarian-Americans in this country that those countries don’t live under the domination and supervision of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.”84
At first the Republican strategists did not realize how badly their man had been wounded; during the debate itself their instant polls never showed a blip at the exchange. We hammered away at it in our spin, but it was repeated questioning by the press that woke them up. Over at the St. Francis Hotel for what he thought would be a routine postdebate briefing, Ford’s chief of staff, Dick Cheney, knew right away they were headed for trouble when Luke Hanna of the Washington Post shouted from the back of the room, “Hey, Cheney, how many Soviet divisions in Poland?” What Ford’s entourage did not yet know was that he could be as stubborn as Carter. The president refused for several days to admit that he had made a huge mistake, thanks in part to what Cheney (later vice president) felt was a fawning phone call from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “Oh, you did a wonderful job, Mr. President, magnificent performance.”85
“WITH LUST IN MY HEART”
Inside our camp there was an air of exhilaration on the flight back to Atlanta, but it did not last long. Carter soon created his own problems with ill-chosen words that came out of his own mouth to reach a younger audience through Playboy. On the cover of the magazine’s November issue, on the newsstands during the climactic October weeks of the campaign, was the photo of a provocative model and a headline in bold letters, “Now the Real Jimmy Carter on Politics, Religion, the Press and Sex in an Incredible Playboy Interview.” Rafshoon and Jody, Carter’s chief image makers, had urged him to grant the interview to moderate the impression held by many young voters of Carter as an unbending and moralistic Baptist. Jody even made arrangements for a chartered plane to fly the writer, Robert Sheer, to Plains. He told Carter he was doing a character sketch and promised to let the candidate’s staff review the text before publication.86
The interview itself was unexceptional. As it concluded, and Sheer was turning off his recorder while Carter showed him out, he asked how Carter dealt with his Baptist belief that people who had sex outside of marriage were inferior. Carter remembered the question as a test of whether he would bring such arrogant beliefs into the White House, responding that Christ warned against judging others, and in the Sermon on the Mount, equated even lust for another woman as equivalent to adultery. Sheer then asked if he had ever lusted for other women, and Carter said he probably had, but that most men were inclined to do so. His actual words were, “Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust, has in his heart already committed adultery.” He then added the fateful words that caused such grief: “I’ve looked at a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that does not mean that 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. The guy who’s loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness.”87
Carter claimed he did not realize that Sheer’s tape recorder was running, which seems likely because he would have immediately reali
zed such remarks would hurt his candidacy if published, and they were. Quite apart from its effect on Carter’s electoral base of white, churchgoing Southerners, its target audience of the young and other voters discovered in Carter “a weirdo factor,” as Rafshoon pungently put it.88
I first learned of the article when Jack Nelson, a friendly reporter from the Atlanta Constitution, called me on a Sunday morning at our Atlanta headquarters and asked for a comment, which, shocked as I was, I would not give. I called Jody and Rafshoon, the initiators of this mammoth exercise in bad judgment, and they laughed it off. But it was no laughing matter. Carter was unapologetic and insisted he was simply giving a religious message of how Christ viewed adultery. The real problem was that these supposedly pious and definitely revealing remarks only blurred his image. Was he a liberal or a conservative? A genuinely religious Baptist or an impostor? Carter himself in reflection realized it was “very damaging.… I had put forth an image, I hope not totally erroneously, that I was an honest, basically good and moral guy, and here I was lusting after women.” On a train trip afterward, he was walking down the aisle, shaking hands with passengers and chatting with reporters, “and all they wanted to talk about was ‘lust in your heart’ and the Playboy interview.”89 Carter belatedly apologized, but the incident remained stuck in the popular imagination.
VICTORY
In the final days of the campaign, Carter’s lead over Ford tightened considerably, with Ford’s carefully managed “Rose Garden strategy” of looking presidential; vetoing Democratic spending bills; and Ford saying that Carter “wanders, he wavers, he waffles, and he wiggles.”90 As Lance admitted, “He was moderate to the moderates; he was conservative to the conservatives; he was liberal to the liberals; and, in fact, he was all of these things.”91 Pat Caddell’s polls told us that Carter was holding on to a sliver of a lead. Our happiest memory aboard Peanut One was the last full day of campaigning: Candidates often spend that day chasing the setting sun, from East to West, finishing in a long sprint to the West Coast. It lasts eighteen hours and is justifiably called the “death march,” because it concludes exhausting months of nonstop campaigning. We finished the campaign in Sacramento in a show of party unity alongside Jerry Brown, a vanquished primary opponent. It had been almost two years since Jimmy Carter threw his hat in the ring, the longest presidential campaign in American history. Carter had traveled more than four hundred thousand miles by plane, and delivered over two thousand speeches.92 An upright piano had been brought on board the rear compartment of the plane, and reporters were belting out songs along with the campaign staff. There was a sense of relief and merriment that the torture of the campaign was over.
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