The FBI file on Corbin confirmed him as a shadowy figure who was arrested several times and spent much of his life skirting criminal violations and grand juries. Who actually stole the book is not clear, but based upon Craig Shirley’s account, one of the principal players may have been Laurie Lucey, a confidential assistant to Landon Butler, one of Jordan’s senior aides, and the daughter of Pat Lucey, a former governor of Wisconsin. Carter appointed him as ambassador to Mexico, but he abruptly quit to help Kennedy challenge Carter. Just days before Lucey resigned, so did his daughter. Around the time she was leaving, Bob Dunn, a longtime friend of Corbin’s and a former member of Lucey’s gubernatorial staff in Wisconsin, joined the White House as an assistant to Carter’s scheduling secretary. It was Corbin who persuaded Lucey to become Anderson’s vice-presidential running mate and help divert liberal votes from Carter. According to Craig Shirley, either Dunn or Laurie Lucey may have passed the debate book to Corbin, who joined the Reagan campaign in its last days, for a price. He visited the Reagan-Bush campaign headquarters during September and October and met with Baker and Casey.
What is forgotten is that by all estimates, the momentum had swung back to Carter as his negative campaign ads reignited doubts about Reagan. The campaign used two types of ads—one positive, showing the president as either commander in chief or Camp David peacemaker; the other negative, implying Reagan was a mad bomber in order to stir up fears of him as commander in chief.62 The week before the election the polls showed a tie—too close to call, with several (Gallup, New York Times–CBS) giving Carter the edge.63
But Caddell told us the momentum was on our side. Although Carter’s poor debate performance cost him several points, as the halo effect from the debate began to fade he nevertheless began pulling either neck-and-neck or even beating Reagan in several respected polls by taking votes from Anderson. Sam Popkin told me Reagan had lost all his gains from the debate, and “the undecideds are swinging wildly.” He believed that if voters went into the booth thinking of foreign policy, Carter would win, but if the economy was on their minds, Reagan would win. Most undecided voters were Democrats or independents who agreed with Carter on the issues but disliked his personal attacks on Reagan or his Rose Garden strategy of staying aloof from the campaign for months after the hostages were taken.64 Carter now would pay the full price during the last hours of the campaign.
SUCKER-PUNCHED BY THE AYATOLLAH
On Carter’s last campaign swing, I accompanied him aboard Air Force One. The sleepless nights working to free the Iran hostages and puzzle out the Soviet motives in Afghanistan had taken a visible toll. The bounce in his walk had disappeared, and he had aged perceptibly. In Houston on October 31 Carter drew his most enthusiastic crowd of the campaign, but I noted that he “absolutely silenced them; he rambled; no coherence.”65 The next day we flew from San Antonio to Miami and then to a fateful stop in Chicago, where the Iranian hostages were thrust back into the faces of voters in the final days of the campaign—and it was Carter who did it. Early Sunday I was roused from sleep at the airport hotel in Chicago at 4:21 a.m. Iran had made another offer. We were all ordered by the White House Operations Center to be ready to leave on Air Force One in fifty minutes, and we were told that the Iranian parliament had voted to release the hostages but set conditions that we might not be able to accept. I scrambled to dress, and we all left, anxious to learn if this would be the final resolution.
That furtive trip back to Washington never should have been made two days before the election. Carter could have examined the Iranian conditions and determined they were unsatisfactory without the drama of canceling his campaign events and returning to the White House. I urged Ham and Jody to tell Carter to stay put, but Ham told me he was reluctant to stop the president because it was “unseemly to campaign now.” I disagreed, but I certainly had no chance of beating Hamilton Jordan in an argument about political tactics.66 I nevertheless went into the president’s private cabin on Air Force One and told him I felt strongly that given the history of the hostage issue, if he suspended campaigning it might appear that he was doing so for political purposes. Carter replied: “That’s a good point, and that’s my feeling.” But we were already on our way back.
Someone with uncanny political instincts who had far more influence made the same point to the president. Rosalynn Carter recounted to me that when her husband called her from Chicago that morning to say he had to come back, she pleaded with him: “Why don’t you stay? Why do you have to come back? It could mean the election.” But he insisted on returning and told her: “I cannot pass up a chance.” She was by now fatalistic, given the many Iranian feints built up by the press, only to collapse before the eyes of a weary and skeptical public, which is just what happened. Rosalynn painfully recalled, “We both felt it might be the end, and the reason was because we both knew that the press had built up so many times the fact that the hostages might get out, and every time we built up expectations that were dashed. And I thought the public would think, Here we are doing that again, just to win the election, which is what happened.”67
Moving into damage-control mode, I jotted down talking points on the Air Force One notepad with “The White House Washington” across the top. “1. The American people resent Iran interfering in our election (they don’t believe JC tried to coincide with election, but that Iranians hope to get better terms). 2. They feel strongly JC should say we will not let them interfere in our election, and we will not give them better terms due to election. 3. They feel almost unanimously we should deal with the hostages only after the election as the Iranians will get better terms before it.”
When we landed at Andrews Air Force Base on the morning of November 2 and took helicopters to the South Lawn landing pad, we were all in a disheveled state but headed straight to the Cabinet Room. The meeting began at 2:00 p.m. and lasted for an hour.68 Waiting for the traveling campaign staff were Secretary of State Muskie and his deputy, Warren Christopher; Defense Secretary Brown; Treasury Secretary Miller and his deputy, Bob Carswell; CIA Director Turner; Brzezinski, his deputy, David Aaron, and his Iran expert Gary Sick; and White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler.69 I have never attended a U.S. government meeting as grim and portentous as this. The fate of the hostages and of the thirty-ninth president hung in the balance. No one in the room failed to realize the gravity of the president’s predicament.
Brzezinski said the conditions laid down by the Iranian parliament might be the basis for an agreement with further negotiations, but they could not be accepted outright. Some demands were simply unacceptable, and one was clearly a trap: The Iranians demanded a reply by Monday, the day before the election. The sense of the meeting was not to reject the offer outright but also not to leave the impression that we were chasing a chimera on the eve of an election. To his credit, Carter refused to accept a bad deal at this critical moment in his political life. Instead he decided to give a short statement to the public, but send a longer reply through a neutral ambassador, responding that the offer represented a step forward but did not go sufficiently far for an agreement.
I felt all of that could have been accomplished from the presidential hotel suite in Chicago without breaking stride in the campaign. Callers were flooding radio talk shows with complaints that Iran was interfering in our election and were worried that the president would agree to better terms before the election rather than after. I urged that we wait until after the election to take any action at all, and advised the president to issue a tough statement making absolutely clear to the Iranians that our terms would be no different after the vote than before. Ham and the president agreed.
Carter told us, “We should let the American people know we won’t be pushed around and that we are not in a hurry to get them out just before the election.” He noted that the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, had used “abusive language for domestic consumption, but their terms weren’t unreasonable. We should do the same.” When the meeting broke up, we went into the vice president’s
office to draft the president’s statement, which took another hour, with Christopher in charge as our lead negotiator with Iran.70 Mondale later concluded that “the ayatollah was needling us; he loved playing Carter and it didn’t cost him anything.”71
Phrasing the reply correctly put us all on a tightrope. Rafshoon argued that a fighting president might have a chance and at least would go out with his head held high. He had long urged that Carter’s gloomy public pull-your-socks-up messages about energy, inflation, and diminished expectations should be balanced by the promise to the American people that “we can solve our problems; we can be strong and at peace; we can get control of our energy problems; we can make our economy work.”72 He felt that if Carter had been ready to “bomb the bastards” in Tehran when the embassy was taken, even if the hostages had been put on trial or executed, “we would have won the election.”73
“IT’S OVER, BOYS”
On that Sunday when we returned from Chicago, the president had one last chance. As everyone was discussing what Carter should say, Rafshoon suggested he “just tell them to go to hell. Really get out there and tell them we’re not going to be pushed around anymore.” Carter retorted that the Iranians might put one hostage on trial each day until he folded, so he said he would go on television and simply say the Iranians had taken a positive step, but he would not be influenced by the calendar, and things would not happen right away.
His three closest senior advisers—Ham, Jody, and Rafshoon—felt that was too weak. Rafshoon again told the president to give a really angry reply: “I’d tell them to go fuck themselves.” Carter retorted: “Will that get the hostages out?” And Ham said no, “but the American people want to hear it.” Carter replied: “Oh yeah, what if they decide to take the hostages out in the courtyard and shoot them? And maybe shoot one every hour? I’m not going to let that happen.”74
So the president went on television, interrupted the Redskins football game, and made a mild statement to let the Iranians’ offer work itself out, not influenced by the election. Carter did resume campaigning after his statement, but the sudden break from Chicago, as I feared, reminded the American public in Technicolor of the humiliation of the hostage crisis. When he rejected the offer, the public figuratively threw up its collective hands and gave up on him. I recorded in my notes of November 3 that we had a depressing flight to Oregon and Washington State with “the heavy hand of defeat in the air.” But I noted that Carter had given his best speeches in Portland and Seattle, and that “he handled it like a true champion. I felt proud of him.”75
As we boarded Air Force One and took off for home, the president spoke with the press on the plane and joked that he would favor Mondale over Kennedy for the 1984 Democratic nomination. But then an ominous call came to the plane from Caddell. Four years earlier he had called Peanut One with the news that Carter was likely to win the presidency. Now to Air Force One he reported a massive erosion of support: “It’s over, boys,” Pat said. He explained that Carter was moving back up in the polls on Saturday; more than half the American people regarded Reagan as a risk, responding to the campaign ads portraying him as a simplistic cowboy who would shoot from the hip.
But then came the latest hostage incident, and it was too much. The focus had shifted back to Carter and Khomeini, and to a sense of frustration and humiliation. The unsuccessful trip back to Washington had driven home the final indignity; as one man told Caddell’s polling operation: “That little son-of-a-bitch can’t handle a two-bit ayatollah. I’ll take my chances on Reagan.”76
The Republicans played successfully on this feeling by saying that a vote for Carter was a vote for Khomeini; the number of people who felt the hostages would be back home quickly had diminished, and the number who believed the Iranian conditions were unreasonable doubled. Jody with a visible tear in his left eye, said: “Good news means bad news” about the hostages, since the latest offer had been a step forward, although not enough.77 Americans did not blame Carter for creating the hostage crisis, only for the disgrace of not resolving it.
When the president came out of his stateroom, I rushed up to him, hugged him, and with tears in my eyes said, “Mr. President, we have let you down.” I was overwhelmingly sad that Jimmy Carter had come so far, from tiny Plains to the Oval Office, and now was being rejected after accomplishing so much; that this good man had been rejected by voters who put him into office four years before.
But he was amazingly stoic. He told us not to inform Rosalynn until we landed at home in Georgia to vote. We touched down at 6:45 a.m. on Election Day, and I went into his cabin and told him that no matter what happened, I was proud of him and appreciated the opportunity to serve him. He replied: “You’re one of the finest people I’ve ever known. You’re like a son and brother to me.” We embraced and wept on each other’s shoulders.78
When the presidential motorcade arrived at Plains, he spoke at the train depot to his family, friends, and admirers, never hinting that he knew he was going to lose, although his speech reflected it. Fighting back tears, he talked about his roots in Plains and how much they had always meant to him. We then drove to his home, and then helicoptered to the hospital in nearby Americus to visit his mother, Miss Lillian, there. His son Jack and Rosalynn were in front of the helicopter. She was facing me and had obviously been crying, although she tried to keep up appearances. But the voters’ verdict was etched in her face, even before the first ballot had been cast—and why shouldn’t it have been? It is an odd thing to know the outcome of an election based on polling data before the voting has even begun.
The ride back on Air Force One to Washington was, in a word, depressing. When we landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and took Marine One back to the South Lawn of the White House that had been his home for four years, Carter spoke to several hundred people assembled from the administration. They were unaware of Caddell’s pessimistic report. I called Fran from my office and gave her Caddell’s projections—not just a loss, but a massive repudiation.
I then went home totally exhausted, physically and emotionally, not just from the last few days but from the accumulation of four years, knowing that despite all our accomplishments, we had not done enough to win the confidence of the American people for another term. Fran met me at the front door and we sobbed together. She had sacrificed so much to give me this extraordinary experience, raising our two young boys, Jay and Brian, while working part-time to supplement my government salary, never complaining about my ridiculous hours, always there with loving support and sound advice.
My deputy Bert Carp woke me by a phone call at 4:00 p.m. to tell me the exit polls showed Reagan burying Carter in a landslide. I was watching the dismal results with Fran and our two young sons, and we now had the difficult task of answering their questions: “Daddy, why did he lose?” “Why don’t people like him?” Then, shortly before nine that evening, I was suddenly told by the White House operator to rush downtown to the Sheraton Washington Hotel ballroom, where the president was going to make his public concession in about half an hour.
When the results came in from the East, South, and Midwest confirming his bleak forecast, Carter, without consulting any of his staff, called Reagan from the White House residence at his home in Southern California at 9:01 p.m. Eastern Standard Time to concede and to congratulate him. I went up on the stage in the hotel ballroom with members of his cabinet and my White House colleagues. Carter shook everyone’s hand and then at about 9:30 p.m. made his concession speech, instead of waiting until the polls closed in the West an hour and one-half later. It was the earliest presidential concession since 1904, when Alton Parker lost to Theodore Roosevelt, but there was no radio then to flash the news to the voters.
With a forced grin, the president told the weeping crowd: “I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you. So I can’t stand here tonight and say it doesn’t hurt.” I made a note to myself: “Hurts Dems in West?” Jody had urged him to wait until 11:00 p.m. so that Dem
ocrats on the West Coast would not be discouraged from voting not only for him but for congressional Democrats. Carter refused: “It’s ridiculous. Let’s get it over with.”79
Senior Democratic officeholders were furious. Representative Tom Foley of Washington, who would later become Speaker, said: “It was vintage Carter at his dead worst.”80 Tip O’Neill told Frank Moore from his home in Cambridge: “What in God’s name is wrong with you people? You guys came in like a bunch of jerks, and I see you’re going out the same way.”81
When a president loses an election, everyone has a reason. The House Majority Whip, John Brademas of Indiana, lost his seat and attributed it to high unemployment. But he caustically said that while Carter had come in as an antiestablishment candidate, once he arrived and settled in, he needed “to loosen up and be part of the give-and-take of politics.” Instead, this Rhodes Scholar-turned-practical politician said: “Carter had the attitude of a Calvinist white man’s burden regarding politics. He wasn’t a good politician.”82
Reagan won in a landslide, with 480 electoral votes to Carter’s 49, the president carrying only six states and the District of Columbia. This was not so much an overwhelming endorsement of Reagan, who took only 50.7 percent of the popular vote, or even a defection to Anderson, as it was a rejection of Carter, the greatest of an incumbent president in modern American history up to that point. Anderson won 6.6 percent of the popular vote, and in Carter’s view they were mainly Kennedy supporters seeking an alternative to Reagan. But Anderson got only 5.7 million votes, while Reagan’s margin of victory was 8.4 million. Even in the unlikely event that every Anderson voter had switched to Carter, Reagan would still have won by almost 3 million votes.
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FINAL DAYS
President Carter Page 107