It was going fine, but he couldn’t fully rid himself of the distractions that were buzzing inside his head like a fly at a picnic table. Just a few days ago, he’d had to can Earl Butz, his Agriculture secretary who was wildly popular with the farmers, after a magazine writer revealed that Butz had told an obscene, repellently racist joke (And who was the magazine writer? John Dean! The guy who told the Watergate committee about “the cancer on the Presidency!” The guy must be planning to make a career out of taking down Republican Presidents!) And then there was the fact that he was coming to genuinely dislike Carter, whose profession of Christian love could not conceal a mean, spiteful streak; how many times was Carter going to link Ford to Nixon’s crimes and misdemeanors?
So maybe he wasn’t fully focused when it was Max Frankel’s turn to question him. Frankel, an associate editor of the New York Times and former Moscow correspondent, took one of Ronald Reagan’s central themes from the primary and threw it right at the President:
“I’d like to explore a little more deeply our relationship with the Russians,” he said. “They used to brag back in Khrushchev’s day that because of their greater patience and because of our greed for business deals, that they would sooner or later get the better of us. Is it possible that despite some setbacks in the Middle East, they’ve proved their point? Our allies in France and Italy are now flirting with Communism. 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. We’ve bailed out Soviet agriculture with our huge grain sales. We’ve given them large loans, access to our best technology, and if the Senate hadn’t interfered with the Jackson Amendment, maybe we—you—would’ve given them even larger loans. Is that what you call a two-way street of traffic in Europe?”
From the command post just offstage, the Ford team of advisors relaxed. He was ready for this one, ready to hit it out of the park. All through the primary, he’d had to push back against Reagan’s charge that “Dr. Kissinger and Mr. Ford”—that bastard Reagan knew how much that sounded like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”—had given away the store to Moscow. He’d been drilled on just how to argue that the Helsinki Accords did not accept Soviet domination as a fact of life. It was the perfect question from which to pivot and raise the issue of Carter’s utter lack of foreign or defense policy experience.
“If we turn to Helsinki—” Ford began, “I’m glad you raised it, Mr. Frankel. In the case of Helsinki, thirty-five nations signed an agreement, including the secretary of state for the Vatican—I can’t under any circumstances believe that His Holiness, the Pope, would agree by signing that agreement that the thirty-five nations have turned over to the Warsaw Pact nations the domination of Eastern Europe. It just isn’t true. And if Mr. Carter alleges that His Holiness by signing that has done it, he is totally inaccurate.” (Let’s see the peanut farmer explain that to the Catholics!)
“Now,” Ford continued, “what has been accomplished by the Helsinki Agreement? Number one, we have an agreement where they notify us and we notify them of any military maneuvers that are to be undertaken. They have done it. In both cases where they’ve done so . . .”
And then he added a final flourish, one he meant as a shout-out to the millions of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians with strong sentimental ties to the Old Country: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
No Soviet domination of Eastern Europe? Did he just say that? —In a room just offstage where the Ford high command was watching, Stu Spencer looked over at National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft, Spencer said later, “turned white.”
—In another room just offstage, where the Carter high command was watching, Carter’s campaign foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski whispered, “Thank you, God, thank you, God.”
—In his home in Northbrook, Illinois, Aloysius Mazewski, president of the Polish-American Congress, leapt to his feet. “Is he insane?” he bellowed.
—From an editing bay in St. Louis, where he was working on TV commercials, Doug Bailey stared at the screen and thought to himself: “This is a bad dream—I did not hear what I just heard.”
—And from the pressroom inside the bowels of the Palace of Fine Arts, where dozens of reporters were seated at long tables, watching the debate on TV monitors, came an insistent hum, a murmur that grew in intensity, as a hundred bodies leaned forward, a hundred minds came to the same, sudden realization: There is blood in the water!
It was now Carter’s turn to respond. But as moderator Pauline Frederick began to call on him, Max Frankel held up his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, with an incredulous smile on his face. “I—could I just follow—did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it’s a Communist zone, whereas on our side of the line the Italians and the French are still flirting with the possibility of Communism?”
The President began his answer cautiously, as a soldier might walk across a field likely to be infested with mines.
“I don’t believe, uh—Mr. Frankel that uh—the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” (Okay, safe enough—Tito had broken with Moscow back in 1948.) “I don’t believe that the Rumanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” (Okay, Ceauşescu had been drifting steadily away from the Soviets.) And then . . .And then the light went on in his head. Hearts and minds and souls, they had gone over this a dozen times in the mock debates. Hearts and minds and souls. And he paused and looked at the panelist with a smile.
“And, Mr. Frankel—I am the Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the United States. Of course I know that the Soviet Union exercises military control over Eastern Europe; they have four divisions in Poland alone. But that’s precisely my point: Why are those troops there? They are there because Moscow knows that if the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians were free to choose their destiny, they would never choose the Communist path. They would never embrace a system that stifles dissent, that denies them the right to worship God as their faith decrees. In their hearts and minds and souls, they are not and never will be dominated by the Soviet Union—and while we seek to preserve the peace, a Ford administration will stand with them in their desire for liberty.”
In the room just offstage, the color came back into Brent Scowcroft’s face.
In another room just offstage, Zbigniew Brzezinski swore softly.
In his home in Northbrook, Illinois, Aloysius Mazesk nodded approvingly.
From an editing room in St. Louis, Missouri, Doug Bailey brought his fist down on a table and yelled, “He shoots, he scores!”
And from the pressroom in the bowels of the Palace of Fine Arts, a hundred reporters leaned back in their chairs. No harm, no foul.
NO HARM, NO FOUL. It was a passing moment in the debate, one that stirred little comment in the first moments after it concluded. Ford had not, after all, broken new ground by praising the courage and faith of Eastern Europeans who lived under Communism.
And that is exactly why it changed the course of the election.
“All you have to do,” said Doug Bailey much later, “is to ask yourself what it would have cost us in momentum and time if Ford had stubbornly insisted on arguing that the Poles and Czechs and Hungarians didn’t consider themselves under Soviet domination. Imagine a week of outrage from every Democratic congressman and mayor from Milwaukee and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Imagine the backbiting from the Reagan camp, all those whispers to the columnists that Ford didn’t know what the Soviets were doing, and that Kissinger didn’t care. And then we’d have had Ford—whose big campaign argument was that Carter didn’t know enough about the world—backing and filling and finally acknowledging, ‘Yes, I misspoke.’ Thank God that didn’t happen.”
What happened instead were the
kinds of conversations, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million of them, that voters—ordinary people, regular folks, citizens who have jobs and families, whose interest in politics is not a daily obsession—have with each other during every election season. They took place in Ohio, in the butcher shops in German neighborhoods in Cincinnati, in the grocery stores of Toledo, in the chats after Sunday mass in Akron’s St. Mary’s Church and in Cleveland’s St. Stanislaus Church. Others took place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the AJ Polish Deli on West Lincoln, in the beauty shops along National Avenue, in the Italian and Serb enclaves in Lincoln Village, where anti-Communism was an article of faith. A lot of them liked what Ford had said. They had had a moment there when they were ready to believe the President was as clueless as the comedians said, but, no, he knew the score. They weren’t sure who they would vote for, but it was good to hear the President say what he’d said about the bastards who had overrun the Old Country.
It was just another ripple in the campaign, one of dozens, hundreds that would alter the flow of the campaign ever so slightly.
And it was exactly the kind of ripple Jimmy Carter’s campaign didn’t need . . . not at all.
IT HAD BEEN the triumphant night of his life—and it could stand as the symbol of the trouble.
Little more than three months ago, he had stood at the rostrum of Madison Square Garden as 20,000 Democrats, in the sure and certain knowledge of their party’s political resurrection, cheered his nomination for President, shouted themselves into a frenzy as he proclaimed, as he had at every speech for almost two years, “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for President.” The words had seemed ludicrous when he began his improbable campaign more than two years earlier. In no other year could a figure like Carter have seriously contemplated a Presidential run. Since the Civil War, no Southerner had ever been elected to the White House. Moreover, the one-term governor of Georgia was so unknown that when he went on the popular game show What’s My Line? no one guessed his identity—and the panelists weren’t blindfolded. When he’d announced his candidacy, the Atlanta Journal- Constitution had headlined: “Jimmy Who? Is Running for What?”
What he and his skeletal staff had realized, however, was that in this first post-Watergate election, all the rules of the game were out the window. No experience in Washington? Great—he hasn’t been corrupted. No link to the unions, the Democratic Party machines? Yes! A breath of fresh air! He was from a plain, small town in Georgia—in fact, that was the name of his home: Plains. And he lived there, farmed peanuts, taught Sunday school. His whole campaign was built around the iconic American symbol of the lonely stranger, come to save the people. He was Shane, Paladin, the Deerslayer, Gary Cooper in High Noon. He would stay not in fancy hotels, but in the homes of supporters, where he’d cook breakfast, make his own bed, carry his own garment bag! In the revulsion over the imperial presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, these gestures—economic necessities—became powerful virtues, even as his Southern roots became in themselves an argument for his candidacy. He rallied liberals to help him dispatch George Wallace in the Florida primary, and his victory there took on enormous significance. The endorsement of Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young spoke volumes about reconciliation between white and black. His homilies—“I want to see us once again have a government as good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as the American people” and “I will never lie to you”—were the perfect antidotes to the obscenity-speckled conspiratorial mutterings of the Watergate tapes.
So he had persevered over a weak Democratic field (no Ted Kennedy, not this close to Chappaquiddick; no Hubert Humphrey, who was very ill), and while a late entry by California Governor Jerry Brown had inflicted damage in the primaries, he had won the backing of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and the laying on of hands by the symbol of the Old Order clinched it for the Exemplar of the New.
And that was the trouble. Moments after he had told his party, and the nation, “we just want the truth again! . . . It is time for our governmental leaders to respect the laws no less than its humblest citizens,” he was surrounded at the podium by the very symbols of the Democratic Party he had defeated: Hubert Humphrey, the New Deal liberal; New York Mayor Abe Beame, the septuagenarian symbol of big-city clubhouse politics; George Wallace, of “segregation forever!” fame; Robert Strauss, Democratic National Chair, the very embodiment of the Ultimate Washington Insider, the honey-voiced sloe-eyed Keeper of the Secrets. It was, at root, a picture fundamentally at odds with the central premise of the Carter campaign: the Lonely Crusader, untainted by the greasy business of wheeling and dealing, the back rooms and marble halls and cushy suites.
Jimmy Carter knew full well what was happening.
“That caused me horrible trouble,” he said much later. “I had run a kind of lonely campaign up to the convention; that’s my nature and it’s part of my political strength. . . . To campaign with local and state candidates not only removed the lonely, independent candidate image depending on the voter only but it was also a reversal of what I had been during the primary season. It contributed to the claim that I was a person of mystery, and that I was fuzzy on things. . . . I never could resolve that question.”
Beyond the inherent contradiction of his campaign was an enervating lack of passion among the core elements of the Democratic Party he now led. More than any candidate in memory, Jimmy Carter had run a character-driven campaign: Vote for me because of who I am, where I come from. It was, therefore, rootless, unmoored in any familiar ideological terrain. It was not driven by a demand for economic fairness, for an end to an unjust war, for enfranchising the voiceless. And because his campaign was so self-centered—literally—it was almost inevitable that sooner or later, voters began asking, with increasing skepticism, one question: Who is this guy? As columnist Richard Reeves wrote just before the election, “When nobody knows where you’ve come from, it’s hard for people to be confident about where you want to go.”
To one key traditional base of the party—the white working-class voters of the Northeast and Midwest—Carter was a stranger, invoking sentiments that rang, if not false, then odd. A “born-again” evangelical was a creature alien to the people of Buffalo, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee. It was not that long ago when others of Carter’s region and faith had seen in the candidacy of John Kennedy the hand of the Pope of Rome, the Antichrist. And for all the wattage of his smile, there was in Carter something guarded, suspicious in his interactions with the older Democrats, almost as if he feared the contagion of corruption would infect him should he embrace them too enthusiastically.
And they knew it; they could smell it. In Buffalo, New York, Democratic leader Joe Crangle told reporters the contest in this Democratic stronghold was about even. “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” he said. In Boston, Mayor Kevin White gossiped with reporters about the bad vibes.
“It’s not that he’s a Southerner,” White said. “It’s him: he’s a very strange guy, and people out there seem to sense it, too.”
They were sensing it, too, at Ford headquarters, hints that the same traditional Democratic base that had fled from George McGovern in 1972 over crime, welfare, race, and patriotism might be targets of opportunity again. “Peripheral Urban Ethnics,” the Nixon campaign had called them, but everyone knew what that really meant: white Catholics who worked with their hands. These voters had turned hard against the Republicans over Watergate and a lousy economy in the ’74 midterms, but now the polling, and the intuition of the insiders, suggested that these Democrats might be giving Ford a second look—enough of them, anyway, to give him a shot. Their response to Ford’s wholehearted embrace of Eastern Europe’s hunger for freedom convinced the campaign to double down on its message. In mid-October, they added a day to Ford’s Ohio schedule; he motorcaded through Akron, Toledo, Cleveland’s Sloane Village, recounting the depredations the Soviets had inflicted on Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and citing the “courageous figh
t of a Gdansk shipyard worker, Lech Walesa”—he pronounced the name “Letch Walooska,” but the audience cheered anyway—“who lost his job for standing up for the rights of workers.” On October 21, the day before the third and last debate, Ford flew to MacArthur Airport on New York’s Long Island, and drove across the Long Island Expressway to Hempstead in Nassau County, home to hundreds of thousands who had fled the increasingly unlivable city, home to Joe Margiotta’s muscular Republican machine. He then journeyed to the city itself, where, a year earlier, after he’d rebuffed a near-bankrupt New York’s plea for aid, a Daily News headline bannered: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” That night, he went to the Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf, a white-tie-and-tails banquet showcasing the political clout of New York’s archdiocese. After the obligatory self-effacing jokes—“If I offer a confession, I know His Eminence will pardon me”—the President concluded with an emotional paean to religious freedom, and recalled the struggle of Hungary’s József Cardinal Mindszenty, who had lived for fifteen years in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest after the Soviets had crushed the 1956 uprising.
Then Everything Changed Page 34