And here was the problem: In 1980, the government was being run not by Lyndon Johnson or Hubert Humphrey, or even Jimmy Carter, but by Gerald Ford, who, in the oversimplified world of politics, was a Republican who espoused conservative principles, even if he did not really govern by them. The ills that were afflicting the American economy by the end of 1979 had festered over decades, but they had happened on the watch of a Republican President whose administration was staffed by many ardent conservatives, like Bill Simon and Alan Greenspan. Reagan would have had a far, far easier case if he had an all-Democratic Washington to run against, so that he could draw the contrast between their failures and his ideas in sharp, clear terms. But Ford? He’d proposed cuts in spending; he’d proposed tax cuts for business and investment; he’d assailed big government. How was Reagan going to paint himself as a radical change from that President?
And change is what the country wanted, after twelve continuous years with the same party in the White House. There would have been an appetite for something new even if conditions were reasonably good. “Twelve years is a long, long time for a party to hold office,” Brent Scowcroft noted when the campaign began. Moreover, as his second term hit the clubhouse turn, Ford was a deeply, deeply unpopular President, with approval ratings in the mid-20s—about where Richard Nixon was in his last days before resigning. Ford might be as lame a lame duck as can be imagined, but his presence in the Oval Office would make Reagan’s argument that much more difficult. (When John Sears, Reagan’s campaign manager, was asked at the end of 1979 what one condition he wished were different, he said, “I’d like to jump into a time machine, go back to 1976, and recount those votes in Ohio and Mississippi.”)
Yet, paradoxically, despite Ford’s unpopularity, he posed one more direct threat: He was President of the United States and he cordially despised Ronald Reagan.
Part of it was intensely personal: Reagan’s primary challenge had almost deprived him of the nomination in 1976, had cost him immeasurable time, money, and energy, and had barely lifted a finger for him in the fall. “His lack of campaigning,” Ford said to reporter and friend Thomas DeFrank, “was one of the three or four reasons that I lost the popular vote to Carter and almost lost the election.”
Part of it was envy; unlike Ford’s troubled relationship with speech, Reagan could bring a crowd to tears, bring it to laughter, bring it to its feet. “He had a helluva flair,” Ford told DeFrank.
And part of it was the simple fact that, in DeFrank’s words, “he neither liked nor respected the former Hollywood actor. He considered Reagan a superficial, disengaged, intellectually lazy showman who didn’t do his homework, and clung to a naïve, unrealistic, and essentially dangerous worldview.”
Armed with the White House, a President, even one with Ford’s standing (or lack of it) could put roadblocks in the path of a Presidential campaign, leaking documents to undermine Reagan’s views on U.S.-Soviet relations or tax policy, painting a picture of Reagan as an elderly, out-of-touch candidate. Well, Reagan and his team reasoned, with Ford as unpopular as he is, we should be able to overcome his opposition. And anyway, once we get the nomination, party unity will be a snap. Nothing will bring Republicans together like the man Ronald Reagan will be running against.
And in their certainty about the identity of their opponent, the Reagan team was in full agreement with just about every player in the political universe.
FOR ALMOST EVERY INHABITANT of the political universe, the identity of the 1980 Democratic Presidential nominee was a given, and had been from the moment Jerry Ford had claimed victory on Election Night 1976. Senator Edward Moore Kennedy was the heart and soul of the party, heir to two martyred brothers, heir as well to the hopes that survived the loss and grief. More than fifteen years had passed since Dallas, and time had erased any shadow that might have dimmed the memory of Jack Kennedy. JFK was not the President who had misguided America into a senseless war or a man with a reckless, dangerous personal life. He was forever a dashing young leader, with a glamorous wife and engaging children, a dazzling smile, flashing wit. Moreover, in the harder times of the late 1970s, with inflation eroding a fifth of a family’s savings every year, with a crippling industrial recession shuttering plants and factories across the Midwest, Jack Kennedy was a link to better times, before the war and the spread of crime and racial upheaval and generational revolt, before the growing sense that America’s best days were behind us. And in Robert Kennedy, all of the yearnings for a different kind of country could be invested in a sense of lost possibility. Bobby had never held the reins of ultimate power, so imagination could grant him the power to resolve every dilemma of race, crime, hunger, war, generational divide.
Ted Kennedy carried all of this and more. He was the most natural politician of all of his brothers, genuinely embracing the backslapping and backroom camaraderie that Jack found bemusing and Bobby found agonizing. In more than fifteen years in the Senate, he had become skilled in the legislative arts; he was far more comfortable in the corridors of power and in the late-night negotiations over an amendment than his impatient siblings had been. He was a guiding force behind some of liberalism’s most significant legislative achievements. For good or ill, these were the measures that transformed America: the first immigration reform act; the National Voting Rights Act and its extensions; the Freedom of Information Act; the Gun Control Act; the campaign financing reform law; the comprehensive Selective Service reform act; the eighteen-year-old vote law; the Occupational Safety and Health Act; the war on cancer bills; the recodification of federal criminal laws; the Bilingual Education Act; the Fair Housing Acts; the age discrimination act; the airline and trucking deregulation bills; the Job Training Partnership Act. One of his severest journalistic critics wrote of him: “He has been an ally of blacks, American Indians, the poor, the sick, the aged, the mentally ill, starving refugees worldwide and immigrants. He has been an outspoken liberal, unafraid to take the controversial positions—on issues such as busing, abortion, gun control, the Vietnam War (late but forcefully), and capital punishment—that other senators clearly avoided.”
With these familial and senatorial legacies, the core blocs of the Democratic Party were in his corner: blacks and Hispanics, the barons of organized labor, the professional pols who still held power in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Jack had won their reluctant allegiance in 1960; Bobby had threatened them in 1968. Ted was one of their own. Back in 1976, when it seemed Jimmy Carter would win the White House in a walk, Ted and his troops had reconciled themselves to waiting until 1984. Carter was hardly their cup of tea—that moralizing, those self-aggrandizing platitudes—but the idea of another Kennedy challenging a sitting President for renomination in 1980? Better to wait. Then, incredibly, Jerry Ford had won! Carter could give all the speeches he wanted about the injustice of losing a campaign when he’d gotten almost a million and a half more votes than Ford, but the Democratic Party was not about to turn back to the guy who’d blown a bigger lead than Tom Dewey. If Carter did run again, he might be a problem in the South, and California Governor Jerry Brown might well take a run; he’d won a fistful of primaries in ’76 as the stalking horse for the “Anyone but Carter” movement. Still, there was no logical scenario for anyone but Ted Kennedy.
“I don’t think he can be denied the nomination if he wants it,” House Speaker Tip O’Neill had said just after the midterms, and at year’s end, at an informal poll taken among the insiders who attended Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn’s Christmas party in Georgetown, more than 150 of the 175 guests picked Teddy as the nominee. That same month, a CBS News poll showed Kennedy with a 53-16 lead over Carter, and showed him ahead even in the South.
Of course, there were those cleared throats and awkward silences among the party pros when a reporter would ask about . . . you know . . . the incident . . . the tragedy. Well, yes it was a terrible lapse, but that was more than a decade ago, and you can’t judge a man’s whole life by his worst moment. Look at his record on
child care, the Equal Rights Amendment, health care, Head Start. Look at that CBS-New York Times poll, for heaven’s sakes: 80 percent were familiar with the Chappaquiddick “incident” and 55 percent still said Teddy was “good under pressure.”
Among those without a strong personal or vocational interest in not offending the likely next President of the United States, the comments were far less prudent. For God’s sakes, he drove off a bridge in the middle of the night with a young woman, and she drowned! It took him hours to call anyone, and then he tried to cover it up! No, you didn’t hear that sort of comment in the more prestigious political circles, but it was there, not far under the surface. By the late 1970s, there were media voices that had not even existed when Jack and Bobby were running, voices not yet fully appreciated by the older political universe, voices that were willing, even eager, to put Teddy’s conduct front and center with the bark off.
The National Lampoon was a humor magazine a universe away from the days when political humor was Bob Hope joking about Eisenhower’s golf game or Mort Sahl’s brainy quips about John Foster Dulles. The Lampoon went straight for the jugular and often hit. In 1979, it ran a full-page “ad” for Volkswagen, showing the car floating on top of the water. “If Ted Kennedy Had Driven a Volkswagen,” the copy read, “He’d Be President Today.” Another issue featured a mock cover of the classic EC comic, Tales From the Crypt, that showed Kennedy accepting the nomination as the decomposed corpse of a young woman strode down the aisle with a placard reading: “CHAPPAQUIDDICK.” And Saturday Night Live, a late-night comedy show with a cutting edge and a huge audience among under-thirties, showed Ted Kennedy—played by Bill Murray—entering his Presidential announcement rally dripping wet and covered with seaweed. Kennedy partisans could shrug off the dark humor—“Most of those kids don’t even vote,” one Kennedy ally said—but they were early signs that the eleven-year-old incident had not exactly been consigned to the past.
Beyond those early hints of potential trouble were the shifts in the political terrain that had redefined what was public and what was private: most notably, the emergence of the women’s movement at the start of the 1970s. Back in 1960, and throughout his Presidency, Jack Kennedy’s compulsive, reckless philandering was regarded as none of the public’s business. During Bobby’s’ 68 campaign, a rookie speechwriter was bluntly instructed by a veteran reporter: “Just remember Rule 1—nothing that happens west of the Potomac is ever mentioned east of the Potomac.”
By the time the 1980 campaign season began, these rules had changed drastically. Teddy himself had been part of that change; when someone died in a car driven by a United States senator, that was hardly private. When the chairman of the House tax-writing committee jumped into a fountain with a professional stripper, when another powerful House chairman put his bedroom playmate on the public payroll, that was the public’s business.
And something else had changed, something that posed as big a threat to a Kennedy campaign as any. The women’s movement was marching under a powerfully provocative banner: “The Personal IS Political.” Don’t tell me about your voting record, the argument went, tell me if you help care for the kids, respect your partner, treat women as equals, not servants or concubines. There were those who scorned this line of attack—Could FDR pass that test? Should JFK have been tidying up during the Cuban Missile Crisis?—but in Ted Kennedy, the movement had found a vulnerable target. It wasn’t just Chappaquiddick but a life punctuated by chronic, alcohol-fueled philandering, with Kennedy behaving like a Lord of the Realm exercising his droit du seigneur. In the fall of 1979, writer Sussanah Lessard wrote a piece for the New Republic about Ted Kennedy’s extracurricular activities. When it was turned down, she took it to the Washington Monthly, a contrarian publication with a very low circulation but significant readership among Washington’s political class.
Titled “Kennedy’s Woman Problem; Women’s Kennedy Problem,” the article detailed the pattern of Kennedy’s assignations—sending a staff member to approach young women, the swift postcoital dismissals—and the assertion that Kennedy’s pattern suggested a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a large, babyish ego that had to constantly be fed. “I don’t believe men who really like women carry on in this way.” That piece, in turn, led to a brief Time magazine note that at a dinner party in Washington, “fourteen talented and interesting men and women spent an hour and a half talking of nothing but the sexual exploits of Edward Kennedy.”
The Kennedy camp would have been a lot more unsettled had Time reported on another dinner party, this one in New York, where former White House press secretary and PBS host Bill Moyers asked the women at the table, all cosmopolitan urbanites, all willing veterans of the sexual revolution, if they would vote for Kennedy for President. Not a single hand went up, not a single head nodded in affirmation.
And about those dazzling poll numbers? It was left to longtime Democratic pollster Peter Hart to note that “nobody has measured the issue correctly. To really understand the impact of Chappaquiddick, it is necessary to ask a series of questions that are much more oblique.” Nor, he might have added, did the relentlessly, incurably credulous reporting of polls ever contemplate the possibility that people might change their minds when they learned more. Kennedy hadn’t run for President in 1972 or 1976—now he was. And the press, out of its deep-seated instincts, was turning its guns squarely in his direction.
IT WAS A SIMPLE act of fate that made the difference for Gary . . . as simple as who was at the desk next to his on the floor of the Senate.
Dale Bumpers had come to the Senate a little less than half a century after he had entered the world with prospects as barren as the land on which he was raised. Charleston, Arkansas, was a town of 851, set in western Arkansas’s Hill Country, a town so small, Bumpers would say later, that “after the town band was formed, there wasn’t anybody left to watch the parade.” It had one paved street, and the dust from passing cars would choke his lungs; there was no running water, no sewer system. He and his brothers and sisters went shoeless in the summer; his mother made his underwear from sacks of flour. He lost a four-year-old brother to dysentery because the town doctor was too ignorant to take the simple steps that would have saved him. What put a light in his life was the journey his father took him on to Booneville in 1938 to see President Roosevelt on a campaign swing. When Dale asked his dad why FDR was holding on to the arm of his son, his father said, “He can’t walk. He had polio when he was thirty-nine years old and he wears steel braces on his legs that weigh twelve pounds. Now, you boys should let that be a lesson to you. If a man who can’t even walk and carries twelve pounds of steel on his legs can be President, you boys have good minds and good bodies, and there isn’t any reason you can’t be President.” His dad was the civic center of Charleston, president of the school board, head of the local Methodist church, served a spell in the state legislature.
The GI Bill got Dale to college and law school, but it was at Northwestern that he got a call in the middle of the night: his parents had been in an auto accident, a drunk driver had hit them head-on. Neither survived. Bumpers scratched out a living—barely—running an appliance store and practicing law out of a cubicle-sized office. But he’d followed his father’s footsteps to civic leadership; he helped make Charleston the first town in the South to voluntarily integrate its schools after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision and got the Methodist church integrated as well.
Still, it was sheer madness for Bumpers to challenge the segregationist ex-governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, when Faubus decided to run for another term in 1970. Bumpers sold the small herd of cattle he’d assembled, begged funds from a reluctant family, and traveled the state, speaking to the state’s pride, how tired he was of its low ranking on education and income and health, how tired they all must be of muttering, “Thank God for Mississippi.” And despite all the attacks on him—why, he’d actually said one time he didn’t necessarily believe that every word
in the Bible was literally true!—he swamped Faubus in the primary runoff, and in November unseated Republican Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. Two years later, he won reelection with 75 percent of the vote. But the governorship bored him, and, besides, Dale was thinking of a much bigger office, and how the hell could you run for President as governor of Arkansas?
So he ran for the Senate, taking on the legendary J. William Fulbright, who’d been there for a quarter century, who’d traveled the world, created the scholarship named after him. What Bumpers understood was that Fulbright was distant, rarely came home, had an aloof quality completely at odds with Bumpers’s down-home way with voters. And on Primary Day, Bumpers beat Fulbright by thirty points.
When Bumpers came to Washington in 1975, he found himself seated next to another freshman senator, Gary Hart. All he knew of Hart was that he’d run McGovern’s campaign in ’72, somehow turning the long-shot anti-war champion into the Democratic Presidential nominee. He soon discovered that Hart was whip smart, a glutton for books, magazine articles, essays, news features, with an ironic distance from the idiocies of politics that mirrored his own. Bumpers and Hart were gym rats as well, working out with weights and the machines, and soon Bumpers became Hart’s best friend in the Senate. They were, in one sense, an odd couple. Hart recoiled at the demands of politics, hated the glad-handing, the purposeless chats with contributors and the party hacks, the photo opportunities and the treacle that passed for so much political speechmaking. He wanted votes because of his ideas, because of what he proposed to do about military waste, the environment, the demands of a global economy.
Bumpers, by contrast, fully embraced the gestures and pieties that warmed the political climate. He could debate the intricacies of tax policy and geopolitics as well as any senator; but, back home, he had a satchelful of stories about small-town lawyers and retrogrades that could render a courthouse square crowd weak with laughter.
Then Everything Changed Page 39