In the four weeks between Iowa and New Hampshire, the moderate wing of the Republican Party tried hard to turn Howard Baker into a credible alternative to Reagan. President Ford himself gave an interview to the New York Times, in which he said, “Everywhere I go, people tell me Ronald Reagan can’t be elected President.” More than three dozen prominent senators, governors, and other officials signed full page ads that ran in the Manchester Union-Leader, New Hampshire’s biggest newspaper, urging the voters to choose a Presidential candidate “who has proven experience, judgment, and temperament. . . . Your life may depend on it.” (The Union-Leader’s fiery publisher, William Loeb, ran front-page editorials denouncing the “Cabal of Cowards who lacked the brains, the guts, and the more manly body parts to back a genuine conservative.”)
On February 26, Reagan won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide, capturing more than 55 percent of the vote, to Howard Baker’s 24 percent. John Connally said he would put all his resources into South Carolina’s contest on March 8 (where Reagan beat him by a 2-1 margin); Phil Crane dropped out completely. John Anderson stayed in through the Massachusetts and Vermont primaries, and then announced that he would leave the Republican race to ponder the possibility of an independent run. For all practical purposes, the contest was over, although Howard Baker and John Connally did compete in later primaries, in states where Reagan participated in three uncontentious debates devoted to denunciations of Ted Kennedy and the Democratic Congress.
Reagan had won without breaking a proverbial sweat. There had been no compelling reason for him to plunge into the campaign frenzy, or to debate his rivals in settings where there was real pressure. Nor was there any reason for him to change the command or the direction of the campaign as it prepared for the general election. If Reagan’s nomination had come with a certain lack of energy or passion in the party . . . well, that would surely change when Reagan and the Republicans found themselves fighting for the White House against the man who symbolized everything they opposed.
After all, there was no doubt that Ronald Reagan would be running against Ted Kennedy . . . was there?
AMONG THOSE ON THE right, the idea of Ted Kennedy as the “liberal media darling” was no more questionable than the idea that water is wet. The press had helped create “Camelot,” running all those pictures of Jack and the adorable Caroline and John Jr., while studiously ignoring the President’s behavior. It had turned Bobby into a saintly martyr. It had lionized Ted, as well, the last lion, carrying the torch, the flag. But the conservatives’ indictment missed one key point. However left the press tilts, there is one bias that overrides any ideology: The press desperately wants to see itself as the tribune that holds the powerful to account, and there is no one who is seen as more powerful than a Presidential front-runner. Ted Kennedy was about to find that out in the days before his announcement: hit first by two quick jabs, then by a roundhouse right that staggered him.
On November 1, ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine show ran an interview with Kennedy that began with Tom Jarriel asking him:
“Senator, you cheated in college. You panicked at Chappaquiddick. Do you have what it takes to be President?”
Two days later, Saturday Night Live opened with that sketch showing the dripping wet Ted Kennedy arriving for his announcement.
The next night, in prime time, a one-hour CBS Reports was telecast, anchored by veteran correspondent Roger Mudd, a MacLean, Virginia, neighbor and longtime friend of Robert and Ethel Kennedy (it had, in fact, been Mudd who took Ethel’s hand on the night of June 4, 1968, and guided her to Robert Kennedy’s side in his last conscious moments). If the Kennedy camp assumed that these cordial relations with the family would yield friendly interviews, they were quickly disabused of that assumption.
In fact, said one Kennedy aide, “if we’d known how bad it would be, we would have sprung a surprise announcement three days earlier, and under the Equal Time Rule, the damn program would never have run.”
There was dramatic nighttime footage that retraced Kennedy’s 1969 Chappaquiddick accident, the footage making it almost impossible to believe the Senator’s account that he had turned onto a dirt road leading to a rickety wooden bridge by accident. Kennedy’s attempt to explain those circumstances was not helpful:
“. . . the circumstances at that—that particular eve—evening did not involve physical trauma, did involve an accident, did involve enormous sense of—of—of loss in terms of the—the life of an individual. . . . Now I have served in the United States Senate for sixteen years, I’ve taken positions, I’ve spoken out on issues . . . and there have been other factors that have impacted on my life and people will have to make that judgment.”
There was a seemingly innocent question about the private lives of public figures, and after Kennedy talked about “the natural inquisitiveness of people,” Mudd asked flatly:
“What’s the present state of your marriage, Senator?”
Kennedy, who had been living apart from Joan for some time, answered:
“Well, I think it’s a—we’ve had some difficult times, but I think we’ve—have—we’ve been able to make some very good progress, and it’s—I would say that it’s—it’s—it’s—I’m delighted that we’re able to share the time and the relationship that we do have.”
Most devastating was the question any candidate would pay a reporter to ask:
“Senator, why do you want to be President?”
What was clear from his first words was that, in the process of seeking endorsements, consulting with Congressional colleagues, governors, and party leaders, reaching out to old family friends and retainers, and raising money, neither Kennedy nor his campaign had ever bothered to think through that question. So the answer came out . . . like this.
“Well, I’m—were I to—to make the—the announcement and—to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country, that it is—has more natural resources than any nation in the world, has the greatest educated population in the world, and the greatest political system in the world. And yet, I see at the current time, after twelve years of Republican rule, that most of the industrial nations of the world are exceeding us in terms of productivity . . . And it just seems to me that this nation can cope and deal with its problems as it has in the past . . . And I would basically feel that—it’s imperative for this country to either move forward, that it can’t stand still, or otherwise it moves back.”
“Well, we got one break,” Kennedy aide Dun Gifford said, when the broadcast ended. “No one was watching.”
In conventional TV terms, Gifford was right; only 17 percent of the TV audience tuned in; more than three times that number were watching the first network telecast of the blockbuster shark-bites-man movie Jaws on ABC. Among those “no ones,” however, was every political journalist, every operative, every financial contributor, and every citizen-activist who had been drawn into politics over the last twenty years, from Manchester to Des Moines to Milwaukee to Westwood. And, like that far larger Jaws audience, what they saw was . . . blood in the water.
And it was not just that audience. Yes, in an age long before computers and streamed video found their way into millions of homes, “Teddy” was seen in its entirety only once. But the half-life of the broadcast was significant, not just in the clips that led the morning newscasts the next day, or the evening news later that night, but in hoots of derision that came from some of Kennedy’s most ardent admirers in the press.
Mary McGrory, the Washington Star liberal who all but worshipped at the Kennedy shrine, wrote that the program “reveals that the Senator, even when invited to expand on the themes of his own choosing, is not articulate or even coherent.” Jimmy Breslin wrote that “I found Kennedy annoying, wanting, disturbing . . . I think people will think [about Chappaquiddick] ‘if this guy doesn’t care about what happened to the girl, why is he going to care about me and my kids?’ ” The New York Times’s Anthony Lewis described Kennedy as “stumbling, inarti
culate, unconvincing.”
From his room in the Savery Hotel in Des Moines, Gary Hart and two of his aides watched the program with a mix of disbelief and delight. For Hart, who had believed from his first days in politics that ideas were the keys to victory, the idea that a major political figure like Kennedy could not explain what he wished to do with Presidential power was almost unfathomable. For his aides, who were thinking in less cerebral terms, the sight of a highly respected newsman like Roger Mudd asking about Chappaquiddick meant that they would not have to fuel the “character controversy,” thus risking exposure by a press that would deplore such tactics, even as it soaked up every revelation and rumor.
For the record, Press Secretary Kathy Bushkin issued a statement to the two Des Moines-based wire service stringers and a Des Moines Register reporter-intern, the only ones following Hart on this visit.
“Senator Hart,” it said, “is staking his campaign on the ideas and proposals he has set forth in the 177 pages of his book, A New Democracy.” Off the record, she offered to bet $100 with any member of the press who thought Kennedy would participate in an Iowa debate.
Neither the CBS broadcast nor the harsh reviews kept Kennedy’s announcement from dominating the political news of November. On the morning of November 10, the Senate Caucus Room was ablaze with lights from the network crews, every square foot of the cavernous chamber packed with longtime Kennedy supporters, curious Congressional staffers, and several platoons of journalists.
His speech, crafted by a committee that included Ted Sorensen, Carey Parker, Dave Burke, and Bob Shrum, was a compendium of liberal pieties, coupled with a pointed assault on “twelve long years of Republican misrule.”
“The Nixon-Ford years,” he said, “put people before profits, corporations before compassion, wealth before workers. Gerald Ford is a nice man, but he has stumbled into misadventure after mistake, and what has been lost is a sense of hope for the future. America needs a Presidency at the center of the action, fighting for the dream that must never die.”
While the announcement was packed with proposals—universal day care, universal health insurance, a return to wage-and-price controls—it did not stop a series of hostile questions from the press, beginning with columnist Bob Novak asking, “How long did it take your staff and your speechwriters to figure out why you want to be President?” and ending with CBS’s Leslie Stahl asking, “What would you say to millions of women who want to know if Chappaquiddick and the rumors about your conduct as a married man make you unfit for the White House?”
Later that day, Kennedy flew to Boston, where he repeated his announcement in the historic setting of Faneuil Hall, then flew to Manchester, New Hampshire, and Des Moines, Iowa. It was the premise of the Kennedy campaign that victories in those first two states would effectively end the nomination contest. More than a premise, it was an assumption rooted in the numbers in the polls, the instincts and inclinations of the pols, and the accumulated wisdom of the press.
Only a few outliers among these circles asked what was a hopelessly naïve, embarrassingly simplistic question: Suppose it didn’t exactly happen?
GARY HART DIDN’T WIN the Iowa caucuses. He did much better than that.
When Ted Kennedy touched down in Des Moines that November evening in 1979, it looked like the Democrats would not even need to hold the caucuses. Fifteen thousand greeted him at a boisterous rally in the Convention Center, and just about every significant Democrat from Senator John Culver to Congressman Tom Harkin to ex-governor and Senator Harold Hughes was there for the laying on of hands. It was that very success that led to Kennedy’s first trouble in Iowa. Late that night at the bar of the Savery Hotel—the all-but-official Ground Zero for information, rumors, speculation, and wisecracks—a Kennedy advance man, a familiar campaign figure going back twenty years, took a sip from his fourth Scotch and soda, and said to a table of reporters, “It’s like that governor from Louisiana once said: The only way Teddy doesn’t crack 60 percent here is if he’s caught with a live man or a dead . . . uh . . . well . . .”
The reporters kept that unfortunate image to themselves, but not the number. Since it had come from the campaign itself, it replaced the quadrennial attempt by the press to figure out how to measure a win. Four years earlier in New Hampshire, Ronald Reagan’s state chair had airily suggested his candidate would win two-thirds of the vote, thus making Reagan’s tie against a sitting President look like a defeat. Now, thanks to the hapless Kennedy staffer (who found himself dispatched to Utah the next morning), a Kennedy landslide was the officially sanctioned benchmark. And no matter how dominant a figure Ted Kennedy was, racking up 60 percent in a multi-candidate field was a daunting proposition.
It was a field that included California Governor Jerry Brown, who was campaigning in Iowa solely for the right to be included in the Des Moines Register debate; South Carolina Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, whose razor-sharp mind was disguised by a voice that sounded remarkably like the old radio character Senator Beauregard Claghorn (of South Carolina); ex-Pennsylvania governor and cable-TV millionaire Milton Shapp, making his second run at the job; and California Senator Alan Cranston, running as a peace candidate devoted to sharp decrease in all military spending—except for the B-1 bomber, responsible for thousands of California jobs.
It was a candidate who was not running, however, who proved to be as significant an obstacle to Ted Kennedy’s Iowa fortunes as the mob of actual candidates.
Ever since his last-minute, “I still don’t believe it” loss in 1976, Jimmy Carter had made no secret of his desire for another shot at the White House.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable,” he said over and over, “that a candidate who wins a million more votes than the next man has a legitimate claim on his party.” In fact, Carter felt so strongly about his claim on the nomination that he felt no need to invest months of his time begging for votes in Iowa; he’d done that already, he’d won the popular vote by a greater margin than John Kennedy and Richard Nixon combined. He would wait, at least until Iowa and New Hampshire were done, and then let his natural base in the South propel him to the lead with a series of primary victories on “Southern Super Tuesday” later in the spring. That strategy required one crucial element: Ted Kennedy had to be stopped before he became inevitable.
That was not, of course, the explanation given by Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan, the two young Carter aides who had engineered his ’76 nomination, for their presence in Iowa in early January. They were, they explained, “visiting old friends, reliving good times,” and providing commentary for ABC’s TV and radio networks. What they did not explain was that they were meeting with Gary Hart’s Iowa organizers, providing them with invaluable lists of caucus goers from 1976, and reaching out to those caucus goers with suggestions on “how to keep the nominating process open, how to give Democrats from around the nations the chance to be heard on who should lead the party to victory.” Not that the Carter backers needed much guidance; many of them came from inside Iowa’s thriving evangelical community, with strong views about the private behavior, or misbehavior, of public men, and the prospect of a Ted Kennedy Presidency . . . well, if a vote for Gary Hart could help prevent that disaster, fine.
Kennedy himself campaigned as front-runner, as though the successes of the McGovern and Carter campaigns had never happened. He stayed out of the four debates among Democrats, and his speech at the Jefferson- Jackson Day Dinner was aimed solely at “the crimes, misdemeanors, misadventures, and misbegotten failures of the Nixon-Ford administration.” It was Gary Hart whose speech stirred the most reaction: In simple, blunt language, he told the assembled Democrats that “we must face hard facts: some of the programs and policies that have fostered our prosperity and progress for more than thirty years have ceased to work. We will not forge a better future if we cling to the past.”
In the days just before the caucuses, Kennedy suffered another media blow, one that came not from a rival campaign, nor from a p
olitical reporter. Reader’s Digest, the second-biggest-selling magazine in the U.S., best known for its evocations of a simpler, small-town America, published a lengthy investigative report on Chappaquiddick, using computer studies to prove that Kennedy had to have been driving at an excessive rate of speed. Worse for Kennedy was a nationally aired TV spot promoting the story, featuring a trench coat-clad “reporter” describing an event “which may have changed history. This is Chappaquiddick—and this—is the bridge.” In the small towns and farm communities of Iowa, where back issues of Reader’s Digest could be found in thousands of attics and basements, the article, and the commercials, carried heavy weight.
On Monday, January 21, on a dry, relatively mild night, more than 90,000 Democrats attended the Iowa caucuses. When the arguments and the horse trading and vote swapping were done, Ted Kennedy had won 38 percent of the precinct delegates . . . and Gary Hart had won 33 percent. For the broadcast networks that night, the story line was obvious.
“Ted Kennedy’s ‘Inevitability Express’ may have jumped the tracks tonight,” CBS’s Dan Rather reported from Des Moines. When Kennedy appeared on the late-night network specials, the questions were virtually identical: “Is your campaign in trouble?” The next day’s political headlines asserted “A Hart-Stopper for Ted,” “The Front-Runner Stumbles,” and, from the now-conservative New York Post: “Teddy Unsteady.”
For his part, Hart expressed gratitude that Iowans “have given me the chance to take my campaign forward, and offer my ideas about how to meet the challenges of the future.” And his campaign breathed a sigh of relief that he had finished second, not first.
Then Everything Changed Page 42