“A win,” his closest aide, Billy Shore, reflected, “would have overwhelmed us. We would simply not have had the resources to deal with the onslaught of the press, the demands on his time, the drain on the money. What we needed was a surprise that began to narrow the choices of the Democrats. And that’s exactly what we got.”
The Kennedy forces argued that “a win is a win is a win. We got more votes than anyone else. Period.” (“That’s what President Muskie said in New Hampshire,” shot back the Boston Globe’s Curtis Wilkie.) Another Kennedy aide said, “Thank God for the primary calendar. We have a month until the next test—and it’s in our own backyard.”
He was right about the calendar and the geography. In a larger sense, he was dead wrong, on both counts.
The four weeks between Iowa and New Hampshire gave the Hart campaign the most precious of all gifts: time. The candidate whose press office had had to beg for a line or two was now besieged by requests for interviews, profiles, face time. Dozens of reporters, columnists, TV bigfeet and their camera crews were asking for—or demanding—access. Hart volunteers in states across America were calling, pleading for a day or two of the Senator’s time: They want to see him in Cleveland! . . . I’ve got three hundred contributors in Pacific Palisades—that’s three hundred grand if he’ll do a Q and A! . . . We can fill the Union Theater if he can come to Madison, and remember, Wisconsin was McGovern’s first primary win! The campaign was still running on financial fumes, with payless paydays for staff members, with money being wired into bank accounts to keep the phones and electricity in campaign offices from being turned off. And some of the more savvy veterans of past insurgent campaigns had begun to notice a potentially fatal problem: In some of the biggest states, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, the campaign had failed to file full slates of delegates. If those slates were not completed quickly, it didn’t matter how well Hart might do in those later contests; he would have deprived himself of hundreds of potential convention votes.
Had the New Hampshire primary come a week or so after Iowa, the Hart campaign would have had no time to deal with any of this; the demands of the first-in-the-nation contest would have taken all of the resources, all of the energy. Instead, there was a month with nothing in between Iowa and New Hampshire. That calendar had been specifically pushed by supporters of both Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy to ensure that an unknown candidate would not be able to score a surprise in Iowa, and then catapult into New Hampshire a week later. Now, that calendar was giving Gary Hart breathing room.
Under the direction of Tim Kraft, who had been national field director of Carter’s 1976 campaign, Hart supporters succeeded in filling out full delegate slates in virtually every state, as Hart stole a day every now and then from New Hampshire to campaign elsewhere, hitting college campuses wherever he went in search of volunteer troops. (At Occidental College, a gangly nineteen-year-old undergraduate from Hawaii shook hands with Hart while a friend snapped a picture. “I’m going to hold on to that,” said Barry Obama. “Might come in handy someday.”)
With painful memories of the divisions that had splintered the Democrats in 1968 and 1972, Hart’s forces were instructed to broaden the slates beyond the reformers’ obsession with blacks, women, and the young. Find young union leaders, women bankers, black business folks, and for God ’s sake, don’t tell us you can’t find any Catholics in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who are for Gary!
Equally important was the campaign’s success in tapping new sources of campaign money. Back in 1972, a young entrepreneur named Morris Dees had created a highly successful direct-mail effort for McGovern, signing up supporters who agreed to contribute $10 a month or more. Using a similar device—with a $25-a-month pledge and coupon books to make the club seem more official—the “Hart for President” club began generating hundreds, then a few thousand, dollars a day. Hart’s campaign also reached out to a whole new generation of businesspeople, whose work, and whose existence, was unknown to the more traditional insiders who dominated Ted Kennedy’s campaign. In California’s Silicon Valley, where technology geeks had become multimillionaires, Gary Hart’s blend of social liberalism and pro-growth economics was striking a chord among the creators of Tandy, Commodore, Texas Instruments, and Atari, and among younger entrepreneurs like thirty-one-year-old Richard Dennis, who said, “I am trying to get a Democrat nominated who’s not in the special interest generation.” (Hart had even sent his official announcement to users of a commercial online information service called CompuServe. When one of Kennedy’s campaign chiefs was told about it, he said: “‘CompuServe’? What is that, a ball machine for tennis players?”)
And Hart’s appeal went beyond the computer world. A new financial player named Mike Milken, who specialized in raising venture capital for start-ups, was particularly helpful tapping into colleagues. And in Hollywood, Warren Beatty was reviving the rock concerts that had raised the money to power George McGovern’s 1972 campaign.
That four-week spread between Iowa and New Hampshire also enabled Hart’s campaign to use one of its key resources—its deep familiarity with the Byzantine rules of the process—to use its funds in “creative” ways. In the post-Watergate world, before the lawyers began drilling loopholes and sinkholes in the campaign finance rules, there were strict limits on how much a campaign would spend in each state, based on population: In New Hampshire in 1980, the limit was $294,000. Some of the ways around this limit were obvious; campaigns would stay just across the border in Vermont or Maine and charge the costs to those states. They’d advertise on Boston radio and television and charge the costs to Massachusetts’s primary, where the limit was much higher. For Hart, something else was needed, some way to enable them to use the money now flooding into headquarters to overcome Ted Kennedy’s name, stature, and ties to the Democratic Party.
It was four days after the Iowa caucuses when a beaming Tim Kraft walked into a senior staff meeting at Hart headquarters in Denver and held up his hand.
“Has anyone ever heard of ‘delegate committees’?” he asked. After a moment of silence, Kraft explained. In most primary states, voters chose not only Presidential candidates, but slates of delegates; and those delegate candidates were also allowed to raise and spend money on their behalf. In the first week of February, Kennedy’s campaign began getting troublesome calls from New Hampshire: I saw three ads this morning on the Today show for guys I never heard of, but they’re running for delegates, and the ads are all about how great Gary Hart is. By the time the primary was over, more than $135,000 worth of ads, brochures, and mailings had been spent on Hart’s delegate committee. The Federal Communications Commission found violations of campaign spending limits, and sanctioned Hart’s campaign—eighteen months later.
If Kennedy’s campaign team misread the impact of the calendar, they made an even-bigger miscalculation in assuming that Teddy would benefit from New Hampshire’s proximity. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but in Kennedy’s case, it meant that New Hampshire voters had been consistently exposed to Kennedy’s career, and his political philosophy; and that was definitely a two-edged sword. All through the 70s, Boston television had shown southern New Hampshire, the state’s population center, the incendiary battles over school busing, with white working-class parents in South Boston—“Southie”—fighting to stop their children from being transported into the heavily black neighborhood of Roxbury. It was a policy Senator Kennedy had supported. For blue-collar voters in and around Manchester, who worked the mills and factories that had survived into 1980, the images of angry parents and frightened children struck with primal force. There was also the political reality that tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents had fled over the border to escape the burdens of “Taxachusetts”; in fact, New Hampshire was one of the only states in the Union that had neither an income nor a sales tax. For many of these refugees, “Massachusetts” was the symbol of the costs of government they no longer chose to bear. The “Live Free or Die” slogan on
New Hampshire license plates could have come with a footnote: “Live Free of Taxes.” The kind of liberalism championed by Kennedy, the kind that Massachusetts seemed to symbolize, was a hard sell once politicians crossed the border into Nashua, Manchester, and Concord, even to many Democrats.
And there was one other factor about the New Hampshire primary: It was open. Any voter, Democrat, Independent, or Republican, could choose to vote in either primary. For genuine independents, Gary Hart’s “heresies” on economic growth, on military reform, on the perils of overgrown government, struck responsive chords. For Republicans, there was something even more appealing about crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary: They wouldn’t have to wait until November to vote against Ted Kennedy. The walking, breathing embodiment of everything they were against was on the ballot right now.
The Kennedy campaign, for its part, stayed on a comfortable, familiar course, convinced that the close call in Iowa was an aberration. The state’s AFL-CIO held rallies that packed the Notre Dame hockey arena in Berlin and the Civic Center in downtown Manchester; students jammed into the theater at St. Anselm’s College and his television ads showcased Kennedy with his children, and with prominent Democrats who endorsed him. He still turned down all debates, leaving Hart and the other candidates to taunt him for his absence. Senator Hollings, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt’s crack about Jack from 1960, suggested that “Teddy might want to show a little less profile and a little more courage.” (Hollings also aimed one of his sharper darts at California Governor Jerry Brown. After listening to him explain that his campaign was “serve the people, save the earth, explore the universe,” Hollings extended his right hand, separated his middle and ring fingers, and said, “Live long and prosper, Jerry.”)
Hart’s campaign in those last weeks was a blur of eighteen-hour days, guided by New Hampshire native Jeannie Shaheen and scheduler Sue Casey: He worked the town dumps on Saturday morning; bantered with Connie and Maria at the Merrimack Restaurant in downtown Manchester; shook hands at plant gates at five a.m.
And then there was the annual Woodsman Conclave in Berlin, where fate took an ax to Ted Kennedy’s hopes for a landslide win.
Hart arrived clad in a checkered shirt, Levi’s, and boots, familiar garb for the Coloradoan. Passing over the offer to compete in the log sawing and pole climbing, Hart instead reached for a full-length double-bit ax, and eyed the three-foot target just twenty yards away. His first throw bounced off the target, but the cameras of the press corps had been out of position, and the gaggle yelled at him to try again. And he threw . . . and the ax revolved once, and then again—and hit square in the bull’s-eye—and stayed there.
The footage made every network weekend newscast, and became the image in every piece all that week in the run-up to the primary. It made the front page of every New Hampshire paper, including the Manchester Union-Leader, whose publisher, William Loeb, thought Ronald Reagan’s conservative credentials were shaky. Its impact was clearly felt when New Hampshire’s primary voters went to the polls on February 26.
Ted Kennedy once again got more votes than Gary Hart, winning 48,500 votes to Hart’s 46,300, with the other Democrats trailing far behind. And once again, Kennedy suffered a serious political defeat. “They say most accidents happen close to home,” CBS’s Bill Plante reported from the Sheraton-Wayfarer in Manchester. “Well, tonight, Senator Kennedy suffered a near disaster right in his own backyard.” The next day’s New York Daily News showed a front-page picture of a clearly discomfited Kennedy under the banner headline: “Hearing Hart Beats, Ted?”
Within a matter of days, two more pieces of bad news hit the Kennedy camp. First, on the morning after the New Hampshire primary, the senior staff learned what no campaign ever wants to hear: it was broke.
The premise of the campaign, fully understandable given his clear front-runner status, was that victories in Iowa and New Hampshire would effectively end the race just as it was starting. There was no reason not to sign up the whole first tier of consultants, pollsters, strategists, advance men, and media producers months ahead of time. Twenty years earlier, they had been hungry young men, happy to spend months in no-star motels for subsistence wages. Now they were no longer young, and it was their families who were hungry. From countless onetime foot soldiers came the same message:
“I have a mortgage, I have two college tuitions, I have a weekend getaway. I love Ted, but I can’t sign up for less than forty thousand dollars.”
Then there was the plane, the chartered 727 that cost $12,000 a day when it was flying, and $5,000 a day when it was just sitting on the damn tarmac. And there were the hotel rooms, and the meals on the road, and the phone bills, and the postage for the mailings . . . and when New Hampshire was over, the campaign had raised $4.1 million and had spent all but $160,000 of it. What was worse, the rules were so damned different from the way the game had been played. There were plenty of allies who’d be happy to write a $50,000 check to Ted, but they couldn’t—$1,000 a person was the maximum, and even if you got checks from husbands, wives, and children, that would take you only so far. And anyway, the friendliest supporters had already contributed, were, in the parlance of 1980, “maxed out.” The family had money, of course, but there was something most people didn’t know. Back in ’68, when Bobby jumped into the race at the last moment, the family had put millions into the campaign, fully expecting that they could raise it when the campaign ended. Robert Kennedy would either be President or a powerful senator. But after he was killed, the appetite for contributing to that effort faded; that money was never recovered. And now, with two “victories” that looked more like defeats, some potential donors were beginning to develop a serious case of buyer’s remorse.
Gary Hart’s campaign, by contrast, had been a guerrilla operation from the beginning, with unpaid volunteers doing the bulk of the logistical work, making the phone calls, advancing the candidate, leafleting the neighborhoods. Now that he was emerging as a contender, those next-generation entrepreneurs and their friends were starting to open their checkbooks, and the direct-mail solicitations of Morris Dees began to bear negotiable fruit.
And Warren Beatty was working the celebrity circuit again. While much of the Old Guard Democrats were in Ted Kennedy’s camp, the younger generation—Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Diane Keaton, and younger rock acts like the Talking Heads—helped bring large sums into Hart’s campaign.
‘I don’t believe this!” one of Hart’s senior advisors said a week after New Hampshire. “I think we’re gonna have more money than Ted!” He was cautioned, on pain of serious bodily injury, to keep that fact quiet until the last possible moment.
The second piece of news was, if possible, more devastating to Kennedy. On February 29, Jimmy Carter announced he would not be a candidate for President. “If I were to run,” he said from his front porch in Plains, Georgia, “I am confident I would win the nomination. But the other day, I was talking with my daughter, Amy, and she convinced me that my work as an international emissary of peace, spiritual leader, and symbol of goodwill is too important to be diverted into political conflict.”
The problem for Kennedy wasn’t that Carter posed any kind of threat to the liberal base that was the source of Kennedy’s strength. The problem was the damn calendar. When the Democratic National Committee designed the rules for 1980 nomination, Jimmy Carter’s supporters still held the whip hand; they very much wanted to keep the South as a key player in the process, something the Southern states wanted as well. So three major Southern states—Georgia, Alabama, and Florida—set their primaries for March 11. With Carter out of the race, and with the nomination rapidly turning into a two-person race, the voters in those three states found themselves with a clear choice: Ted Kennedy . . . or the guy who wasn’t Ted Kennedy.
In 1980, several million Southern whites, who had started pulling the Republican lever for President years earlier, remained enrolled in the party of their ancestors. For them, the Kennedys were the symbol of Northern
intrusion into their customs and mores. It wasn’t that they wanted to go back to segregationist days—hell, look at some of those football players wearing the uniforms of the Crimson Tide and the Gators and the Bulldogs now that integration was a fact of life!—but old wounds of pride still remained. And it was more than race; Teddy had lined up with the anti-war crowd, the longhairs, the flag burners, and, besides, did anyone believe we really knew the story of what had happened with him and that young girl?
By conventional measures, it would have seemed impossible for Gary Hart to exploit Kennedy’s weakness in the South. It was John and Robert Kennedy who had drawn him into politics in the first place; he had run the campaign of the most anti-war, “radical” Presidential nominee since William Jennings Bryan. His age, his dress, his whole affect spoke of a candidate utterly at odds with a Southern sensibility, one that included a deep reverence for the U.S. military and its traditions.
Except . . . one of Hart’s abiding passions as a senator had been military reform, a movement that argued, in Hart’s words “we are spending ourselves weak” by throwing billions at gold-plated weapons systems fated to break down in combat, to leave the U.S. forces weighed down, bereft of the mobility that won modern wars. This was by no means a movement from the ideological Left. The “Military Reform Caucus” that Hart helped found included Republicans like Representatives Charles Grassley, Newt Gingrich, Senator William Cohen. And he had become a very close friend of the forty-four-year-old Naval pilot who had become the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate in 1977 and whose father and grandfather were both senior admirals. Hart had traveled abroad with the liaison, even been a groomsman at the ex-pilot’s wedding, and had shared many conversations about defense policy . . . and about a potential political career for the ex-pilot.
Two weeks before the trio of Southern primaries, the pilot resigned his commission. A week later, TV ads began running throughout the region.
Then Everything Changed Page 43