Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  “I’m retired naval aviator John McCain. My seven years in a North Vietnamese prison gave me plenty of time to think about how America must defend itself from its enemies. The stale arguments about ‘more’ or ‘less’ are meaningless. What we need is ‘better’—ships and planes that can fight the conflicts of the late twentieth century. I’ve watched Senator Gary Hart for three years. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, he’s fought those who would weaken our defenses, and those who would waste taxpayer dollars. Wouldn’t it be great if our fighting men had a President who had their back? A President like Gary Hart.”

  On March 11, Gary Hart beat Kennedy in Alabama and Georgia, and held him to a virtual tie in Florida (in each state, 10 to 15 percent of voters voted for Jimmy Carter, unable to stomach either of the major contenders). Hart also won 120 of the 205 delegates at stake, putting him ahead of Kennedy. The calendar, however, now turned ominous for Hart. The coming tests in March and April were all in the heart of Kennedy’s strength: Illinois, where Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne and the remnants of the Daley machine were solidly for Ted; New York, where the old Democratic alliance of labor, blacks, and Jews were all but bound by blood; Pennsylvania, where the Philadelphia machine of Billy Green had helped put Jack Kennedy in the White House. The mood was understandably somber at Hart’s Denver headquarters, as pollster Dottie Lynch combed through the numbers.

  “Here’s the paradox,” she said. “When voters are reminded about Chappaquiddick, Ted’s support falls right through the floor among women, even self-described ‘Kennedy Democrats.’ But the same voters also say they’d punish anyone engaging in ‘negative’ campaigning by voting against them.”

  “In other words,” said Billy Shore, “we have to remind them about Chappaquiddick without . . . reminding them of Chappaquiddick.”

  At that moment, the phone in the conference room rang.

  And Ray Strother, Gary Hart’s media producer, looked at the phone, leapt to his feet, and ran out of the room.

  The ad that began running in Illinois, New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania was stark, with nothing on camera but a telephone, the only color in the ad a bulb on the phone blinking red, as an announcer, his voice pitched low, began to speak:

  “The most awesome responsibility in the world lies in the hand that picks up this phone. It must be a steady hand, who can face a crisis calmly, firmly, resolutely. Because when that phone rings, panic or paralysis will put our freedom, our survival at stake. When you come right down to it . . . is there anything more important in a President? Gary Hart: a steady hand for troubled times.”

  The message helped keep Kennedy’s margins down in the big industrial states, but Kennedy’s strengths among traditional Democratic blocs were simply too strong. From New York’s Garment Center to Chicago’s Grant Park to Philadelphia’s shipyards, Kennedy spoke of “a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party,” the threat to the progressive tradition posed by “those who march under the flag of justice, but neither understand nor respect nor support it.” With the strong backing of labor and blacks, he won by clear margins in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York; only in Wisconsin did Hart’s “new politics” message prevail. Yet once again the rules and the calendar combined to make Kennedy’s victories pyrrhic.

  By 1980, Democrats had disposed of virtually every vestige of the “winner take all” approach to the primaries; more than nine of every ten delegates were chosen by “proportional representation.” You could win by a landslide in a Congressional district, and still get only one more delegate than the opponent you’d crushed. You could lose a state by fifteen points and still wind up with almost as many delegates as the winner. Hart’s showing in Pennsylvania’s small towns and in New York’s suburbs and upstate communities kept Kennedy from piling up the kinds of margins Ronald Reagan was racking up on the Republican side, where “winner take all” was alive and well.

  (“It’s a basic difference in philosophy,” explained a CBS analyst. “Republicans treat Presidential politics like a poker game: You win the pot, you win the money. For Democrats, it’s like a children’s birthday party, where everyone gets the same size piece of cake as everyone else.”)

  And now, with the end of March, spring became the season of Ted Kennedy’s discontent. The battlegrounds shifted to the Midwest, the South, the Mountain West, where the Kennedy brand lacked the power, and where “New Democrats” like Hart were prevalent. These were also states where the Hart volunteers had been at work for months, culling lists of likely voters, drilling foot soldiers in the art of turning out caucus goers and primary voters.

  “If you remember nothing less about this process, remember this,” Tim Kraft had instructed his lieutenants. “This is not November. This is not the Electoral College. The big states may actually be less valuable, because you get more delegates winning big in small states than you do winning closely in big states.”

  All through April and May, Hart’s tactics, his “not from the East” persona, and his now-significant financial advantage, yielded wins in Indiana, North Carolina, Nebraska, Oregon, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nevada. The big Southern prize, Texas, went for Hart by a fifteen-point margin. (“From the Great Beyond, LBJ Wins Last Fight With the Kennedys,” headlined a Dallas Morning News postmortem.) Now only the last contests lay ahead, on June 8, with California, Ohio, and New Jersey the major prizes. The inevitable sports metaphors flew: “Kennedy, Behind in the Last Round, Seeks a Knockout”; “It’s Fourth and Long and the Clock’s Running Out”; “Five Lengths Behind Down the Stretch.”

  A buoyant Gary Hart teased some of the biggest of the journalistic big-feet when they met for an off-the-record breakfast in Washington six days before the Super Tuesday contests.

  “Can’t you guys come up with some fresh clichés?” a buoyant Gary Hart asked. “You know, ‘Ted’s Down a Pawn and a Knight’ or ‘Out of Trumps on a Six-Heart Bid’?”

  “Maybe you can use that line when you see Ted,” breakfast host God-frey Sperling said, as he looked at a piece of AP wire copy. “Or haven’t you heard? Kennedy just challenged you to debate before Super Tuesday.”

  Hart paused for a moment, then retreated to familiar ground.

  “I’ve been calling for debates for six months,” Hart said. “The fact that I have more delegates now doesn’t change anything.”

  There was considerably more skepticism among Hart’s senior staff when they met that night over dinner in a private room of Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel. There was no misreading the strategic shrewdness of Kennedy’s debate challenge. Hart was 100 delegates ahead, but there were more than 600 delegates at stake the following Tuesday. Kennedy needed to win by big margins to overcome Hart’s lead, and the debate challenge would essentially freeze the “Ted Is Dead” narrative that was driving media coverage. Nor was there any doubt what Kennedy’s line of attack would be. Gary Hart’s not a real Democrat; he’s no friend of labor; he opposed domestic content laws, he’s against auto import quotas; he’s for tax breaks for business. He wants to take an ax to Social Security and Medicare and other entitlements.

  “The problem,” Kathy Bushkin said to her colleagues, “is that Gary thinks his ideas are good enough to get you to vote for him. He’s got more positions than the Kama Sutra—I’m talking policy here, guys—and when the press asks him to put them in a sentence, he snaps: ‘You mean, what’s my bumper sticker?’ We have got to keep him out of sounding like a Brookings Institute Fellow with ice water in his veins.”

  The campaigns agreed to a one-hour debate on the Saturday evening before the primaries, moderated by ABC’s Frank Reynolds. The Hart campaign cleared Friday evening and Saturday morning and early afternoon for debate prep. The first session did not go well at all: A young political journalist named Michael Kinsley had come to Los Angeles and played Ted Kennedy in a mock debate; his jabs and talking points clearly discomfited Hart. Worse, Hart found himself unable to articulate his idea in the sixty-and ninety-second time limits. When he abruptly cut the
prep short—“I wonder if Lincoln rehearsed before he debated Douglas,” he snapped—the aides sat silently for a few minutes, then adjourned for the night. They could only assume that Hart was retreating into himself, and was relying on his own instincts . . . or else was indulging in private relaxation. (“I wasn’t interested in exploring just how private,” one staffer told a friend.)

  None of them knew what happened in the hours after that session until after the debate. None of them knew that Warren Beatty had come down from his penthouse suite in the Beverly Wilshire, had visited Hart until well after midnight, bringing with him a sheaf of papers that had been collected for them by a onetime senior staffer in the late Senator Robert Kennedy’s Senate and campaign offices. What was clear was that when Hart emerged from the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel for the drive to ABC’s studios, Billy Shore thought he seemed remarkably at ease, “almost mellow—not a word you think of when you think of Gary.”

  Hart won the coin toss and chose to let Kennedy go first with his opening statement. It began with a brief indictment of the Ford administration, but turned quickly to an unsubtle assault on Hart as a Democrat marching under false flags.

  “When you attack the federal government, that’s the government that created Social Security, the GI Bill, Medicare, food stamps, Head Start, aid to education, the safety net for the least among us, that doesn’t sound like a Democrat—that sounds like Ronald Reagan.

  “When you aim your fire at the public school system, that has given millions of our citizens a chance for a better life, or the social safety net that keeps our poorest Americans from hunger and homelessness, that doesn’t sound like a Democrat—that sounds like Ronald Reagan.

  “When you talk about tax breaks for big corporations to bribe them into bringing jobs into the ghetto they should have been providing decades earlier, that doesn’t sound like a Democrat—that sounds like Ronald Reagan.

  “We’ve already got one Ronald Reagan who’ll be running for President, and he’s where he belongs: on the far right wing of the Republican Party. We don’t need a Ronald Reagan as the nominee of the Democratic Party.”

  “Senator Hart, your opening statement,” moderator Frank Reynolds said.

  From his seat in a holding room one floor above the studio, Billy Shore watched the monitor as Hart began his response with a small smile on his face. Shore thought: Never seen that before.

  “I’m running for President,” Hart said, “because America cannot build a better future if it is chained to ideas of the past.” Then he turned away from the camera, something his media advisors repeatedly instructed him not to do, and talked directly to Kennedy.

  “Senator, I do believe that one of our goals must be ‘to halt and reverse the growing accumulation of power and authority in the central government in Washington, and to return that power of decision to the American people in their own local communities.’ Does that really sound like Ronald Reagan to you? I’m surprised . . . because the man who spoke those precise words was Robert Kennedy in 1966, and again in his Presidential campaign.

  “Do tax credits for businesses that bring jobs and housing into poor neighborhoods sound like Ronald Reagan to you? I’m surprised . . . because that is at the heart of Robert Kennedy’s Community Development Corporation proposal, one he put into action in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

  “Does a plan to reform the public school system really sound like Ronald Reagan to you? I’m surprised . . . because it was Robert Kennedy who said, ‘When I go into the ghetto, the two things people hate most are the public welfare system and the public school system.’

  “For millions of Americans, Robert Kennedy’s legacy is not some sentimental fantasy. It’s the moral and political courage he demonstrated in challenging us—whatever our party—to face conditions as they are, and not to evade hard decisions with soft thinking about hard choices. That is what the great leaders of our party, from Roosevelt to Truman to John and Robert Kennedy have always done. I think that’s what Democrats must do if we are to protect this country from the tender mercies of Ronald Reagan.”

  The next fifty-five minutes of the debate might as well have been canceled. The exchanges over Afghanistan, the Middle East, inflation, recession were consigned to the last few sentences of the network news reports, and to inside pages of the next day’s newspapers. What filled the screens and the front pages was a confrontation played almost like a gunfight from an old Western movie: the challenger, facing his rival, the look of surprise on Kennedy’s face when Hart revealed he had been quoting Kennedy’s brother, the sheer audacity of claiming as his own the legacy of his rival’s brother.

  (Hart never revealed the identity of that mysterious political operative; as Hart and his team were celebrating what one journalist called “the likely defining moment of the primary campaign,” one of his aides asked him what had convinced him to challenge Ted Kennedy directly. Said Hart: “You remember in ’68 those protesters with the signs that said ‘Bobby Ain’t Jack’? Let’s just say there are a few folks with ties to the Kennedy family who think that ‘Teddy Ain’t Bobby.’”)

  On June 3, Hart won primaries in New Jersey, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana—and California, where Kennedy’s strength in black and Hispanic neighborhoods could not overcome Hart’s appeal in the suburbs and in the more conservative inland neighborhoods. He held Kennedy to a two-point win in Ohio. Only in Rhode Island (a Massachusetts neighbor) and West Virginia did Kennedy win convincingly. Hart captured more than 350 of the 600 delegates at stake, giving him an overall edge of more than 200 delegates.

  In another time, with different rules, it might have been possible for Kennedy to turn his attention to the convention, and to appeal to the Democratic Party’s old bulls for their support. The 1980 rules made that impossible; delegates were bound to their candidates for the first two ballots. In fact, many of the most significant figures in the party might not even be delegates. There was no provision for automatically seating senators, governors, members of the House. Indeed, many of those officials, who had run as Kennedy delegates when it was certain he would be the nominee, found themselves shut out, until the Hart campaign, wanting no rerun of the 1972 regular-reformer split, found room for them as substitutes.

  After two days of deliberations, Steve Smith came to Ted Kennedy’s home in MacLean, Virginia, and delivered the verdict: There was no plausible path to the nomination. On Tuesday, June 10, Ted Kennedy walked into the same Senate Caucus Room where he and his brothers had announced their candidacies . . . and suspended his campaign.

  For the third time in as many contests, a long-shot, insurgent Democrat had captured the Presidential nomination of his party. There was celebration in the Hart camp, of course, but it was tempered by two daunting facts. First, while Democrats had held the Congress for decades, the fracturing of the old New Deal coalition had made winning the White House an uphill slog. Since Roosevelt’s fourth term victory in 1944, only one Democratic candidate—Lyndon Johnson—had won more than 50 percent of the popular vote ( Jimmy Carter hadn’t been able to win an electoral majority even while winning the popular vote). Second, Ronald Reagan was a far more formidable candidate than either Richard Nixon or Jerry Ford had been. Of course, Ronald Reagan was a Republican. And in the climate of 1980, with President Ford serving out his term with record-low job-approval ratings, running as a Republican was the equivalent of running a footrace with a fifty-pound pack on your back.

  NOTHING BETTER CAPTURED the fortunes of the Republican Party in 1980 than its choice of the site of its thirty-sixth national convention. When President Ford’s first full term began in January 1977, there was strong sentiment to hold its next convention in Detroit. For Ford, it would mean a valedictory in his home state. For Ronald Reagan, it would symbolize his appeal to working-class Democrats, who had helped propel him into two terms as California’s governor. “When you play on the other guy’s turf,” Reagan often said, “you’re likely to win.” When it came time in ea
rly 1978 for the Republican National Committee to choose a host city, it was already clear that the battered auto industry, and the urban nightmare that was Detroit, would be exactly the wrong backdrop for the party’s national convention.

  “Detroit would have been the perfect setting for an indictment of the liberal welfare state,” said National Chairman Bill Brock. “Unfortunately, it would have been hard to convince America that the country had been run for the last twelve years by two flaming liberals named Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.” So the Republicans turned instead to the South. While Carter had carried almost every state in the Old Confederacy, the region had long ceased to fit the old “Solid South” category. The combination of backlash against the civil rights revolution, a resurgent patriotism in the face of the Democrats’ influential peace wing, and the emergence of politically engaged religious conservatism made the region a clear target of opportunity. So the Republican National Committee chose Dallas, Texas, as its convention site, despite some hesitancy over lingering memories of the Kennedy assassination. For all the optimism about its prospects in the South, the mood when the Republicans gathered for the August 11 opening was decidedly muted.

  They had watched a cautiously upbeat Democratic Party nominate Gary Hart a month earlier in the very city they had shunned; Detroit would stand as the embodiment of what the party’s convention call dubbed “twelve long years of a Republican-led assault on the hopes and dreams of working Americans.” They had watched a feisty Senator Joe Biden deliver a keynote address that invoked the Magna Carta, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, his father’s folk wisdom, Franklin Roosevelt’s Inaugural, John Kennedy’s Inaugural, Pope John XXIII’s encyclicals, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration, Shylock’s “Hath Not a Jew” soliloquy, Satchel Paige, and a litany of the moderate Republican attacks on nominee-to-be Ronald Reagan (“Jerry Ford was right—and Ronald Reagan is wrong! Dick Cheney is right—and Ronald Reagan is wrong!”). It was after Biden’s one-hour forty-minute speech that CBS and NBC independently decided to end the tradition of live gavel-to-gavel convention coverage.