Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Read online

  Throughout the summer, the polls remained too close to draw any conclusions. Then, on Labor Day, came the first sign of real trouble. My wife, Kathleen—we’d gotten married that June—and I were spending that holiday Monday enjoying Georgetown. Toward evening we stopped by a Wisconsin Avenue college bar to check the news. I’d written Carter’s big campaign kickoff speech, which he’d given earlier that day at a picnic he was attending down in Alabama. After he’d read my draft, he told me right there in the office—talk about an unusual occurrence!—how much he liked it, making me eager to see how it played on the networks. Suddenly on the TV screen above the bar appeared a tanned Ronald Reagan looking happy and relaxed, in his shirtsleeves. Standing, attractively windswept by the harbor breezes, the Statue of Liberty to his back, he spoke about our country and the hopes it stood for. His punch line was that the Democrats had betrayed those hopes.

  “I’m here because it is the home of Democrats,” he said in explaining his presence in Liberty State Park. “In this country,” he went on confidently, “there are millions of Democrats who are just as unhappy with the way things are as all the rest of us.” He was celebrating those millions of immigrants that New York’s harbor has welcomed over so many decades. “They didn’t ask what this country could do for them, but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. . . . Today a president of the United States would have us believe that dream is over, or at least in need of change.”

  Ronald Reagan grasped the deep-running need shared by Americans to feel positive about their country and themselves. He himself believed completely in the brighter, shinier world of which he spoke, and his conviction was infectious. Jimmy Carter, a decent and honest man, had notoriously gone on national television the year before, offering a somber speech that faced the present and the future squarely but was barren of the blue skies Reagan now reminded Americans they had coming as their birthright.

  Carter was never to live down the fallout from that speech, and with a reelection campaign looming on the horizon such a downbeat address had been far from strategic. Carter certainly had ample cause to share his concerns—about energy consumption, and each citizen’s personal role in energy conservation—with his constituents. Yet he broached these subjects without suspecting how unpopular they would eventually make him, convinced that telling difficult truths would itself rouse the country to its time and its historic tasks. During that broadcast, now known as the “malaise speech,” Jimmy Carter hadn’t actually even used the word malaise, yet in speaking to the press, his pollster-advisor Patrick Caddell had framed the speech’s themes that way, thus tarring Carter with its doleful stoicism.

  Jimmy Carter was, it turns out, too much the smartest guy in a small town, a governor whose great virtue back in 1976 had been that he wasn’t incumbent Gerald Ford and that he was untainted by proximity to Nixon, Watergate, or Washington. His current rival, also originally a small-town boy, and a two-term governor, appeared to be a figure out of a different solar system, and not only because he’d been a Hollywood star. The much-anticipated, long-awaited debate between the two, when it finally came, took place in the political eleventh hour, just a week before Election Day. It happened in Cleveland, and was a game-changer, though not to the incumbent’s advantage.

  By the next afternoon after that debate, traveling with the president I could assess the very visible lack of excitement at upstate New York Democratic rallies. It amounted to negative reinforcement, telling me what I didn’t want to know about the results. Next to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter hadn’t, with all his sincerity and earnestness, been able to seize a single advantage during the debate. There, at the Cleveland Convention Center, it had been Ronnie’s evening from beginning to end. He’d been calm, confident, and even a bit condescending.

  This time, the line of his that passed into history was the humorously reproachful “There you go again.” Triggered by prim Carter statements characterizing Reagan’s sometime stands on Social Security, Medicare, and the possibility of universal national health insurance, it said nothing and everything at the same time. Just four words, and it was all he needed to convey his message when it came to Carter’s own problems. The challenger was putting the incumbent in his place, and the effect was devastating.

  For Jimmy Carter, Iran had become a political wild card. When, at daybreak a year earlier, the American Embassy in Tehran had been stormed by militant students, with more than fifty diplomats and staff taken hostage, his calm handling of the crisis had initially brought strong public support. The effect, in this early period after the standoff began, was to make him invulnerable to the challenge to his renomination posed early on from the left by Senator Edward Kennedy. But as the months began turning into an entire year and the hostages remained in the control of their captors, the stagnant situation and the American powerlessness it came to symbolize became a reflection on Carter himself.

  It was hard to argue otherwise. The fact is, the Iranian government had given its support to an act of war committed against the United States. According to the State Department, “any attack on an embassy is considered an attack on the country it represents.” What could be clearer? For most Americans, the situation in Tehran was just one more example—along with rising OPEC oil prices and the then increasing domination of the American auto market by Japanese competition—of how our country was getting kicked around. But if there was an alternative to Carter’s course it wasn’t visible then and hasn’t revealed itself since.

  The final hope came in the early hours of Sunday morning, before the 1980 election. We had spent all Saturday campaigning in Texas, ending for the night in Chicago after a brief stopover in Milwaukee. Near midnight a local congressman had even convinced the president to make an appearance at a large Italian-American event, featuring sports heroes like Joe DiMaggio.

  It was a short night. Around 2 a.m. I was awakened by a noise in the hall. Recognizing the clipped, military inflection of the Secret Service, I knew something was up. I heard someone say “Deacon,” the president’s code name. I called the Situation Room on my white “signal” phone. The woman who answered connected me quickly to the National Security Council staff. Then the good news: what I heard sounded like the hostages in Tehran were close to release. As I listened, it struck me the Ayatollah Khomeini’s latest conditions were no more exacting than those we’d already said we could meet.

  Once again, the same menacing wild card was back at the top of the deck. And, again, Jimmy Carter had no choice but to draw it. If he could manage to get the hostages out, he might still win reelection. If not, he probably couldn’t. And everyone in the country understood that this was so.

  Tragically for Carter, when later that Sunday the terms being demanded by Tehran became clear, the conditions that could determine his political fate, the news wasn’t good. All along, the squabbling mullahs had thrown stumbling blocks in the way and now they were at it again. The hostages would not be getting out before Election Day. When President Carter went on television that night to release the news, I watched and heard victory escaping, literally, through the airwaves. What I wished at the time was that he’d have talked tougher, showing himself to be righteously furious at the Iranians for daring to mess with an American election. But I was only a speechwriter, not the man at the head of the country. His instincts of caution—pure Jimmy Carter, when you came right down to it—were clearly defensible for a president with the lives of captured citizens at risk. Yet I dreaded what the impact would be on Tuesday.

  We awoke Monday, the final day before the election, to a speechwriters’ crisis. The index cards containing Carter’s election eve talking points—dictated to us by pollster Caddell and delivered, we thought, to the hallway outside press secretary Jody Powell’s office, had not gotten to him. Hendrik “Rick” Hertzberg, the chief speechwriter, had to transcribe them from the backup copies on Air Force One after takeoff.

  I could see the tension, exhaustion, and looming despai
r on the faces around me. The major polls—Gallup and the New York Times/CBS—were too close to call. The one countervailing red flag—and it was bright crimson—was the fact that Lou Harris, who’d made his name polling presidential elections since he’d worked for Jack Kennedy’s campaign back in 1960, had staked his reputation on Ronald Reagan as the winner.

  At the first stop—in Akron, Ohio—Carter got out there and ramped up his attack on Reagan. First, he hit him for daring to quote Franklin Roosevelt; next, he belted him for saying “the New Deal was based on fascism.” Then he bashed him for a whole laundry list, from opposing the minimum wage to failing to back “every single nuclear arms limitation agreement since the Second World War.” After that, he swung at him for labeling Medicare “socialism and communism.”

  And once he’d gone this far, why not go all the way? So he did. He pronounced the campaign’s “overriding issue” to be “peace and the control of nuclear weapons and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorist countries.” The question facing the voter—he clearly implied—was peace or war. He was on one side, Carter made clear, while Ronald Reagan, his opponent, was on the other. The choice, for right-thinking voters, he implied, was an obvious one.

  This was precisely what Caddell had advised against. The goal for Carter’s last day of campaigning was to ignore Reagan and come across as “calm and presidential” in light of the latest news from Iran. Here was Carter making the explosive charge that his opponent’s election would mean “war.”

  At this point I was listening to the president while standing in the shadow of Air Force One. Standing nearby was Steve Weisman, a New York Times reporter and a friend, who saw the pain cross my face. He wanted to know what was bothering me. Rick Hertzberg, alert to the possibility of a story developing in which a White House speechwriter is revealed as depressed by his boss’s performance, pulled me aside. “Don’t show your feelings like that,” he cautioned.

  Once the president returned to Air Force One, Jody Powell, his close aide of many years, gently pointed out that he might be overdoing it. “Some people seem to think you might have gone too heavy on Reagan,” he pointed out. “I think they like it,” Carter replied mildly. “It turns them on.”

  From Akron we flew to Granite City, then to East St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri. After this we doubled back to Detroit. It had become clear that the only places where Carter was drawing an emotional reaction were African-American communities. I’ll in fact never forget a previous appearance at a black church in northern New Jersey and the singing of “Amazing Grace.” But now, at each stop, Carter simply did what every candidate before him had done when facing Reagan: he attacked him for being too far right, too in over his head for the big time, too extreme to be trusted with nuclear weapons. What else was there to do, even though we had been warned by Reagan’s last electoral victim that these particular charges wouldn’t work?

  To our dismay, at least one network news program, CBS’s, led that night with the one-year anniversary of the hostage-taking, not the next day’s crucial election. Carter, receiving an update on the campaign coverage when he returned to the plane from the Detroit stop, was chiefly concerned not with the network accounts Rick replayed to him but with a piece of news his pollster had just given him. Out there in America, many voters were not even aware, despite all the drama of the weekend, that the hostages might soon be freed.

  As we flew from Detroit to Portland, across those vast stretches of seemingly unending plains and then abruptly over the Rockies, someone asked why we weren’t stopping to campaign. “Because there’s not a single state we’re flying over that we have a chance of carrying,” said domestic policy advisor David Rubenstein, voicing the awful truth.

  When we got to Seattle, our last stop, Carter delivered his best speech of the campaign by far. I think it helped that we were in an airport hangar, which echoed his every word. With ten thousand people screaming, their voices resounding through the rafters, he was on fire. He had the rhythm; he had the audience. “How many of you believe we’re going to whip the Republicans tomorrow?” Huge applause. “You don’t know what it does to a man who’s been campaigning since early this morning—I got up at five o’clock Washington time. When I asked Jody Powell, ‘Where do we spend the night?’ he said, ‘Governor, this evening there ain’t no tonight tonight.’ ”

  Back on Air Force One, Carter joined us for drinks, a rare occurrence. He even invited the press up from the back of the cabin to join in. I couldn’t help noticing that the back of his hand showed a mass of cuts made by the many rings and watches of the men and women in all those receiving lines. But it was all about to end. The next stop was to be Plains, Georgia, where Jimmy Carter would cast his own vote.

  Then the news—dire and definite—came. While I sat with the press, worried that a few reporters were busily taking notes under the table during what was supposed to be an off-the-record chat with Carter, Jody and Rick went up to the front of the plane, to the president’s cabin. The time was now 4 a.m. back in Washington. Three of his top advisors—Caddell, Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, and Jerry Rafshoon—were at the White House and had just minutes before received the latest poll results.

  President Carter, Caddell told Jody, was going down by a landslide. All the neck-and-neck status, so recently reported, had been undone by the obstructionism of the factions in Tehran. After teasing us with the possibility of a settlement, the Iranians’ demands seemed unchanged to the voters. We’d been taken for a ride again, one more time.

  Carter was about to get the news. Returning to his cabin, he grinned when he first saw Jody and Rick. Still in an exuberant mood, still high from his thunderous Seattle reception, he had no way of suspecting the devastating news he was about to hear. “Is that Pat? Let me talk to him,” he said. Then, with the phone at his ear, his face collapsed. I’ve often wondered if he knew in those closing days and hours that this was coming. Now it had.

  Jody, seeing his boss of so many years in pain, now moved quickly and surely. He understood exactly what needed to be done and instructed Rick accordingly. “The presidency is gone,” he told him somberly. “We want to try to keep from losing too much of the Senate and House.” The mission now entrusted to Rick and me was to write a speech for Carter to use in Plains that would cool the country down, ease the hate, and attempt to limit Democratic losses. “Jody’s a soldier,” Rick said of the young Georgian who’d been with Carter from the start and now was guarding him to the end.

  The memory of what transpired over the next several hours, as the plane headed southeast to Georgia, is indelible for me. There we were, a small band of defeated warriors huddled together in a snug, small room high above the American landscape, working resolutely to produce the words and phrases that would help make the best of a terrible situation.

  • • •

  Late that morning, back in Washington finally, I went out to cast my own vote. As I got to my polling station I remember there was a guy racing angrily into it. In my mind, whether it was true or not—maybe he was just having a bad morning—I saw him as one of the millions of irate citizens piling on, joining the massacre. His image burned itself into my mind’s eye and became a sort of collector’s item, a bit of unwanted memorabilia, from those last weeks of the campaign. Here was a voter, it seemed to me, so mad at Carter he intended to vote straight Republican with the intention of flushing the thirty-ninth president out of politics and out of his life once and for all.

  That evening, I watched Carter show up ahead of time, well before he was expected, at the Sheraton Washington ballroom to concede defeat. It was the earliest concession speech by any American presidential candidate since 1904 and it would wind up costing several West Coast Democrats their seats. Stories would grow of people leaving the voting lines on word that the president had given up the fight. Nevertheless, I always assumed his hurry wasn’t so much selfish on Carter’s part as it was self-protective. He was exhausted. If he’d gotten any more exhaus
ted, he wouldn’t have been able to control his emotions, his very self.

  The next morning, Kathleen and I woke up, had breakfast, got into our car, and began driving north toward Pennsylvania, with no particular destination in mind. What I didn’t know then, as we hit the highway just to get away, was that the fierce battle I’d just witnessed, played out across the entire American landscape, was just a prelude.

  Those two years with the Peace Corps in Swaziland changed my life. They got me off the academic track and into politics.

  CHAPTER TWO

  STARTING OUT

  “Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point.”

  —HENRY ADAMS, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

  When you visit Capitol Hill as a tourist, the men and women working in the offices appear to have always belonged there. They make you think of soldiers manning a citadel: they’re friendly but continually on guard. You’re the outsider; they’re the presiding officialdom; and the dividing line is clear. That’s certainly how it struck me on long-ago high school trips to Washington.

  It’s different, though, once you become an insider. When you’ve passed through the gate and find yourself admitted to the inner sanctums, as I was in my mid-twenties, you never again refer to it as “the government.” You realize all too quickly the distinct separateness of each congressional office, the jealousy with which each and every Senate staffer guards his or her position. You learn the same is true at the numerous executive agencies. You grasp this fast or you don’t survive long.

  I know, too, from experience that once you’re inside Washington politics, in the thick of things, you have a far different sense of what goes on. You’ve discovered how the engine works because you’re one of its parts. For the decade after returning home in 1971 from the Peace Corps in Africa, I was deeply involved with the day-to-day reality of the actual enterprise of governance. I worked as a staffer for a president and, before that, for a pair of senators—and was proud of the fact. Call that period of my life my apprenticeship. Those jobs taught and broadened me. The pace of the work was unrelenting; it absorbed me entirely.