CHAPTER 25

Jimmy Who?

THE 1972 DEMOCRATIC disaster of George McGovern’s candidacy had not expelled the virus of “reform” that spawned the party’s unprecedented midterm national convention in Kansas City on December 5–7, 1974. It featured efforts by National Chairman Robert Strauss to bring Democrats back to moderation against the radical elements that had nominated McGovern.

Organized labor’s delegates, a majority of them supporting Strauss, were holding a closed-door caucus as the convention began Friday night. I noticed labor delegates entering a large meeting room with only cursory attention paid to who walked in. In those days before I was a regular television performer, I was not recognized and did not pay attention to my personal appearance. Wearing a wrinkled sports jacket with no tie and needing a haircut, I at age forty-five could pass for a labor skate. With close to three hundred people in the room, I unobtrusively took a seat in the rear.

A commotion at the door halted proceedings that had just begun. Arguing with labor officials (one with a firm grip on his arm) was Christopher Lydon, a reporter for the New York Times. Very tall and preppy looking, Chris was wearing a tweed jacket with a colorful ascot, a press pass around his neck. A union official grasped him firmly, ejecting him from the meeting. Suddenly, he was pointing at me, showing the union officials that one reporter already was there. I was quickly given the bum’s rush out of the caucus.

“You son of a bitch!” I shouted at Lydon in the hallway outside the room. “What good did it do you to get me kicked out?” Lydon shrugged and flashed a supercilious grin. That did it, and I took a swing at his jaw. But with Chris half a foot taller than I, my feeble punch landed on his chest and fellow journalists grabbed us before anything more serious transpired. Unfortunately, a brief account of the incident appeared on the front page of Sunday’s Kansas City Star, enhancing my reputation as a madman.

The convention itself involved a struggle over racial quotas where Strauss, by giving ground, averted a walkout by black delegates. But I missed the real story taking place at the Holiday Inn where small groups of delegates trooped into a small room to be pitched by a little man with a deep southern accent. It was Jimmy Carter, in his last days as governor of Georgia. I did not even know he was in Kansas City until 1977, when I read about it in Jules Witcover’s account of the 1976 campaign, Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency. On December 12, Carter announced his candidacy, an event so widely ignored that I was not aware he was running for president until five months later.

         

ON AN UNSEASONABLY warm Manhattan early evening in April 1975, I was unable to find a taxi and set out for a sweaty twelve-block walk from the St. Regis Hotel, where I was staying, to the Century Club, where I was scheduled for cocktails with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (then President Ford’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations).

I was walking rapidly when a long black limousine pulled up. A rear window went down, and a voice, in a nasal New York accent, called out: “Novak! Get in the car! We’ll take you wherever you want to go!” I couldn’t see inside the limo, but the voice belonged to Eliot Janeway, the economic analyst, investor, and would-be political kingmaker.

When I entered the car, I was surprised to see Jimmy Carter. “You know Governor Carter, don’t you?” Janeway said. “We’re on our way to see Ted Sorensen [Jack Kennedy’s aide and speechwriter] to talk about the campaign. [pause] The governor is running for president.” I responded “Really?” Carter said nothing, but fixed a manic grin on his face.

I thought my friend Eliot had picked another lemon. Janeway envisioned himself as part Bernard Baruch (counselor to the great) and part James Farley (political maestro). He was an early booster of Lyndon Johnson, but Janeway despised the Kennedys and broke with LBJ after he went on the 1960 ticket with JFK. He tried to pump up presidential support for House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana, but their unlikely candidacies fell flat. Carter seemed to me to be in the same category.

         

THE FIRST TIME I ever really took Carter seriously for president was a few weeks after I saw him in Eliot Janeway’s limo. I was lunching at San Souci with Alan Baron, one of the truly unique characters I have known in politics.

Alan was a Democratic activist from Sioux City, Iowa, who was very liberal, very Jewish, obese, and a cocaine user and homosexual. He was loud in an accent more Yiddish than Iowan, and exhibited atrocious table manners, sometimes emitting a fine spray of food while talking. And did he ever talk. I can’t think of anybody with whom I would rather talk politics than Alan. We disagreed ideologically on everything, but we never talked ideology. Baron loved political gossip and passed it on to me for column-writing purposes. He also made brilliant interpretations of voting results to draw fascinating conclusions.

At lunch late in August 1975, Alan and I agreed President Ford was in such bad shape that any Democrat could win. There was no favorite in the large field of serious Democrats: Scoop Jackson, Birch Bayh, George Wallace, Morris Udall, Sargent Shriver, Jerry Brown, Fred Harris, Lloyd Bentsen, Terry Sanford, Milton Shapp, Frank Church, Dale Bumpers, and Jimmy Carter. When I asked Baron whom he thought would win, I was shocked when he chose Carter, who was dead last in the polls.

Alan was on the left wing of the Democratic spectrum (at that time on Senator George McGovern’s staff) and feared Carter would sell out the liberal cause. (In 1976, McGovern fired Baron for attacking Carter, by that time, the all but certain nominee.) Baron regarded Carter as untrustworthy and of poor character, who would hurt the Democratic Party if nominated and hurt the United States if elected. He would, Alan said, do everything he could to stop Carter.

Yet, Baron told me, he sensed in Carter the same determination possessed by McGovern in 1972. Forget the polls, he advised. But how, I asked, could the former governor of Georgia survive the New Hampshire primary? “New Hampshire is no longer first,” Baron replied. “The Iowa caucuses are first.” But nobody paid attention to them. Not anymore, Baron told me. He kept in touch with his home state, and Carter was working it hard. The other candidates—like sheep led to the slaughter—were being sucked into Iowa to cut off Carter. That suddenly made Iowa important. If Carter won there, he could roar into New Hampshire and win it with momentum from Iowa and then capture Florida by convincing liberal candidates he would be their surrogate there to stop Wallace. Little Jimmy would then be the front-runner.

         

ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1975, Jimmy Carter was the guest on CBS’s Face the Nation. By then, he and the Iowa caucuses were no longer a secret known only to Alan Baron. The scenario that Baron laid out for me in August was well under way.

On Face the Nation, Carter was asked whether he favored the 1974 post-Watergate campaign finance reform (putting limits on contributions). Carter began: “I favor the law. I’ve been a member of Common Cause for a long time, and participated in the evolution of the ideas that led to that law.”

As I sat in the family room of our suburban Maryland home that Sunday, alarm bells went off in my head. I had covered campaign finance reform legislation and never caught a whiff of Jimmy Carter. And the governor of Georgia, a member of Common Cause, a liberal do-gooder organization?

On Monday, November 31, I checked my sources in campaign finance reform. Yesterday, they said, was the first they ever heard from him. I then called Common Cause. Just as I suspected, Jimmy Carter was not now and never had been a member (though his wife, Roslyn, had joined).

So I had caught Carter in two little untruths. Coming from the presidential candidate who at every campaign stop said, “I’ll never lie to you,” that was not trivial. But it was not all. The first question to Carter on Face the Nation was why he was running against Scoop Jackson after making his nominating speech at the 1972 Democratic convention. Carter replied: “I certainly wouldn’t disavow a long-standing friendship [with Jackson]. I’ve known Scoop since I was working under Admiral [Hyman] Rickover on the atomic submarine program and he was a junior member of Congress involved with atomic energy.”

That, too, rang false to me. I got in touch with people who had worked with Rickover in the nuclear program. They thought it impossible that Carter as a navy lieutenant would have had serious contact with Jackson, a member of the powerful Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy (or with Rickover himself, for that matter). I then called Senator Jackson. Scoop told me he was sure he did not know Carter when he was in the navy and did not meet him until he ran for governor of Georgia in 1970. Two more untruths.

Carter was questioned by Godfrey Sperling’s group of reporters over breakfast at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel on Thursday, December 2, five days after the Face the Nation broadcast. Sitting across the long narrow table from the smiling candidate, I brought up these discrepancies. He blandly admitted he never had joined Common Cause but considered Roslyn’s membership (“She writes the checks”) as his own. As for what Jackson told me, he recalled reminiscing about “the old days with Scoop” when he breakfasted with the late Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia. That entailed a check by me with one of Russell’s former aides, who angrily told me that Carter’s talk about chummy breakfasts “greatly exaggerated” his relationship with the southern patriarch.

Carter’s December 2 breakfast produced more varnishing of the truth that I checked out. The worst was his claim to have “worked hard” on Atlanta’s voluntary school busing plan. I placed calls to several school board and NAACP members in Atlanta, and none could recall Carter working on the busing compromise. As governor he did sit in on a lone negotiating session between the school board and the NAACP, where his only contribution was to state his objection to school busing.

Carter also told the reporters on December 2 that he always had favored federal revenue sharing going to local governments and not the states, taking that position even when he was governor of Georgia. I checked high and low, but could find no public record or personal recollection of such an unselfish position by Carter. I did find a 1971 statement to Congress by Governor Carter: “I support the concept of sharing additional federal revenues with state and local governments.” There was no mention of cutting off the states.

Finally, on December 2, among those listed by Carter as policy experts with whom he consulted were Wilbur Cohen, former secretary of health, education and welfare, and George Ball, former under secretary of state. That sounded fishy to me, and I called both men (whom I knew well). Cohen told me he spent a day with Governor Carter in Atlanta in 1973 and had not seen him since. Ball said he had breakfasted with Carter once the previous autumn—and had never seen him again.

It took me a month to follow all these leads and make sure there was no evidence to support Carter’s claims. Finally, in the Evans & Novak column of January 6, 1976, within the span of 650 words, I documented nine separate untruths uttered by Carter in his Face the Nation and Sperling breakfast appearances. I quoted a black leader from Atlanta who was a leader in negotiating the school busing compromise as saying: “For him [Carter] to claim that he did anything to help a settlement is an outright lie.” Then I added my view:

Actually, “fibbing” better describes falsely claiming credit—common among candidates, who usually have more than a little Baron Munch-hausen in them. But Carter is the anti-Washington, anti-government, anti-lawyer candidate telling audiences “I’ll never lie to you” and setting post-Watergate standards of honesty. Against that pledge, old enemies in Georgia use the words “lie” and “liar” with disturbing frequency to describe him.

         

I FOLLOWED Alan Baron’s admonition to get to Iowa early, and found in the autumn of 1975 that Carter was planting deep roots in the state. By the time I returned to Iowa the second week of January 1976, everybody recognized the state’s importance and knew Carter was leading there. I was one of six reporters who showed up to follow Carter on a motorcade through rural northwest Iowa.

Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell greeted me in Sioux City on Monday, January 12, where the trip started. My “Carter Lies” column had run a few days earlier, and Powell informed me that he and the governor considered me the liar. He handed me a point-by-point rebuttal that was more than twice as long as the column.

Assuming all the reporters wanted private time with the candidate, Powell said each of us could ride with Carter in his auto on a leg of the daylong trip. Jody said we would rotate in order of seniority, which would be determined by the reporters. Johnny Apple of the New York Times looked us over, and said Novak was the most senior and that he, Apple, was second. So with foreboding, I got in the backseat with Carter that cold January morning.

“Bob,” Carter said, “you have done me a grave injustice and you may well have damaged my candidacy. But that’s not what bothers me. I’m just sorry that you have such a low opinion of me. That really hurts me.” Then he smiled and directed his innocent gaze toward me. “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Governor.” “Let’s just forget about this, Bob,” Carter said, holding his own rebuttal to my column in his hand, “and have a good candid conversation.” Candid, hardly! After that, Carter gave unresponsive answers to my uninspired questions.

It was a long, boring day, and at the end of it, Kevin Horrigan, a young Kansas City Star reporter, approached me. As the most junior correspondent, he had traveled the last leg with Carter. He had many questions for the candidate about the Evans & Novak column, but he said Carter told him that matter had been taken care of that morning. “Bob Novak apologized to me,” said Carter. “He said he was sorry he wrote the column.”

“Did you really apologize to him?” Horrigan asked me. “No,” I replied, “I said I was sorry he felt that way about me.” After the Iowa incident, I became convinced I was too soft in my column by talking about “fibbing.” Jimmy Carter was a habitual liar who modified the truth to suit his purposes.

A week later, as voters assembled for the Iowa caucuses, Carter led all candidates in the crowded field with 27.6 percent. Indiana’s Senator Birch Bayh was a poor second at 13.1 percent.

         

IOWA PROPELLED CARTER into New Hampshire with momentum. Still, this upper New England state did not seem hospitable to a little-known ex-governor from the Deep South. What I did not realize was that Carter for the past year had been methodically preparing the soil in New Hampshire just as he had in Iowa.

Besides being good, Carter was lucky. Inexplicably, Scoop Jackson and George Wallace skipped New Hampshire. As I reported in a column from Manchester one week before the primary, “Carter clearly has the center right road all to himself.”

On February 24, Carter won New Hampshire with 30 percent of the vote, as his liberal opponents divided their vote: Udall, 24 percent; Bayh, 16 percent (ending Bayh’s once promising candidacy); Harris, 11 percent; Shriver, 9 percent.

         

CARTER AGAIN SHOWED his tactical genius in the Florida primary on March 9. He convinced what was left of the liberal pack—Udall, Harris, and Shriver, before Brown and Church began their late-blooming campaigns—to stay out of Florida to prevent a victory there by the dreaded George Wallace. They gave Carter a clear field as the liberal(!) candidate, and an easy win against Wallace and Jackson.

That left the Illinois primary on March 16 as the last real chance to stop Carter (though Udall, Brown, and Church would continue into June). Covering Carter in Chicago, I was given time to chat with the candidate and was seated beside him on a campaign bus ride on Friday, March 12.

Jimmy ended our interview with something strange and Carteresque: “You know, we really don’t know each other very well, Bob. I think we should really try to know each other better, so we could understand each other. Could you come down to Plains for a day or two, to spend some quiet time together away from the campaign? Could you do that?” I decided to play along. “Governor,” I replied, “I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more. It would be really helpful to me.” Carter said he would call my office to set it up. I never expected the call would be made, and it never was.

Two days later, on March 14, we faced each other in CBS’s Washington studios for Face the Nation. I wanted to flush Carter out on his declaration that he would reduce nineteen hundred federal agencies down to two hundred without revealing what agencies would be eliminated. Ed Rabel of CBS News apparently had the same idea and preceded me at the beginning of the program by asking which of those agencies would be closed. Carter responded with a typical evasion: “There is no way I can take off from campaigning, do a complete and definite study of what the federal government is and what it’s going to be three or four years in the future.”

I followed up sarcastically: “Governor, I’ll give you a question you don’t have to take time off from campaigning to answer.” Noting that state spending in Georgia actually increased while he was eliminating agencies, I asked: “Would you reduce the federal payroll, and if so, by how much, forgetting about how many agencies you eliminate?” Carter replied: “I can’t say that I would.”

I seized on something that typified Carter’s demagogic style. I had done some research on it, and sprung the trap:

Novak: Governor, when you were asked on the campaign trail about foreign policy, I noticed that you always make a criticism and get a good deal of applause for it: that one of the things wrong with our foreign policy is whenever you run into an embassy and see quote “a fat, bloated, ignorant, rich, major contributor to Nixon who can’t even speak the language of the country in which he serves.” You think that’s part of what’s wrong with our foreign policy. Governor, can you name one such fat, ignorant, bloated ambassador who can’t speak the language?

Carter: No, I wouldn’t want to name any.

Novak: Well, can you name one, though? You make the accusation all over. There are only four ambassadors, Governor, who gave contributions to Mr. Nixon. Are any of them that fit that category?

Carter: Well, I wouldn’t want to name names. But the point I’m making is, and I don’t do it every time I make a foreign policy speech—

Novak: Pretty nearly.

Carter: Every now and then I do, but not often….

Novak: Governor, your credibility has been challenged by your critics and by some people in the press. And there are only four people who are now serving as ambassadors who gave money to Nixon. Three of them know the language of the country that they work in, and one of them is taking language training. Isn’t that bordering on demagoguery when you make a flat statement about these kind of quote “fat, bloated, ignorant ambassadors”?

Carter: Well, I don’t believe so. I think it illustrates a point very clearly….

Novak: Are you going to continue to use that formulation and get applause from it?

Carter: I may or may not.

In fact, Carter did not. But on Face the Nation, he was furious and dropped his smile for once. I had a final shot at Carter—and I took what I learned Carter felt was a cheap shot—as the last question of the broadcast.

Novak: Governor, when you are ever asked about your desire to cut the defense budget 7 or 8 billion dollars, you always mention how many generals or admirals there are. Do you know, either in percentages or in flat amounts, what the cost of salaries of the generals and admirals is?

Carter: No, I don’t.

Novak: It’s four one-hundredths of one percent, or 41 million dollars. Don’t you think that also borders on exaggeration in making that a major issue?

Carter: No, it doesn’t, because the actual number of admirals and generals is mirrored all the way down the ranks.

I had made Carter look like a fool. There was no smile in his cold eyes, as he said to me after the program ended: “Bob, you’re very tough and very good.” “Thank you, Governor,” I said. “You’re very good.” I lied. I thought it was a very poor performance by Carter and one of my most effective efforts as a television interrogator. Other people apparently did not agree.

My first appearance on national network television came in 1963 on Face the Nation. The program’s format then had one print journalist joining two CBS correspondents on the panel each week. In the intervening fourteen years, I was asked to be the outside questioner more than anybody else—and usually with a prime guest, such as Jimmy Carter. But after that Carter program on March 14, 1976, now more than thirty years ago, Face the Nation never again asked me to be a questioner. Nobody at CBS ever told me why, and I did not ask. I learned that a Carter aide had complained to CBS that I was biased, and I assume that the network wanted a less aggressive questioner.

Two days later, on March 16, Carter won the Illinois primary in a landslide. I could see there was no way to stop him from a nomination to oppose an unelected Republican president who looked like a sure loser.

GERALD R. FORD was so battered by his struggle for the Republican nomination that he began the general election campaign trailing Jimmy Carter by 30 percentage points in the popular vote and 496 votes in the Electoral College, according to my rundown.

Because the Republican convention was so late in 1976, Ford’s kickoff did not come until nine days after Labor Day on Wednesday, September 15. The venue also was unusual to start a Republican presidential campaign: Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the leftist-dominated University of Michigan and a liberal Democratic stronghold.

But this university was Ford’s alma mater. His strategists waited so long to start because they wanted him fully prepared for a carefully honed speech delivered in an academic setting.

I was a pool reporter when the president joined the Michigan football team for dinner at their training table. It was an uncomfortable meeting for the ’76 Wolverines and the old grad (Class of ’35) former football captain. Bo Shembechler, Michigan’s uptight coach, was displeased with this distraction, and the players seemed uninterested in dining with the president of the United States. Although he was a big man, the players dwarfed him. Ford, seeming ill at ease, made no attempt to break the ice with the players. I could not have imagined Ronald Reagan similarly disengaged from the young men.

The real difficulty with this kickoff was epitomized by the lead paragraph of the Evans & Novak column of September 19, 1976, datelined Ann Arbor:

The presence of a Washington super-bureaucrat aboard Air Force One when it arrived in Michigan for the Ford campaign kickoff suggested the clinical nature, and hence the limitations, of the President’s vision of America’s future.

The “super-bureaucrat” was Paul O’Neill, the career civil servant who was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, as President Ford’s successive chiefs of staff, worked closely with him at OMB. (In 2001 Cheney brought O’Neill, then CEO of Alcoa, back to government for an ill-fated two years as secretary of the treasury.) O’Neill was in Ann Arbor to explain to reporters accompanying the president the details of Ford’s proposals on housing, employment, and education. I wrote that “the new ‘vision for America’ that White House press agents had predicted would emerge from Ann Arbor is essentially the vision of a Washington bureaucrat.”

Ford’s speech was delivered to an audience of fourteen thousand—predominantly students and preponderantly friendly. They were, I wrote, “anesthetized by Mr. Ford’s recitation of programs concocted for him by the federal bureaucracy.” Bad as this was, the worst at Ann Arbor came when Ford thought it necessary to laud Henry Kissinger and his new peacemaking mission for southern Africa:

At my direction, Secretary Kissinger [booing begins] is now engaged in an intensive effort [prolonged, accelerated booing, forcing the President to stop temporarily] to help all the parties, black and white, involved in the mounting crisis in southern Africa, to find a peaceful and just solution [continued booing].

I wondered how Jerry Ford, tethered to the bureaucracy and Henry Kissinger, could possibly come back against even a flawed opponent.

         

WITH PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES scheduled for the first time since 1960, Carter looked ill at ease and ineffective in the opening debate. On September 29, I wrote this in the Evans-Novak Political Report:

The election is rapidly boiling down to this: Will the public decide that Jimmy Carter is so weird and unreliable that the gap in key industrial states, already narrowing, closes entirely and tips the election to Ford?

The answer may depend, in large part, on Debate No. 2 next Wednesday evening on foreign policy and national security, subjects in which we do not believe the supposed Ford advantage is as great as generally perceived. If Carter takes a hard line, he might regain his lost momentum.

Seldom have I proved so prophetic. Never have I played such a personal role in fulfilling my own prophecy.

         

STILL BELIEVING THAT the best way to cover a debate was watch it on TV from a remote location, I attended none of the 1976 debates. But Rowly was at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco for the second debate of October 6, 1976. I wish I had been there, for this was probably the only debate that ever, by itself, has determined the outcome of a presidential election—an influence that could be traced to me, however unintentionally.

The drama occurred midway when Max Frankel of the New York Times asked Ford whether he was too soft on the Soviet Union. Frankel’s drawn-out question contained this sentence, which got Ford’s attention: “We’ve virtually signed, in Helsinki, an agreement that the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.” Ford stumbled through a verbose answer but would have been all right had he stopped before he uttered this fateful final sentence: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford Administration.”

I could not believe my ears, and neither could veteran diplomatic correspondent Frankel, who jumped in with a follow-up question, starting an extraordinary colloquy that may have changed the course of history:

Frankel: I’m sorry. Could I just follow? Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there and in, and making sure with their troops that it’s a Communist zone? Whereas, on our side of the line, the Italians and the French are still flirting with the possibility of Communism?

Ford: I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous. It has its own territorial integrity and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.

This was not merely a candidate making one incredible mistake. Ford had repeated the same mistake four times. I knew immediately that I was to blame. Ever since my March 22 column on the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine accepting Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Ford had been under pressure from conservative Republican and ethnic nationality groups to reject any such policy. Ford stubbornly refused, out of fear it would be interpreted as a disavowal of Kissinger and détente.

But now, with the election a month away, he went into the San Francisco debate determined to put this issue to rest if somebody raised it. He intended to say simply that the United States did not recognize the permanent organic union of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Instead he said there is no Soviet control over Eastern Europe, a policy Spoonerism of which only Jerry Ford was capable. Nothing could be better calculated to upset conservatives and antagonize ethnics (especially Polish-Americans).

Carter instantly recognized the rich prize dropped in his lap. He accused Ford of failing to enforce the Helsinki agreements and then took dead aim:

We’ve also seen a very serious problem with the so-called Sonnenfeldt document [sic], which apparently Mr. Ford has just endorsed, which said that there’s an organic linkage between the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union…. He’s also shown a weakness in yielding to pressure. The Soviet Union, for instance, put pressure on Mr. Ford and he refused to see a symbol of human freedom, recognized around the world, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Rowly and I immediately recognized the scope of Ford’s blunder. Writing from San Francisco on deadline after the debate, Rowly referred to Ford “freeing Poland with the slip of a tongue” and questioned how the president “could so confuse reality to forget about four Soviet army divisions permanently stationed in Poland.” I put the political spin on what happened in the Evans-Novak Political Report of October 13:

Those contemplating the damage done to Ford’s ethnic hopes by the Polish blooper miss the point: the problem is what the gaffe did, to ethnic and non-ethnic alike, in painting the picture of somebody who really does not know what he is talking about.

General Brent Scowcroft, who had succeeded Secretary of State Kissinger as national security adviser, watched the debate in an adjoining room and was described by Stu Spencer as “turning white” when he heard Ford’s words. But he was alone among Ford staffers, according to a candid account of the Ford inner circle’s reaction from Bob Hartmann in his memoir Palace Politics. “Only Scowcroft caught the slip,” Hartmann wrote.

It took four days for Ford to issue a non-apology apology that claimed a misunderstanding. That slowed Ford’s comeback, which had brought him within two percentage points of Carter in the Gallup Poll taken just before the second debate.

         

JAMES A. BAKER III had taken over the Ford general election campaign. I had met Baker during the great delegate chase, and saw he was unlike politicians to whom I had grown accustomed. He was handsome, well groomed, and exceedingly smooth. He replaced Ford’s meandering style on the stump with a two-item agenda: middle-class tax cuts (“The best tax reform that I know is tax reduction”) and defense preparedness (“I have a deep personal commitment to a strong national defense program”). Under Baker’s direction, Ford had ceased his personal attacks on Carter that made him look unpresidential. A special preelection edition of the Evans-Novak Political Report showed Ford had closed the gap so much that he was only fifty electoral votes behind Carter going into the election. The switch of one big state could elect Ford.

Yet, there was something too slick, too gimmicky and inauthentic in Ford’s new campaign style, as often was true of enterprises controlled by Jimmy Baker. But Carter seemed even less authentic to me—the presidential candidate in my experience who had the most difficulty telling the truth.

Actually, Carter was the last Democrat for whom I seriously considered voting. How could that be when I considered him a liar and charlatan? Because much of his rhetoric on my issue, the cold war, when he talked about Solzhenitsyn or the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, was better than Ford’s. The problem was that it was just rhetoric. I did not think Ford was any better than Carter as a cold warrior. But I hoped he would use in his first full term people who would be a counterweight to Henry Kissinger détente: Fred Ikle, John Lehman, and the enigmatic Don Rumsfeld. So, with misgivings, in mid-October I made a private decision to vote for Ford.

         

IN SEPTEMBER, Ford’s campaign chairman Rogers Morton publicly conceded the entire South to Carter. Jerry Ford was the last old-fashioned Republican candidate for president. Swamped in the South, Ford lost the country by two percentage points in the popular vote and by fifty-six electoral votes (six more than the ENPR forecast). Democrats increased, by one seat in each House, their huge congressional majorities that had been bloated by the 1974 Watergate elections. Republican Senate and House candidates made no gains in the South. Bill Brock, one of the Republican Party’s shining stars in the Senate, was defeated for reelection in Tennessee. In New York, Pat Moynihan ousted conservative James Buckley in a landslide. It was a dismal election night for Republicans. I was not perceptive enough to see there would be a renaissance ahead after Americans had four years of Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office.