Sunday, July 18th

HARD TO DO anything but stare out at the brilliant blue sea. The air cleared in the night—I even had to pull up a blanket—and now it is the best day in ages. We had rain the day before yesterday and in the emancipation from watering I can garden. So great weedings and prunings are in progress. The lilies are in full glory now, useful indoors because they do not fade, sometimes for as long as two weeks.

It has been a packed week. Mary Tozer was here while the national democratic convention was going on, but in the forty-eight hours we managed one lovely late afternoon sitting on the terrace, watching the birds fly past and the lazy sails on the blue sea. We did stay up to hear Carter’s acceptance speech and I’m glad we did. In bed afterward I thought that what he represents is the gentle revolution I talked about in my commencement address at Clark last year. The words “simple” and “compassion” were often used by him, and simple compassion is something we have not seen in government for a very long time, since Lincoln. It is hard to imagine what it will be like, if he is elected—the sense of a real new beginning.

I wonder why the media people still manage to sneer at rather than applaud this man. He did the impossible alone to get the nomination and that in itself is rather marvelous. For once I was disappointed in Washington Week in Review, and especially in Peter Lisagor, who appears to be quite cynical about Carter. Is he just too good to be true? “Too true to be good,” as Shaw would have it?

But there is something fundamentally moving about him—the town of Plains itself, his mother who went to India at sixty-eight with the Peace Corps for two years. This is not a usual story, though it could only perhaps have taken place in the United States. And if we have a Congress and President working together at last, great things could happen.

There is also a lot of chaffing about “unity,” as though it were a dirty word. The fact is that the unity was forged long before the convention and not imposed as so many commentators have said. Carter saw the women’s caucus twice for an hour each time, for instance—that was not brushing opposition aside. It was an attempt to accommodate and to see what was possible. And that is what politics is about.

The Republicans never mention the inner cities. And that is the crucial problem before us. I am greatly pleased about Mondale. Muskie is an “elder statesman” now, and we want fresh, vital, young men in power.