CHAPTER
FIVE
Jimmy Who, Plain Old Jerry, and the Pulitzer Prize: The 1976 Campaign
Gerald R. Ford was a bland, balding Republican congressman from Michigan, a political nice guy, the House minority leader but no political star. Nobody ever envisioned him as a president, certainly not Richard Nixon, who once told insiders that appointing Ford his vice president in 1973 was his insurance against being forced out of office in Watergate. Bad guess, because Ford not only became president, his plain talk rallied Americans past the nightmare scandal Nixon and henchmen had visited upon them.
Jimmy Carter was a former Georgia governor and as unlikely a candidate when he began his campaign from Democratic obscurity. Carter got started early, long before Ford was summoned from Congress to become vice president in 1973, the only man ever to take that office and then the presidency itself without election to either job.
In the end, the improbable Democrat beat the unelected Republican, but only narrowly. It was not surprising that Ford lost the 1976 election. That he came close to winning it was a political miracle for a humdrum Republican who had never before run in an election outside his Michigan congressional district, who came to the presidency because of his own party’s scandal, and worsened his situation by pardoning Nixon for Watergate crimes.
The 1976 presidential campaign was a political show no scriptwriter could have invented. It was the first campaign subsidized by the government, with candidates who could prove significant public support for their party nominations entitled to have their contributions matched by Washington. That was a magnet for candidates, as were the thirty primary elections in which Democratic rules required that even far-back losers who managed at least 15 percent of the vote get shares of a state’s nominating delegates in proportion to their popular votes.
So the prospects and pretenders lined up, with Carter first, at the start as at the end. When he began, Carter was a former governor of Georgia with no national standing. Carter said he was so obscure that he couldn’t even get anybody to rake his muck, although he always insisted there was none to rake. Carter said he never misrepresented or lied, never would, and had never in his life made a promise he didn’t keep. That in itself defied belief, but he kept saying it. Think of it—the first president since George Washington who never told a lie, and Carter hadn’t even chopped down a cherry tree. But there was a tough politician behind the façade, and if he didn’t lie, he certainly bent the record when it suited his campaign purposes.
Ford had to fend off the challenge of Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, and barely did. He wouldn’t have but for the Republican protocol of going by the pecking order, which meant renominating the sitting president even though they would have preferred the more conservative, more polished performer from California.
For a reporter, it was great political theater and I got a bonus along with my front row seat. I received the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for my coverage of that campaign. Gene McCarthy used to say that you knew you were over the hill when you started quoting yourself, but that didn’t stop him from doing so, and I will risk it. One of the stories in my Pulitzer entry described the candidates as “Gerald R. Ford, who never sought the presidency until he held it, and Jimmy Carter, the driving, self-started Democratic challenger.” I wrote before the election that Carter led narrowly by standard measurements. “However, this is not a standard election, this contest to restore the seal of voter approval to a White House that has lacked it for 27 months.”
The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in the spring and most winners, being reporters themselves, find out about it in advance. With a clue, you could wear your best suit to work for the celebration. I had no hint. I didn’t even know the date the Pulitzers were being awarded that year, although I certainly remember it now, April 18, 1977. I was going out of town that week, so I went to get my hair cut and to buy a new pair of shoes. The AP bureau couldn’t figure out where I was when word of my prize hit the wire. I did my errands and was headed back to the office when I met two colleagues carrying cases of champagne. Before I could ask what that was all about, Ann Blackman told me, “You just won the Pulitzer Prize.” I was stunned. We walked into the bureau and all of my colleagues stood up and started applauding. At first I was too dazed to say anything except “Let me see the bulletin.” I wanted to see on paper that I really had received the highest honor in my profession. I read it, took a few minutes to settle down, thanked people, and shook hands. The moment I remember best was on the telephone a few minutes later. I called my father, retired in New Hampshire. “Dad, I just won the Pulitzer Prize,” I told him. He didn’t say anything for a few moments, and when he did speak, his voice was too choked with emotion to be understood. At that point, mine was, too. By my desk I have an unabridged dictionary my parents gave me that spring, inscribed with “a deep sense of pride for which we cannot find the words.”
When you get a Pulitzer, everybody you know calls, and so do some people you don’t. My friend Jules Witcover called to congratulate me and added, “I suppose you’re wearing those awful pants.” He knew my fashion taste, or lack of it, too well. I had on checked, bell-bottom double-knit pants, which I now know should not have been worn on my worst day at the office let alone my best. The AP photo that moved on the wire that day shows me standing with one foot on the desk, one checked pantleg all too prominent, on the telephone with a cigar in my mouth. When newspapers published the lineup of Pulitzer winners the next day, it was a row of serious journalists with an oddball AP guy in the middle. I’m still stuck with that awful photo. It is the one selected by the Newseum, the museum of journalism, to go with my biography in their display.
One of my calls that day came from an agent who wanted to represent me on the speaking circuit. I never was comfortable making speeches for a fee, wary of anything that might seem to conflict with my work. So I told the agent no. I also said I thought it was amusing to be called a few hours after I won the Pulitzer. “I’m not any smarter than I was yesterday,” I said. But at age forty-two, I did know the lead on my obituary: “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,” or some variation of those words.
After the 1972 election, I accepted a management job, becoming assistant chief of the Washington bureau of the AP. The job was to help manage a bureau of more than one hundred reporters and photographers, satisfying work when it dealt with the news, frustrating when it involved complaints from headquarters in New York and from dissatisfied newspapers. There was too much of the latter for my taste. I spent too many hours researching and explaining last week’s slipup, not enough working on next week’s stories. I dealt with it but I didn’t like it. When Ford became president in 1974, he hired an old friend, Jerald ter Horst of The Detroit News to become White House press secretary. Jerry resigned as bureau chief of the News to take the job, and the editor called me, offering half again the salary I was getting at the AP, with a company car for good measure. It added up, and I left the AP to take the News offer. (By the time I did, Jerry had quit the White House in protest at the Nixon pardon, becoming a columnist.) My new job was cushy and relaxed by AP standards. I hated it. I was used to the pressure and urgency of the wire, not the more leisurely pace I found. It was a good bureau and a good paper, with good people. It just wasn’t my place, and I hadn’t been there a month before I knew that I wanted to go back to my professional home. In less than a year, I did, returning to the AP after Labor Day 1975 as a special correspondent. I was a reporter again and there was a campaign beginning again. I took a pay cut to go back. No company car, either. I never regretted it.
Carter had rewritten the calendar for presidential candidates by starting his campaign earlier than anyone before. That was the only way up for the man who began as “Jimmy Who?” He spent twenty-two months campaigning actively, toting his trademark garment bag over his shoulder from airports to Holiday Inns or borrowed beds in the homes of supporters. He began his first address as the Democratic nominee with the line he had uttered from a thousand platforms: “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president.” It was part nostalgia, part told-you-so to the Democratic establishment that would have preferred somebody else—Ted Kennedy if he would have run, or Hubert Humphrey if he hadn’t been so shopworn, or Walter Mondale if he’d had the stomach for the rigors of the campaign. Fourteen Democrats did try, some so pointlessly they had to get out shortly after they got started.
The most persistent of the losers was Representative Morris K. Udall of Arizona, “old second-place Mo” as he came to call himself after chasing Carter in almost every presidential primary. Udall was a man with a serious program to offer and a serious campaign to run, but he didn’t let that make him pompous. He used to tell his campaign audiences about the day he introduced himself at a barbershop in Keene, New Hampshire:
“ ‘Hi. I’m Mo Udall and I’m running for president,’ I said. And he said to me, ‘Yeah, I know, we were just laughing about it.’ ” Udall said he was at least distinctive because, as he liked to observe, except for him there were no six-foot-five, one-eyed Mormons who had played pro basketball running for president that year. The campaign wore on him, but it never wore out his humor.
One night he draped himself over a threadbare blue chair in what passed for a fancy suite at a hotel in New Hampshire and mused on the lifestyle of the candidate. “There goes the imperial presidency bit,” he said, sipping his Scotch and water. “Who the hell reserved this one?”
The 1976 campaign sequence began, inevitably, with Richard Nixon, who shaped it when he resigned the presidency to avoid impeachment for Watergate. Agnew, his vice president, had been forced to resign in 1973 to escape jail for tax evasion on bribes he’d taken from Maryland contractors since his days as county executive. For the first time, the president chose the vice president, subject to approval by Congress. Nixon nominated Ford, the House minority leader, a man with the seniority and congressional standing for easy confirmation. No superstar, just a plain-vanilla congressman, which was fine with Nixon, who didn’t want any long shadows cast by the man standing behind him.
So it was Vice President Ford and then President Ford when, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president ever to resign the office. Ford said at first that he might not run for a term in his own right in 1976, but he got over that after eleven months as president by appointment.
So the president who quit was the effective kingmaker and king slayer of the Republican campaign of 1976. Nixon’s Watergate crimes haunted the party and the Ford ticket. The Nixon pardon made the burden heavier for Ford. Then, instead of gratefully getting out of the way in 1976, Nixon persisted in claiming attention from his political exile.
But for Nixon, Ford would not have been running. But for the baggage Nixon left, he might well have been elected.
Nixon wouldn’t shut up. He wouldn’t go away. Just before the New Hampshire primary, with Ford struggling to hold off Ronald Reagan, Nixon emerged from exile for his first public venture since his resignation—a high-profile visit to China. The Chinese sent a jetliner to pick him up in California. The skeleton was out of the closet. New Hampshire voters started asking Ford again about the unconditional pardon he had granted the resigned president in September 1974. It had to hurt in a primary election Ford won by only 1,317 votes. I never figured out why Ford didn’t renounce Nixon as a bothersome ingrate meddling in foreign policy. Instead, Ford said he’d asked Nixon to relay his greetings to Mao Tse-tung.
Lyndon Johnson once called Nixon a chronic campaigner. Carter became one in his quest for the Democratic nomination. He began planning his 1976 campaign before McGovern’s drubbing in the 1972 election. He’d been interested in joining the McGovern ticket and had let the nominee know he was available for vice president. Fortunately for Carter, McGovern never called.
Carter waged the prototype nonstop campaign, planning and preparing for the better part of two years even before his marathon run for the nomination, which he began with his support in public opinion polls barely above the 3 percent margin of error, which meant, statistically, that he could have been near zero. He made about 1,500 speeches, in about one thousand cities. He went to all fifty states. He traveled nearly a half-million miles. It was told that after a wearying campaign day, a bleary-eyed Carter inadvertently grabbed the hand of a department store mannequin. Hubert Humphrey once remarked that after enough campaigning, a candidate’s hand becomes a frozen stump and the handshake itself becomes an act of hostility, not friendship.
When strategist Hamilton Jordan set out the campaign plan to Carter, he told the candidate it would be vital to cultivate the right political reporters in order to get national attention. Jordan figured there were about forty worth knowing, but at first he could only come up with eighteen names. Carter followed instructions. I saw him in New Hampshire early on, and he said, “I’ve heard good things about you.” I didn’t know why. In those precampaign days, I hadn’t heard much about him.
With that garment bag, he looked like a salesman, and he was one, pitching himself. Another point in the Jordan blueprint was that stories about a candidate in the New York Times and the Washington Post don’t just happen; they have to be planned. Which meant that he had to get somebody to pay attention to him. The Carter folks figured that one way was to compete in some straw polls early on, when just showing up would be enough to lead them. So they organized to get votes in window-dressing straw polls before any of the other candidates bothered or paid attention. All it took was a handful of votes to beat the rest of the field, and Carter did. Suddenly, the meaningless straw poll at a Democratic dinner in Iowa had meaning—it got Carter’s name in the newspaper and on television. I had colleagues who boasted at the time that they had discovered Jimmy Carter in Iowa. I think he discovered them first, engineering stories that billed him as a formidable candidate in the state where the first Democratic votes of the campaign would be registered in neighborhood caucuses. No candidate before had devoted the kind of attention and effort Carter invested in Iowa, and it paid dividends. He led the precinct caucuses, the first voting of 1976, with 28 percent of the vote. That made him the winner among candidates, although the real winner, nearly 10 percent stronger, was the vote to remain uncommitted. Even so, Iowa was the send-off Carter needed and he arrived in New Hampshire a made man.
There was a crowd waiting—fourteen candidates, five of them with broad enough backing to have qualified for federal campaign aid, in which donations were matched after a candidate proved himself by raising $5,000 in small contributions in each of twenty states.
Mo Udall was there, joking as usual. He said he’d adopted the platform of the sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona: “Ladies and gentlemen, them is my views, and if you don’t like ’em, I’ll change ’em.” Only joking, he told his rallies, presenting himself as the real Democrat, the dedicated liberal who would pursue the traditional objectives of the party. Later in the campaign, Udall went out to shake hands at dawn at a Pittsburgh plant gate. “Here’s Mo Udall,” a union host announced. “Come over here and tell him our problems.” One steelworker shook Udall’s hand, eyed the weary campaigner, and walked away. “He’s got more problems than I do,” the man told the union guy. I have an age-yellowed note to myself, saved for unremembered reasons, on an interview with Udall in his Boston hotel room. We’re both tired. I ask, he answers, questions about the coming primaries, about Carter, about what happens next. But as he talks, Udall starts rubbing his eyes, including the glass one. And suddenly my attention is off the interview and on his left eye. He’s rubbing it hard. I conjure up a scene in which that glass eye is going to pop out and it is going to roll across the room. It will be like the football game when the player loses his contact lens. Referees, linesmen, everybody on his hands and knees, pawing the football field for the contact lens. Except we’ll be looking for an eye, not a lens, and it probably will roll under the couch and be hell to find. My notes are becoming decidedly eccentric. That’s enough interviewing. Thanks, Mo. Goodnight.
Carter was a center-right Democrat, but he didn’t concentrate on philosophy. His secret was to play it both ways. At a rally in Dallas, the band brought him on stage with an appropriate medley: “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Carter ran as the anti-Nixon, the trust-me candidate. He went to church every Sunday, read the Bible; the religious dedication was part of the image. “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ve never made a promise in my life that I didn’t keep,” he said in speech after speech. And if that claim wasn’t a lie, he was a saint. One way not to make political promises he didn’t keep was to make promises so vague that he could not be held to specific commitments. He said, for example, that he would cut the federal government from 1,900 to 200 agencies, but he would not say which ones would go. No matter; nothing of the sort ever happened.
Nor did he jettison the entire tax code, “a disgrace to the human race.” One of my images of candidate Carter is of a man standing at a lectern with thick law books piled so high he had to peer around them, not over them. That’s the disgraceful tax code, he would explain, then promise that he would erase it in favor of a simpler, fairer system. That, of course, did not happen either.
It angered him when people complained that he was indefinite and imprecise. When he heard that Ted Kennedy had said so, Carter snapped to an Atlanta Journal reporter, “I’m glad that I don’t have to depend on Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey or anyone like that to put me in office. I don’t have to kiss his ass.” That didn’t sound much like Jimmy the Baptist, but he would periodically step out of that character, usually because he was angry.
To get to the nomination, Carter had to climb through a crowd of Democratic candidates, a roster of political pilgrims who didn’t yet know they were going nowhere.
Sargent Shriver, for example, was trying to prove himself more than a Kennedy brother-in-law. It didn’t help that his plan to seek the nomination had been leaked into print by Senator Kennedy, who had opened the whole field in the first place by announcing he would not be a candidate. Jules Witcover went to see Kennedy to check the story about Shriver’s plans. In his book, Marathon, Witcover reported Kennedy’s account: “He told me he was going to run and I wished him well.” That seemed the faintest of praise. So Witcover needled the senator about it. “ ‘Well,’ I asked him, ‘if Benito Mussolini walked in here and told you he was going to run, would you wish him well?’ Kennedy laughed and then, grinning broadly this time, said, ‘If he was married to my sister.’ ” Shriver staggered through the early primaries and quit after spending more than $800,000, saying that he had achieved remarkable success in view of all his handicaps, not least the idea that he was just trading on family connections. At that price, success had to be in the eye of the candidate with a family fortune.
The story went that before he quit the campaign, Shriver walked into a bar near the Boston waterfront and cried heartily, “Beer for the house. And I’ll have a Courvoisier.” Shriver insisted it never happened. He said Tip O’Neill made it up. Perhaps he did, but Shriver’s problem was that people believe it could have happened, whether it did or not.
Birch Bayh, the senator from Indiana, was running in place, too. He lasted two primaries. Bayh was all hands; he liked the politics of touch. He punched people playfully in the arm. It was said that Bobby Kennedy once threatened that if Bayh punched him in the arm one more time, he’d punch him in the nose. In Concord, New Hampshire, Bayh walked up to a man, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi. Birch Bayh of Indiana.” “Hi. Chris Wells of New Hampshire,” the man said, and walked away. One day Bayh talked about the horror of nuclear war. “If I’m president, and I’m kind of horrified to think about it,” he began, and paused. Somebody started laughing and then everybody did.
Fred Harris, the senator from Oklahoma, was never going to be president, but he was going to not do it with a touch of class. When his turn came to speak in a droning, ninety-minute campaign debate, Harris suggested that the TV audience would appreciate it if they’d agree to play a tape of Muhammed Ali’s last fight instead. He’d run briefly in 1972 and didn’t get anywhere then, either. He was deadly serious about his issues but not about himself. His last campaign words bear retelling:
“You couldn’t call it victory because we didn’t run that well. But we ran just well enough to keep going. So it wasn’t really defeat. So we didn’t know what to call it and we just decided to call it quits.”
Then he told about the guy who was defeated for sheriff but showed up the next day wearing his pistol anyhow. “Somebody said, ‘Well, Willie, what are you doing with that pistol? You didn’t get elected sheriff.’ He said, ‘Listen, anybody who doesn’t have more friends than I do needs protection.’ ” Udall’s variation was the crack he made in conceding one in his succession of primary defeats: “The people have spoken, the bastards.”
Senator Henry Jackson of Washington was running again. Since 1972, he’d had surgery to correct a drooping eyelid and create a new, alert look. We used to joke that his audiences needed an alertness booster more than he did. Jackson, a senator of substance and achievement, was no orator although he’d been instructed to try to be demonstrative. He overdid it. On the platform, Jackson looked as though he was demonstrating karate. Chop, point, wave, slash. He won two primaries, including Massachusetts, where court-ordered school busing had the voters inflamed. In one of his more bizarre boasts, Jackson used to tell people how he had courageously confronted that issue: “I laid it on the line. I took on the bigots . . . I told them I was against forced busing.” That was some ultimatum—what Jackson told them was, obviously, exactly what they wanted to hear.
George Wallace was telling them what they wanted to hear, too. In three campaigns, the Alabaman had become a national political force, despite the 1972 assassination attempt that had cost the use of his legs. Now he was campaigning again, in pain and in fear, running when he could not walk, and without a chance of winning. “When I was taken out of the primaries,” he would say, meaning when he was shot and partially paralyzed. The boisterous Wallace rallies of earlier campaigns were shadows now; people were searched for weapons at the door, and the former governor who used to glory in wading through crowds now spoke from behind a bulletproof plastic shield. Getting there was trying, too, because Wallace was afraid of flying. But he kept going. “Some folks in government are paralyzed in the head,” he told his crowds. “At least I’m not paralyzed in the head, I’m paralyzed in the legs.” If this were any other candidate, you would assume that ambitious men were using him, forcing him to run despite the torment. But this was George Wallace, and campaigning was what he did.
In Boston, where tempers were heated over school busing for racial desegregation, I watched him play the Orpheum Theater. Vaudeville was back on the old stage in new, political trappings. First the warm-up man, barker and cheerleader in one, to get things started, and then the country-and-western music folks, pickin’ and singin’ for George. Then the candidate, wheeled to the stage, lifted into position behind his bulletproof lectern. The body was broken but the voice still strong against those unelected bureaucrats and judges, those “social experimenters” who wanted to bus children away from their neighborhood schools. The Wallace theme was “send them a message,” and this time it would be a message from liberal Massachusetts if he got any kind of support in the Democratic primary. (He ran fourth.) All right, Wallace said that night at the Orpheum, he wouldn’t win the primary tomorrow, but he’d do better than expected. Under Wallace rules, any votes at all should count as more than expected.
I’d seen the Wallace shows in three campaigns. This was a sad reprise in a fit setting. The Orpheum was long past its prime, but a majestic relic. The blue paint was peeling from the balcony, the vast maroon curtain looked worn, seedy. The murals over the stage were faded; the columned loges and vast lobbies were mementos of another era. After vaudeville, the theater went to screen and stage acts, then to movies, then to whoever wanted to hire a hall for a night. Last night it was the Black Muslims. Tonight, Wallace Campaign Inc. Tomorrow, dark.
Along with the name candidates there were, as always, fringe entries. The Reverend Arthur O. Blessitt, for example, who sometimes campaigned carrying a big cross, later found to have had a small wheel at the bottom making it easier to maneuver. With the Federal Election Commission in business, there was now a government agency to which the token and oddball candidates could report that they were running for president, so that they could at least seem to be official. I got the FEC list and wrote a story about the more than forty names on it. One of them was a man who called himself Joe America and I put him in my story. His widow called after it appeared to say he had killed himself some time after he filed, an awkward development I decided I could only make worse by doing a follow-up to report why he wasn’t running.
After leading the field in Iowa and winning the New Hampshire primary, Carter was the Democrat to beat. He had the organization, he had the campaign contacts, and he was not going to be stopped. He also got the breaks. In the Wisconsin primary, Udall seemed to have upset the favored Carter, holding his first and only victory rally of the primary season before it turned out he’d lost. ABC and NBC both declared that Udall had won. The AP did not. Dion Henderson, our Milwaukee bureau chief, knew his state too well to get it wrong. Too many precincts are still out in the Janesville area, he said. It’s conservative Democratic country, and Carter is going to catch up there. He did. The newsman knew better than the network computers.
But the Milwaukee Sentinel went to press with a banner headline: “CARTER UPSET BY UDALL.” And the bare survival that would have been an embarrassment to the front-running Carter became instead a Harry Truman moment. The next day’s news photographs were of the beaming Carter holding up the front page, as Truman had displayed the Chicago Tribune that incorrectly announced his defeat by Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.
Udall took it with wry, painful humor. “You may amend my statement of last night and insert the word ‘Loser’ where I had ‘Winner,’ ” he told us at his morning-after news conference. He kept running second to Carter. “I’m old second-place Mo,” he told us. “We’ll get the nomination on the second ballot.” Except that there would not be a second ballot because Carter won on the first one, as had every convention nominee, in both parties, since 1952.
The stop-Carter movement—an alliance of the Jackson campaign, proxies for Humphrey, organized labor—tried to peak in Pennsylvania. Carter peaked instead. When he won that primary, his seventh victory, the contest was effectively settled, the nomination his, even though two more rivals came off the Democratic bench and beat him more often than they lost to him.
Carter made his mistakes. For example, he used a line that might have crippled a candidate in more politically correct times. He defended “ethnic purity” in American neighborhoods. He said he saw nothing wrong with it and would not force racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.
Questioned about it later, he repeated the phrase and said he resented any suggestion that it was racist. He finally admitted he’d made a serious mistake and apologized for it. While he was trying to live it down, a campaign invitation came in from The Family of Leaders, a group of middle-class blacks in Philadelphia. He figured it was a drop-by appearance; instead he was stuck for three hours. Before Carter was introduced to the audience, the audience was introduced to him, one at a time, about 180 people. A man in a blue jacket with the odd label “Ducky’s Dashery” passed among them with a microphone so that every member of the audience could do a self-introduction by name and organization. And some of them were real joiners, with long lists of affiliations to tell Carter about. “I won’t be any better president than I am a candidate. I’m going to make some mistakes,” he said when he finally got to speak. One of which clearly was not going to be a return engagement before the Family of Leaders.
The new Democratic rivals awaiting Carter in the closing month of the primaries were Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. of California, Reagan’s free-form successor. Each won four states but it was too late to stop Carter. He won when and where it counted. Carter lost two out of three primaries to Brown on the last day of the season, but he won big in Ohio, closing in the delegate majority he needed, and convincing the party’s powers that he was their man, like him or not.
Carter liked to say that he had no need of political bigshots or bosses in his campaign. Maybe he didn’t need them, but he certainly used their services. He kept in regular contact, privately, with Chicago’s Mayor Daley. After the primaries, the mayor returned the favor, saluting Carter’s eighteen victories and telling the party there was no reason to hesitate in lining up behind the inevitable nominee. “Carter’s victory in Ohio is the ballgame,” Daley said. Favor for favor, when nominee Carter got to Chicago he called Daley “the greatest mayor in the world.”
In the Republican primary campaign, the only president never elected started fast but then stumbled against Reagan, the former California governor who had his own celebrity as a movie actor and television host. They were mostly B movies, but Reagan was an A performer on the campaign stage. He would easily have won the 1976 nomination had Ford not reversed his early disclaimer of candidacy and run for the office he held by appointment. Reagan came close to winning the nomination anyhow, despite Ford’s presidential pulpit and his efforts to placate the Republican right. The major one was the campaign sacrifice of Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. Ford had nominated Rockefeller his vice president and Congress had concurred, but the conservatives never had liked the New Yorker and never would. So the Ford political people began sending signals that Rockefeller should renounce candidacy. When the Ford campaign committee opened, the signs and banners bore his name only, no mention of Rockefeller.
At an outdoor presidential news conference that summer, where the legs of the folding chairs sank into the mud of the overwatered South Lawn of the White House, I joined the clamor for recognition to ask a question. I wanted to ask Ford whether the absence of his vice president’s name at his newly opened campaign headquarters meant that Rockefeller was going to be replaced on the ticket. The answer was obvious—he was out—but Ford almost certainly would have ducked the question somehow. I never got to ask it. Another reporter jumped up in the row in front of me and shouted his question instead. Washington was hot and humid in the summer, this guy asked incisively, so would Ford be prepared to absolve men from wearing neckties to work? Sure, said Ford, after which somebody shouted, “Thank you, Mr. President,” and the news conference was over. Vice President Rockefeller yielded that fall and said he did not want to run again, quitting before he could be fired from the 1976 ticket. Ford operatives thought maybe they could get Reagan onto the ticket. But Reagan didn’t want to run with Ford, he wanted to run over him.
So it would be Reagan the showman against the solid, stolid Ford. “I have been called an unelected president, an accidental president,” Ford would say later in the campaign. “We may even hear that again.” Actually, it went without saying. It was so. Then, too, Ford was charismatically-challenged. “Gerry Ford gave a fireside chat and the fire went to sleep,” said Mark Russell, Washington’s resident comedian.
Ford’s plain, everyman beginning as president, “a Ford, not a Lincoln,” the guy who got up and made his own breakfast, was in winning contrast to the wily pomposity of the Nixon White House. But Reagan was a performer, showing the style he would patent when he did become president. He was the master of the unassailable statistic. “Did you know that there is more than three-fourths as much forest in America today as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge?” he asked one crowd. “Do you know that there are more white-tailed deer?” No, on both counts. I didn’t know that. When I asked Reagan how he knew it, he said he’d read it somewhere. He also had read or heard somewhere that the paperwork generated by the bureaucracy in Washington in a year would make a pile one hundred feet high, one hundred feet wide and 4,500 feet long. Prove that wrong. Or right. “I think it would make a great annual bonfire,” he said.
One frigid day he climbed on top of a pile of feed sacks in front of a country store in Cornish Flats, New Hampshire, and warmed to the numbers game, complaining about the obstacles the government put in the path of new nuclear power plants. Reagan said it took eleven years to get one built because of all the “fairy tales” about risks, which he claimed were infinitesimal. “The odds against a fatality are one in three hundred million,” he declared. “Your odds against having a fatal automobile accident are only one in four thousand . . . of getting struck by lightning one in two million, a hurricane or tornado one in two and a half million, your odds of drowning of one in thirty thousand.” He had more odds, but I didn’t write them down.
I did ask Reagan’s campaign aides where all those numbers had come from. One said the National Safety Council. Another said Jimmy the Greek. A third said he didn’t care. A week later, the campaign sent me a memo, saying the odds were taken from the report of a task force that studied nuclear risk ratios for the government.
So informed, I covered what the Reagan campaign called a Citizens Press Conference. Those were fake Reagan news conferences at which only ordinary citizens, not reporters, were allowed to ask questions. That way the questions were almost always the same and easy to answer. But at Dartmouth College, a young man who had seen Reagan’s nuclear risk numbers had a trick question for the candidate: “Do you know what the odds would be for a horse to drown in molasses?” Reagan didn’t know but he said that didn’t affect all the research that proved nukes safe. Nobody knew. There were no odds for what happened to the horse in Boston’s North End in the Great Molasses Flood of 1916, when the streets flowed in the stuff from a factory disaster. The questioner was a student who had been riding the campaign press bus as a reporter for his college newspaper. The Reagan people kicked him off, saying that he was no longer entitled to ride the bus because he had disqualified himself as a reporter by asking a question at a Citizens Press Conference. That taught him. Play by their rules or walk home.
Reagan was the government minimalist. One New Hampshire campaign day I heard him ponder what would happen if the government just quit for a while. “I wonder if we were to close the doors and sneak away for a few weeks, I wonder how long it would take the American people to miss us,” he said, drawing a ripple of laughter from a confused audience that had come to hear him tell what he wanted to do as president, not that the job was irrelevant.
“What is wrong is that an intellectual elite living on the shores of the Potomac has taken over our decision-making,” Reagan said that day, a line that could have come from a George Wallace dissertation on pointy-headed bureaucrats.
Those were bits from The Speech, the set piece Reagan delivered as he campaigned, little changed from the text he had used when he was in the lecture and broadcast business before he ran. He always had been a one-speech man. I covered him during his first campaign for governor of California in 1966 and flew with him one day in a four-seat plane for an appearance in the San Joaquin valley, farm country. The use of migrant Mexicans, then called braceros, as farm laborers was an issue in that campaign. Reagan opposed federal plans to cut back the number of migrants admitted to work the fields, arguing that the Mexicans would do jobs Americans would not take. Stooping to cut asparagus, for example. He made the asparagus-cutting part of his set speech, as unvaried a dissertation as any theatrical script. Flying up to the valley that morning it got hot and Reagan got thirsty. He asked the pilot for a cold drink but there wasn’t any, except for a bottle of champagne in a cooler under the seat. So the campaign hop became a 10:00 A.M. champagne flight. We sipped, chatted, and looked down at the checkerboard of farm fields below. I jokingly asked Reagan whether that was asparagus growing down there. He solemnly delivered the bracero speech, word for word.
Reagan’s 1976 campaign did one thing for late night television. It knocked Bedtime for Bonzo off the air. That was one of Reagan’s fifty-one movies, the one in which his costar was a chimpanzee. Dartmouth students showed it one night to needle him while he was campaigning in Hanover, but Reagan wasn’t bothered. “That was a good movie,” he said. It was off the rerun air because the Federal Communications Commission had ruled that equal time rules would apply to any TV station that broadcast Reagan movies. Equal time for what was not clear, since Ford didn’t make movies.
Things kept happening to Ford. He stumbled down the steps of Air Force One. He bumped his head on the helicopter door. He tumbled on a ski slope. No matter that he was the most athletic president since Theodore Roosevelt. He was accident prone, to be kind. To be cruel, he looked like a klutz. At a rally in North Carolina, a Ford supporter introduced the president defensively, as “a man who has proved he can win elections and chew gum at the same time.” He lost the primary there. Ford went to California to campaign for S. I. Hayakawa for senator and called him Hayakama. It was alleged that Ford had said Hiawatha, which wasn’t true but made print anyhow. Hayakawa won.
In Walnut Creek, California, he was dedicating a replica of the Liberty Bell and was supposed to ring it. When he reached for the clapper it came unhooked and fell out of the bell.
When the Nashua, New Hampshire, chamber of commerce honored its man of the year, President Ford was there for a perfect photo opportunity. Or nearly perfect. The winner was the chief fund-raiser for the Reagan primary campaign against Ford.
Then there was the dairy tour in Cambellsport, Wisconsin, when Ford got too close to a cow, which soiled the presidential pants. They hustled out to the motorcade for another suit and Ford changed in the farmhouse.
Both parties had cow problems. In Omaha, Nebraska, the Carter campaign staged a mock cattle auction as a fund-raising gimmick. A cow was supposed to be led down the street to publicize the event. But it went berserk and had to be hauled off to the stockyards. “It was not a committed cow,” Carter said.
In Concord, New Hampshire, Ford met Tommy Boyd, fourteen, who had a cast on his left arm.
“How did you get that?” the president asked.
“I fell,” Tommy replied.
“I fall a lot, too,” Ford said.
By then, Ford’s press secretary, Ron Nessen, was sporting a “Ski New Hampshire” button at every public appearance, atonement for his politically regrettable remark that the president found the slopes there too icy for his skiing. And his campaign spokesman, Peter Kaye, was trying to get over a gaffe of his own. The Ford campaign had dropped a plan to canvass door-to-door, walking the state, in political parlance. They would use telephone canvassing instead. More effective, Kaye said, although we reporters knew the real reason was a shortage of volunteer canvassers.
“New Hampshire is a difficult state to organize,” Kaye said. “It’s a helluva state to walk in because if you get forty miles outside the city, there’s nothing but trees and bears.” Not a smart start in an effort to get primary votes. “I put my paw in my mouth,” Kaye confessed.
Reagan had his own set of problems. There was the Social Security hangover, a touchy issue in New Hampshire, where elderly voters were a powerful constituency. As a Goldwater champion, Reagan had joined in promoting the idea that the system should be voluntary, a proposal he now disowned. When he stirred a controversy by suggesting that Social Security funds might be invested in the stock market, Reagan got out of it with a ploy he would use as president, saying it wasn’t a proposal from him, just an idea he had read about. He finally ducked the Social Security issue with the cop-out politicians always used, saying a commission should study the system and its future financing.
In New Hampshire, Reagan’s best friends were at times his worst headaches. Governor Meldrim Thomson, for example, the textbook publisher who became a textbook right-wing Republican and cultivated state conservatives for Reagan. The trouble was that he insisted Reagan was going to beat Ford outright in the primary. The Reagan people wanted him to be quiet; they were trying to play down expectations, saying that 40 or 45 percent of the vote would be a victory against a sitting president. Thomson wouldn’t stop. Just before the voting he said on national television that Reagan would beat Ford by at least five percentage points. With Thomson’s unintentional help, Ford won the expectations game.
The Republican primary vote was close to a tie, Ford winning by less than 1 percent. Reagan claimed a moral victory, pointing to the way McCarthy in 1968 and McGovern in 1972 had been judged winners in defeat. Not this time. Ford had won his first election outside his Grand Rapids, Michigan, House district, after trailing in the early polls and in Thomson’s late forecasts of a Reagan victory. In different circumstances, a standoff would have been an embarrassing setback for a sitting president. But for Ford, any victory was victory enough.
Reagan was the glamour candidate, although it didn’t do him much good at the beginning of the primary campaign. Ford plodded past him in the first three primaries and the question became when Reagan would throw in the hand. Even John Sears, Nixon’s 1968 primary genius, then the Reagan manager, talked privately about withdrawal after a Ford landslide in Illinois. But Reagan wasn’t quitting; he still had cards to play. And Ford was misplaying his. His people were overconfident, counting on a North Carolina primary victory that would end the Reagan threat. Actually, the Reagan people expected to lose, too. They were planning a last try, an address on national television, hoping for a performance as igniting as the one he had given for Goldwater in 1964. But Reagan himself was not writing off North Carolina. He was running hard there, denouncing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the very idea of détente with the Soviet Union, the policy Ford had inherited from Nixon. He found headway in the Panama Canal issue, saying that negotiations to turn it over to Panamanian control at the end of the century were a giveaway he wouldn’t tolerate. “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it,” he said in a line that became so standard that we reporters and then some people in his crowds began reciting it with him. The Reagan campaign made more adroit use of television than before, an obvious tactic when the candidate was a TV pro, but one oddly ignored in the earlier states. They simply put the old TV performer on TV, talking to the camera in taped speeches, a format Reagan’s managers had shelved out of concern that it would call attention to the fact that the candidate was an actor. He was, but the voters didn’t worry about it.
It worked, not least because Ford was bumbling through his campaign with so-what speeches. The Ford people spent their efforts lining up Republican leaders to demand that Reagan get out of the president’s way. “Tell him to quit,” Reagan retorted.
Reagan said that the pressure for him to withdraw was coming from the same White House that had tried to keep him from running in the first place. When Ford had said earlier that Reagan was too far right to win the election, the challenger had a ready comeback: “It does come rather strange since he tried on two different occasions to persuade me to accept any of several Cabinet positions in his administration. I didn’t want to be in the Cabinet.”
Was Ford trying to take him out of the 1976 campaign?
“No,” Reagan smiled. “I just thought he recognized my administrative ability.”
Ford had to confirm the offers, and said he had made them in an effort to unify the party. But he couldn’t appoint Reagan out of the way and now he couldn’t force his challenger out, either. Reagan upset the president with 52 percent of the vote in the North Carolina primary, a turnaround so surprising that he’d flown out of the state and couldn’t even claim his victory on election night. He’d left behind his state campaign chairman, Senator Jesse Helms, but the senator didn’t want to be around to take the blame. Helms flew to Washington before the polls closed, saying he had to tend to Senate business, although there wasn’t any. By the time the Reagan upset and revival became evident, it was too late for him to get back to celebrate.
Reagan was in La Crosse, Wisconsin, that night, speaking to a hunters’ group called Ducks Unlimited and ducking requests for his reaction to the North Carolina returns, even when they showed him leading. He was in the air on the way to Los Angeles when word came that he really had won. By then, the Reagan campaign had announced that he was canceling campaign appearances for the following week to put together a national TV address. His half-hour speech was a reprise of what he’d been saying to primary state audiences. In it, Reagan escalated his Kissinger attack. He quoted Kissinger as having said, “My job as secretary of state is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available.” Quite a quote, but he didn’t cite a source. A spokesman said he got it from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who had feuded with Kissinger as chief of naval operations. The State Department said the quote was invented and irresponsible. But it was fodder for the Reagan set speech from then on. “The evidence mounts that we are number two in a world where it is dangerous if not fatal to be second best.”
From that point, the Republican campaign became a war in the political trenches, with neither candidate able to advance past the other. Overall, Ford won fifteen primaries, Reagan twelve, on the way to the most closely contested national convention of the era. Ford’s strength was still his office; he could flatter uncommitted Republicans with White House invitations while his campaign lieutenants pressed for commitments.
But in a party dominated by conservatives, Reagan was the conservative preference. He was an unrivaled political performer—even when he wasn’t trying, as on the misty morning in Flint, Michigan, when Reagan boarded his motorcade outside the three-tiered motel where he’d spent the night. I glanced up at the third floor and there was a man at the window, which was open wide, gawking down at the Ronmobile. He was naked, and clutching the drapery around his middle like a towel after a shower. On the other side of the window stood a woman and she also appeared to be wearing nothing but the wraparound drapery. They watched intently as the caravan pulled out. Adam and Eve in the garden of presidential politics.
When Ford got awkward questions he tended to answer awkwardly. For Reagan, the aw shucks, look at your shoes, smile wanly response was an art form. He actually told one audience that he was embarrassed to ask for votes for president. “I wonder what you think of God?” a man asked him one day. “I wonder if you will let him direct your life.” Reagan did the modesty number. “I’ve always had a little difficulty talking about my own faith and my own beliefs,” he replied. Only a little, though. “I don’t know how any man could ever seek the position I seek or hold the position that I held for eight years and think that he could do it without being able to call on God for help.” Years later, I was told, President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were taking communion at a church where the practice was to take a piece of the bread, dip it in the wine and then partake. She went first and the bread slipped from her fingers and dropped, irretrievably, into the wine cup. Reagan seemed puzzled. He took the bread and paused. Then he dropped it into the wine and walked away.
While Ford and Reagan were wrestling for Republican delegates until and into the Republican National Convention, Carter was strolling to his Democratic nomination. He already had set about a methodical talent hunt for a vice presidential nominee, personally delivering the most significant and lasting reform of the 1976 campaign. In time, the studied search for a running mate would become standard in both parties. McGovern’s Eagleton disaster had shown the flaws of the hurried, haphazard way of choosing. Agnew had resigned the vice presidency for misconduct a careful screening might have spotted.
Carter put his staff to work on vice presidential possibilities in the spring as he campaigned for his own nomination. Before the convention he winnowed the list to seven names, had his lawyer friend Charles Kirbo check them out, and broke tradition by announcing the names he was considering. Each of the finalists got a questionnaire about his personal and political life, his medical history, finances, and tax returns. Then Carter personally interviewed them, some at his home in Plains, Georgia, some at the convention in New York. It was a new way of vice president-picking, a sort of public auditioning. But there was still only one vote that counted: the presidential nominee’s.
Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota was one of the men Carter interviewed, and he obviously made a winning impression, despite early misgivings about him as a campaigner. He had, after all, run a fledgling presidential campaign himself, exploring the possibility of candidacy and observing during a visit to Atlanta that Jimmy Carter was just the kind of running mate he might want. But Mondale dropped his presidential campaign notions in 1974, saying he didn’t have the overwhelming desire it would take to make the race and didn’t want to spend two years sleeping in Holiday Inns. But he told Carter in the vice presidential interview that he’d really quit after concluding he wouldn’t be able to line up enough support to win. Now he was ready to run for No. 2.
Outside, Carter said he had had no doubt that Mondale would be a vigorous campaigner despite his presidential dropout. “What I said at the time was that I did not want to spend most of my life in Holiday Inns,” Mondale said. “But I’ve checked and found they’ve all been redecorated. They’re marvelous places to stay and I’ve thought it over and that’s where I’d like to be.” There were others to be interviewed, but he would be the man. He had hit it off with Carter, and he had passed what another of the Plains interviewees called the real test. He’d stood answering questions with Carter without raising a hand to try to shoo away the swarms of gnats that buzzed around your face when you stood still there.
Carter kept his choice to himself until the morning after he was nominated at the New York convention. Then he called Mondale. That had at least kept a bit of suspense alive at a foregone convention. In his convention speech, Carter praised the Democrats for their on-time decorum, “without any fights or free-for-alls” like those in Chicago in 1968 and Miami Beach in 1972. I wrote at the time that it was “an affair without passion, a marriage without romance, performed with all the precision of a prearranged royal wedding. But after their flings, their spats, their divorces of the past decade, Democrats were ready for Jimmy Carter, the outsider who barged into the party and became the bridegroom.” And Carter began with a runaway lead in the public opinion polls over either potential Republican nominee, Ford or Reagan.
In the Republican struggle, Reagan broke the old rules on the vice presidency in an attempt to pry nominating votes away from Ford. It wasn’t Reagan’s idea; it was a ploy designed by Republican strategist John Sears, who sold it to the candidate. Three weeks before the convention, Reagan announced his prospective running mate, reaching left to say he’d run with Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, a liberal but according to Reagan a man whose “independent thought and action” set him apart from the Washington buddy system. They certainly set him apart from Reagan’s political buddies. The idea was to persuade moderate and liberal Republicans aligned with Ford that they should take another look at Reagan. The problem with the odd political pairing was that the Reagan people had to placate their own conservative allies. Schweiker said he certainly could support Reagan’s policies, although he didn’t seem very familiar with them. Organized labor gave Schweiker’s Senate voting record a 100 percent rating, which put him on their side more reliably than Mondale.
Reagan, who didn’t know Schweiker before he signed on, slipped now and then and called him Weicker, which was the name of another liberal Republican, Senator Lowell P. Weicker. That was fair enough since Schweiker had trouble pronouncing Reagan’s name at first, not knowing whether to accent the e or the a.
No matter: they were a ticket—an odd ticket, but a ticket. The Sears game plan went beyond that, though. He engineered a rules proposal to force all candidates, meaning Ford, to name their vice presidential selections before being nominated. It was to be a test of convention strength in which the nominating commitments Ford had won in the primaries and caucuses for votes on the nomination would not be binding on the delegates, and Reagan might show the muscle to prove that they really wanted him for president. He couldn’t do it. The rule change was narrowly rejected and the game was up. Reagan’s managers tried one more maneuver, winning a platform plank that effectively rejected the administration’s foreign policy of detente with Moscow. Ford’s managers said fine, they didn’t care. They wanted no more procedural tests, only the climactic vote on the nomination. Nobody read platforms anyway. Ford was nominated with a margin of 117 votes, the closest contest of modern convention times, and then called on Reagan at his hotel in the middle of the night. It was a gesture of political detente because people customarily go to see the president, not the other way around.
Ford made his vice presidential selection the old-fashioned way. Reagan would have been the ideal running mate, but he’d insisted that he not even be asked. So the president batted names around with his inner circle in the small hours before dawn, settling on Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, who had Reagan’s blessing, which meant he was fine with the restive conservatives. Besides, Dole was a tough, acid campaigner, the kind of candidate who could run a road show while the president stayed close to the White House. Too tough and too acid for his ticket’s own good, it would turn out later.
Trailing by a pollster’s landslide as he began his campaign against Carter, Ford issued the challenge that would revive televised debates between presidential nominees, making them a part of every campaign to come. “I am ready and eager to go before the American people and debate the real issues face-to-face with Jimmy Carter,” the president said in his convention closing speech. Within minutes, Carter had issued a statement accepting debates and saying the candidates should face tough examination of their proposals. I wrote it that way and got a complaint from the Carter camp saying that they hadn’t accepted the Ford challenge, they had issued a counter-challenge and had intended to seek debates before the president did. The pettiness got pettier when the two camps negotiated debate terms. The Carter people demanded sit-down debates or adjustable podiums so that Ford’s height advantage wouldn’t show—he was three inches taller than Carter. They finally agreed on lecterns approximately forty-two inches high, based on a formula that averaged the distance between the top of each candidate’s belt buckle and the floor. By then the Carter people had figured out that the candidates would be standing so far apart that the height distance wouldn’t show, but neither side would yield a point that might conceivably be to the other’s advantage. Trivia like that keeps campaign consultants in business.
Carter campaigned as he had in the primaries, on a platform that consisted largely of not being Nixon, promising never to lie, and snapping at anyone who suggested that his proposals were lacking in specifics. They were lacking, but he didn’t like hearing it. One dull weekend in Americus, Georgia, where reporters stayed when Carter was in Plains, I did some research on Carter’s statements about the Democratic record on the economy and wrote a piece saying that the story he told wasn’t the whole story. I didn’t think what I wrote was hostile or harsh; it just filled in some blanks with facts. Past Democrats hadn’t done quite as well as Carter claimed on inflation and economic growth. He’d gone back to Harry Truman for the inflation numbers, for example, without including the fact that wage and price controls had been in effect at the time. It was not the kind of story to make waves, but it arrived on a quiet news day and the Macon Telegraph put my piece on the front page, where Carter read it. He then told his staff to rebut it. On the campaign plane that week, press secretary Jody Powell came by my seat and handed me what looked like a college term paper. It was about twenty pages long, in a blue binder. “Read this,” he said. It was the Carter staff rebuttal. It argued with my story, but it didn’t contradict my facts. Indeed, it ended with a concession that his figures on past budget deficits were wrong. I read it and took it back to Jody. “Have you read this?” I asked. He had not. He did, and that seemed to be the end of it. But a week or so later, Carter met with AP reporters and executives in Washington in a session I had arranged and told my bosses he couldn’t understand how “a good reporter like Walter” could have written such a story. They didn’t know what he was talking about. I defended my story. They didn’t know what I was talking about. So we dropped it. After the session, Powell called me over to make peace with Carter. We shook hands. “Truce?” I asked. “Truce,” Carter agreed. Then he turned to the president of the AP and complained to my boss that I certainly had written an awful story.
Carter was a master of having it both ways. He said he was against outright amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders—but he would offer them all unconditional pardons. He would cut defense funds by at least $5 billion, but he wouldn’t say whether the cuts would be from actual current spending or from some undefined future budget projection. Pressed for details on his promise to slash hundreds of agencies out of the government, Carter was asked again, which ones? Can’t say yet. So how could voters judge him on that promise?
“Well, whether they can or not, they’ll have to, because there is no way I can take off from campaigning to do a complete and definitive study of what the federal government is and what it’s going to be three or four years in the future,” he retorted. Nevertheless, he did promise that he would balance the federal budget within one term as president. “You can count on it,” he said. Actually, you couldn’t. Ford made the same balanced budget pledge when we asked him about Carter’s. “I guarantee it,” he said. In Ford’s flat accent, it came out “gorontee.” No matter how it was said, it wasn’t going to happen, no matter which man became president. Reagan chimed in with an identical pledge in 1976 and in 1980 when he won, but he couldn’t accomplish a balanced budget either.
Carter had a guaranteed applause line for every audience. “I owe the special interests nothing,” he would say. “I owe people like you everything.” He used it in odd circumstances, as when thanking labor unions, which certainly are special interests, for the money they were putting into his campaign.
He was a born-again Christian with an odd outreach plan aimed at people who weren’t. That showed up in his interview with Playboy, not usually a forum for devout southern Baptists. In it, Carter volunteered that he wasn’t all that pure. “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust,” he said. “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times . . . and God forgives me for it.” Carter said forgiveness extended beyond a man who looks with lust but to one who leaves his wife “and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock. Christ says don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife.” This strange campaign fare was published just before the first Ford-Carter debate, but it wasn’t mentioned. None of the panelists asked a question about the interview and Ford could hardly raise it himself, although he had criticized Carter’s exposition as “poor judgment and lacking in good taste.” Later, the Ford campaign bought ads in 352 newspapers, reproducing a Playboy cover that promoted the interview. “Now, the real Jimmy Carter,” the promo read.
Carter might have done better to borrow a line Udall had used “about the minister who had a sign outside his church and it said, ‘If you’re tired of sin come in,’ and underneath, somebody had written, ‘If you’re not, call 836-.’ ” At least that left them laughing at the joke, not joking about the candidate.
That first debate didn’t change much. No breakthroughs on the issues, no mistakes to mark either candidate. It would have been memorable only as the first presidential campaign debate in sixteen years except that the sound system failed, leaving the candidates and panelists on the Philadelphia stage in strained silence for twenty-seven minutes while technicians fixed the problem. Since nobody knew for sure when the microphones would be live again, Ford and Carter stayed at them, saying nothing, neither looking at the other, both perspiring in the blaze of the television lights. The TV people finally got the sound hooked up again, the moderator apologized for the breakdown, and the candidates picked up where they’d left off, as though nothing had happened.
By late September and early October, Ford was gaining on Carter. The polls were narrowing and the president seemed to have things moving his way. Then he made the great blunder of the great debates, in the second of the series, when he declared that “there is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” Astounded at the misstatement, Max Frankel of the New York Times followed up by asking whether he’d understood Ford to say that the Russians had not made eastern Europe their sphere of influence and occupied most of the countries there. It was a way out for Ford but instead he dug in deeper, saying people of nations like Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland did not consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. “Each of these 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,” the president said, as though he could erase the Iron Curtain. I thought Ford blundered into that misstatement because as a congressman and House Republican leader he was attuned to the annual “captive nation resolutions” declaring freedom in the states Moscow actually controlled. Whatever the reasoning, or lack of it, Ford couldn’t see that he’d erred. He came out of the San Francisco debate thinking he’d done fine, and resentfully resisted advice to back off the eastern Europe statement. He got angry at campaign advisers who wanted him to recant. Hadn’t they told him back at the debate hall that he’d been great? He preferred to believe that. He got angrier at reporters who kept questioning him about the debate gaffe, but he wound up defending himself and finally apologizing for what he called a misunderstanding. It took him two days and five attempts before he finally said “what I meant to say,” which was that he did not accept or recognize Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Carter was reveling in it. Maybe Ford had been brainwashed like George Romney on Vietnam, he suggested. “I understand Polish-Americans for Ford is disbanding,” Carter sniped. Later, he said he had been shocked by Ford’s insensitivity and lack of knowledge. “He disgraced our country,” Carter said, an overstatement but one made for political cause, since the flap was carving into Ford’s support, especially among ethnic voters. There had been a sense of momentum about the Ford campaign but now it stalled.
After the Playboy and eastern Europe episodes, I addressed an editors’ conference and summed up the choice awaiting the voters: “It’s either the Walter Mitty of adultery or the man who freed Poland.” It had to be my best line because a gossip columnist picked it up and attributed it to Mark Russell, the master of political comedy.
Carter’s challenge was that he was a relatively conservative man with a business background, leading a relatively liberal party accustomed to leaders with congressional, academic, or labor resumes. That also was part of his strength. The voters were quite content in the center. They just didn’t like what Nixon had done, and Ford still bore the taint of the man he stopped identifying by name, calling him “my predecessor” or “Lyndon Johnson’s successor.”
Ford usually was a placid campaigner, but he bristled when pressed about the Nixon connection. Earlier in the campaign a college questioner ran the list: Ford’s support of Nixon in Congress, his defense of the ex-president against impeachment, the Nixon pardon. “We have a new team,” Ford snapped back. “We have followed a very middle-of-the-road to conservative view in economic policy. It has been a policy decided by me. I don’t go back and look at what the former president did because he didn’t have the hard decisions like we had in 1975. If there is a similarity, it is pure happenstance.” But he could not exorcise the ghost, especially the pardon he granted Nixon a month after the resignation in 1974, saying he did so to end “an American tragedy in which we have all played a part.” He was in a no-win spot. Let the threat of prosecution linger over the exiled ex-president, and the scandal would linger, too. Let Nixon be indicted and put on trial, and the spectacle would dominate national attention. Pardon him for Watergate crimes and the new administration would pay. The honeymoon would be over after a month. Ford did and it was.
Two years later Ford was still trying to get past the pardon. He said he’d done it for the good of the nation and was glad he had. “Now, the political ramifications . . . it is up to the public in the general election, but I am convinced it was right in the national interest, and I would do it again.” The political ramifications were obvious, but he couldn’t admit that. The Nixon pardon hurt. It cost him votes, perhaps enough votes to have made the difference in what turned out to be a close-count election.
Carter could have that one both ways, too. “I still think the action he took was improper and ill-advised, and I would not have done it, but I honor his right to make that decision,” he said. Nor, said Carter, would he try to make an issue of it. He didn’t need to. But just in case, he added, “The American people know who pardoned President Nixon.”
The Nixon pardon was the question that got Bob Dole into trouble when he debated Mondale. I asked it. I was a panelist at the Houston debate, held ten days after Dole had accused Mondale of mudslinging for raising the Watergate and pardon issues. I reminded Dole that he’d said during his 1974 Senate campaign in Kansas that the pardon was premature and mistaken, and asked him why it wasn’t an equally appropriate topic for the Democrats in 1976.
“Well,” Dole said, and coughed a bit nervously, “it is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it’s not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be or World War II or World War I or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century.” He wasn’t finished. He said he had added up all the casualties “in Democrat wars in this century,” and it came to about 1.6 million, equal to the population of Detroit.
For Mondale, Dole’s claim that they were “Democrat wars” was a can’t-miss pitch and he hit it. “I think Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight,” Mondale said. It was an image that stuck to Dole in that campaign and beyond. He later backed off the “Democrat wars” line and effectively apologized, but it stuck, a liability in 1976, revived by his critics twenty years later when he ran and lost as the Republican presidential nominee himself.
In 1976, Dole played the role of the Republican heavy, and he also did the hefty lifting of the campaign. He traveled for the ticket while Ford stayed home at the White House to accentuate his incumbency, as though being there was his best argument for staying there. It may have been. It almost worked.
I not only reported the 1976 campaign, I was reported on, in a Wall Street Journal profile. Flattering stuff. The headline read “AMONG THE BOYS ON THE BUS, WALTER MEARS IS IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT.” The Journal assigned Ron Shafer to report the piece, and he traveled with me as I traveled with Carter. He was a fine reporter and good company on the press bus, but I found it a bit odd and awkward to be covered while I did my job of covering the candidate. Shafer found it a frustrating assignment because I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary and he needed a lead. “Do something colorful,” he pleaded. Finally, at a campaign stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he found his material, although I thought it told more about how skilled he was than how colorful I was. His lead:
“During a recent campaign stop here, reporters traveling with Jimmy Carter rushed to an auditorium room where phones were set up for their use and found that the door was locked. As they pounded on the door, they didn’t notice a pay phone on the wall behind them—or the man who was calmly striding toward it. At the sound of a phone behind dialed, the group turned to see Walter Mears of The Associated Press dictating a news story to his office. Mr. Mears flashed a Jimmy Carter grin, waved to his pals, and kept on transmitting the news.”
That election night was a long one. Once lagging by thirty points in the public opinion polls, Ford almost overtook Carter. It took most of the night to cement Carter’s victory, by what turned out to be a two-point edge, with only twenty-seven more electoral votes than he needed. There hadn’t been a presidential election that close in sixty years. I wrote the AP’s running story on the election, updating it as the situation and the numbers changed. In our parlance, each updated story is a lead. I wrote eighteen that night and early morning, the last of them timed off at 4:19 A.M. “Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated President Ford and won the White House early Wednesday, ending eight years of Republican rule and crowning his long, often lonely campaign out of the political wilderness. He rejoiced in Atlanta at 4 o’clock in the morning after the tension of a long count and a close race.” When I won the Pulitzer, the Los Angeles Times said it was for “the volume of his copy.” A colleague said that made me the first reporter ever to win one for overfiling.
Even a near miss was a miracle for Ford. He was the nominee of the party of Watergate and Nixon. The liabilities Nixon had snidely cited after nominating him vice president had not gone away. Fairly or unfairly, he had the image of a bumbler. His own campaign polls showed that going in, a majority of Americans did not consider him a strong leader, and a significant minority did not think he was particularly smart. He had barely survived the Reagan challenge in a wearing campaign for the nomination.
Looking at that pile of troubles, the smart political money would have been on an easy Democratic victory, perhaps a landslide, certainly not the 50 percent Carter got to Ford’s 48. In defeat, Ford said he thought that history would treat his brief presidency kindly. It has. His special gift was that he was an ordinary American. A better politician would have made a worse president in his time. Inaugurated, Carter thanked Ford “for all that he has done to heal our land.” Carter also said that no defeated president ever had done as much as Ford to help the victor prepare to take over the White House.
“I wanted the new president to have an easier start than I had,” Ford said.