Which hardly matters, because Jimmy Carter didn't mention the presidency to me that day, and I had other things on my mind. It was the first Saturday in May -- Derby Day in Louisville -- and I'd been harassing Jimmy King since early morning about getting us back to Atlanta in time to watch the race on TV. According to the schedule we were due back at the governor's mansion around three in the afternoon, and post time for the Derby was 4:30. . . But I have learned to be leery of politicians' schedules; they are about as reliable as campaign promises, and when I'd mentioned to Kennedy that I felt it was very important to get ourselves back to Atlanta in time for the Derby, I could tell by the look on his face that the only thing that might cause him to go out of his way to watch the Kentucky Derby was a written guarantee from the Churchill Downs management that I would be staked down on the track at the finish line when the horses came thundering down the stretch.
But Carter was definitely up for it, and he assured me that we would be back at the mansion in plenty of time for me to make all the bets I wanted before post time. "We'll even try to find a mint julep for you," he said. "Rosalynn has some mint in the garden, and I notice you already have the main ingredient."
When we got to the mansion I found a big TV set in one of the basement guest rooms. The mint juleps were no problem, but the only bet I could get was a $5 gig with Jody Powell, Carter's press secretary -- which I won, and then compounded the insult by insisting that Powell pay off immediately. He had to wander around the mansion, borrowing dollars and even quarters from anybody who would lend him money, until he could scrape up five dollars.
Later that night we endured another banquet, and immediately afterward I flew back to Washington with Kennedy, King and Kirk. Kennedy was still in a funk about something, and I thought it was probably me. . . And while it was true that I had not brought any great distinction to the entourage, I had made enough of an effort to know that it could have been worse, and just to make sure he understood that -- or maybe for reasons of sheer perversity -- I waited until we were all strapped into our seats and I heard the stewardess asking Teddy if she could bring him a drink. He refused, as he always does in public, and just as the stewardess finished her spiel I leaned over the seat and said, "How about some heroin?"
His face went stiff and for a moment I thought it was all over for me. But then I noticed that King and Kirk were smiling. . . So I strangled the sloat and walked back to my hotel in the rain.
The Last Crazed Charge of the Liberal Brigade: The Shrewdness of Richard Nixon, the Deep and Abiding Courage of Hubert Humphrey and All of His New Found Friends. . . Jimmy Carter at Home in Plains, One Year Later the Leap of Faith
SPECIAL BULLETIN
BEAUMONT, TEXAS (Apr 29) -- Anarchist presidential candidate Hunter S. Thompson announced yesterday during opening ceremonies at the Beaumont Annual Stock Auction that Democratic front-runner Jimmy Carter was "the only candidate who ever lied to me twice in one day." Thompson's harsh denunciation of Carter -- who was also at the auction for purposes of wrestling his own bull -- came as a nasty shock to the crowd of celebrities, bull wranglers and other politicos who were gathered to participate in ceremonies honoring Texas Land Commissioner Bob Armstrong, who followed Thompson's attack on Carter with an unexpected statement of his own, saying he would be the number two man on a dark-horse(s) Demo ticket with Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Armstrong also denounced Carter for "consciously lying to me, about the price of his bull." The Carter-owned animal, a two-year-old peanut-fed Brahman, had been advertised at a price of $2200 -- but when the front-runner showed up in Beaumont to ride his own bull, the price suddenly escalated to $7750. And it was at this point that both Thompson and Armstrong stunned the crowd with their back-to-back assaults on Carter, long considered a personal friend of both men. . . Carter, who seemed shocked by the attacks, lied to newsmen who questioned him about the reasons, saying, "I didn't hear what they said."
The Law Day speech is not the kind of thing that would have much appeal to the mind of a skilled technician, and that kind of mind is perhaps the only common denominator among the strategists, organizers and advisers at the staff-command level of Carter's campaign. Very few of them seem to have much interest in why Jimmy wants to be president, or even in what he might do after he wins: their job and their meal ticket is to put Jimmy Carter in the White House, that is all they know and all they need to know -- and so far they are doing their job pretty well. According to political odds-maker Billy the Geek, Carter is now a solid 3-2 bet to win the November election -- up from 50-1 less than six months ago.
This is another likely reason why Carter's brain trust is not especially concerned with how to put the Law Day speech to good use: the people most likely to be impressed or even converted by it are mainly the ones who make up the left/liberal, humanist/intellectual wing of the Democratic party and the national press -- and in the wake of Carter's genuinely awesome blitzkrieg in Pennsylvania and Texas, destroying all of his remaining opposition in less than a week, it is hard to argue with the feeling among his staff-command technicians that he no longer needs any converts from the left/liberal wing of the party. He got where he is without the help he repeatedly asked them for during most of 1975 and early '76, and now the problem is theirs. The train has left the station, as it were, and anybody who wants to catch up with it now is going to come up with the air fare. . .
But I have just been reminded by a terrible screeching on the telephone that the presses will roll in a few hours and that means there is no more time at Rolling Stone than there is in the Carter campaign for wondering why about anything. Idle speculation is a luxury reserved for people who are too rich, too poor or too crazy to get seriously concerned about anything outside their own private realities. . . and just as soon as I finish this goddamn wretched piece of gibberish I am going to flee like a rat down a pipe into one of those categories. I have maintained a wild and serious flirtation with all three of them for so long that the flirtation itself was beginning to look like reality. . . But I see it now for the madness it was from the start: there is no way to maintain four parallel states of being at the same time. I know from long experience that it is possible to be rich, poor and crazy all at once -- but to be rich, poor, crazy and also a functioning political journalist at the same time is flat-out impossible, so the time has come to make a terminal choice. . .
But not quite yet. We still have to finish this twisted saga of Vengeance and Revelation in the shade of the Georgia pines. . . So, what the hell? Let's get after it. There is plenty of room at the top in this bountiful nation of ours for a rich, poor and crazy political journalist who can sit down at a rented typewriter in a Texas motel with a heart full of hate and a head full of speed and Wild Turkey and lash out a capsule/narrative between midnight and dawn that will explain the whole meaning and tell the whole tale of the 1976 presidential campaign. . .
Hell yes! Let's whip on this thing! Until I got that phone call a few minutes ago I would have said it was absolutely impossible, but now I know better. . . If only because I have just been reminded that until I saw Hubert Humphrey "quit the race" a few days ago I was telling anybody who would listen that there was no way to cure an egg-sucking dog. . . So now is the time to finish this rotten job that I somehow got myself into, and also to congratulate my old buddy Hubert for having enough sense to ignore his advisers and keep the last faint glimmer of his presidential hopes alive by crouching in the weeds and praying for a brokered convention, instead of shooting his whole wad by entering the New Jersey primary and getting pushed off the wall and cracked like Humpty Dumpty by Jimmy Carter's technicians.
I am beginning to sense a distinctly pejorative drift in this emphasis on the word "technician," but it is only half intentional. There is nothing wrong with technicians, in politics or anywhere else. Any presidential campaign without a full complement of first-class political technicians -- or with a drastic imbalance between technicians and ideologues -- will meet the same fate that doomed
the Fred Harris campaign in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But the question of balance is critical, and there is something a little scary about a presidential campaign run almost entirely by technicians that can be as successful as Carter's.
"Awesome" is the mildest word I can think of to describe a campaign that can take an almost totally unknown ex-governor of Georgia with no national reputation, no power base in the Democratic party and not the slightest reluctance to tell Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and anyone else who asks that "the most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ" and to have him securely positioned, after only nine of 32 primaries, as an almost prohibitive favorite to win the presidential nomination of the nation's majority political party, and even bet to win the November election against a relatively popular GOP president who has managed somehow to convince both Big Labor and Big Business that he has just rescued the country from economic disaster. If the presidential election were held tomorrow I would not bet more than three empty beer cans on Gerald Ford's chances of beating Jimmy Carter in November.
. . . What? No, cancel that bet. The Screech on the telephone just informed me that Time has just released a poll -- on the day after the Texas primary -- saying Carter would beat Ford by 48% to 38% if the election were held now. Seven weeks ago, according to Time via The Screech, the current figures were almost exactly reversed. . . I have never been much with math, but a quick shuffling of these figures seems to mean that Carter has picked up 20 points in seven weeks, and Ford has lost 20.
If this is true, then it is definitely time to call Billy the Geek and get something like ten cases of 66 proof Sloat Ale down on Carter, and forget those three empty beer cans.
In other words, the panic is on and the last survivors of the ill-fated Stop Carter Movement are out in the streets shedding their uniforms and stacking their weapons on street corners all over Washington. . . And now another phone call from CBS correspondent Ed Bradley -- who is covering Carter now after starting the '76 campaign with Birch Bayh -- saying Bayh will announce at a press conference in Washington tomorrow that he has decided to endorse Jimmy Carter.
Well. . . how about that, eh? Never let it be said that a wharf rat can get off a sinking ship any faster than an 87% ADA liberal.
But this is no time for cruel jokes about liberals and wharf rats. Neither species has ever been known for blind courage or stubborn devotion to principle, so let the rotters go wherever they feel even temporarily comfortable. . . Meanwhile, it is beginning to look like the time has come for the rest of us to get our business straight, because the only man who is going to keep Jimmy Carter out of the White House now is Jimmy Carter.
Which might happen, but it is a hard kind of thing to bet on, because there is no precedent in the annals of presidential politics for a situation like this: with more than half the primaries still ahead of him, Carter is now running virtually unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and -- barring some queer and unlikely development -- he is going to have to spend the next two months in a holding action until he can go to New York in July and pick up the nomination.
Just as soon as I can get some sleep and recover from this grim and useless ordeal I will call him and find out what he plans to do with all that time. . . And if I were in that nervous position I think I would call a press conference and announce that I was off to a secret think tank on the Zondo Peninsula to finalize my plans for curing all the ills of society; because a lot of strange things can happen to a long-shot front-runner in two months of forced idleness, and a lot of idle minds are going to have plenty of time for brooding on all the things that still worry them about living for at least the next four years with a president who prays 25 times a day and reads the Bible in Spanish every night. Even the people who plan to vote for Jimmy Carter if he can hang on between now and November are going to have more time than they need to nurse any lingering doubts they might have about him.
I will probably nurse a few doubts of my own between now and July, for that matter, but unless something happens to convince me that I should waste any more time than I already have brooding on the evil potential that lurks, invariably, in the mind of just about anybody whose ego has become so dangerously swollen that he really wants to be president of the United States, I don't plan to spend much time worrying about the prospect of seeing Jimmy Carter in the White House, There is not a hell of a lot I can do about it, for one thing; and for another, I have spent enough time with Carter in the past two years to feel I have a pretty good sense of his candidacy. I went down to Plains, Georgia, to spend a few days with him on his own turf and to hopefully find out who Jimmy Carter really was before the campaign shroud came down on him and he started talking like a candidate instead of a human being. Once a presidential aspirant gets out on the campaign trail and starts seeing visions of himself hunkered down behind that big desk in the Oval Office, the idea of sitting down in his own living room and talking openly with some foul-mouthed, argumentative journalist carrying a tape recorder in one hand and a bottle of Wild Turkey in the other is totally out of the question.
But it was almost a year before the '76 New Hampshire primary when I talked to Carter at his home in Plains, and I came away from that weekend with six hours of taped conversation with him on subjects ranging all the way from the Allman Brothers, stock car racing and our strongly conflicting views on the use of undercover agents in law enforcement, to nuclear submarines, the war in Vietnam and the treachery of Richard Nixon. When I listened to the tapes again last week I noticed a lot of things that I had not paid much attention to at the time, and the most obvious of these was the extremely detailed precision of his answers to some of the questions that he is now accused of being either unable or unwilling to answer. There is no question in my mind, after hearing him talk on the tapes, that I was dealing with a candidate who had already done a massive amount of research on things like tax reform, national defense and the structure of the American political system by the time he announced his decision to run for president.
Nor is there any question that there are a lot of things Jimmy Carter and I will never agree on. I had warned him, before we sat down with the tape recorder for the first time, that -- although I appreciated his hospitality and felt surprisingly relaxed and comfortable in his home -- I was also a journalist and that some of the questions I knew I was going to ask him might seem unfriendly or even downright hostile. Because of this, I said, I wanted him to be able to stop the tape recorder by means of a remote-pause button if the talk got too heavy. But he said he would just as soon not have to bother turning the tape on and off; which surprised me at the time, but now that I listen to the tapes I realize that loose talk and bent humor are not among Jimmy Carter's vices.
They are definitely among mine, however, and since I had stayed up most of the night, drinking and talking in the living room with his sons Jack and Chip Carter and their wives -- and then by myself in the guest room over the garage -- I was still feeling weird around noon, when we started talking "seriously," and the tape of that first conversation is liberally sprinkled with my own twisted comments about "rotten fascist bastards," "thieving cocksuckers who peddle their asses all over Washington," and "these goddamn brainless fools who refuse to serve liquor in the Atlanta airport on Sunday."
It was nothing more than my normal way of talking, and Carter was already familiar with it, but there are strange and awkward pauses here and there on the tape where I can almost hear Carter gritting his teeth and wondering whether to laugh or get angry at things I wasn't even conscious of saying at the time, but which sound on the tape like random outbursts of hostility or pure madness from the throat of a paranoid psychotic. Most of the conversation is intensely rational, but every once in a while it slips over the line and all I can hear is the sound of my own voice yelling something like "Jesus Christ! What's that filthy smell?"
Both Carter and his wife have always been amazingly tolerant of my behavior, and on one or two occasions they have had to deal w
ith me in a noticeably bent condition. I have always been careful not to commit any felonies right in front of them, but other than that I have never made much of an effort to adjust my behavior around Jimmy Carter or anyone else in his family -- including his 78-year-old mother, Miss Lillian, who is the only member of the Carter family I could comfortably endorse for the presidency, right now, with no reservations at all.
Whoops! Well. . . we will get to that in a moment. Right now I have other things to deal with and. . . No, what the hell? Let's get to it now, because time is running out and so is that goddamn sloat; so now is the time to come to grips with my own "Carter Question."
It has taken me almost a year to reach this point, and I am still not sure how to cope with it. . . But I am getting there fast, thanks mainly to all the help I've been getting from my friends in the liberal community. I took more abuse from these petulant linthead bastards during the New Hampshire and Massachusetts primaries than I have ever taken from my friends on any political question since the first days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and that was nearly 12 years ago. . . I felt the same way about the first wild violent days of the FSM as I still feel about Jimmy Carter. In both cases my initial reaction was positive, and I have lived too long on my instincts to start questioning them now. At least not until I get a good reason, and so far nobody has been able to give me any good reason for junking my first instinctive reaction to Jimmy Carter, which was that I liked him. . . And if the editors of Time magazine and the friends of Hubert Humphrey consider that "bizarre," fuck them. I liked Jimmy Carter the first time I met him, and in the two years that have passed since that Derby Day in Georgia I have come to know him a hell of a lot better than I knew George McGovern at this point in the '72 campaign, and I still like Jimmy Carter. He is one of the most intelligent politicians I've ever met, and also one of the strangest. I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feeling for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . Or maybe "stupid" is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 68
