And so, a week after finishing a distant third in the New Hampshire primary, this onetime logical front-runner permanently suspended his campaign.
A GOVERNOR WHO HAD BEEN out of office several years seemed to be in a more propitious position—for instance, for avoiding those ideological minefields.
On New Year’s Day, Jimmy Carter arrived for his latest visit to Iowa in a blizzard and windchill of forty-five below zero, suffering from an intestinal bug. His personal aide stepped off the plane in Des Moines having left his coat in Atlanta, where it was 103 degrees. They made their way to an event in the basement of the Holy Spirit Church in the little town of Creston. After his speech, Carter was asked by a concerned churchwoman about a recent interview he had given to a Catholic publication in which he said he personally considered abortion “morally wrong,” but also opposed a constitutional amendment to ban it, but did support a “national statute” of some sort. In Creston, a reporter heard him tell the woman, speaking “even more softly than usual,” that “under certain circumstances” he would support a state abortion ban like the one passed in his native Georgia, even though that had been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. He then issued a clarifying statement insisting that he had “had a very consistent position on abortion for several years,” encompassing his personal opposition, his opposition to both the proposed constitutional amendment banning all abortions and another that would give states the right to ban it themselves, and endorsing more wider availability “of contraception devices for those who believe in their use” and of “[b]etter adoption procedures to minimize abortion.” Which was even more confusing. It was then that the comedian Pat Paulsen began telling the joke about how officials wanted to put Jimmy Carter on Mount Rushmore. “But they didn’t have room for two faces.”
But voters, apparently, did not agree. “Ambiguous though it was,” Evans and Novak soon were reporting, “Carter’s reply gave pro-life forces more than they get from other major Democratic contenders here,” and “also explains the growing outrage among Carter’s famous opponents here over the little peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, out-sharking them by winning anti-abortion liberals.” Leave the jokes to the cynics. In Iowa, Jimmy Carter—always Jimmy Carter, never James—was playing beautifully. He was just the sort of antipolitician in whom people clearly longed to believe. The reasons seemed far more spiritual than political—and were revealed far better by the dreamscape of popular culture than by the mundane world of polls or public policy.
There was a curious little movie that came out the previous summer, the summer of Jaws, which cineasts adored but the public avoided. Brilliant, yes, but difficult: a sort of scattered, discursive allegory for a national mood buried a bit too far beneath the surface of the national consciousness to make it a simple thing to explain. The picture, called Nashville, was directed by Robert Altman. It began with the perambulations of a sound truck for presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker, blaring aphorisms, folksy but vague:
“I’m often confronted with the statement, ‘I don’t want to get mixed up in politics. . . . I can’t do anything about it anyway.’ We can do something about it”—
(In the background, a billboard reading “The Bank,” dilapidated, like American capitalism itself.)
“When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to take his entire voyage to the New World”—
And from there, a random, unmotivated cut to an apparently entirely unrelated scene—Altman’s method throughout the whole film. A country star named Haven Hamilton (a haven and a Founding Father) is recording a soppy Bicentennial anthem, somehow simultaneously brashly jingoistic and apologetic—more or less like the nation it was celebrating, these days: “We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.”
Cue melodramatic timpani roll.
A pretty female BBC reporter is on the scene, kicked out of the studio, finding her way to another in which a white singer played by Lily Tomlin is recording a song with a black gospel choir. Cut back to Haven Hamilton, berating a hippie musician for his long hair. Another country star, Barbara Jean, receives a hero’s welcome at the Nashville airport. The sound truck happens by: “When the government begins to ask the citizens to swallow the camel, it’s time to do some accounting.” Comes a hip young stud on a Harley-Davidson, played by Jeff Goldblum. A drill team in blue sequins and batons. A waifish hippie, played by Shelley Duvall. A rock band. A soldier. (He’s asked, “Did you kill anybody this week?”) A black man. A good ol’ boy campaign manager.
“Congress is run by lawyers . . . and you wonder what’s wrong with Congress.”
“I don’t vote for anybody for president.”
A huge pileup on the expressway, all these random, unrelated people suddenly thrown together in the same space, the same situation, wandering randomly, wandering like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the animals leaving Noah’s Ark, but wandering toward which destination, or surviving what flood, it was never made clear. A mysterious man with a violin case, popping up in scene after scene. A bluegrass band playing at a bar; a John F. Kennedy poster, people waving a Confederate flag. A song floated throughout the soundtrack: “It don’t worry me. . . .”
In a voice-over, the real-life newsman Howard K. Smith narrates Hal Philip Walker’s unlikely story. He gave a commencement address that made him a national sensation—with bromides like “Have you stood on a high and windy hill and heard the acorns drop and roll? Have you walked along the valley beside the brook, walked alone and remembered? Does Christmas smell like oranges to you?”—then won three presidential primaries in a row, and was about to win a fourth, here in Tennessee.
Two and a half hours pass onscreen. This motley assemblage unites once more, apparently by chance, at a rally for Walker at the curious replica of the Greek Parthenon that Nashville (“the Athens of the South”) built for the 1897 World’s Fair: the red-white-and-blue bunting everywhere, the brass bands, the glad-handers, patriotic songs, masses of security men looking around nervously—and the man with the violin case. The viewer knows how this ends. A flag ripples. Shots ring out.
Haven Hamilton takes control: “Y’all take it easy now. This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville. They can’t do this to us here in Nashville! Let’s show them what we’re made of. Come on, everybody, sing! Somebody, sing!” And they, all of them, gospel choir, rock band, country band, sing: “It don’t worry me. . . .” The camera pulls back to take in the entire scene, a rippling flag, a Walker for President sign, then up to the heavens, longingly.
Nashville: you could pick through the various runes and try to make them signify something coherent, but the incoherence felt like the point—but an incoherence, be that as it is may, that is shared. That somehow ends with this shambling, variegated community redeemed, as one. Like a nation—our nation, our confused, ambivalent, longing nation, looking for meaning in the Bicentennial year, looking for meaning, finding none, but insisting on meaning nonetheless. All in it together.
And maybe that redemption could come from the old bloody South: Sam Ervin’s South, Howard Baker’s South—the South of the men who redeemed the nation from the wicked Nixon.
The presidential candidate was never pictured. What he looked like was entirely left to the viewer’s imagination. Nor was his proposed “replacement,” what it actually might consist of in practical political terms, ever described. Both were left as absences—voids into which voters could project their very desire.
Maybe he looked like James Earl Carter.
HE WAS BORN IN A town of 550 souls, Plains, Georgia, in 1924, a few miles south of the cemetery that housed the first Carter to settle those parts, born in 1798. “My life on the farm during the Great Depression more nearly resembled farm life of fully 2,000 years ago than farm life today,” his campaign memoir proclaimed: bricks heated on a fire to keep people warm at night and only the breezes to keep them cool; an outdoor privy and a hand pump for water, heated on the woodstove when it came time for t
he luxury of a warm bath; hand-cranked clippers to cut the hair of both humans and mules. An extraordinary, demanding, hardworking, conservative, civic-minded father—first director of the local Rural Electrification Administration office, when “Jimmy” turned thirteen; an extraordinarily brave, independent-minded mother, a nurse (actually more of a community doctor) who defiantly insisted on treating black people the same way she treated whites and was famous or infamous as the most liberal woman in the county.
The farm was the center of a civilization—“Mr. Earl’s” civilization. Crops to grow, harvest, and market; livestock to raise—but also meat to cure, sugar to grind into juice and boil into syrup, timber to hew, lard to render. There was a blacksmith shop; a tannery; a general store with staples and products of the Carters’ own manufacture: stuffed sausage, sweet milk separated into its component parts, butter, pickled pig’s feet, wool blankets. The store was the lifeline for the twenty-five black families whose wage labor drove the machine, and who had a little village of their own, called Archery, with their own African Methodist Episcopal church, and whose children played on terms of equality alongside Jimmy and his brother Billy and sisters Gloria and Ruth—except for certain social conventions that had to be hewed to, and never questioned. (“We never went to the same church or school. . . . We did not sit together on the two-car diesel train that could be flagged down in Archery.”) They all worked together on terms of equality, too, starting at 4 A.M., when the whole community was awoken by the clang of the bell. The mules had to be rounded up by lantern light; “cotton had to be picked by hand; peanuts were pulled out from the ground, the dirt shaken off them, and then stacked on poles to dry; the whole round of work that lasted until sundown. Later in the year the corn leaves were pulled, the fodder tied into little bundles and stuck on top of the corn stalk to dry.” Autumn meant harvesting corn and velvet beans (“the stinging fuzz made this one of the most difficult of all farm jobs”). Winter meant slaughtering hogs and cutting cane and felling and stacking timber—“and then the annual cycle would repeat itself.” But he still had enough energy, starting when he was but five years old, to regularly walk two miles down the railroad tracks to sell boiled peanuts on his own in the streets of Plains. Twice a year, a medicine show came to visit, but that’s not where he spent his newfound riches. The boy his father nicknamed “Hotshot” bought five bales of cotton when he was nine years old and kept it in his father’s storehouses until the price rose from five to eighteen cents; out of the proceeds he bought five houses and collected $16.50 a month from the tenants in rent until he left home for the U.S. Naval Academy. (He’d been so ambitious to go to school in Annapolis that he’d rolled his feet on Coca-Cola bottles for hours every week when he read that flat arches disqualified applicants.)
Perhaps it was the intricate, self-sufficient complexity of this miniature world into which his father initiated him that gave Carter his preternatural confidence. It had been more than three years earlier when he told his mother he intended to run for president. “President of what?” she earnestly responded.
She was not alone. “Jimmy who?” was the question in Washington; the first time Carter traveled to Iowa the only people who showed up for a reception scheduled at a Des Moines hotel were the candidate, his longtime press secretary Jody Powell, their local organizer—and just three Iowans. They had ordered enough food to serve two hundred. At least, Carter later joked to journalist Martin Schram, the embarrassment was easy to contain: “There weren’t any newspeople there to cover the event.” Although it had to be said that this was in February 1975—far, far earlier than any other candidate had bothered to campaign in Iowa before, even George McGovern, who also had made it his strategy to try to get the press to report “surprise” strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire as momentum to catapult him into later contests.
Carter had, by then, a national profile of sorts, at least among political junkies. The day after his failed bid for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966 he announced his campaign for 1970, exhibiting the indefatigable energy for which he would become known. He claimed to have made approximately 1.5 speeches per day in the intervening four years and to have shaken six hundred thousand hands, or half the voting population of Georgia. He prevailed; his January 1971 inaugural speech—“I say to you quite frankly the time for racial discrimination is over”—got his face on the May 31, 1971, cover of Time (“Dixie Whistles a Different Tune”). In his campaign book he wrote with surprising frankness about his experience, as a mere second-year governor, of meeting the 1972 Democratic presidential prospects, and Nelson Rockefeller, and Richard Nixon, and Spiro Agnew. He wasn’t impressed. He began “to realize that the president is just a human being. . . . I lost my feeling of awe about presidents.” That summer he joined the movement to stop George McGovern, and delivered a nominating speech for Scoop Jackson at the convention; that November, his aide and confidant Hamilton Jordan wrote a ninety-page strategy memo on how he might become president, and another aide moved to Washington, D.C., to open a Carter beachhead. Carter traveled to Latin America, then Europe and Israel, and joined David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, a sort of study club for the internationalist foreign policy elite, mingling with the likes of cofounder Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy mandarin under Kennedy and Johnson with whom he established a rapport. He started showing up in the news, picking fights with Richard Nixon (Nixon was “conspiring with major oil companies to increase bottle gas prices by as much as 410 percent”). And he began hogging the TV networks’ cameras so adamantly—he made himself conspicuously present at every milestone in Hank Aaron’s home-run chase, and even made a cameo on the game show What’s My Line (no one knew who he was)—that a Nixon-loving letter writer to the Atlanta Constitution referred to him as “the carping-peanut-brain self-serving public image builder, Jimmy Carter.”
And, while doing so, he was folksy. Always, he was folksy.
He hit the road for the DNC as chairman of its congressional campaign effort in 1974. “It scared us in the beginning, not being from Washington,” the staffer he traveled with that year later related to Richard Reeves, in one of the many where-did-Jimmy-Carter-come-from profiles that began appearing week in and week out. “But in most of the campaigns we concentrated on, we were dealing with non-incumbents, and almost all of them benefitted from being able to joke about Washington or take some licks against what was happening there”—and Carter’s staffers were among the first to realize that Watergate might make it an advantage not to be an incumbent, for the first time in political history.
Just to make sure, though, they commissioned a poll. Its central question was “People say a member of Congress should be preferred as a presidential candidate because of broad foreign policy experience. Others say a governor should be preferred because of experience running things. Which make sense to you?” “Governor” won, by a ratio of three to two. Carter began, too, his practice of staying in ordinary citizens’ homes; the Carter camp didn’t know anyone else and was on a shoestring. But necessity soon became a virtue: it was folksy, and useful for establishing a national network of volunteers. Ted Sorensen, who had been JFK’s speechwriter and was now a Carter supporter, pointed out: “How can you vote against someone that slept on your couch?”
The notion of a savior from Dixie was in the political air, too—especially one without the racist baggage of George Corley Wallace. The Democrats’ first “mini-convention” in November 1974, in Kansas City (where, in keeping with the nation’s new longing for nostalgic innocence, the delegates made constant pilgrimages to the Harry Truman Library), was noisy with Southern drawls trying to affect a presidential air: Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Terry Sanford of North Carolina, George Wallace, Robert Byrd.
But only one of them, who had officially announced his presidential campaign way back in December 1974, was already establishing his beachhead in Iowa.
The standard tactic was to persuade the biggest name you coul
d find to head your statewide organizations. But this was impossible when your national name recognition was only 2 percent. Virtue of necessity: having any well-known figurehead would only pigeonhole the candidate with the ideology of that person. So Carter’s staff put together a twenty-member “Iowa Carter for President Steering Committee” instead, a geographical and ideological smorgasbord—which automatically granted them twenty well-dispersed field offices. It also provided a plethora of local knowledge—for instance, that Democrats in the Sioux City area might appreciate the gesture, for his campaign’s opening banquet, of honoring a nearly blind old woman named Marie Jahn, who thirty-eight years earlier had become the first female officeholder in the state, in her little town of Le Mars, population 8,895. The event, on February 26, 1975, was the first of Carter’s unprecedented twenty-one campaign visits to the state—the first of many times perhaps (for the event was too far below the radar for any record of it to have been preserved) in which he drawled winsomely that, since his assets were already listed in his campaign literature, he would instead note his liabilities:
“I’m not a lawyer.” (A good laugh line.)
“I’m not from Washington.” (That one was even better.)
“I’m not a member of Congress.” (Bull’s-eye.)
“I’ve never been part of the national government.” That line, a reporter, said “drew so much laughter that he couldn’t continue.
The post-Watergate riffs came easily, a product of biography. There was his first run for elected office, for state senator, in 1962, as an independent against a corrupt courthouse machine. The fraud against him was blatant and extravagant: votes by dead men recorded; entire precincts that supposedly voted in alphabetical order; stuffed—overstuffed—ballot boxes. (One district of 333 voters recorded 431 votes; voters who watched their ballots torn up in front of them were threatened with death should they report what they saw.) The review board ruling upon his challenge did not even hear witnesses. With no small courage, Carter appealed. He won. His longing for political service was like something evangelical. (When his pastor asked him why in the world he wanted to enter a profession so sordid as politics, he retorted, “How would you like to be the pastor of a church with eighty thousand members?”) The gospel of good government would be his ministry: he was the only legislator to read every bill, and his proudest accomplishments as governor (he spoke of these as if he’d cured a dread disease) were technocratic feats like reducing the number of state departments and agencies from three hundred to twenty and, he said, cutting administrative costs in half.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 81
