The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  A technocrat, yes, but one who got to the statehouse telling stories like a populist: “My chief opponent”—Carl Sanders, a pillar of the Georgia political establishment whom his campaign labeled “Cufflink Carl”—“got almost all the endorsements,” Carter later recollected. “We made an issue of the big shots standing between him and the people, and eventually almost every endorsement (which he avidly sought) cost him votes in some fashion or another.”

  His presidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best, was published by a Christian press. (On the back cover: “Other Inspiring Broadman Books . . . Modern Stories of Inspiration, Compiled by Bill Stephens. True stories of people who have encountered God.”) He liked to quote a line from a favorite sermon: “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” He also liked to dwell on a word that almost never appeared in political speeches: love. How we needed “to bind our people together to work in harmony and love one another.” How federal employees should begin each workweek with “their hearts full of love.” How we needed a government “as filled with love as are the American people.” His Iowa state chair, Tom Whitney, related how he chose this dark horse: “we spent two hours talking about Christ. For a moment we shared a concept and a thought process that we both believe is a fundamental need in our society. Which was the concept of love—love thy neighbor. We explored the ‘I am Third’ process in which God is first, family and friends second, and I am third. This nation needs a totally loving president.”

  Carter made personal contact his campaign’s fetish. Driving between Ames, Iowa, and Marshalltown, he happened upon a farm. He stopped. The proprietor, named Fred McClain, was not home. Carter took a piece of campaign stationery, wrote out a note, and stuck it in the front door: he was sorry he had missed him. And Mr. McClain had a “beautiful farm.” It was signed, “Jimmy.”

  A physics professor at Iowa State, Charles Hammer, a Democratic chairman for his congressional district who had worked for the antiwar liberals Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, had been impressed watching “Jimmy” field tough questions at a town meeting. He got a call: “This is Jimmy Carter. I’d like you to be on the state campaign committee.” Hammer said he would have to think about it. The governor gave the professor a phone number, a date, and a time to call him back. The professor called him at the appointed time to announce he’d decided to take him up on the offer. He expected a campaign office on the other end of the line, but Mrs. Carter answered the phone instead. At their Plains, Georgia, home. He was shocked, though not as shocked as when Rosalynn Carter said, “Hello, Charles. How’s Hazel”—his wife. And that “Rosalynn”—first names only—had recalled Hazel telling her she had a brother in Michigan, and asked for her brother’s address so Jimmy could write him a note. “He always sent handwritten notes,” another Carter watcher marveled. “He wrote them to anyone. He’d get all the names at the meeting and he’d go to Powell, who usually followed his boss around, noting names and addresses of people Carter met at gatherings. And he’d write them.”

  In the normal course of modern politics, in a time when more and more politicians sold themselves via the cold, impersonal media of direct mail and TV, this stuff was about as strange as est. But it worked: not, of course, merely on the objects of this unusual attention, but on the reporters who wrote about how it was unprecedented.

  There was an annual Jefferson-Jackson fund-raising dinner in Des Moines, held in October, attended by thousands of Iowa Democrats. “We figured,” Jody Powell later recollected, “that somebody’d take a straw poll or something like that.” And indeed, the Des Moines Register did, though no campaign had ever thought to make anything out of it before. The Carter machine, though, already humming, decided to make this a test of its organization. The other candidates showed up, caring only to polish their after-dinner speeches. Only Carter showed up with an entire armada. In the parking lot volunteers did “visibility” work, chanting and singing Carter songs, holding up Carter signs. Inside his steering committee worked the aisles like convention floor whips. Their candidate got 23 percent of the votes; Hubert Humphrey was second, but with only 12 percent; Bayh was third with 10; other supposedly marquee candidates—Sargent Shriver; Congressman Morris “Mo” Udall of Arizona; Fred Harris, a former liberal senator from Oklahoma who had served as chairman of the Democratic Committee—brought up the rear. Jody Powell, meanwhile, had casually tipped off reporters: “the Register had a poll that was worth looking at.” The New York Times bit—and ran the following headline the next morning: “CARTER APPEARS TO HOLD A SOLID LEAD IN IOWA AS THE CAMPAIGN’S FIRST TEST APPROACHES.” Birch Bayh had finally entered the race only three days earlier; George Wallace would not enter for another two weeks. “Sometimes,” an aide told a reporter just around them, “I think we’re the only people trying to win this nomination.”

  Seven weeks later Carter was profiled in the New York Times Magazine—“Peanut Farmer for President.” The article was packaged on the cover with a drawing of Carter as a country boy in straw hat and overalls, and inside, with a portrait of the candidate as a smiling seven-year-old boy, another of him playing barefoot, a steely one of him as an Annapolis midshipman, and one captioned, “Peanut farmer, 1975” (he wasn’t really a peanut farmer; he owned a peanut warehousing business). The writer was a novelist named Patrick Anderson, who had ghostwritten Jeb Magruder’s new memoir, An American Life. He had asked to profile Carter after the editors had proposed to him Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Nelson Rockefeller. He described the Georgian as “a soft-spoken, thoughtful, likable man, an introspective man who enjoys the songs of Bob Dylan, the poems of Dylan Thomas, and the writing of James Agee, William Faulkner, John McPhee, and Reinhold Niebuhr,” and who “stubbornly defied segregation in his hometown of Plains.”

  The piece was reported out of Florida, another key early state where Carter’s organizing had been early and intense. Anderson followed him pressing flesh at a resort town, charming locals with a joke at President Ford’s expense that reporters could soon recite by heart, about how he would respond when asked how he would feel if his daughter had a premarital affair: “I told him that Mrs. Carter and I would be deeply hurt and shocked and disappointed . . . because our daughter is only seven years old.” Anderson went on to puff Carter as a kind of ideological Superman: a get-tough conservative (pledging “all-out economic” war in the event of another oil embargo before he would let America be “brought to her knees again”), a compassionate liberal, and an organizational genius, who, forced to agree not to fire any employees to get his reorganization bill passed, still managed to reduce the state’s payroll “from an annual increase of 14 to 2 percent.”

  Most of all, he depicted a soothing counterimage to the dreaded George C. Wallace, that toxic perennial of presidential campaign seasons going back all the way to 1964. Wallace’s moment in the national spotlight began the same year Carter entered the Georgia state legislature, when Wallace proclaimed in his 1963 inaugural address, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” then “stood in the schoolhouse door” to keep the University of Alabama from being integrated. Each of the three times he subsequently ran for president he softened his image more; however, each time that only terrified liberals some more: maybe this was the year he’d prove palatable enough to the masses to win, and the demonic energies released in places like South Boston and Kanawha County, West Virginia, would ride roughshod over the nation. Wallace entered this year’s race on Veterans Day, November 11. He was making his biggest stand in Florida. And it was in Florida, the New York Times Magazine reported, that Carter handled a “tanned, ponytailed, fortyish, and mad as hell” woman at a campaign event with near-heroic aplomb. “What are you gonna do about those welfare cases who don’t want to work?” she demanded. “The ones who’ve already bankrupted New York City and Detroit and Washington, D.C?”

  “I’m glad you asked that,” said Carter, the very soul of reason. “I think the firs
t thing we have to do is to separate those who can work from those who can’t.”

  “They don’t want to work,” the lady protested. “I’ve talked to people on welfare who enjoy it!”

  “Well, the statistics show that only about 10 percent of the people on welfare are able to work,” Carter said. “The rest are children or mothers or handicapped or . . .”

  “I don’t believe that,” the blonde cried.

  “Well, perhaps you’d better believe your statistics and I’ll believe mine,” Carter said, and began to outline his finely canted position on welfare, which was that the system should be simplified, that some sort of national minimum income should be provided, that able-bodied recipients should be offered training jobs—and be denied benefits if they refuse a job—and that those welfare recipients who can’t work should be treated with compassion and respect.

  “But they don’t want to work!” the blonde persisted, as people began to shush her and mutter that she was drunk. Carter patiently soldiered on, reasonably, liberally—but, somehow, also conservatively, too. He spoke both of his compassion for those on welfare, and of his insistence on putting them to work, for example in one of 136 day-care centers for the mentally retarded that were staffed by welfare mothers. Anderson, the Times reporter: “Down at my end of the bar, I scribbled in my notebook: ‘Good—stubborn—stuck to his guns.’ But at the same time I was wondering if any man could hope to defeat George Wallace in Florida advocating ‘compassion and respect’ for welfare recipients.”

  Anderson clearly hoped Carter would defeat Wallace. He went on to describe Carter’s other heroic acts of racial reconciliation: his repeated stands for racial integration in Plains, even upon pain of a boycott of his business; his insistence on running in 1970 as a “pro–civil rights” candidate (though Anderson noted that “many conservatives seemingly chose to disbelieve him, or to see him as a lesser evil to the known ‘liberalism’ of Sanders”). Anderson later noted that some among “the Eastern liberals for whom reading the Sunday New York Times is a religious experience” told him that it was his article that turned them on to Carter.

  The article went on, eloquently, about the soul of the Southerner’s “Replacement Party”–style appeal: “Carter’s pitch is more idealistic than ideological. He says that America is drifting, that people are ashamed of their government, and that all he wants is to see America with a government ‘as idealistic, as decent, as competent, as compassionate, as good as its people.’ He closes almost every speech by saying earnestly that he would never tell a lie or duck an issue just to be president—a piety that makes some journalists groan aloud, but that apparently impresses many listeners.”

  One of those impressed listeners, it turned out, was the reporter, Patrick Anderson, who soon joined the Carter campaign as a speechwriter.

  Another Carter panegyric, in what one of Carter’s anguished competitors, Mo Udall, called the “incredible flow of press starting with that silly poll in Iowa,” appeared on January 16 on page A1 of the Washington Post. It introduced the political class to some members of his homespun family: his mother, Lillian, “a remarkable woman of broad interests who went to India as a Peace Corps volunteer nurse 10 years ago, at age 67”; his steely wife, Rosalynn, daughter of a mechanic father and a mother who still worked at the post office, and who some said wanted the presidency worse than he did.

  But the Post also dwelled on that preternatural confidence. It reported him working for zoning laws in Plains to control commercial development and souvenir sales for “when I am president,” his conversations with reporters about “my inaugural address,” and programs planned for “the first year of my administration.” It noted, too, a certain contempt for the very calling he had chosen for his lifework. It quoted one of his former supporters in the state legislature: “Jimmy never learned the three guiding rules of politics—reward your friends, punish your enemies, and then make up with your enemies.” Another critic, who insisted on anonymity, called him abrasive, unfeeling, ruthless—“and totally egocentric.” And another: “Politicians don’t like him because he doesn’t like them.”

  Ah, but that was the point: all the usual résumé lines that boosted candidates in every previous campaign in history—experienced, connections, institutionally savvy—could only hurt you in the first presidential election after Watergate.

  An interviewer asked Carter how he had hit on these themes, so unusual for a presidential campaign in any other year: trust, integrity, openness, love. He replied, “All Democratic candidates—congressional, governors—have available to us polls showing broad thematic studies. The polls showed us the post-Vietnam feeling, the feeling of exclusion, the embarrassment at lower ethical standards, at Washington. Those were available.”

  This was an interesting answer. It spoke to the man’s arrogance: everyone had access to this information, but I was the only one with the wit to listen. The candid moment also revealed a snag in the very story line: what does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

  And besides, the other candidates had listened to such poll messages. It was the zeitgeist; how could they avoid it? There was Birch Bayh’s “moral leadership” pledge (and a biographical film in which he sifted a lump of dirt: “I come off a farm in a little place called Shirkieville . . .”). There was George Wallace, whose entire national political appeal had always been built on projecting a homespun, anti-Washington image. When Frank Church finally got his candidacy on line he featured slogans like “For Old-Fashioned Honesty: Church for President,” and “In 1976 vote for the man who saved us from 1984.” Fred Harris, a former liberal senator from Oklahoma who had served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, would apologize to crowds for having been “part of the mess”—and told friends, “I spent five lousy years kissing their asses in Washington before I figured out it didn’t mean anything.” Mo Udall foregrounded his upbringing in a town with but ninety-three souls, and his campaign materials pushed his “integrity”—so much so that at a fortnightly on-the-record breakfast for Washington bureau chiefs, columnists, and reporters one of them asked, “Are you prick enough to be president?” The eight-term congressman, whose memoir was titled Too Funny to Be President, responded with a joke whose punch line involved the candidate riding a horse in a parade. The owner insisted it was a mare but the politician said it must be a stallion: “I can distinctly remember riding through the streets and hearing people say, look at the prick on that big white horse.”

  Political pricks on big white horses were in such bad odor in 1976 that, as one political handicapper put it, “this year, negatives are positives.” And for now, Jimmy Carter was playing that game the best of them all. The thirty-five thousand Democratic activists raised their hands in their precinct caucuses on January 19, the same day that Gerald Ford delivered his second State of the Union address. “Uncommitted” won: who wanted to commit to a politician? But among those willing to stake themselves on one, it was James Earl Carter who prevailed. The next morning he was featured on the Today show, the CBS Morning News, and Good Morning America. That night, Walter Cronkite said Iowans had spoken, “and for the Democrats, what they said was Jimmy Carter.”

  Yet how much that could possibly mean for the long haul was up in the air. When William Safire ran his New Year’s Day “1976 Office Pool” column, question three read, “The Democratic ticket will be (a) Jackson-Brown (b) Bayh-Carey (c) Humphrey-Carter (d) Kennedy-Bentsen”—four senators being almost the only choices on offer. Antipolitics sounded all well and good. But how could someone running against Washington win the support it took among the powerful to get to Washington?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  “Not the Candidate of Kooks”

  TWELVE MONTHS EARLIER, THE PRESIDENT orated before the joint session of Congress, “The state of the union is not good.” Indubitably, that still was the case. But this was an election year. And the Bicentennial year. Surely different rhetoric was called for.
And so in this year’s State of the Union speech it arrived: “In man’s long, upward march from savagery and slavery, throughout the nearly 2,000 years of the Christian calendar, the nearly 6,000 years of Jewish reckoning, there have been many deep, terrifying valleys,” but also one example that “shines forth of a people uniting to produce abundance and to share the good life fairly and with freedom. One union holds out the promise of justice and opportunity for every citizen. That union is the United States of America.”

  He said, “In the recent past,” Americans “sometimes forgot the sound principles that guided us throughout our history. . . . We thought we could transform the country through massive national programs. . . . Too often they only made things worse.” And so he proposed transferring $10 billion from the federal government down to the states so they could take more control of administering the Medicaid program themselves; matching every dollar in slowed growth in the federal budget with a dollar in tax cuts; a tightening of welfare eligibility and “long-overdue reform of the scandal-riddled food stamp program”; more funds for federal prisons and longer sentences for drug offenders; a defense budget increase; a cap on the pay for federal workers. He proposed a bill for catastrophic health coverage for seniors but said we “cannot realistically afford federally dictated national health insurance.” The controlling trope was “common sense,” and “new realism” was the headline phrase.