You could celebrate Boston University’s curmudgeonly president, John Silber, who gave a grumpy address called “Counterfeits of Democracy” at Faneuil Hall: “Increasingly, we confuse the pursuit of happiness, guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence, with the pursuit of pleasure.”
You could point out—like Doonesbury in the Sunday morning paper and Jesse Jackson calling for blacks to boycott and the Native American group in Portland, Oregon, who said their invitation to join the Bicentennial Wagon Train was like Jews being invited to a party for Adolf Hitler—that the American dream did not include all Americans’ dreams.
You could point out, as media voices did during Operation Homecoming in 1973, that the whole thing served the malign ideological purpose of dissuading a nation from a desperately needed reckoning with the sins of its past.
You could dismiss the whole thing as infantilizing: “birthday parties,” after all, were for children.
And some people did. But the vast, vast majority did not. Indeed, wrote Elizabeth Drew, “the children understood better that this was a special evening”—the New Yorker implying that they were the ones who had it right.
The day after, it was almost hard to remember that the keynote of the preparations had been ambivalence and embarrassment—the ambivalence of a nation where only eight months earlier, 68 percent of citizens had told Gallup pollsters that the government consistently lied. (George Gallup wrote, “If this persists, it is within the realm of possibility that the United States will in the near future experience its greatest crisis of confidence since 1933.”) Indeed when Oberlin, Ohio, was chosen as a stop on the Bicentennial Wagon Train the local newspaper’s editors confessed nothing but apprehension. They reported, “The Bicentennial [has] not really caught on here or across the nation.” In a special Bicentennial edition of the paper in April, they reflected that the celebration had been “conceived more out of obligation than desire . . . the nation as a whole is not much in the mood for a birthday party. With a choice of red, white and blue decorations, the dominant tone seems to be blue.”
Then, the day arrived, and those same editors changed their mind.
“Our apprehensions were unfounded,” they wrote. “America truly does have a heritage to celebrate this year and the wagon train made part of that heritage come to life for us.” And lots of people agreed. Card-carrying, charter members of the suspicious circles tried on the sort of simple patriotism associated with followers of Ronald Reagan, some for the first time—and discovered they liked it. And for the many who had liked it already, the reaction was sheer unadulterated relief that they could tune those suspicious circles out.
Dread proved unfounded:
There were no fatalities in Weehawken.
Only about five thousand protesters showed up in Washington.
The National Safety Council said that highway casualties had been “normal.”
And, lo, there were no terrorist attacks.
And dread suddenly became passé. Time: “[T]he best part of it was that its supreme characteristics were good will, good humor and, after a long night of paralyzing self-doubt, good feelings about the U.S. . . . Only five year ago, in protest against the U.S.’s involvement in Indochina, the flag was being burned, burlesqued, and spat upon. Today many of the self same Americans who chose then to disown their flag are hoisting it high.” And Newsweek: “It’s nice that we’re promoting our country for a change rather than putting it down.” And, of course, the president: “After two centuries there is still something wonderful about being an American,” he said while turning immigrants into citizens at Monticello. “If we cannot quite express it we know what it is. You know what it is or you would not be here.”
There turned out to be something so exuberantly spontaneous about the way people felt their way through the festivities—like the riders of a subway car in tense, violent Boston who broke out in a rendition of “Happy Birthday, America,” and the revelers who found themselves dancing—“spontaneously and jubilantly,” Elizabeth Drew observed—when Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops ripped into a boisterous “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And the throngs who surprised themselves by applauding the most famous lines when a lecturer in Revolutionary costume read out the Declaration on the National Archives steps.
IF THE KEYNOTE OF THE preparations was ambivalence, the word that dominated the post hoc reflections was surprise.
An AP special correspondent (“Nation’s Hunger to Feel Good Erupts in Fever of Patriotism”) exulted at how the day “turned out to be a big, warm surprise party. . . . The grim clichés of more than a decade—‘the American malaise,’ ‘the sick society’—were scarcely heard in the land, praise God.” Blacks were “less reproachful,” Indians less “militant,” the distaff sex “paused in her march to full equality” (a good thing!), the young were becoming “less critical.”
Elizabeth Drew: “The feeling of the day sort of crept up on many of us, took us by surprise. There was a spirit to it that could not have been anticipated. For those of us who had been in despair about this Bicentennial Fourth of July, who feared the worst, the surprise was a very pleasing one . . . a lot of us have become so jaded that it is hard to believe that anything is real. But the politicians and the salesmen did not destroy the day—they became almost irrelevant. The celebrating seemed genuine. . . . the feelings came up on us when we least expected them.”
A Toledo resident who journeyed to New York: “We’re all so jaded, but we were able to savor each one of the ships. . . . It’s real exciting because all these countries have gotten together to celebrate the Bicentennial with us.”
The Birmingham News: “America turned a corner on a self-induced illness of the spirit and stretched its psyche in a burst of national joy and celebration.”
Self-induced: throw a big party, and the illness was gone.
ONE OF THE FEW DISSENTS came from an unusual source. A remarkable thing had taken place while Americans enjoyed their birthday party. For days a hundred Israeli commandos had been drilling painstakingly for “Operation Thunderbolt,” using a precise replica of Entebbe’s airport terminal; the model was based on intelligence gained from construction workers and interviews with released hostages. Late on Bicentennial eve, transport planes ferried the commandos 2,500 miles to Entebbe, Uganda; to avoid radar detection they were never more than a hundred feet above the sea and the land. On July 4 they set down with their planes’ cargo bays already opened, disgorging jeeps that they then drove to the terminal, dropping two Ugandan sentries with silenced pistols. They overpowered the Palestinian kidnappers and their Ugandan security force, then scooped up the hostages and loaded them into the rescue planes under enemy fire. Simultaneously three more cargo planes unloaded the armored personnel carriers whose forces disabled eleven Ugandan MiGs that might have pursued the rescued hostages as they winged their way to freedom. The whole thing took but an hour and a half—102 hostages rescued, only three killed. The Israelis lost only one commando.
Almost immediately some half-dozen Hollywood companies vied for rights to tell the story. And a former Hollywood hand named Reagan voiced a certain disappointment. He said, “This is what Americans used to do.”
THE GOOD FEELINGS LINGERED INTO the Democratic convention a week later in New York City. Gotham, said Jules Witcover, “left its customary cauldron of ill temper, rudeness, and freneticism in an uncommon mood of cordiality. Cab drivers who on other occasions not only refused to stop for rush-hour passengers but also tossed epithets as they sped by now became ambassadors of good will. Waitresses, elevator operators, hotel clerks, shopkeepers were uncharacteristically courteous. Police put off their snarling and helped conventioneers find their way around.”
The city, he said, seemed eager “to live down its reputation.” So did the Democratic Party—that cantankerous conglomeration H. L. Mencken once called “gangs of mutual enemies in a precarious state of symbiosis.” Platform drafters finished their work at the Mayflower Hotel a day early, having
produced a document as ideologically nondisputatious as the man who would run on it. Feminist forces led by Bella Abzug who had come in demanding 50 percent of delegate slots for women at the 1980 convention came away, satisfied, with a deal promising the party would merely “promote” gender equality and that a President Carter would press for the ERA. Forces led by Jerry Brown’s state treasurer, Sam Brown, who had organized the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in 1969, when some two million Americans stayed home from work or school on the same day to protest the war, came in demanding the endorsement of a “full and complete pardon” for all those in “legal or financial jeopardy” for evading the draft or deserting the military, and came away satisfied with an amendment merely promising pardon consideration on a case-by-case basis. (They also got a symbolic concession: a speech from the convention platform by the wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, author of a forthcoming memoir, Born on the Fourth of July.) “You have to give up a bit,” Sam Brown the former antiwar firebrand said, “in order to take control of the presidency.”
“The idea that the Democrats, if they behaved, might actually inhabit the White House once again,” Witcover wrote, had “mellowed that usually fractious party.” So had their mellow nominee-apparent—and, perhaps, the mild springlike breezes that transformed the customarily sweltering city into what the journalists phoning in their copy invariably called a “lovefest.” The party chairman, the glad-handing Texan Robert Strauss, was asked if the convention would be “dull.” He answered, smiling, “It can’t get too dull for me.”
There had been storm clouds over the horizon. In the middle of June, Carter decamped for a relaxing trip to Sea Island, Georgia. He wore an Allman Brothers Band T-shirt while fishing, reporters noticed. In Georgia, the red-hot Southern rockers, whose singer Gregg Allman was married to Cher, “have the force of religion,” the Village Voice’s James Wolcott explained. Their label was Macon-based Capricorn Records. Carter had been friends with its CEO, Phil Walden, since 1973 when the governor called on him to talk about boosting the state’s entertainment industry. Carter then signed a law tightening protection of record companies from the scourge of bootleg cassette tapes. Walden promised a series of fund-raising concerts starring the Allmans, Wet Willie, the Marshall Tucker Band, and the Charlie Daniels Band to help put him in the White House—a nice solution to get around the FEC’s thousand-dollar contribution limit. But rock stars enjoyed certain recreational activities hazardous to the reputation of Baptist presidential candidates. A federal grand jury was considering drug charges against a number of those in the Capricorn Records orbit; then came the news that the Allmans’ former road manager had been convicted for conspiracy and drug distribution, partly on Greg Allman’s testimony offered under immunity. Suspicions lingered that Capricorn was more or less a front for a drug ring.
But nothing whatsoever ended up being made of it in the presidential campaign. The drug connections of the powerful were no longer really news.
Drugs, in fact, were everywhere, and hardly anywhere controversial. The editors of Consumer Reports had published Licit & Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens and Marijuana—Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol, weighing in at 623 pages, treating substances illegal under federal law no differently from their ratings of toasters or the new Chrysler LeBaron (Section VI: “Inhalants, Solvents, Glue-Sniffing”). In 1975 a new magazine had been inaugurated, Marijuana Monthly—“a publication,” its prospectus read, “dealing with marijuana’s growing impact upon society. We present the facts, the fiction, the humor and the opinion about marijuana and the lifestyle of its users.” High Times, which began publication a year earlier, had been intended as a single-issue parody of Playboy (complete with a centerfold picture of a high-grade cannabis specimen). It was selling 550,000 copies a month by 1975. Saturday Night Live made plain every week that bingeing on pot was just what your ordinary mildly antiauthoritarian hip young professional was supposed to do. (One Chevy Chase gag noted the FBI was warning of a shipment of “killer dope” infiltrating New York. “In an effort to aid the FBI in its investigation, Weekend Update is undertaking its own analysis of the marijuana sent to us anonymously by any viewers who may be worried. Simply place a small sample of the suspected cannabis in an envelope and send it immediately to: Chevy Chase, Apartment 12, 827 West 81st Street, New York City 10053.”)
Carter had promised to end federal penalties for possession of less than an ounce of pot, eleven states having already decriminalized the stuff. President Ford was asked by a student on the campaign trail in New Hampshire if he agreed. His reply: “Until there is a higher degree of unanimity among the scientific world that marijuana is not harmful to the individual, I do not think we should decriminalize marijuana.” But that seemed like only a matter of time. As for cocaine—“not, strictly speaking, an addictive drug,” New York magazine reported late in 1973—in 1977 Eric Clapton and Jackson Browne both recorded celebratory songs on the subject; Clapton’s eventually charted at No. 30.
In the summer of 1976 the Associated Press reported that one of Carter’s nephews, William Carter Spann, was serving ten to life in Vacaville, California, for two armed robberies in San Francisco. The name never made the news again. It seemed no one cared about Jimmy Carter’s vagrant relations, nor his stoned rock-and-roll friends—except, perhaps, those young voters for whom the latter was a recommendation, and who joined the lovefest along with everyone else.
YOU COULD SEE IT IN the veritable street festival out in front of the Americana Hotel, where the Carter forces were headquartered: announcements stenciled on the pavement and volunteers passing out leaflets like carnival barkers, Italian ice and pretzels vended by colorful characters in carts and balloons and Bicentennial Big Apple T-shirts and Carter buttons and that wacky fellow in the Uncle Sam costume who always seems to show up at national conventions. Carter strode out upon a makeshift sidewalk dais, more relaxed than ever—“it looks like his more natural smile,” a journalist wrote—with his wife and their darling eight-year-old Amy, trying out jokes, teasing the throng by hinting that he might just shock the world by revealing his running mate right then and there, promising that he would never, ever tell New York to drop dead. He ended with the patriotic affirmation that “we still live in the greatest nation on earth.”
Former candidates exuded love, too: Mo Udall, affirming, “Now we’re here to help Jimmy Carter celebrate his victory”; Jerry Brown, the last holdout, calling Carter “our nominee.” High-minded delegates toured the exhibit at the Whitney, “Two Hundred Years of American Scripture”; the proverbial curtain opened at Madison Square Garden Monday evening, July 12, on a set that featured a white picket fence, and red-white-and-blue bunting meant to call forth nostalgic recollections of the last time the Democrats met at Madison Square Garden, in 1924.
The first keynote speaker was John Glenn, now a senator, formerly an astronaut—an old-fashioned sort of hero. (“Doubts? Fears? Lagging confidence? Well, no wonder. With all that has befallen us, a lesser nation might well have collapsed.”) The second keynoter was a new-fashioned sort of hero: Barbara Jordan, star of the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings two years earlier, who if anything topped her patriotic oration of 1974 (“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total”). She was took the stage to the strains of “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and the standing ovation lasted two minutes, roaring right on through the chairman’s frustrated gavel bangs (“Ladies and gentlemen! . . . You’re neither ladies nor are you gentlemen!”), and then she was introduced, and the ovation lasted for another sixty seconds after that.
“It was 144 years ago,” her deep voice rumbled, “that members of the Democratic Party first met in convention to select a presidential candidate.” (She smiled, anticipating the delight at what she was about to say.)
“Since that time Democrats have continued to convene once every four years and draft the party platform and
nominate presidential candidate. Our meeting this week is a continuation of that tradition.
“But there is something different about tonight, there is something special about tonight. What is different, what is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker!”
Another thirty-second standing ovation.
She concluded, some twenty minutes later:
“We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the republic. There is no way to improve upon that, but what we can do is to find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.
“Now, I began this speech by commenting to you on the uniqueness of a Barbara Jordan making a keynote address. Well, I am going to close my speech by quoting a Republican president. . . . ‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master’ ”—
More roars interrupted her.
“ ‘This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference is no democracy.’ ”
Quoting Lincoln, she got another standing ovation, wave after wave after wave. It all felt very, very good.
THE NEXT NIGHT, ON GERALD Ford’s sixty-third birthday, Bastille Day, the speakers included George S. McGovern: “Eight years ago some Democrats had doubts about Hubert Humphrey. And they gave us Nixon’s first four years of war and domestic strife. Four years ago, some Democrats had doubts about me—and we got Nixon again. To repeat that sort of folly would be unconscionable.” Then Hubert H. Humphrey: “The patriots of 1776 believed, and this party has always believed, that a democratic government must be an active force for the betterment of human life. But there are new Tories abroad in the land. And their words are newly fashionable. They appeal to cynicism. They cater to the people’s mistrust of their own institutions. . . . They tell us our afflictions will be healed if we but leave them alone—if we seek private gain rather than public good. . . . There was no room for the Tories in Philadelphia in 1776. And I say there is no room for them in New York in 1976 or in Washington in 1977.” Young Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts also spoke, and the first black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, and George Wallace, Coretta Scott King, Mayor Daley, Frank Church, and Admiral Zumwalt—unity.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 99
