“GOVERNOR, WE HAVE COME TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR FUTURE”
Shortly after his inauguration as governor in January of 1971, the presidency of the United States clearly was coming onto Carter’s personal horizon, although among his cronies and even in the privacy of their fishing trips the only term they used was “national office.”35 Indeed, Carter was so determined to become president that at the 1972 Miami Democratic Convention, he instructed Ham to start a movement to promote him as Senator George McGovern’s running mate, even though he had been a leader in the anti-McGovern elected officials at the convention.36 Ham recalled that when they went to Miami they “had this crazy idea of getting Carter on the ticket as VP. We tried to have it both ways. We tried to get on the ticket but not get caught trying.”37 Chance favored Carter in McGovern’s crushing defeat. He also met Patrick Caddell, McGovern’s brilliant young pollster, just out of Harvard and already a major figure in national Democratic politics—but not to the taste of Kirbo, who recalled that it was “the first time I saw that damn pollster with the long hair.”38 But gradually the Carter team coalesced into a fighting force with awesome political skills.
Carter’s ambition to gain the presidency was reinforced by measuring himself against the stream of potential candidates who visited him at the governor’s mansion seeking his support. He remembered that “after spending several hours with them drinking beer and so forth, I didn’t see that they were any more qualified than I was.… I was amazed at how parochial they were and how narrow-minded they were.” As governor he had to implement laws they had put through Congress, which Carter said they could barely remember.39 Still, it seemed presumptuous—even absurd in Ham’s view—for Carter to think or at least talk openly about the presidency until prompted by supporters outside his inner circle. The first formal memorandum came from Dr. Peter Bourne, a physician who had helped draft speeches for Carter’s gubernatorial campaign. With the Vietnam War dragging to a close and Watergate further coloring the voters’ suspicion of Washington, Bourne correctly realized that the forthcoming 1976 presidential campaign might be a time for an outsider with a fresh approach. He wrote Carter a long letter in the summer of 1972, arguing that this was his moment and that he needed to start building a political base. He urged him to travel the country campaigning for Democratic congressional candidates and to write an autobiography; Carter did both.40
This sparked a series of meetings in Atlanta throughout the 1972 presidential campaign with Ham, Rosalynn, and his cousin Don Carter, a journalist with Knight-Rider newspapers. The regulars at the mansion joined in. On October 17, Ham started off lightly: “Governor, we have come to talk to you about your future. I don’t know any other way to say this, and it’s hard to bring myself to say the words, but I guess I will just have to say it.” After hesitating for a second, he got it out: “We think you should run for president.”41 Carter put off his decision until the day after McGovern’s overwhelming defeat. When she realized he intended to run, Rosalynn called his sister Ruth and exclaimed, “‘Jimmy’s going to run for p-p-p…’ I couldn’t even say the word, it was so unreal to me.”42 On November 5 he convened another meeting of his inner circle at the mansion; they realized they needed a concrete plan, and Carter asked Ham to pull together all the ideas in their recent meetings into one memorandum. The result was Ham’s seventy-two-page outline of his brilliant strategy for catapulting the unknown governor of a medium-size Southern state to the White House. It became one of the most famous campaign blueprints in modern American political history.
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William Hamilton McWhorter Jordan (pronounced “Jerdan”) was born in 1944 in Charlotte, North Carolina, but grew up in Albany, Georgia, not far from Jimmy Carter’s Plains. He had been Carter’s youth coordinator in his unsuccessful 1966 gubernatorial campaign; his campaign manager when Carter was elected governor in the 1970 race; and then his gubernatorial executive secretary. Ham fought in the Vietnam War when many in our generation sought every means to avoid it. Almost certainly his exposure to Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the American military against the Viet Cong, would later lead to multiple battles with cancer and a premature death. Now he was the unchallenged manager for what looked like an impossible presidential campaign. To Carter “Ham was just like one of my own children.”43
Ham, as everyone called him, was movie-star handsome, with a thick shock of black hair and an impish smile. He had the most analytical political mind of anyone I ever met. He never bragged about himself, and in all our years together, I never heard a cross word from him. He supported my work on policy, was unfailingly kind to my wife, Fran, and championed me during a crucial showdown during the postelection transition. One of the most remarkable parts of the Carter presidential campaign—and later the White House years—was the total absence of rancor and competition among Carter’s top aides. We each knew our roles, and while I always checked our policy proposals and speeches with Ham, Jody Powell, and Rafshoon, there was rarely much pushback. They respected my sense of where Carter needed to position himself on substantive policy issues, and I respected their expertise on electoral politics and the media.
But there was no doubt who ran the overall campaign. In retrospect, Ham’s bold plan seems self-evident, but only because it was visionary. He accurately addressed the political situation and the huge challenges Carter would face as a candidate, and he laid down a precise “Plan of Action,” with specific tasks allotted in meticulous detail and an overarching theme—restoring trust in government after Watergate. For Carter to be considered a national rather than a regional candidate, he advised him to make clear his commitment to racial equality while also warning him against dwelling on race lest he risk alienating the whites who had to make important adjustments: “the working class men and women who have traditionally voted Democratic and are still having to cope with certain aspects of racial integration; busing, preferential treatment given some blacks in employment, etc.” The trade-off between the social agenda of the Democratic Party and an emphasis on jobs and growth for working-class whites and blacks remains a dilemma for Democratic presidential candidates to this day, as Hillary Clinton learned in 2016.
Assume “a learning posture,” Ham wrote. “Don’t pretend to have all the answers or know everything … a major aspect of your campaign will be to travel the country, listen and learn … [but you] are not going to compromise the beliefs and principles you have lived by to be elected.” And as a governor rather than a legislator like his congressional opponents, Carter could also argue that his was the best preparation for the presidency; Ham also foresaw an important tactical advantage for Carter. As soon as he left the governor’s office at the start of 1975, he would be the only candidate who could commit to a full-time campaign. That would also enable him to make the earliest announcement for president, which would attract “inordinate amounts of coverage and publicity.” The reverse side of that was a warning to Carter that he had to be ready both emotionally and physically for a brutal schedule, traveling across the country almost without interruption, returning to Georgia only every other weekend for a few days of rest. He laid out a budget that allowed for “a heavyweight issues man” to work up position papers; initially that was Steve Stark, a talented young journalist with the Boston Globe, and soon would be me.
Robert Strauss, the legendary Texas-Washington political guru who was serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, convened a meeting of potential presidential candidates and their campaign managers in September 1974. Bob and I became very close in the campaign, regularly sharing advice and concerns. He was a natural politician, respected by both Republicans and Democrats, with a twinkle in his eye, profound and profane, his sentences loaded with four-letter words. His purpose was to explain the Democrats’ new rules aimed at taking the nomination out of the hands of the party bosses, as well as the post-Watergate fund-raising regulations that had been issued by the Federal Election Commission. While the other candidates brought smoo
th, impeccably dressed Washington lawyers to understand the new rules, Ham came wearing an informal blue jacket and khaki pants, accompanied by two young election experts in their twenties. Their minds uncluttered by the baggage of past campaigns, they were quick to understand that the convention of 1976, still two years away, would not be brokered by party bosses in backroom deals, and that their national strategy fitted the new rules. These would democratize the nominating process and open it to more than thirty primaries, where average voters would hold the keys to the nomination—just the kind of process for a newcomer with no other job and a gift for retail politics. Ham also was the first to spot the potential impact of the early Iowa caucuses as an unappreciated engine of momentum for the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
Then fortune smiled. Late in 1973, well before Carter formally announced for president, Strauss was searching among moderate young Southern governors for a new chairman of the Democrats’ Congressional Campaign Committee to help elect members of Congress in the midterm elections. Whoever was chosen would pile up political debts and gain national exposure. Over a few drinks with Kirbo and the governor in the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, bells rang in Strauss’s head. Thanks to his Time magazine cover Carter had more visibility than his Southern colleagues. Kirbo and Carter persuaded Strauss not only to name him to the post, but to give Ham an office at Democratic National Committee headquarters to coordinate Carter’s efforts, including his travel. As Carter gleefully recalled, while this was part of his budding attempt to run for president, “we didn’t tell anybody”—and certainly not Strauss. In retelling the story, Ham smiled and said, “This was probably the last time we ever put anything over on Strauss.”44 His perch in Washington gave him access to a nationwide database of politically active people in key states, and congressional candidates who would prove invaluable to the still-inchoate, budding presidential campaign.
INTO THE VORTEX
That is when I was drawn into the widening vortex. Early in 1974, Governor Carter called me at my Atlanta law office and invited me to lunch with him in his spacious office in the Capitol. Over an unappetizing tuna salad sandwich on plain white bread, for which I had to pay a few dollars to his secretary, Mary Beasley (I was not alone; even Bert Lance had to pay),45 an early sign of his frugality, he said that after he left office, he wanted to make something out of his new but normally inconsequential position as chairman of the DNC’s Congressional Campaign Committee by going around the country to stump for the party’s candidates. With the shadow of Watergate threatening Republican electoral prospects in the 1974 midterm elections, he asked me to undertake a special assignment. Without understanding his underlying motive, I accepted his request to develop positions critiquing the policies of the Nixon administration and suggesting Democratic options on every topic from health and energy to defense and foreign affairs. I reached out for ideas to Democratic staffers in the House and Senate and experts in Washington think tanks, and produced more than twenty-five policy papers, which were sent out under his signature on a “DNC74” letterhead and which I still have. I kept the names of those who helped me during that precomputer era in a small blue box, alphabetized by issue. Many eventually served in the Carter administration. And when the presidential campaign formally got under way, the policy papers gave us a head start.
When the six-month project ended, I called the governor in October 1974 and asked to take him to lunch at Dante’s Down the Hatch, a restaurant in the newly created Underground Atlanta, near the Capitol. Together in a booth, with a burly Georgia state trooper protecting him, I got right to the point, because I knew he regarded small talk as a waste of time. Arguing with what I mistakenly believed was highly original political acumen, I told him that in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Democrats were likely to take the House and Senate in a landslide, for which he would get some measure of credit. I said that he was bound to stand out in a weak Democratic field for president, and that if he won a few Southern primaries, someone might want him on the ticket as vice president. Carter smiled broadly and said, “Stu, I have already decided to run, but I am going to be the Democratic candidate for president, not vice president. Would you like to join my campaign?” I accepted on the spot and broke the news to Fran that night.
I had been a high school basketball star in Atlanta; Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude at the University of North Carolina; a junior aide on LBJ’s White House staff straight out of Harvard Law School; and research director for the Humphrey presidential campaign in 1968. I returned to Atlanta to serve as a law clerk to a federal judge; became a young partner in the prominent Atlanta firm of Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy, and eagerly joined local and state Democratic politics. I served on the Fulton County and Georgia State Democratic Executive Committees; led the drafting of a new charter for the Georgia Democratic Party; and worked on policy issues in the campaigns of Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, Sam Massell, and first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. The one that was most special was the 1972 congressional campaign of Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s closest aides, who became the first black congressman elected from the Deep South since post–Civil War Reconstruction. Fran organized the Northern, mostly white, section of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. I headed Young’s policy group and helped secure Justice Department approval for his Voting Rights Act petition to overturn the racially gerrymandered district that would have denied him success, and coauthored a book about his historic victory.46 In his memoir Andy fondly remembered the “help from key young whites in the district,” highlighting the roles Fran and I played, and noting the major role I would play during the Carter presidency: “I’ll always be proud that Stu Eizenstat’s initial political involvement was with my congressional campaign.”47
For the rest of Jimmy Carter’s Georgia team, he had been the sole focus of their political lives; as deeply committed to him as I became, I was a relative latecomer. When I was finally admitted to Carter’s inner circle on the strength of my policy papers in his run for governor, and later, when he moved into national politics as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, I was under no illusion that my relationship with him could ever be as deep as the others’. Like Carter himself, they were not only from the South but of it, going back generations. Hamilton Jordan’s great-great-grandfather was a Confederate general; ten of Jody Powell’s relatives had fought against the Union in the Battle of Antietam; and his senior aide Frank Moore’s great-grandfather was in the Battle of Chickamauga.
By contrast, my paternal great-grandfather and grandfather had fled Russia early in the twentieth century during the Russo-Japanese War and the Kishinev pogrom—one to Atlanta, the other to Palestine. A little later, my mother Sylvia’s family, the Medintz’s, emigrated from Lithuania for America, leaving behind three sisters of my maternal grandfather, who were killed in the Holocaust. As a boy in Atlanta, I was a member of another minority group in the South: the Jews. When my mother, Sylvia, took me swimming at Mooney’s Lake, we were stopped by a sign reading, “No Blacks, Jews, or Dogs Allowed.” This was not my only early experience with racial and religious discrimination. As a twelve-year-old, I bowed to the segregation of Atlanta’s buses and failed to give up my seat in the white section to an elderly black women laden with shopping bags. My mother had to look at private schools when Georgia’s governor Ernest Vandiver threatened to close the public schools to avoid desegregation. And as a student at the University of North Carolina in 1962, I was blind to the reason for the nation’s first sit-in, when students from a nearby black college blocked my access to a nearby Howard Johnson’s restaurant. Notwithstanding my academic record, federal judicial clerkship, and White House service, I got only one offer in 1970 from a major Atlanta law firm, Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy, one of whose founding partners was Jewish. For the others, it was still no blacks and Jews allowed. One of the major things that drew me to Jimmy Carter in the 1970 gubernatorial campaign was his opposition to discrimination,
which shaped his courageous civil rights policies as president, to which I contributed.
Over time, I developed my own increasingly close relationship with Carter through his respect for my policy expertise and judgment; rightly or wrongly he called me his “brains.”48 I was buoyed by his comment one evening early in the administration, asking if I liked my job, and telling me I was “the perfect staff member, well organized with excellent judgment,” and that he had confided to Stan Cloud of Time that “I was doing a superb job,” and he “couldn’t get along without me.”49 So during the long 1976 presidential campaign, I coordinated all domestic- and foreign-policy positions, and established the major task forces of outside experts on key economic and national security issues.
After Carter won the Democratic nomination, I realized how lucky I was to be at this point in history and to live in this wonderful country. Here I was, thirty-two years old, the only son of Sylvia and Leo, a Jewish small businessman in Atlanta who, together with his brother Berry, ran a small shoe company wholesaling what in Yiddish are called shmattes (literally “rags,” but in this case low-cost shoes), mostly to small Jewish merchants throughout the South who had also fled what they called “the old country” for a new land of hope. Combined with this emotion was another powerful one. I had the privilege of participating up close in the grandeur of American democracy at work, in a nation filled with remarkably diverse people who had assembled here in history’s greatest migration and, while occupied by their own challenges, were held together by common American values.
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