President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  THE RELIGIOUS POPULIST AND ROLLING STONE

  As I worked more closely with Carter, I came to realize that his Southern Baptist religion was deeply woven into the fabric of his and Rosalynn’s lives. He began teaching Sunday school when he was eighteen and continued even as governor. A friend gave him a book by the famous liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Courage and the Courage to Change, and, among Niebuhr’s other works on theology, it influenced him deeply. From years of working with him, I found that one statement of Niebuhr’s seemed to sum up Carter’s unusual approach to politics: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” He told me he was also influenced by the dilemma posed by the theologian Paul Tillich about “the potential conflicts between a life built on my own faith in Christianity and the … pragmatic role of public affairs.” As governor and president, he was true to his commitment to keep religion separate from government. While devout, what he objected to were public displays of religiosity. He was bothered by Nixon’s religious services in the East Room and “by Billy Graham always hanging around the White House and ostentatiously being put forward by President Johnson and others to show that they were church people.”50

  He also discovered early in his presidential term that even approaching the line separating church and state did not go over well inside the high councils of government. At the first of regular weekly White House breakfasts for Democratic congressional leaders, Carter’s guests gasped when he asked his Georgia friend and budget director Bert Lance to say grace. At a later breakfast the Democratic majority whip John Brademas, a former Rhodes scholar whose district took in South Bend, Indiana, was asked by Carter to intone the prayer; he concluded with the appeal: “O Lord, if it is just the same to you, please let Notre Dame beat Georgia Tech in the upcoming football game.” House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a Boston Irishman, also took a dim view of religious displays. When he debriefed the House Steering Committee about that first congressional breakfast, he expressed his surprise at the opening prayer but, not to be outdone, closed his eyes and recited a Catholic prayer. When he finished and looked around at his colleagues, he declared, “That will last for the entire session.”51

  Candidate Carter’s Baptist beliefs were influential with two disparate voting blocs: Southern white conservative evangelicals, and black voters everywhere. I accompanied him on several campaign trips to black churches from Newark to Cleveland, and he was right at home singing Christian hymns with the impassioned black choirs, while holding hands with their pastors and swaying to the music. Even as a Jew, seeing him bond with these black Americans brought tears to my eyes: Most had left the South to escape the worst of segregation, still suffered from discrimination, and yet retained their patriotism and the strong religious feelings that helped shelter them from a hostile world. Carter connected with them through the shared experiences of his upbringing in ways that the more secular liberal politicians in the North could not.

  His Christian religion was a bridge that enabled him to create a unique electoral coalition of conservative Southern whites and disadvantaged blacks around the country. During a campaign swing in North Carolina, he was surrounded by a group of Southern Baptists in a backyard, where one of them asked about his religious faith. Carter recalled: “I just told them very frankly how I felt about it—that I had always been a Christian, that I had taught Sunday school. And they asked if I was ‘born again’ and I said yes, which is not an extraordinary thing for a Southern Baptist. I mean all of us claim to be born again when we become personally aware of and commit ourselves to Christ.” Washington reporters witnessed the exchange, and Carter reflected that “they took the ‘born-again’ phrase as kind of a weird thought of having revelations from heaven or having contact with or communications or conversations with angels and things like that, and I really deplored it.”52

  He was not guided by the Bible in making his decisions, but his faith helped sustain him during the traumas of office. He fully accepted my Jewish faith and close observance of our holidays and customs, and even participated in our family Passover Seder after the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. I was never made to feel uncomfortable with Carter’s religion. On the contrary, Carter once told me: “I think, Stu, my whole life and its priorities [have] been shaped by my Christian faith, as yours has by your Jewish faith. It is a normal thing for someone who is as devout as I am and as you are, to say that without embarrassment.”53

  Another factor in Carter’s ascension to the presidency was his populist streak, which appealed to rural voters and a spectrum of urban liberals. Carter’s populism was rooted in his family. His grandfather was a close associate of the Georgia populist Tom Watson, a leader in the congressional battle to legislate free rural mail delivery, and Carter claimed that the idea originated with “my granddaddy” when he was postmaster in Richmond, Georgia. Preserving the RFD was a prime political project of Carter’s father; Republicans opposed this now-almost-forgotten service that once connected millions of isolated American farms to the world, if only through the Sears Roebuck catalog that came in the mail.54 Like his idol Harry Truman, he had worked in the fields and plowed behind a mule, and did not hide his suspicions of large institutions, corporations, and organizations favoring the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of ordinary people.

  One speech brought national attention to his populism and helped propel him to national recognition, a Law Day speech on justice delivered on May 4, 1974, at the University of Georgia School of Law before the state’s legal establishment. Carter followed Senator Ted Kennedy, whose celebrity bulked up the audience, which, by another totally unlikely stroke of luck, included the gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson of Rolling Stone magazine.

  Instead of flattering his eminent audience, the governor delivered a sharply critical attack of the legal profession at a high intellectual level that few elected officials could have matched. He began on a disarming note, describing himself as a “peanut farmer, an engineer, and a nuclear physicist, not a lawyer,” and quoted Niebuhr to the effect that “laws are constantly changing to stabilize the social equilibrium of the forces and counterforces of a dynamic society.” There followed a second, more surprising reference with a refrain from “a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan, that ‘the times, they are a-changing.’” He then proceeded to awaken his audience by attacking the “inadequacies of a system of which it is obvious that you’re so patently proud.”

  Thompson paid close attention as the governor of Georgia laid into lawyers and the legal system in which “the powerful and the influential have carved out for themselves or have inherited a privileged position in society, or wealth or social prominence for higher education or opportunity for the future. Carter cited his policy of appointing judges on merit; his creation of a commission to hear citizen complaints about judicial performance; and the shockingly inequitable sentences for the indigent. Within the lifetime of many lawyers in the audience, Georgia chain gangs had been a notorious feature of incarceration; Carter called the state’s prisons a disgrace and reminded the listeners of his reforms to return 95 percent of the state’s prisoners to their homes. He chastised the bar association for failing to greet Martin Luther King, Jr., with “approbation and accolades” when he demanded equal treatment for black as well as white citizens. And he also reminded them that the first speech he gave as a member of the state senate, “representing the most conservative district in Georgia,” called for the abolition of procedures that kept black citizens from voting.

  Carter remarked that individual lawyers, doctors, teachers, and even his fellow peanut warehousemen were deeply committed to their clients, patients, students, or customers, but that something happened when they organized into pressure groups that reversed their priorities. As a prime example, he mentioned “working people struggling for a decent pay, while the Teamsters Union and others were not only committing crimes, but in effect cheating people who had trusted them.” Thompson reported that speech in glowing t
erms that helped etch Carter’s populist profile among the political elite, and validated him as an acceptable Democratic candidate for a party whose base was more liberal than he was on fiscal issues.

  Carter never felt comfortable with many of the union leaders he had to deal with in Washington, even though their unions were the organizational backbone of the Democratic Party. Unions were deeply unpopular among his base in the conservative, nonunion South, and he saw them and especially their leaders as part of the entrenched interests against which he railed, although as president he supported much of their agenda, such as reforming labor laws to facilitate organizing workers.

  This highlights one problem with populism. In a period of deep voter anger over institutions, as today, it can be a winning campaign formula but not a governing philosophy. It is impossible to govern without co-opting major institutions and their leaders to support a president’s agenda and stand behind him in tough times. A president can and must appeal over the heads of Congress to the public to put pressure on its representatives in Washington to support his proposed legislation. But he cannot appeal too often for public support without wearing out his welcome, and at the same time he must reach accommodation with the organized groups inside the Beltway, who too often call the shots via access to their deep congressional connections and carefully targeted campaign contributions.

  But to run a populist, antiestablishment campaign, a candidate has to be well known. And, he was still “Jimmy Who?” among the press and public. With Carter’s national name recognition at less than 1 percent, he was desperate to get any national attention. He went on the television quiz show What’s My Line? None of the panel identified him as the former governor of Georgia and a presidential candidate. Henry Owen, the head of foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution, who met Carter at briefings I arranged at Brookings, ran into Carter and Jody Powell at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and dropped them off on the West Side of Manhattan. As Carter and Powell got out of the taxi, Powell leaned over and told the hardened New York cabby, “You have just driven the next president of the United States.” He replied, “Yeah, and I still want to get paid.” When they left, the cabby turned to Owen and said, “Who was that kook?”55

  THE PRIMARIES

  But even at that early stage Ham knew that name recognition was less important than winning the Iowa party caucuses, whose potential had not yet sunk in with the political establishment. He concluded that Carter had to work by stealth to become the surprise winner, while most of the better-known candidates were still at work in Congress or their governors’ mansions. Between Carter’s announcement for the presidency late in 1974 and the caucuses on January 19, 1976, the candidate made an astonishing 110 trips to Iowa, many lasting a full week or even longer. These were amplified through visits by Rosalynn Carter and his remarkable mother, “Miss Lillian,” with her personal warmth and a mile-wide smile. When the caucus votes were tallied, some 60 percent were undecided, but that was not the headline newspapers used. Carter was declared the winner with 27 percent, or fewer than fourteen thousand votes. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana was second with 13 percent.

  On to New Hampshire, another small state that trades in retail politics where voters were generally moderate to conservative, take their responsibility seriously, and demand persistent, personal contact with candidates. The man from Plains, his wife, his mother, and their sons and daughters-in-law had spent another hundred days campaigning there at town hall meetings and meet-and-greet sessions. A spunky fellow Georgian, Dot Padgett, came up with the creative idea of organizing a “Peanut Brigade,” hundreds of Georgians who fanned out over the state to serve as validators for their former governor. It worked: This time Carter was the clear winner.56

  The next leg of the early campaign strategy involved knocking out Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, in the first Southern primary, held in Florida on March 9. That would leave Carter the sole Southerner in the race and earn the gratitude of Northern liberals confronting Wallace’s divisive racism. Here again Carter’s clueless opponents were only too happy to defer to him, let him destroy Wallace, and then pick up the pieces. They failed to realize that another primary victory would propel him into the early primaries in the Northern states with an edge. Carter spent a great deal of time in Florida, the state next to Georgia and thoroughly familiar to him, backed by a superb organization put together by a young aide, Phil Wise, who moved to Florida for months before the primary (and became his White House appointments aide). Washington State senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson made a belated effort to win the senior citizens and Jewish voters in South Florida, but it was too little too late. It was the beginning of the end for Wallace, who was debilitated from the assassin’s bullet that had severed his spine while he was running for president in 1972. Campaigning from a wheelchair, he had lost much of the fire that ignited his earlier campaign in 1968 around the South and in blue-collar areas around the country, taking traditionally Democratic votes from Hubert Humphrey in key battleground states, as I painfully watched with Humphrey’s senior staff in Minneapolis. Carter narrowly beat him, 34 to 31 percent, with a slogan coined by Rafshoon to resonate across the South: “Send them a president, not a message.” Carter went on to defeat Wallace decisively in the North Carolina primary, whereupon Wallace left the campaign and endorsed Carter.

  There were bumps in the primary road, as Carter lost liberal Massachusetts and New York the same day, and narrowly escaped a loss in Wisconsin to representative Morris “Mo” Udall of Arizona, winning 37 to 36 percent when the farm vote came in late, after his promise to raise milk price supports—enabling him to emulate the famous 1948 Chicago Tribune headline, “Dewey Beats Truman,” as he held up the headline of the Milwaukee Journal, with his broadest smile: “Udall Beats Carter.” As the campaign rolled on, he had an added weapon: Eleven family members worked in eleven different states to spread his message.57

  Few campaigns made better use of scarce financial resources than Carter’s in its early days. The candidate often stayed free at the homes of supporters in the primary states to save money. He flew economy class with Jody Powell as his most frequent companion. But airplanes are an essential tool even in the ground game of today’s politics, and they do not come cheap.

  When he began to expand his reach, Carter needed to find a trustworthy pilot near the small town of Plains, where he would retreat on weekends to rest, plan for the coming week, and meet with his Atlanta-based staff. There was no shortage of daredevil crop dusters, but once again, small-town luck was with him. G. Thomas Peterson, former chief test pilot for Aero Commander in nearby Albany, had set up a company in Plains with six single-engine and four twin-engine Cessnas. Peterson Aviation Services bought about one hundred acres of land, which, as Tom explained, could serve as a runway exceeding five thousand feet, “depending upon the amount of mowed grass.”58 On a Sunday afternoon following the 1974 Christmas holidays, he received a call from Governor Carter, who asked Tom to hold on until he could move out of earshot of his state police bodyguards, telling them he was going to look for Indian arrowheads, which they knew was one of his favorite pastimes. He asked Peterson: “Will you consider flying me, not in a big plane? I’m going to be president of the United States.” The pilot held his tongue but remembers he almost blurted out, “President of what?”

  In the beginning our small staff contingent flew in a Cessna 172 that held only three passengers and the pilot; the charge was $25 per seat, and we would leave from a small airport outside Atlanta for the one-hour flight to Plains. The passengers were from Carter’s inner circle and me. There was only one engine and no control tower to guide our landing of the plane. As Peterson explained: “People could hear you coming in, and if you could hear them you could land.” When the plane was low enough, he got his landing vectors from the instruments. When we landed, I literally felt like kissing the ground—and rightly so, because Peterson recalled one landing at sunset, when the plane was headed straig
ht for the trees at the end of the small runway.

  As his pilot, Peterson became familiar with the essentials of Carter’s character the rest of the country would come to know, albeit imperfectly. One was Carter’s unfettered self-confidence. Another was his insistence on punctuality, which had been imbued in him from his Annapolis days. Even more striking was his deep religious faith. In one of their maiden campaign trips, Carter asked Peterson why he did not attend church regularly and told him about the importance of putting religion in his life. While this left a lasting impression, it did not improve his pilot’s church attendance.59

  With the primary victories and consequent national exposure, the Carter campaign expanded and quickly moved upscale to chartered jets. Once Carter secured the presidential nomination, he graduated to a Boeing 727 with 140 to 150 seats. Some member of the campaign press corps jokingly referred to the plane as “Peanut One.” The name stuck, and our barnstorming days were over. Although most of my time was spent developing and coordinating campaign policy from headquarters in Atlanta, I frequently flew on Peanut One.

  I can attest from personal experience that there is no activity more physically, intellectually, or emotionally demanding than a presidential campaign in a country as large and diverse as the United States. It is a fit test for a potential president. Campaign staffs are small, and the candidate must take positions literally on the fly as news breaks in the United States or around the world. A sitting president has his White House Staff, supported by an enormous federal bureaucracy, to provide facts and recommendations for key decisions. A misstep can often be reversed or ameliorated by presidential actions down the road. Not so for a new and still largely unknown challenger fresh on the campaign trail, where one mistake can be fatal. The Carter campaign did not have the deep resources available to the incumbent, Gerald Ford, who had the White House Rose Garden as a stage set for showing himself as presidential. Ford could sleep in his own bed while Carter and the traveling staff had to bunk in hotels after brutal twelve-hour days on the road and in the air.