President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  At each stop the local Democratic dignitaries, mayors, governors, and members of Congress typically would wait on the tarmac to greet the candidate. We always had to be sensitive to national issues and avoid being drawn into divisive local politics. I had a full-time staff person, Isabel Hyde, to help avoid these local potholes.

  On Peanut One, Carter occupied a small section partitioned off in the front of the plane with a small desk for a work space and a green couch for naps. On a table near the desk lay a well-used Bible, and on the wall a good-luck horseshoe provided by a supporter at a campaign rally. Behind the president’s flying office were the ubiquitous Secret Service agents with their special lapel badges and coiled white plastic wires hanging down from their earphones into the backs of their suit jackets. Our staff section came next, and then in the back sat the irreverent, jaded working press. The reporters entered through the rear door of the plane, their section strewn with their papers, tape recorders, and typewriters, along with plastic cups, plates, and napkins. The rear wall was hung with a newspaper photo of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller making an obscene gesture, middle finger up.60

  POLICY GOALS

  In conceptualizing the policy goals of his presidential campaign, I tried to make them compatible with Ham’s political strategy. Eventually one of my essential functions in the White House was to keep our policies aligned with our political base, not always successfully. In preparation for the formal launch of his improbable presidential campaign, Carter and I met alone at night or on weekends in the downstairs sunroom off the main foyer of the governor’s mansion. He would often be in blue jeans with an open shirt, barefoot, as we discussed issues literally from A (abortion) to Z (Zaire). He had no religious scruples against abortion under certain circumstances, but neither did he feel comfortable encouraging it. The Supreme Court had handed down its Roe v. Wade decision only a few months before, and the sharpest question immediately facing any presidential candidate was whether the government should underwrite abortions for poor women. As on so many other issues where Carter tried to bridge a gap, we arrived at a middle position supporting a woman’s right to abort but opposing funding it through Medicaid. One “B” issue, school busing, was also a tough call, but while strongly supporting the integration of schools, Carter believed it was bad public policy to require students to be bussed to other districts to achieve racial balance in the classroom.

  Carter strove to navigate skillfully in the center between the traditional ideological poles within the Democratic Party and knit together as best he could his diverse and often incompatible winning coalition of Southern conservatives and Northern liberals and blue-collar industrial-state workers and their unions. It became clear that he was a fiscal conservative pledging to balance the budget, but also a social and foreign-policy liberal, for example, pledging to withdraw all American troops from South Korea, and cut billions from the defense budget—neither of which he did as president (only 3,000 of over 40,000 U.S. troops were withdrawn from South Korea, and defense spending was substantially boosted).

  On several key issues he took liberal positions more out of political necessity than personal belief. In May 1976, with Carter in the political ascendant, heading for our first major Northern primary in Pennsylvania, Steve Schlossberg, the general counsel of the United Auto Workers, called me with a compelling proposition: The UAW would be the first major union to endorse Carter if he would support their number one issue: universal, mandatory, comprehensive national health insurance.61 No issue motivated the labor and liberal communities more than this expensive program, which ran contrary to Carter’s fiscal conservatism. He gave me the authority to negotiate their endorsement, but insisted that I draw the line at a set of principles, without committing him to timetables and details, to be phased in “as revenues permit.”62 Carter likewise pledged to create a Department of Education in exchange for support from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. He freely announced his (and Rosalynn’s) support for the Equal Rights Amendment, which earned him the backing of liberal women’s groups, here exercising his own conscience.

  But the Carter campaign was less about detailed issues than the broader themes of restoring the voters’ trust in the presidency. As we went through the exhaustive list of issues, these were ones that came from his heart. He alone among the Democratic candidates understood that Democratic voters and the electorate at large were not seeking to expand the New Deal or the Great Society with a burst of new programs.

  Carter introduced himself to the nation at Washington’s National Press Club by announcing his candidacy on December 12, 1974, followed by an evening kickoff in Atlanta’s Civic Center. The speech was one of the earliest in presidential history, and for a Democrat, one of the most conservative, as well as populist. He declared himself “a farmer, an engineer, a businessman, a planner, a scientist, a governor, and a Christian,” an early signal to his Southern Baptist base. At the urging of the campaign team, it was more a thematic address than the classic Democratic programmatic speech I would have preferred. But his political advisers were right in capturing the mood of the country. There were no clarion calls for big new spending programs on health, education, or welfare.

  It was clear from the speech and our private conversations that his prime domestic goals were conserving energy and protecting the environment, and attacking pork-barrel water projects. The speech contained virtually nothing on foreign policy and national security aside from a brief promise to “protect the integrity of Israel” that I slipped in. A promise for a stronger military would normally have been on the agenda of a candidate who was a Southerner and a former naval officer, but Carter showed his early suspicions and flinty spending habits by simply calling for an “adequate military preparedness” and demanding more efficiency from the defense establishment. His most heartfelt national security appeal was an alert to the danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I helped temper his unrealistic goal in early drafts of a worldwide elimination of all nuclear weapons, by adding as an “ultimate goal.”63

  But the essence of the announcement speech and of the entire primary campaign was a clear anti-Watergate, anti-Washington message. He hammered away at restoring trust in government through reforming the bureaucracy, tearing away secrecy in decision-making, and passing strict ethics laws to control lobbyists and appoint regulators, senior officials, diplomats, and judges on merit and not connections. He promised specific ethics reforms on gifts, financial disclosure, limiting the revolving door of officials leaving to lobby the agencies they led, appointing judges on the basis of merit, and barring the appointment of government regulators from the industries they regulated. For good measure, he advocated universal voter registration; an end to racial discrimination; and a reform of a tax system he believed was a “disgrace to the human race” in favoring the rich and powerful over those who earned their living “with the sweat of manual labor.” Although Carter was accused of being “fuzzy” on the issues, in the course of a long and brutal campaign, he took scores of specific positions, which our policy shop gathered up after the election at his request, and over our objection, published as a memorandum from me and my deputy David Rubenstein after the election. But there can be no doubt that it was his thematic message of trust and reform, underwritten by the promise that he would never lie to the American people, that had the greatest impact during the campaign.64

  * * *

  Nevertheless we had to get through the primary season with my tiny and inexperienced policy staff of just a few full-time people, only one of whom besides myself, Al Stern, a professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University, a colleague in the 1968 Humphrey campaign, had ever been in the crucible of a presidential campaign. We had to take positions on dozens of issues, foreign and domestic, in preparing campaign speeches and answers to questions that inevitably came from the press and policy-oriented groups.

  To add heft and weight to the domestic- and foreign-policy side of the cam
paign, I added several young bright aides from Congress and academia, including Richard Holbrooke and Robert Hunter (foreign policy), Jerry Jasinowski (economics), Orin Kramer (financial), Kitty Schirmer (energy), and David Rubenstein as my chief deputy. I also created a series of advisory groups composed of prominent academics like Lawrence Klein of Wharton to head our economic task force; to lead our foreign-policy group, Zbigniew Brzezinski of Columbia, later his national security adviser; along with Cyrus Vance, a New York lawyer and experienced diplomat, later his secretary of state. I regularly consulted on international issues with Brzezinski’s Columbia colleague Richard Gardner, who came to Atlanta as early as 1975 and slept on our living-room couch. I worked with Ham, Jody, and Rafshoon to develop broad themes for his speeches. First was establishing what he had done as governor to provide a sound, well-managed state government by never raising taxes and leaving a budget surplus. But his more basic, winning campaign message cut across ideological boundaries: to restore trust in America’s government, pledging, as he put it, “I will never lie to you” and “a government as good as its people”—on which he tried to deliver.

  “ETHNIC PURITY”

  Every presidential campaign has its crises. They usually arise from remarks taken out of context, tangled and ill-phrased statements, and similar self-inflicted wounds. These are impossible to avoid in the hothouse atmosphere and under the unrelenting pressures of nonstop campaigning in different time zones, little sleep, and the press and political opponents ready to pounce on every miscue. Candidates take great pains to stay on message, and drifting off the agreed line can reveal more subtle views of their world than fit easily into oversimplified campaign mode. On April 6, the same day as he eked out a one-point victory over Udall in the Wisconsin primary, Carter was in Indianapolis heading toward Pennsylvania for a crucial test three weeks later. At the urging of Geno Baroni, a Jesuit priest I brought on board to help us understand and reach out to white, urban, largely Catholic voters in the North, he was campaigning in the industrial belt from Wisconsin to New England.

  Someone asked Carter if he had any objection to German Americans living in their own neighborhoods and sharing their own language and songs. He said he did not, and if he had stopped there, the issue of race that was hiding under the surface of the question would have stayed unnoticed. But in a clumsy attempt to transfer his support from white Southerners to white Northern ethnics, he went further in Indianapolis: “I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination. Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis or inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration.”65 He later tried to seek shelter from the storm he had brought upon himself by dismissing this as “an offhand statement.”66 But it sounded as if he wanted minorities kept out of traditionally white neighborhoods.

  I received a call at home from Jody Powell, telling me that we had a real crisis on our hands. I told him that I would immediately reach out to Andy Young, our black Atlanta congressman whom Fran and I had helped elect, and who had already taken Carter to meet the suspicious Congressional Black Caucus, where he left a good impression by emphasizing his commitment to civil rights and wowing them with the number of blacks in senior positions in his campaign.67 With as much emotion as I could muster, I appealed to Andy for help. He paused, said he was concerned about the remarks, but knew Carter well enough to believe he was no racist. But that did little to calm the furious reaction. Mayor Maynard Jackson of Atlanta postponed plans to endorse Carter, angrily exclaiming, “Is there no white politician I can trust?” Jesse Jackson went over the top, attacking Carter’s remarks as a “throwback to Hitlerian racism.” Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, another rising black politician, was hardly more artful: “We’ve created a Frankenstein’s monster with a Southern drawl, a more cultured version of the old Confederate at the schoolhouse door.” Carter’s Democratic competitors joined in. “Just who does he want to wall out?” asked Mo Udall. Scoop Jackson accused him of talking differently to different groups.68

  Ham later tried to explain away his boss’s words by saying that “We didn’t know, living in south Georgia, what it meant to say ‘ethnic purity’ in a Pennsylvania or Ohio neighborhood urban ethnic setting.”69 I think otherwise. While it certainly was not scripted, I believe Carter was sending a message to the conservative white, ethnic vote in the North—and he finally had to back down. In a news conference aired on NBC’s Today show fully three days later, he had to apologize for an “unfortunate” remark, but compounded the crisis by saying that while he supported open housing, he also opposed using federal “force to move people of a different ethnic background into a neighborhood just to change its character.”70

  The belated and qualified apology was not enough. It took a downtown Atlanta rally organized by Andy Young, at which the key speaker—Daddy King—saved Carter’s campaign by proclaiming in his booming voice, “I forgive you, governor, and I support you all the way.”71 The incident in its entirety ironically locked in the black vote throughout the country, and Carter swept the Pennsylvania primary, winning all but two of its sixty-seven counties. He was now virtually unstoppable, or so I thought.

  THE NOMINATION

  As he piled up primary victories in the South and Midwest, liberal Democrats tried to block his nomination and dubbed their group ABC—“Anybody But Carter.” The fact was that the outspoken liberals never were with this Southern moderate. I was present when Joseph Rauh, the liberal leader of Americans for Democratic Action, literally pulled Carter off his chair as he tried to speak at their reception.72 He hardly did much better with the labor movement; the AFL-CIO, suspicious of a candidate from a nonunion state, waited until after the Democratic Convention to endorse him. Nevertheless Carter plugged away, accumulating delegates in the primaries with such regularity that he came close to losing his luster as a new face challenging the old guard. He stumbled toward the end as two fresh faces entered the race late: California’s maverick governor, Jerry Brown, and the silver-tongued Senator Frank Church of Idaho, won a bunch of late primaries. But he hung on to win Ohio on the last primary day, buoyed by the unique support of blacks in Cleveland and conservative whites in downstate rural areas. He ran in thirty of the thirty-one primaries and won eighteen of them. Jordan’s battle plan was perfectly executed by Carter, winning what had seemed an impossible victory.

  The convention in New York was remarkably calm and united, a striking contrast with the 1968 convention in Chicago, literally torn apart by riots against the Vietnam War and tear gas from Mayor Richard Daley’s tough police, which I had personally observed as a member of Humphrey’s staff. As Carter’s representative to the convention’s Platform Committee in 1976, I presented his positions on a wide range of issues and had to debate only a few. The most contentious was amnesty for those who had evaded the Vietnam draft, which I ironed out with the antiwar activist Sam Brown, who eventually joined the administration. The only plank to which Carter objected was the party’s traditional pledge to support Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, which he felt would tie his hands in any Middle East negotiations. Carter sent me a handwritten note, “Stu., Good Job, JC,” on a copy of the final platform.

  The delegates overwhelmingly supported his vice presidential choice, the liberal Minnesota senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale, giving the ticket regional and ideological balance. Carter needed an entrée to the inner workings of Congress, and ties to the labor and liberal community, along with the snappy slogan, “Fritz and Grits.”

  As Jimmy Carter rose to give his acceptance speech and saw the waves of adoration from the delegates in Madison Square Garden, he felt a sense of “achievement, of euphoria.” And yet true to form, at this most momentous of occasions, he told me he was privately “hoping that the ceremonies would soon be over,�
� a sentiment few politicians would feel, since they would never want the public adoration to stop. But that was not Jimmy Carter: “You know, the trappings of a convention, the making of a speech on different teleprompters and things like that certainly didn’t destroy the good feeling of the time, [but] the accolades even then made me a little bit uncomfortable.”73 He took the rostrum with his trademark toothy grin and greeting: “I’m Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president!” The Madison Square Garden crowd roared approval.

  But the speech itself was hardly a traditional Democratic laundry list of promised programs. He spoke as a political outsider coming to give the government back to the people, and recognizing that “government has its limits and cannot solve all of our problems.” He spoke about love as no candidate before or since: “Love must be aggressively translated into simple justice. The test for any government is not how popular it is with the powerful, but how honestly and fairly it deals with those who must depend on it.” He bemoaned the link between money and politics, and landed on his favorite campaign cry—a pledge to reform an unfair tax structure that was “a disgrace to the human race.” That pledge and others resonate to this day—exposing lobbyists and ending a double standard of justice that let “big-shot crooks” go free while the poor went to prison. His foreign-policy vision was strikingly idealistic—“to depend in world affairs not merely on the size of an arsenal but on the nobility of ideas” and to commit himself to stamping out international terrorism and preserving human rights. The speech was hardly a liberal war cry, but it clearly laid out the principles that had won him the nomination.74