His anti-Watergate populist campaign had been aimed at reforming Washington and its established interests, but after winning his party’s nomination he said: “The biggest handicap I had politically speaking after the convention was [that] I was immediately saddled with all the gubernatorial candidates, the congressional candidates, and the local candidates of the Democratic Party.” He yearned to be the “lonely peanut farmer looking for votes,” instead of a man of the establishment wrapped into his party.1
Ham believed that one of the reasons Carter lost all but one-half of 1 percent of his big lead over Ford in the 1976 election was that he came to be seen as just another traditional Democrat. But the party’s institutional constituents and the Washington establishment, the press, the pundits, and opinion makers, against whom he had run, held great sway over the success of his initiatives as president, and now over his reelection. And for the leaders of such groups, who, wrongly or rightly, felt slighted, Carter’s campaign for reelection was payback time.
The disaffection of key elements of the Democratic coalition was no surprise to Ham Jordan. He had prepared for a possible challenge long before the primaries, with a top-secret memo in January of 1979.2 He laid down several warnings: Though the supposed advantage of presidential incumbency was exaggerated, Carter should still delay declaring his candidacy as long as possible to avoid looking like just another candidate; resist appeasing one wing of the party as Ford had done by dumping the moderate Republican Nelson Rockefeller; “show strength to discourage [primary] opposition”; and win votes in the general election by being a successful president. Ham believed that even though Kennedy had worked with Carter on transportation deregulation and admired his advocacy of civil rights and human rights, there was nothing to be gained politically from meeting the senator halfway on principled issues like health insurance, because that would not buy him off if Kennedy thought he could win.3
At a meeting with his top staff and Mondale in the White House Treaty Room on January 28, 1979, Carter showed how he could govern in a nonpolitical way—and then turn on a dime to campaign mode. He said we must “make our platform politically attractive, because in our first two years, I have taken up negative things … [and] put the Republicans in a tough position with our support for a balanced budget, controlling the federal bureaucracy, and supporting a strong defense.” Mondale urged him to woo the liberals and the unions and not antagonize the responsible left unnecessarily. Rafshoon’s message as media adviser was different: Project the image of a prudent president fighting inflation and regain the image of being above party politics and Washington. Carter readily agreed and brought up other eroding elements of the political base, in particular women.4 This would be a circle we could not square, but Carter remained confident. On June 12, meeting in his White House residence with Rosalynn, Mondale, Rafshoon, Moore, and me, he swaggered: “I don’t care if Kennedy runs. I will whip his ass,” his favorite macho expression.5 This choice comment soon made the political rounds, by design.
* * *
Why did Kennedy challenge the president of his own party? Ham felt the simple answer was that he felt he could beat Carter and be elected president. But from Kennedy’s own entourage there were as many different explanations as there were senior people about whether he should subject himself to the brutal regimen of a presidential campaign against a president of his party. Steve Breyer said Carter’s political weakness combined with Kennedy’s own feeling “that it was his obligation to be president.” Kennedy, inheriting this sense of entitlement from the assassination of his two older brothers, was also the object of a stream of appeals from senators who told him they would go “down the drain unless you run.”6
Paul Kirk, his senior political aide (and future chairman of the Democratic National Committee), argued against running on the ground that Kennedy was still young and would have other opportunities. In fact Kennedy got off to a bad start in a television interview late in August 1979, when Roger Mudd of CBS asked him flat out to give his rationale for a presidential run and Kennedy could not give a crisp answer. It was remarkable that he was so ill prepared for such an obvious question only two months before he actually announced his candidacy. In the critical three months at the start of 1980, Carter’s poll numbers leaped to more than 60 percent approval as voters rallied around the president right after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Over time, the failed hostage rescue and the continued erosion of the economy gave Kennedy a second wind, but too late for him to catch up.
Mondale made one last, futile effort to avert internecine bloodshed, pleading with Kennedy to give Carter a clean shot at Reagan. When Kennedy told him he was going to take the plunge, Mondale replied: “You should know we don’t intend to leave voluntarily; we intend to win this thing. This is going to get nasty, and I’m very sorry about that.” Mondale concluded that Kennedy never realized how his challenge might help Reagan and shift the country to the right.7
Years later I asked Kennedy himself why he had run, and he replied that one element was whether “the federal government was going to be used as actively in terms of dealing with economic issues.” Could his challenge have contributed to Reagan’s victory? Kennedy replied that events so overwhelmed Carter’s chances that “I wonder, given those factors, [if] anybody could have been as successful.”8
GEORGE MEANY AND THE UNIONS
Carter was acutely uncomfortable with the central leadership of the most powerful of the Democratic Party’s major constituency groups, organized labor’s AFL-CIO, whose headquarters were just across from the White House. At the time labor represented almost one of every four private-sector workers, and their union dues and members, who helped get out the vote in the key battleground states, provided an indispensable engine for Democratic candidates. But the president of the United States and the president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany—the peanut farmer from Plains and the plumber from the Bronx—had no common history or shared idiom.
Carter’s native Georgia had few union members, and he had never campaigned in union halls; their leaders were as foreign to him as their conventions, and he made little effort to attend them. He met frequently with labor’s national leadership and supported most of their major initiatives: They ranged from raising the minimum wage; signing the liberal talisman, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act; initiating job-training programs; expanding public service employment; and saving the jobs of tens of thousands of unionized autoworkers at Chrysler. But the UAW, the nation’s most politically liberal union, gave Carter no credit and even worked against his renomination. This made Carter rightly furious and he exploded at a staff meeting in December 1979, with one of his favorite expletives: “We need to be mean to Fraser [the UAW president] and not kiss his ass.”9 As Carter saw it, Kennedy’s attack “led to Doug Fraser’s having to choose in a very painful fashion between loyalty to Kennedy, who had been his ally for many years, and loyalty to me.”10 Much later Fraser came to realize the consequences of casting his lot with Kennedy. After Reagan defeated Carter in 1980, Fraser confided to James Blanchard, a Democratic congressman from Michigan (later governor) who led our Chrysler bill in the House: “Jim, that was the biggest political mistake I ever made. If there’s one thing I regret, we just assumed that whoever the Democrat was, would win, and it never dawned on me that Reagan could possibly win.”11 It would not be the last time that Democratic leaders would be caught in their own bubble.
The administration also supported labor’s top priority, a bill to make it easier for workers to choose to become unionized. It passed the House overwhelmingly, but despite intense White House lobbying was blocked by one vote in a Senate filibuster, and the AFL-CIO blamed Carter rather than themselves for not doing enough to put the law over the top.12 Despite all our work together, labor’s disenchantment sent its leaders into the arms of Teddy Kennedy, setting the stage for one of the most bitter intraparty battles in modern American political history.
BELLA ABZUG AND THE ERA
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p; It is a supreme irony that liberal women activists gave Carter so much grief after he and Rosalynn did so much for their cause. No less an authority than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg proclaimed that “people often ask me, ‘Well, did you always want to be a judge?’ My answer is it just wasn’t in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president and was determined to draw on the talent of all the people, not just some of them.”13
As with other disenchanted elements of the Democratic coalition, many of them felt he had not done enough. Promoting equal rights for women was for Carter an extension of civil rights for blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. Rosalynn was a passionate advocate for women’s empowerment. During the 1976 presidential campaign, Carter issued more detailed statements on that issue than on virtually any other topic.14 In his first year in office Carter created a Presidential Advisory Committee for Women, the first of its kind, to implement the National Action Plan of the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Its two top priorities were increased appointment of women in federal government jobs and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).15
When Carter took office in 1977 only one woman was serving among 97 judges in the federal courts. By the time he left in 1981, he had appointed 40 women to judgeships, or five times more women to the federal bench than all previous presidents of the United States combined.16 He told me that if a Supreme Court vacancy occurred, he would name a woman, almost certainly Judge Shirley Hufstedler, who instead became the nation’s first secretary of education.
He also issued an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination in federal employment and appointed a record number of women to top positions in the White House, regulatory agencies, and executive branch departments, even nontraditional positions in the Pentagon. Up to and through the Carter administration, only six women had been appointed cabinet secretaries in U.S. history, and Carter appointed three of them. He appointed three of only five women as undersecretaries, 80 percent of women who ever held the rank of assistant secretary, and the first women ever to serve as general counsels and inspectors general.17
So why did relations sour? When the House and Senate approved the ERA in 1971 by huge bipartisan majorities (354–23 and 84–4), it seemed headed for certain approval by the requisite three-quarters of the states. And who could oppose giving equal rights to women? The ERA applied only to government laws and regulations and did not touch private or purely social relationships. By 1977 Indiana became the thirty-fifth state to ratify the amendment, and in 1979, Carter’s Justice Department ruled that no state could rescind its approval. To provide more time for the remaining three states, the president obtained congressional approval to extend the deadline for ratification to June 30, 1982. The vote for that was much closer, signaling the success of a rising right-wing opposition on social issues. The Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority turned the ERA into an attack on the family. It was a remarkable display of the power of the new evangelical coalition against a constitutional amendment that simply read in a few short words: “Equality of rights under law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
The president appointed Sarah Weddington, a senior White House staffer, whose office was across from mine in the West Wing, to coordinate all ERA efforts, including weekly strategy meetings with the President’s Advisory Committee on Women. He also met regularly with the heads of major women’s organizations. The president ordered cabinet officers and agency heads to speak on the ERA in unratified states. The president and first lady, the vice president and Joan Mondale, and the entire White House staff made the ERA a regular topic of our speeches. Briefings were held for opinion leaders in key states and for national business leaders. Both Carters personally called key legislators and individuals.18
If only 13 legislators in three states—Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada—had changed their votes, the amendment would have been ratified. The women’s groups blamed Carter. They simply could not believe that the president of the United States could not pressure the few remaining recalcitrants to push the amendment over the top. Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization of Women (NOW), opposed Carter’s nomination even in 1976, and for reasons he could never understand, he could not get along with the group despite his record number of female appointments and his work for women’s rights.19
But Carter’s most persistent and annoying female appointee was the formidable former New York representative Bella Abzug. I first met her under an unusual circumstance at the 1976 New York Democratic Convention, when we were walking in opposite directions along a hallway and she hooked her arm in mine, thrust me against the wall like a wrestler, and began to harangue me about the ERA. Bella was short, heavy, and feisty, and wore one of her huge and garish trademark hats that could literally knock your eye out. After the election she was offered and turned down a variety of senior posts, and finally took the chair of Carter’s Advisory Committee on Women. From the start she felt there was not enough contact with the president or his cabinet, so she requested a full-hour meeting with him, but he offered only a quarter of an hour, which she and the committee rejected.20
The committee then wrote a report criticizing Carter’s cuts to social programs and sent the White House a draft press release in advance of its December 20, 1978, meeting.21 That meeting was extraordinary, with Bella chastising him for the delay in fixing the date for the meeting. She told him his forthcoming budget would not be good for women and that they “should not be sacrificed to NATO increases.” Then she listed a bill of particulars, with public service job cuts and much more. He listened impassively. Years later she told me she felt that the president behaved “rather oddly, and so there were problems between us, but then he kept talking about how we would have a better relationship in the future.” She realized that he was “generally annoyed at us,” but she found out later the decision had already been made to fire her.22
Bella would regularly leave her White House meetings and stage an impromptu press briefing in the portico outside the West Wing to blast Carter’s budget cuts. The president himself noted that she and her committee would have productive and friendly meetings with him, and then on three or four occasions she would leave the White House and “condemn me as being insensitive to women’s issues.”
He finally told Ham to explain that she was supposed to represent him, and that when she criticized him, it made it impossible to accomplish even what they had agreed to do.23 She told Jordan in effect to get lost. Finally Carter had “a bellyful,” as Jody put it, and fired her as committee chair.24 But as Ham reflected: “Instead of being seen as a tough action, it was seen as callous and chauvinist. We got no credit for all the stuff that we had done.”25 She was replaced as chair by Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of Lyndon Johnson and wife of Virginia’s governor and then senator Chuck Robb, and a strong and effective advocate for women.
Bella had a very different perspective. She felt that Carter did not make a major effort on behalf of the ERA, and the other major grievance, shared with NOW, was Carter’s opposition to Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women. When challenged that this was not fair, Carter quoted President Kennedy’s famous declaration: “Life is not fair.”26
So this was another bridge burned with the liberal community, with each side feeling aggrieved. We should have known to expect this kind of confrontation, and it wasn’t that we weren’t warned—by no less than Rosalynn Carter. With her usually unerring political judgment, the first lady warned Jody, Anne Wexler, and me at a 1978 meeting in the Map Room of the White House that appointing Bella to head the committee would be a bad idea. We argued that we would need Bella to help us with women in the reelection campaign. Rosalynn was right, and we were wrong.27
NORMAN PODHORETZ AND THE NEOCONS
While Carter was being attacked by the left wing of the Democratic Party, he was also attacked from the right by a small but influential group of Democrats who w
ere domestic New Deal liberals but strong anti-Communist hawks on foreign and defense policy. They were called neoconservatives, neocons for short. The movement was started by disillusioned Democrats after Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. His campaign slogan, “Come Home, America,” was taken as a call for withdrawal from international engagement, and they formed a group that initially named itself the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, or CDM, to avert the leftward drift of Democratic foreign policy.28
After the election about two dozen committee members, including Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University professor of government, signed an advertisement stressing their disagreement with what they saw as the disastrously soft foreign policy of McGovern and his followers toward the Soviet Union.29 Among the Democrats who supported them were Max Kampelman, the Carter administration’s representative to the Helsinki Accords; Richard Perle, Scoop Jackson’s foreign-policy aide; and Ben Wattenberg, an author and commentator who felt the media were so infatuated with the new-wave politics of the left that an intellectual counterweight was urgently needed. (Ben and I had shared an office as staffers in the Johnson White House.) CDM received much of its funding from the AFL-CIO.
Once the Carter administration began settling in, the group began to take issue with the president’s appointments, such as former McGovern adviser Paul Warnke as the chief negotiator for the SALT II talks. A few neocons got lesser jobs, but it became clear that those identified with Scoop Jackson were frozen out. Kirkpatrick, an intellectual light of the movement, drew a bright line between right-wing pro-American governments and left-wing anti-American ones, arguing in a now famous November 1979 Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” that “traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies” and calling it a historic mistake for the Carter administration to back away from pro-American but anti-Communist dictators.
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