President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  As we faced the Kennedy challenge from the left and the Reagan program of massive tax cuts from the right, we realized we might be dead in the water without our own program. The president’s rhetorical marker was “Inflation Robs Jobs,” a damp response to Kennedy’s bold but unrealistic spending proposals.82 We had already begun to fashion our own stimulus package with modest tax cuts and some spending programs targeted on creating jobs. Treasury Secretary Miller and I met with Lane Kirkland, who had succeeded Meany at the helm of the AFL-CIO.83

  The meeting dramatized our dilemma with Kennedy and the party’s liberal wing at this time of austerity and high inflation. Their focus was on jobs, jobs, and jobs, and not on inflation at all. Kirkland told us that the Republicans had the initiative in a bad economic situation and the president needed a program, “and he can’t do it with chicken shit; it must be substantial.” He promised to help broker a compromise if we would embrace Kennedy on a few issues to help him save face. So we searched the Kennedy campaign’s minority reports looking for places to meet him halfway, but the best that we could find that would be consonant with Carter’s inflation fight was a meager $5 billion targeted tax credit for distressed industries and areas with some help for small business.84

  But Democratic members of Congress were growing panicky about the political attractiveness of the large income-tax cuts endorsed by Reagan and began proposing their own—especially Russell Long, who was up for reelection in 1980. Carter tried to resist them with smaller, more targeted tax reductions.85

  Tip O’Neill, who would have to keep his followers in line as presiding officer at the convention, called me on August 12 with a stern message to reach out to Kennedy: “You all need to put aside your Southern pride.” He proposed a statement that only a wise, canny old politician could have devised: The president should declare himself in full agreement with the Kennedy minority reports on raising employment—and then promise: “When the Congress of the United States puts a program on my desk, as is the will of this convention, I will sign it.”86

  The president then asked Ham and me to meet secretly with Kennedy’s people and work out a deal. We agreed to debate only five of the minority planks, with voice votes on four of them. The only plank to be put to a time-consuming roll-call vote would be Kennedy’s $12 billion economic stimulus program, which if seriously considered by Congress would probably blow the gaskets off the financial markets. We won that vote only after a bitter floor debate, during which I was angrily accused on the convention floor of selling out the Democratic Party’s values and principles. Some of the Kennedy delegates screamed at me, a brief but sickening rerun of the 1968 Democratic Convention I saw firsthand, which exploded in Chicago over the Vietnam War.

  But Kennedy refused to give up; he made the convention his own and not the president’s, even though it was Carter running for president and not the last scion of the Kennedys. He delivered a brilliant, barnstorming speech with his vision of the party’s direction and no hint that he was endorsing the party’s nominee. It was as much an indictment of Carter’s direction for the party as it was a critique of Reagan. He gave Carter no credit for anything in the domestic arena, even legislation on which they had worked closely together. The most memorable line was his pledge that “The dream will never die”—Kennedy’s dream. Kirk called the speech “very much a personal thing,” not a staff recommendation.87

  After Carter gave a prosaic acceptance speech the following night, Kennedy practically had to be pushed onto the platform to shake his hand. But Kennedy quickly turned away, the president remembered, in “a combination of anger, disappointment, and frustration.” There were no traditional joint curtain calls with arms raised in front of millions watching the convention. It was one of the most churlish moments in a storied political career.Carter thought Kennedy had been drinking: “His face was all flushed and when he came up there, he was angry—this was the culmination of his failed campaign.”

  Kennedy had a very different view: He behaved, he told me later, “more out of sorrow than out of real anger” and blamed the press for exaggerating the story.88 But Carter felt it “tore the party apart,” that the Democrats never came together by the November election, and it could have made a difference if Kennedy “had graciously withdrawn and urged all of his supporters to go with me.”

  With all the hours we had spent working successfully as partners on many issues, it left me with a cold feeling that Kennedy really did not care who won the general election. It was unfathomable then, and remains so now, that he failed to recognize that his divisive conduct would only help open the Oval Office to someone who profoundly opposed everything for which he had fought. Kennedy finally agreed to do a joint fund-raising event with Carter in Washington on the condition that the Carter campaign and Democratic National Committee assume part of his campaign debts. But as president, Carter felt he was in the role of a supplicant begging Kennedy to help him in the election. Kennedy found it hard to back Carter by name and would say—grudgingly, Carter remembered—that he was “voting for the nominee of the Democratic Party.”89

  Given the hostage crisis, the state of the economy, and the rightward drift of the country, it is by no means certain that Carter would have won the election without the distraction of the hard-fought primaries. One analysis showed that a third of self-identified Democrats rejected the president for another term and an even larger percentage of the self-identified liberals who were the ideological core of the party. He was unable to hold his base. What can be said with greater conviction is that the bitter primary battle and Kennedy’s minimal support in the general election helped assure Carter’s defeat, just as Reagan’s challenge to Ford in 1976 was a factor in our victory. It also ended Kennedy’s presidential ambitions, which ironically liberated him to become one of the most influential senators of his era, forging bipartisan health and other legislation, and dying a respected, admired American statesman.

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  “ARE YOU BETTER OFF…?”

  By mid-1980 Ham foresaw that the protracted primary campaign had badly hurt the president with the electorate by forcing him into a “political posture” so that every decision was placed in a political context by the press. In another crisp, analytical “Eyes Only” memorandum that he typed himself on June 25 for Carter, he warned that the president’s greatest personal challenge against Reagan was that in the primaries “support for you based on your being a likeable, well-intentioned, compassionate, and at times atypical politician has been eroded badly.” And that, Ham continued, made the president “seem more like the manipulative politician bent on reelection at all costs, than the man and the President that you are.”

  Carter’s challenge, as his chief political strategist saw it, was to dispel the notion that there was no difference between him and Ronald Reagan. Unless he could do so the Democratic coalition would never coalesce, minority voters would stay home, liberals defect, the third-party candidacy of the liberal Illinois Republican congressman John Anderson would flourish, and voters would decide on personal qualities. Here Reagan, with his sunny temperament, had a distinct advantage, and to overcome it Carter would have to present a vision for the future and draw a clear contrast between a prospective Reagan and a Carter presidency.1

  Reagan was a far more formidable opponent than he seemed when caricatured as a mere former B-movie star who played opposite a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo. He was a Democrat until 1962; had a long public career as president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild union in difficult times; was an implacable foe of Communism and conservative spokesman for one of America’s largest corporations on General Electric Theater; and, most important, a two-term governor of California who made a national name in the heartland as the scourge of rioting students in the 1960s and patron saint of homeowners groaning under high property taxes.

  RACE AND POLITICS

  But race was and remains a far more important and sensitive dividing line in American society and politics, and therefore a
careful balance for any candidate, but especially for a Southerner who was as liberal as Carter on civil rights. This opened the way for Reagan to play the race card, and he soon showed that he knew how to do it. When we first began to run through the tough issues for Carter’s first presidential campaign in our meetings in the governor’s mansion, school busing to achieve racial balance was one on which we spent a great deal of time. He supported the Atlanta school system’s policy that any child could be bused to a different school at government expense, but none could be forced to do so, and that busing must help integrate schools and not result in white flight by students.

  Only a little more than a decade after Lyndon Johnson confided to his closest aides that by signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act he was writing off the South for the Democratic Party, Reagan took dead aim at Carter’s most vulnerable targets in the Old Confederacy by firing up the issues of race and religion. Ham had long warned that Carter’s base would become shaky when the average Southern voter realized that the president was more liberal on social issues than he appeared to be as the down-to-earth, born-again Baptist peanut farmer from Plains.

  The other flashpoint was affirmative action to rectify generations of racial discrimination, and it came to a boil in the Supreme Court, where the issue still appears on the docket, to say nothing of the heated political rhetoric in most national elections right down to 2016. The initial test case was brought by Allan Bakke, a thirty-five-year-old white man who had twice been rejected by the University of California Medical School at Davis, which reserved sixteen places in each entering class of one hundred for “qualified” minorities. Bakke contended that his race had excluded him, and that this amounted to unconstitutional reverse discrimination. Although the federal government was not a party to the suit, the Supreme Court was interested in the administration’s opinion in the form of a brief known as an amicus curiae—a friend of the court. The Bakke case presented a genuine clash of two American values: the need to override racial discrimination against the commitment to reward individual merit irrespective of race or origin—an enormously difficult political problem that pitted two key Carter constituencies against each other: vocal black supporters of affirmative action, and white working-class voters struggling to move up the socioeconomic ladder.

  Nixon had won them over to the Republican side as the “silent majority” in 1968 and 1972. Carter had partly recouped them in 1976, and Reagan now coveted this huge voting bloc. For Bakke’s supporters the university had erected a racial quota, and this also drew in several major Jewish organizations to raise the specter of quotas at elite universities that had limited the number of Jews in years past. For black and liberal supporters of the university, the program was designed to rectify a historical injustice to blacks. Vernon Jordan, a friend from Atlanta and president of the Urban League, called to declare that the Bakke case was as important to the black community as Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ended public school segregation.2

  The initial draft of the brief Attorney General Griffin Bell personally delivered to the president in the Oval Office came down squarely on Bakke’s side. Bell explained to Carter, Lipshutz, and me that the slots had been specifically reserved for blacks only, and were an unconstitutional racial quota against white applicants. Bell told us that as a former federal judge who had decided similar cases, he had recused himself and given the task of writing the sensitive brief to the “best black lawyer in America,” his solicitor general, Wade McCree.3 The president told me the next day in his private office that he had read the brief, and “it was not well done.” But he was clearly torn, however much he recognized the importance of affirmative action: “We can’t go with quotas, and decisions have to be based on the merits of the students.” He asked me and Lipshutz to give him our thoughts on how to improve it, and to articulate his views.4 He elaborated at a cabinet meeting that he felt “race could be a factor, but not the exclusive factor” in admissions.5

  Mondale, Califano, White House Counsel Lipshutz, and I were appalled at the proposed brief, which we felt was contrary to the president’s affirmative-action policy. When I called McCree for an explanation, he told me he had not written the brief but entrusted it to Frank Easterbrook, a conservative holdover from the Nixon-Ford administration and strong opponent of affirmative action (now a Reagan-appointed appeals court judge).

  When Bell’s draft leaked, all hell broke loose. The Congressional Black Caucus met with the president, Mondale, and me and argued that if the Court ruled against the university’s program it would be as bad as the Dred Scott case, in which the high court upheld slavery and contributed to the multiple causes of the Civil War.6 I was besieged by calls from and meetings with other black leaders. I even went to the White House tennis court to discuss Bakke with the president, and he told me he was also getting a lot of anguished calls.7 I worked with Lipshutz on a memorandum to form the basis for a new brief, which the president approved. We tried, in Solomonic style, to split the baby, supporting affirmative action, opposing racial quotas, but taking no position on whether Bakke should be admitted, instead asking the Supreme Court to send the case back to the California courts to reexamine how the university’s program worked in practice.

  Fortunately, Drew Days, the assistant attorney general for civil rights—one of many blacks appointed by Carter to important subcabinet positions—took charge and revised the brief, noting that Allen Bakke’s lawyers were ignoring the essence of American black history by mistakenly treating him rather than the black applicants as a victim of racial discrimination.8 Days emphasized Carter’s view that race could be a factor in college admission—but not the only one—and also recommended that the case be sent back to the California courts.

  Justice Lewis Powell cast the decisive vote to split the baby a slightly different way, by admitting Bakke as the victim of a rigid racial quota that violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but permitting the use of race as one of several admission criteria. However, the Supreme Court did not resolve a dilemma that remains a legal as well as a political conundrum to this day. There were other difficult civil rights challenges, but none of our proposals for cutting through the dilemma satisfied either the civil rights activists demanding jobs and university places set aside for blacks, or the white middle class that saw itself squeezed by all sorts of government actions to lift minorities but not them. All this undermined Carter’s white support in the South and elsewhere, and he knew it. And of course so did Reagan.

  It was no coincidence that Reagan staged the first rally after his nomination in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the site where, in 1964, three young civil rights workers were abducted, murdered, and buried in an earthwork dam by the Ku Klux Klan. He proclaimed fealty to states’ rights, the Southern code word for local obstruction of the federal government’s efforts to end racial injustice. For disaffected workers nationwide, Reagan invented a code word of his own, “welfare queen,” for his fictitious characterization of women breeding children for ever-larger welfare checks so they could supposedly ride around in Cadillacs—when in fact most could barely afford bus fare to find any work at all to support their families.

  WHITE EVANGELICALS TURN ON THEIR OWN

  Religion was the other powerful arm of Reagan’s successful attack on Carter’s Southern white base. The president’s born-again Baptist beliefs, teaching Sunday school, reading the Bible each night with Rosalynn, often in Spanish, helped carry him to victory in the South in 1976. But in the 1980 election, he was swamped by some two-thirds of the white evangelical Southern Christian vote that was cast for Reagan.9 Remarkably, this key base of support was shifted to a divorced former movie actor with little or no religious involvement, who fused a number of strands into a potent, durable political force for the first time in the 1980 election.

  One strand grew out of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion early in pregnancy and ignited a movement calling itself “pr
o-life” in a religious defense of the fetus. Like the debate over affirmative action, the abortion wars are with us to this day. They are not subject to reasoned debate, thanks in part to Nellie Gray, a young Catholic lawyer who left her job in the U.S. Labor Department and organized the initial March for Life in Washington on the first anniversary of the Court’s decision. “Pro-life people,” she proclaimed, “will not negotiate with baby killers.”10 I met with her and a delegation in the White House in 1978, where they handed me a red flower, and I explained the president’s views on abortion, which supported a women’s right to choose but opposed Medicaid spending for abortions. But for her it was morally offensive to have any exceptions to a complete ban on abortion, not even for rape.

  Abortion alone was not enough of a religious issue to spark a political revolution. Jerry Falwell, an evangelical Baptist pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia, managed to weave it together with white segregationists who had organized private schools to escape the Supreme Court ruling desegregating public schools. In response, President Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enforce a new policy denying tax exemptions to these segregated private schools.11 Falwell, whose Bob Jones University denied entrance to blacks, was about to lose his tax exemption in 1975, and in 1978 the IRS under Carter denied tax-exempt status to every one of the all-white private schools. Then a gay-rights measure was approved by a referendum in Miami and surrounding Dade County, and finally the Equal Rights Amendment for women was sent to the states for ratification igniting the evangelical and parts of the Catholic communities.12