What had been a religious movement became a political awakening when Falwell formed the Moral Majority in the summer of 1979 as a PAC linked to secular activist conservative groups that flooded supporters with direct mail and raised money, led by Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie (a prodigious fund-raiser for conservative causes, as a pioneer of direct mail campaigns), Howard Phillips (founder of the Conservative Caucus in 1974, a nationwide, grassroots advocacy group), and Terry Dolan (a New Right activist and leader of the Christian Voice, a conservative Christian lobby). Within a year the Moral Majority had organized in 47 states with the goal of mobilizing ten million evangelical voters for the 1980 election. Its agenda even extended to building the B-1 bomber.13 For Falwell this represented a shift in strategy and mission from the 1960s, when he believed abortion was not a religious issue, and opposed liberal ministers who included civil rights in their mission. It was not until 1978 that he delivered his first public sermon condemning abortion.
This turn to political activism was part of a broader realignment of the mainstream Southern Baptist Convention, previously a moderate organization that counted Carter as a member, believed in the separation of church and state, opposed prayer in public schools, and stayed out of politics. Falwell met with Reagan as the presidential campaign was beginning, and as Falwell’s son put it: “We began to see winning elections as a way to make our country a better moral place.”14
Carter had never heard of Falwell until he and Rosalynn received a letter from a friend telling them that Falwell frequently took to the radio to condemn Carter and his religious faith. Then the Moral Majority hit the front cover of Time, and to Carter “it was just like a signal out of the remote distance.”15 Fallwell’s group bought $10 million worth of advertising time on radio and television across the South branding Carter as a “traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.” (By contrast, the publicly financed budget for the entire Carter campaign was $26 million). This well-financed invective knew no limits. In a 1980 speech Falwell willfully misquoted the president at a Christian ministers’ breakfast at the White House as a supporter of homosexuals on his staff. He only backed off when Carter’s liaison to the Christian community, Baptist minister Robert Maddox, produced a tape of the event that made clear the president had said nothing of the kind.16
Reagan saw an opportunity and pounced. He embraced the New Christian Right’s social agenda and came out for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. One month before Election Day in 1980, Reagan traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, to speak at Falwell’s college, advocating, among other things, the restoration of prayer in public schools.17 A master of political symbolism, he talked about making America a “shining city on a hill,” evoking the Puritan origins of the nation’s founding. The marriage of Christian evangelicals and secular conservatives became a significant force behind the Reagan landslide and remains a crucial part of the Republican coalition today.
BILLYGATE
Amid all Carter’s other troubles, the last thing he needed in an election year was a family scandal. But when his younger brother, Billy, cozied up to the brutal Libyan dictator Mu’ammar Gadhafi, it became a political nightmare for the president and a personal tragedy for Billy. The youngest of Miss Lillian’s children, 13 years his famous brother’s junior, she called Billy the smartest of the lot. He was well read and intelligent, but the resemblance stopped there. Chubby, short, gap-toothed, undisciplined, a college dropout, a heavy drinker, and a homey jokester, he was the polar opposite of his straitlaced, highly disciplined older brother. Their father doted on Billy, and when James senior died of cancer, 16-year-old Billy was devastated not only by the loss but by the fact that Jimmy took over the family business, which Billy admitted being “mad as hell” had not fallen to him.18
Billy served four years in the marines, and when Jimmy became governor of Georgia, Billy finally got the chance to run the warehouse, which he did successfully. He was not the uneducated buffoon many thought (and he often projected). He was an avid reader, and Chip Carter said that after his death, more than 20,000 books were found in his attic.19
Though he could not abide the national fame that came to his brother, he reveled in the attention lavished upon him at his gas station, when the press swarmed into tiny Plains and discovered what great copy Billy made with his gasoline station. He called himself an authentic American: “I got a red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.” He joked about his family: “My mother went into the Peace Corps when she was 68. My one sister is a motorcycle freak; my other sister is a Holy Roller evangelist; and my brother is running for president. I’m the only sane one in the family.” As the harsh national spotlight intensified on Billy, so did his consumption of alcohol. There is no question the two brothers loved each other deeply; Billy campaigned for Jimmy in the South to help convince voters his brother was the genuine article.20 As the president’s brother, he went on the talk-show circuit, cracking self-deprecating jokes and selling a brand of beer to which he lent his name, “Billy Beer,” capitalizing on his image as a Southern “good ol’ boy.”
But when he tried to take advantage of his brother’s Oval Office address in more serious matters, he nearly pulled everyone down with him. In the autumn of 1978 Billy made a highly publicized trip to Libya in the company of Georgia officials and business leaders eager to make deals with Gadhafi, who was anti-American, anti-Israel, and a supporter of terrorism. In return Billy hosted a delegation of Libyans in Atlanta. Asked why he was becoming involved with such a nefarious country, he said: “The only thing I can say is there is a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews.” He complained that the “Jewish media [tore] up the Arab countries full-time” and defended Libya against charges its government sponsored terrorism by arguing that “a heap of governments support terrorists and [Libya] at least admitted it.”21
The president immediately distanced himself from Billy’s remarks, telling NBC News that he hoped people would “realize that I don’t have any control over what my brother says, and he has no control over me.” Out of filial loyalty Jimmy refused to criticize his brother in public but called him to express his concern that many of his talk-show appearances had been canceled because of his intemperate remarks.22 Ham, who knew Billy well, felt he was “out of control,” both loved and resented his famous brother, and had a “perverse need to kind of hurt him.”23
But this was hardly the worst of it. The warehouse had been placed in trust while the president was in office, and Billy was out of a job. He began drinking more heavily and in March 1979 spent several weeks in an alcohol abuse center. When he was released, jobless, he turned back to the Libyans. Once the American diplomats were taken hostage in Iran, the White House searched frantically for any opportunity to gain their release, and Gadhafi was worth a try. Rosalynn suggested to Brzezinski that Billy’s Libyan friends might help.24 Brzezinski agreed, and then Billy swung into action far above his pay grade. He asked his brother to arrange briefings at the State and Commerce Departments and arranged for the Libyan chargé d’affaires to meet with Brzezinski. That was the first time the Libyans had been in the White House since long before Carter became president, after Gadhafi’s forces temporarily seized the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli and the State Department withdrew our ambassador.
Shortly afterward Lloyd Cutler, who became White House counsel after the cabinet shake-up, learned from intelligence sources that Billy was being paid $180,000 by Gadhafi. Cutler insisted that the Justice Department rule on whether Billy should register as a foreign agent, and what, if anything, he had done to earn the money. Suddenly stories about the affair began appearing under headlines containing the word “Billygate.”25
At our senior staff meeting on July 18,26 Carter bemoaned the press trying to make this another Watergate, and raised the question of whether Billy had used his influence at the White House improperly. Billy contended the six-figure payment was a loan for oil sales he was supposed to facilitate, and on the eve of his brother’s nominatio
n for reelection he belatedly registered as an agent of the Libyan government. In an abundance of caution, Cutler asked Alfred Moses, who was working in the White House on Israeli and Jewish relations and had been a partner at one of Washington’s most prominent law firms, Covington & Burling (where I am now senior counsel), to represent the president and Brzezinski.
The Senate held a hearing to determine whether Billy received classified documents for his Libyan trip or if the White House had helped him further his business interests with the Libyans. He conceded that he had brought his notoriety on himself, refused to apologize, and in his defense said: “I considered myself to be a private individual who had not been elected to public office and resented the attention of different government agencies that I began to hear from almost as soon as Jimmy was sworn in.” And, he declared, he was not a “buffoon, a boob, or a wacko.” The president submitted written testimony that his brother had no influence on U.S. policy in general or Libya in particular, “and he will have no influence in the future.” In the end the president thoroughly dispatched all questions at a press conference in a relaxed manner, and the Senate investigators issued a report a month before the election, clearing both brothers. Billy Carter died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 51.27
SWAMPED BY THE MARIEL BOATLIFT
Then Fidel Castro piled on. Carter was dedicated to improving relations, but sent a personal message to Castro at the end of 1978 warning that relations could not advance if the Cuban military expanded its role in Africa.28 Feeling he was riding high, Castro retorted belligerently that America should get out of Europe, but started releasing political prisoners and permitting Cuban Americans to visit their relatives on the island.
This planted the seeds of one of the foreign-policy fiascos in the midst of the presidential campaign: the Mariel boatlift, which created a humanitarian crisis for the U.S. government and a political crisis for Carter. Congress had just amended the Refugee Act to consolidate a number of existing programs and triple the number allowed entry each year under regular asylum and resettlement programs, among them a thousand Cubans a month. Before the ink was hardly dry on the new law, it was overwhelmed by a surge from Cuba.
On March 28, 1980, some Cubans hijacked a bus, killed a guard at the Peruvian Embassy, and asked for asylum; they were soon joined on the grounds by 10,000 others, egged on by Castro himself. Carter said the United States would accept 3,500 Cubans through Costa Rica. Embarrassed and angry at the number of Cubans eager to leave his Communist “paradise,” Castro also emptied his prisons and opened the port of Mariel for more to leave. The Cuban American community in South Florida saw Castro’s announcement as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. They sent boats from Florida with lists of Cuban relatives or friends to pick up at Mariel Harbor. When they returned with many of those on their lists, they also carried Cuban political dissidents, mental cases, and even released criminals. Under maritime law the U.S. Coast Guard could not stop them.
This presented Carter with an impossible dilemma: Where to put them? It was impossible to turn them away or send them back to Cuba. More than a half-dozen government departments converged at an emergency White House meeting late in April.29 Mondale said that the boatlift served as a safety valve for Castro’s failing regime, a point that I suggested the president incorporate in a forthcoming speech. On April 27 Carter declared that it was “proof of the failure of Castro’s revolution, and a callous, cynical effort by Castro to play on the emotions of the Cuban American community in the U.S.”30 All true, but of little help.
Castro had no intention of allowing an orderly flow of refugees; South Florida’s Cuban Americans angrily refused to stop the sealift, and official threats to seize their boats were not taken seriously. Carter then inadvertently undercut his own policy on May 5, when he told the League of Women Voters: “We as a nation have always had our arms open in accordance with American law. Those of us who have been here for a generation or six or eight generations ought to have just as open a heart to receive new refugees as our ancestors were received in the past.” I cringed when I heard those impromptu if idealistic remarks; they were interpreted by everyone in Cuba—and voters in America—as an invitation to open the floodgates.31
The next day the president declared a state of emergency in South Florida and approved an additional $10 million to reimburse voluntary agencies for assistance in settling the Cubans. Meanwhile the weekly flow of refugees jumped from about 20,000 to 37,000 during the week following his open-arms remarks. We had to move decisively, even if belatedly. The Coast Guard was ordered to get tough and stop small boats plying the ninety-mile strait between Florida and Cuba, but it took most of the month of May to stop the flow. On May 2932 the president reported that no boats had gone south for two weeks: “It’s a mess, but we’re doing the best we can.” Immigration centers were set up for the Marielitos in south Florida, and when they became overcrowded, a processing center was established at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. Within eleven days it was filled to capacity with almost 19,000 refugees. As we scattered the Cuban émigrés into military bases in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, riots erupted at Fort Chaffee, and some detainees escaped.
A human dilemma became a political nightmare. We lost all those states in the Reagan landslide, and young Bill Clinton, running for reelection in Arkansas after his first term as governor, suffered the only loss in his entire political career. I believe it is one reason for the frosty relations between the two ex-presidents to this day. By the end of May the unauthorized boatlift had landed more than 94,000 Cubans. The vast majority were ordinary Cubans, and although only 2,746 were classified as serious or violent criminals and denied American citizenship, the impression lingered across the country that Carter had allowed in an invasive horde of undesirables.
The crisis was unprecedented, and we were slow off the mark. But as with so much of the Carter presidency, there was the unheralded accomplishment of adding some 100,000 law-abiding Cubans to the beautiful mosaic of America, although it was done in the worst possible way. The Cuban American community in Florida gave no credit to Carter and voted heavily for Reagan, damaging beyond repair Carter’s chances of winning the state. The cruel irony is that Castro hurt Carter just as he was reaching out in friendship, as no president would do until Barack Obama renewed relations 45 years later. Fidel Castro, in a conversation with Robert Pastor after the Carter administration, acknowledged that he had made a mistake, passing up a chance with Carter that he would never have again.33
VOODOO ECONOMICS BEWITCHES THE REPUBLICANS
As we went into the final months of the election campaign, the Democratic coalition had fractured, while Republicans were united behind Reagan and his aggressive and easily understood brand of conservatism. It no longer preached the party’s mantra of austerity and balanced budgets. Conservative think tanks had been laying the ideological groundwork based on the antitax Proposition 13 wave rolling out of Reagan’s California and dignified it with their research. He sailed through the Republican primary campaign and latched on to an economic program that to this day remains the basis of Republican orthodoxy: deep tax cuts, particularly for wealthy individuals and corporations. It is based on the proposition that they would spend their tax savings and generate so much economic growth and so many jobs that the tax reductions would be more than made up for by increased revenues. This came out of a dubious theory advanced by a little known economist, Arthur Laffer, whose Laffer Curve offered the American people the possibility of having their cake and eating it—lower taxes, higher growth, and more federal revenues.34
Reagan’s primary opponent, George H. W. Bush, a businessman who had majored in economics at Yale, derided the idea as “voodoo economics.” Yet within a year it was adopted by Reagan and swallowed by Bush after he accepted the vice-presidential nomination to unite Main Street and Wall Street. It became known as supply-side economics, and whatever one thought about it—and I found no more logic in its supposed merits than had candidate Bush—it seemed li
ke an easy nostrum against the curse of stagflation.
Two Republican members of Congress, the earnest true believer Senator William Roth of Delaware, and the telegenic former professional football quarterback Representative Jack Kemp, representing his old team’s Buffalo district of New York, proposed a bill codifying Laffer’s ideas, which became the principal economic plank of Reagan’s campaign and was eventually passed into law in a modified form after his election. Thus the campaign saw a historic reversal of roles. Until then the Democratic Party’s candidates and presidents from Roosevelt through Johnson presented programs and initiatives, while Republicans from Hoover through Ford (with the important exception of Nixon) were budget balancers who argued for a limited role for government. Now a Democratic president was the budget balancer, reducing spending on popular programs and opposing a big tax cut for fear of igniting more inflation and because, as he told Miller: “I just cannot flip-flop.”35 We presented no attractive new alternative, only thin gruel and more of the same.
Carter was a New Democrat unable to articulate a framework that voters could understand at a time when households were being squeezed between higher prices and fewer jobs. The Republicans had become the party of lower taxes and boundless growth. Reagan’s optimistic message was of unlimited possibilities, while Carter preached sacrifice and limits. Reagan was the pioneer who struck gold in California, Carter was the public scold from the Bible Belt, preaching the old-time religion of spending cuts and balanced budgets. Forget that when Congress passed a version of Kemp-Roth in 1981, it led to billion-dollar budget deficits in triple digits36 and that the same happened in 2001 after Congress enacted President George W. Bush’s proposals of deep tax cuts on the same theory, blowing through the budget surpluses that we achieved in the Clinton administration by raising taxes on the wealthy, restraining government spending, and helping the economy thrive.
President Carter Page 105
