by Ira Shapiro
In contrast to Nelson and McGovern, Tom Eagleton, only fifty years old, seeking his third term, threw himself into his reelection campaign with his characteristic intensity and energy. Eagleton understood and navigated the shifting currents of American politics as well as anyone. It was partly a result of representing Missouri: at the very center of the country, with major cities, declining industries, and large farming areas, it was the classic swing state, almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and a microcosm of America. In August 1978, Eagleton had surprised Carter by urging him to finish all his liberal proposals by the end of the year and spend the last two years of his term on a limited legislative program, emphasizing moderate to conservative issues. Eagleton also seized the opportunity to take the lead on legislation creating inspectors general in the major departments of government to lead the fight against “fraud, waste and abuse” to counter the expected charge that he was a big-spending liberal. His stalwart efforts to rescue Chrysler earned him headlines and plaudits around the state.
Eagleton artfully dodged a political bullet from his chairmanship of the District of Columbia Subcommittee. The Washington region’s Metrorail system had opened in March 1976 with five stations downtown, and by 1978, the system had expanded into suburban Maryland and Virginia. Everywhere it went, Metro’s modern rail cars and futuristic, vaulted-ceiling stations had excited residents and tourists alike. But there was considerably less excitement about finding the money to pay for the full 101-mile system that was on the drawing board. The federal government had to fund 80 percent of the construction, with the various localities, negotiating among themselves, to put up the other 20 percent. The House of Representatives had passed legislation in early 1979 to authorize $1.7 billion for the federal share, but that was before the economy moved into recession, and budget cutting became a mantra on Capitol Hill. As subcommittee chairman, Eagleton was the key player who would decide the fate of the legislation in the Senate.
His staff advised him that it would be politically disastrous to find the money for the Washington, D.C., Metro at a time when federal funds for bus service in St. Louis and Kansas City were being slashed. Eagleton was torn, agreeing with their political judgment, but knowing how much the full Metro system would mean to the Washington region. So he took a page from Proxmire’s book and added some embellishments.
He asked Mac Mathias, who was the ranking Republican on the D.C. subcommittee, to meet with him. They had a strong bond, having been elected to the Senate in the same turbulent year, 1968, and having collaborated on D.C. home rule legislation. Where Eagleton exuded intensity, Mathias was relaxed, slow-moving, and sometimes appeared dreamy-eyed. He drove an old battered station wagon from his farm in Frederick and often brought his dog into the office. But he had a keen intellect, and had been a powerful supporter of civil rights and opponent of the Vietnam War, locking arms with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in well-publicized parades. As a Maryland senator with hundreds of thousands of constituents in the Washington suburbs, Mathias was deeply committed to completion of the Metrorail.
Mathias came to Eagleton’s office and sank comfortably into a big armchair opposite Eagleton’s desk.
“Mac, I’ve decided to oppose the Metro,” Eagleton said abruptly.
“Then it’s dead,” Mathias said in a deep voice.
“No Mac,” Eagleton said hastily. “We’ve got a plan.” He told Mathias he would personally oppose the legislation but wouldn’t kill it. In fact, he would help orchestrate its passage in the Senate, lending his staff director to the Maryland senators, Mathias and Paul Sarbanes, and enlisting freshman Carl Levin to manage the legislation in committee. Mathias nodded, and visibly relaxed.
The plan went off like clockwork. Eagleton criticized funding a “gold-plated subway system” for the Nation’s Capitol. He alerted John Danforth, his Missouri colleague and close friend, so that Danforth could also oppose the legislation. With Mathias, Sarbanes, and Levin taking the lead, the Senate passed the funding legislation by a comfortable margin. It became law on January 3, 1980.
As the fall campaign heated up, Eagleton’s polls showed him running very strongly with his opponent, Gene McNary, a St. Louis county supervisor, generating little excitement. But Eagleton faced one more unusual challenge. He had a troubled niece who had joined the Church of Scientology. Early in 1980, she had tried to extort money from Eagleton, threatening to expose some alleged embarrassing action if he did not pay her. Eagleton refused to be extorted and went to law enforcement authorities. In October 1980, while Eagleton was campaigning for reelection, he was also forced to testify against his niece in her trial for extortion. Eagleton’s friends were understandably nervous, wondering how Missouri’s voters would feel about this melodrama playing out during the last weeks of the campaign. Ultimately, however, the voters seemed to admire Eagleton for not giving in to extortion—brushes with a troubled family member are all too familiar and served to humanize Eagleton even further. He seemed to maintain a large lead over McNary as the election drew near.
ACROSS THE COUNTRY, A number of Democratic senators who had prepared for tough races were moving toward comfortable victories. In California, despite being targeted by NCPAC, Alan Cranston had amassed a large lead over Republican Paul Gann, who had helped spearhead the adoption of Proposition 13 two years earlier. In South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, who had pledged that “no one would run to the right” of him, was heading toward a landslide victory. In Louisiana, where only the Democratic primary mattered, Russell Long had dispatched his primary opponent handily. Dale Bumpers, John Glenn, Wendell Ford and Daniel Inouye were similarly unassailable. However, a number of other senators, ranging from rising stars to distinguished veterans, were facing unexpectedly tough campaigns.
Gary Hart’s movie star looks and rapid rise to national prominence while managing a presidential campaign that lost forty-nine states had evoked some skepticism when he arrived in the Senate in 1975. But Hart had made close friends with some of the young senators focused on defense issues, like Bill Cohen and John Culver. He had impressed many people with his serious work on the sensitive and contentious Church Committee, as well as SALT II, and a range of energy and environment issues. Now suddenly, Hart, whose political future had seemed unlimited, faced the distinct possibility of being a one-term senator. He had come to the Senate on the Democratic tide after Watergate, but that tide had run out. Bill Armstrong’s defeat of Floyd Haskell two years earlier augured badly for Hart; Colorado seemed to have ended a brief experiment with progressivism. The Republicans nominated Mary Estill Buchanan to run against Hart, and the still-novel notion of a woman senator seemed to capture the fancy of Colorado voters.
Hart campaigned furiously, battling uphill. But at a key juncture in the campaign, Barry Goldwater came to Colorado. The visit by the legendary Republican should have helped Buchanan. But Goldwater and Hart had served together on the Church Committee, and Hart had deeply impressed his senior colleague, even though they disagreed on issues constantly. When asked about Hart during an interview, Goldwater described him as “the most honest and most moral man” that he had ever met in politics. The headline in the Denver Post—“Goldwater Praises Hart”—was a huge boon to the Hart campaign.
Many Washington observers had found John Culver to be a formidable first-term senator, combining great intelligence with a forceful personality and strongly held convictions. Elizabeth Drew, one of Washington’s most distinguished reporters, had profiled Culver in a laudatory book, Senator. He had built expertise on defense issues, playing a critical role in Carter’s decision to kill the B-1 bomber.
Despite his strong start in the Senate, Culver had given serious thought to retiring. He had already been a Senate staffer and served ten years in the House. Educated at Harvard, he was an unabashed, unreconstructed New Deal/Fair Deal Democrat, who would have been more comfortable representing Massachusetts than Iowa. He did not like where the politics of the country were going, and he did not fe
el well suited to six more frustrating years. But after Roger Jepsen upset Dick Clark in 1978, Culver decided that he had to run again. “He knew he could lose. He wasn’t like Talmadge and the others who didn’t think they could lose,” John Podesta, then Culver’s Judiciary Counsel, recalled. “But he thought he was the strongest candidate, and he couldn’t give in to the right.” Culver decided to run as the liberal he was, making no compromises with the prevailing political climate. He drew a tough opponent in Representative Charles Grassley, an Iowa farmer turned legislator, who could not be mistaken for a Harvard liberal. The National Conservative Political Action Committee targeted Culver from the beginning, running hard negative ads right through Election Day.
In the last week of the campaign, Culver and Grassley squared off in a major debate on a university campus. A gadfly third-party candidate, determined to crash the debate, first disrupted it by yelling from the audience, then charged up onto the stage and came at Culver. Culver wrestled him to the ground, and when his opponent grabbed his tie, Culver wrenched his head back so hard that the tie snapped. The unusual debate attracted some national press attention, but whether it would help Culver in Iowa remained to be seen.
Herman Talmadge, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, had been in the Senate since his election in 1956. He had followed in the footsteps of his father, Eugene Talmadge, who had been elected governor of Georgia in 1932. Being a Talmadge in Georgia compared to being a Kennedy in Massachusetts: seemingly a life ticket to the Senate. Talmadge was one of smartest senators, as he demonstrated in his performance on the Watergate Committee. “With Watergate,” he wrote, “I not only became a nationally known politician but a star of daytime television as well.” But after his twenty-nine-year-old son drowned in May 1975, a grief-stricken Talmadge turned heavily to drink. He and his wife had a bitter divorce, in which she charged him with stealing money from his Senate office accounts. His administrative assistant, Dan Minchew, was convicted of misappropriating funds. The Senate Ethics Committee recommended that Talmadge be “denounced” for his conduct, and the full Senate did so.
Still Talmadge remained a formidable politician. He faced a tough Democratic opponent, Zell Miller, a future Georgia governor and senator, and crushed him in the Democratic primary in late August. Miller was the only serious threat to the veteran senator; there seemed to be no way that Mack Mattingly, a pleasant IBM salesman running on the Republican ticket, could possibly challenge Talmadge. But politics had changed in Georgia, just as they had all over the nation. The Republicans sensed Talmadge’s over-confidence and vulnerability and poured money into harsh negative TV ads.
In Washington state, an aging Magnuson ran precisely the campaign his staff had feared. At one point, with the television cameras on, Maggie had walked slowly down the steps disembarking from an airplane, waiting on each step and eventually stumbling. The film footage led to a devastating television ad, showing Magnuson on the steps, with a clock in the background timing just how long it took to get down. He looked like the old, frail, crippled man that he in fact was. Slade Gorton, his energetic, attractive opponent, struck exactly the right note, suggesting that Maggie be given a gold watch for retirement. “I’m not saying Maggie hasn’t done some good for the state,” Gorton told Time magazine. “He has. I’m saying he has now become part of the problem of inflation, and I’m part of the solution.” The Seattle Times called Maggie “the candidate of nostalgia, highly expensive nostalgia.”
Javits’s last campaign had likewise become painful to watch. On September 9, Nassau County Supervisor Alphonse D’Amato beat him decisively in the Republican primary. It was “a stunning defeat,” in the words of the New York Times. Javits had made a terrible decision in choosing to run, and now he compounded it, struggling to find the money to stay in the race as a third-party candidate. Many of his friends and admirers feared that if he stayed in the race, he would cause the defeat of the Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Holtzman, the liberal congresswoman who had distinguished herself on the House Judiciary Committee during consideration of Nixon’s impeachment. An October 30 New York Times editorial stated that it still considered Javits the best candidate of the three, but that “with this last hurrah, [Javits] may lose even more than the seat he has held with distinction for twenty four years. He may also weaken the progressive causes to which he devoted his political life.” The Times called on Javits “to complete a brilliant career with a selfless, principled withdrawal.” Javits stayed in the race.
THESE SENATE RACES WERE uncertain in part because the presidential race seemed to remain too close to call. Reagan had come out of the Republican convention with a large lead over Carter, and all the issues going his way. But the race had tightened after the conventions. The Democrats took advantage of some of Reagan’s most extreme views, working effectively to paint him as out of the mainstream. Four years earlier, Gerald Ford had made just such a comeback against Jimmy Carter, because of uncertainty about the newcomer. Now that he was president, Carter benefited from some of the same unease that voters felt about his challenger. There were hints that the hostage crisis could be resolved before the election, creating an “October surprise” that would allow America a sense of relief and boost the beleaguered president.
Sitting on a comfortable lead, the Reagan campaign had avoided a debate with Carter by insisting that any presidential debate should include John Anderson, the former Illinois congressman, running a principled and effective independent candidacy. With Reagan’s lead vanishing, his campaign reversed its position, calling for one head-to-head debate. Patrick Caddell, Carter’s pollster and principal political adviser, fought the proposal, fearing Reagan’s skill on television, but Hamilton Jordan and other Carter aides believed that the president’s intellect and grasp of the substantive issues would more than offset Reagan’s ability as a performer. The Carter campaign agreed to the debate, which was scheduled for October 28, in Cleveland, just one week before the election. Polls and press reports indicated that many voters remained undecided, waiting to watch the debate and then make up their minds.
Sadly for Carter, Caddell was right. In the debate, the president showed his mastery of the issues, but seemed tight and uncomfortable. He tried to humanize himself by saying that he had asked his ten-year-old daughter, Amy, what she thought the most important issue facing the country was. Her supposed response, “Nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms,” was widely ridiculed.
Reagan, on the other hand, came across as a calm, friendly man who had a good grasp of the substance—not at all the extreme right-winger that the Democratic campaign had tried to portray. Reagan deflected Carter’s sallies with ease and amusement, saying things like “there you go again.”
Then in his closing statement, Reagan, looking straight into the camera, unleashed what might still stand as the most devastating and effective closing statement in the history of presidential debates: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is America respected around the world as it was?” Ronald Reagan won the debate hands down, and the press reporting of the debate, replaying Reagan’s best lines and Carter’s gaffe, magnified his victory.
After listening to Reagan debate Carter, Gaylord Nelson turned to Kevin Gottlieb, his administrative assistant, and said, “It’s over.” Gottlieb assumed that Nelson was predicting a Reagan victory. “Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” Nelson said. “Ronald Reagan proved to the American people tonight that he’s not a crazy man, not someone to be feared. If he wins it will bring out people who normally don’t vote. That means I’m done.”
Jimmy Carter tried to rally, but Election Day, November 4, happened to be the anniversary of the hostage taking. The television news focused again and again on reviewing the key events of this agonizing national experience. Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report all had cover stories on the hostage crisis. Pat Caddell’s daily polling showed massive sli
ppage in Carter’s position, as virtually all the undecided voters broke to Reagan.
The night before the election, on the way to Plains, Georgia, to vote, Jimmy Carter was told he was going to be defeated. In his diary, he wrote: “It was hard for us to believe the dimension of what Pat was telling us, but it later proved to be accurate.”
ON ELECTION DAY 1980, I got up early to read the Post and the Times and drove five minutes to the voting place at Wayside Elementary School in Potomac, Maryland, soon after it opened. In front of the school, the candidates for local office and their supporters had set up their tables and were passing out campaign literature and sample ballots, making one last effort to sway the undecided or uninformed voters. Because it was early, there was almost no line; only a few minutes passed before I got to cast my vote for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale and then split my ticket to support Republican Mac Mathias for the Senate.
That special Tuesday, nothing demanded my attention at the Senate subcommittee where I worked. I could just as easily be nervous, imagining what was happening across the country, without going in. I had decided to take the day off, to hang out with Nancy, my wife, play with Susanna, our four-year-old daughter, and just think about the election: what it meant for the country, and, of course, what it might mean for me.
It was a cool, cloudy day. The temperature was in the mid 40’s, and there was a slight drizzle of rain. By the afternoon, I was restless and went to the Jewish Community Center in Rockville, Maryland, to relieve the stress by swimming laps. As I walked to my car afterward, I was struck by a feeling that the Republican landslide building across the country was coursing through my veins. I lived and breathed politics in those days, but even for me, this was unusual.
