Outside Looking In

by Garry Wills

  NOTES

  1 John T. Donovan, Crusader in the Cold War: A Biography of Fr. John F. Croning, S.S. (1908-1994) (Peter Lang, 2005).

  9

  Carter and Others

  I got involved with Jimmy Carter’s campaign, as with Richard Nixon′s, by accident. When Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace during Wallace’s second run for the presidency in 1972, Clay Felker, the editor of New York, asked me to survey the South to see what effect this would have on the presidential race that year. I started calling politicians and reporters in the southern states, and when I got the office of Jimmy Carter, Georgia’s governor, his press secretary, Jody Powell, came on the line and said that the governor would be glad to talk with me if I would just come down to Atlanta. A memo from the time was later published, telling how Powell and Hamilton Jordan had mapped a strategy for getting reporters to raise Carter’s national profile for a run at the White House—and my name was on the list of journalists to court.

  When I got to Atlanta, Powell said that the governor was about to fly to Tifton in south Georgia to talk with a group of sheriffs who were grumbling against his racial policies. We got on the governor’s small plane and he began teasing me about big-shot New Yorkers (he did not know I was from Baltimore, not New York, and had in fact been born in Atlanta). When we got to the sheriffs’ meeting, Carter was not intimidated by the clear hostility some of the men displayed when he went into their room. When he rose to speak, he did not preach to them or use liberal talking points. He spoke their language, saying their mamas had told them we all have to get along with each other. He took their questions and went out to a sincere round of applause. I was impressed.

  When we got back on the plane, he said he wanted to stop off in his hometown, Plains. He showed me around his residence there, and then around his peanut business. He introduced me to his brother, Billy (his mother was away from home). It was a tour many journalists would be given in the next few years. I wrote an article saying that Carter was aiming to be president, and could well make a good one. Shortly after the article appeared, I met Carter at a Democratic dinner in Washington, and he said he liked what I had written—all but one point. What was that? “Where you said I was trying to run for president.” “Aren’t you?” “No.” Later, when he promised the American people that he would never lie to them, I had reason to question that.

  When he did run for president, I flew on his campaign plane, and was impressed all over again. Once, standing in the airplane aisle, someone (I think it was Jim Wooten) asked him how he would differ from a Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. “I’m not afraid of intellectuals.” I believed him. I had read his book, Why Not the Best?, which he wrote himself. It had a precision that comes from clear thinking. Later he was asked on the plane, “Why do you keep bringing up religion?” He answered: “I resolved when this campaign began never to bring religion up myself. But you people keep asking me about it. If I don’t answer you, you’ll say I’m dodging the issue.” This was before Reagan and the Moral Majority, and George W. Bush and the Religious Right, made religion a proud part of their campaigns.

  Back in 1976, reporters thought an evangelical believer had to be a kook. He was asked if he felt that he was “born again.” He said he was, as all Christians must be, since Jesus said (John 3.3), “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” A leading question from a Playboy interviewer provoked Carter to admit that he had experienced lust in his heart. The interviewer did not realize he was just making the evangelical admission that he was a sinner, like all men, and that he was again quoting Jesus, from the Gospel of Matthew (5.28): “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The religious illiteracy of the press was made the basis for charges that Carter was a religious extremist.

  While he was campaigning Carter did not announce on his schedule what church he would be going to on Sunday. Those of us who were interested had to follow him to see where he might turn up. Once I was in a small group that sat together in a pew while Carter worshiped in a new church on the campaign trail. The pastor that morning preached from the story at Luke 12.13, where a man asked Jesus to decide on a property dispute with his brother. The preacher said, “Who would dare to bring up such a petty matter with the Lord?” Jody Powell passed a note down the pew from journalist to journalist, with the words: “If Sam Donaldson were following Jesus, he would sure as hell be asked petty questions.”

  So far from injecting religion into politics, Carter had the historical Baptist belief in a separation of church and state. Roger Williams was one of the earliest proponents of that view, and Baptists were among the strongest supporters of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the great champions of religious freedom. When Carter became president, he never had a prayer service in the White House, never invited Billy Graham, the pastor to presidents who would be called in to bless George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War. Carter continued to uphold the old Baptist position even after the Southern Baptist Convention broke from its tradition to join the Religious Right. A former president of the Southern Baptists, when he paid a visit to the White House, told Carter that he and his fellow members were praying that the president would give up his “secular humanist” ways.1

  Carter was the first American president to face up to the energy problems of the world. He responded to the oil crisis of 1979 by cutting back on fuel use in government buildings. He installed solar panels at the White House, promoted wind energy subsidies, and regulated gas consumption in vehicles:Between 1973 and 1985, American passenger vehicle mileage went from around 13.5 miles per gallon to 17.5, while light truck mileage increased from 11.6 miles per gallon to 19.5—all of which helped to create a global oil glut from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, which not only weakened OPEC but also helped to unravel the Soviet Union, the world’s second-largest oil producer.2

  Yet Carter showed, eventually, that he could be intimidated by intellectuals. When his polls dropped precipitately, he retreated to Camp David and invited in all kinds of professors and pundits. He organized a pep talk to the nation under the bumbling guidance of Patrick Caddell. The address he came down from the mountain to deliver became known as “the malaise speech,” though he never used the word “malaise” in it. This, combined with the unflattering picture of him collapsing as he jogged, and with his tale of being assaulted by a rabbit in the water, conveyed a false image of Carter as weak or cowardly. By letting the shah of Iran come to America for medical treatment, he provoked the American hostage crisis in Iran, and his attempt at a rescue raid there was feckless. He boycotted the Moscow Olympics to protest Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. The economy tanked as his term was ending. Thus, despite such achievements as the Panama Canal Treaties and the Camp David Accords, Carter ended up looking provincial, puritanical, and ineffective. His successor, Ronald Reagan, got the credit for the release of the hostages from Iran, a release Carter had prepared. Reagan used Carter’s low approval polls (21 percent when he left office) to dismantle Carter’s wise energy policy and other governmental regulations.

  Out of office, Carter began to recover Americans’ respect. I saw two sides of the man at a Mike Mansfield Conference in Montana where we were both on the discussion programs. Speaking to a small audience of students, he was asked how he, who had once been the chief law officer of the nation, could condone the action of his daughter in breaking the law—Amy Carter had been taken to jail for a protest against apartheid held in front of the South African embassy. He answered: “I cannot tell you how proud I am of her. If you students do not express your conscience now, when will you? Later on, you will have many responsibilities—jobs, families, careers. It will get harder and harder to be free to speak out about injustice. Amy was doing that.” The students loved him. That was in the afternoon. But at night, in a huge gymnasium, with what looked like half of Montana flooding in, Carter gave a formal speech that was preachy and dull. As he droned on about “agape love,” the
audience began to stream out at all the doors.

  Subsequently, Carter’s has been the most successful ex-presidency of all time. No one else has made such an impact worldwide after leaving the nation’s highest office. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia—but one reason he did that was to baffle the antislavery movement of northern universities. James Madison tried to draft a new constitution for the state of Virginia—but he failed in his compromise measures. Herbert Hoover made important contributions to public life, first by leading the European Food Program in 1947 and then by chairing two Commissions on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government. But Carter’s activities dwarf all earlier work by former presidents. He is the only ex-president to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. (Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama won the award during their presidencies.) The Carter Center in Atlanta is at the heart of many international negotiations for peace. He has personally overseen the fairness of foreign elections. He has taken an activist role in poverty programs like Habitat for Humanity. He has been a leader in the conversation over moral leadership in politics, arguing that respect for life cannot be restricted to outlawing abortions, gay marriage, and stem cell research.3 His is a voice of conscience in all nations, not just in ours.

  Dukakis

  Early in the (early) Iowa primary of 1988 I flew around the state, first with Michael Dukakis, then with his wife Kitty, in progressively smaller prop planes. At the end of one day, when Dukakis had to get back to Massachusetts for some duty as the state’s governor, we got on a small Learjet loaned him by a business supporter (there were fewer controls on this back then). Dukakis had only a small staff with him and two journalists. He sat up front with me and the other journalist, David Nyhan of the Boston Globe. Nyhan breathed with relief that at last he was on a jet, no matter how small, rather than the prop aircraft we had been riding in short jumps around the state. Dukakis asked why it made a difference to him. Nyhan said the jet made him feel safer, and “I don’t want to die.” Dukakis said with surprise, “You think of dying?” Nyhan: “Of course. Don’t you?” “No, never.” I was no longer surprised to hear such an answer from Dukakis. He is the supreme government wonk. If there is no government program against dying, why bother to think about it?

  This fit with what he told me when I asked for the book that most influenced him. Unlike many who have to consult their memory or their caution, he answered at once: “Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind.” It is the most secular account of America one can imagine. To judge from it, no one could imagine religion having any place in American history or culture. It is not surprising that Dukakis was drawn to it. His campaign managers had to remind him that it would be useful for him to remember that he has a Greek heritage, and to start showing up at Greek churches. It was the same pattern observable when another Greek ran for national office. Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president, had to resume the name Spiro after being known for most of his adult life as Ted Agnew.

  I got what seemed to me the essence of Michael Dukakis when my editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, told me about editing Kitty Dukakis’s book during the presidential campaign. Alice called about some changes in the book and got Michael on the line. She asked for Kitty and he told her: “She’s in the shower. Call back in thirteen minutes.” That attention to detail served him in some ways in his administrative tasks as a governor—and even as a professor—but it did not have the expansive touch of the born politician.

  I learned something about Dukakis during the campaign. I took some time off to go to the Kennedy School at Harvard. He had taught there after his failed bid for re-election after a first term as governor. I looked at his student evaluations, and they were excellent. That is far from typical of the politician who turns to the classroom. After George McGovern failed to reach the presidency, my dean at Northwestern considered inviting him to teach a course there. Since I knew McGovern from the 1972 campaign, and from our shared participation in some programs at the Institute for Policy Studies, Dean Weingartner asked if I thought he would make a good visiting professor. I said yes (so much for my academic prescience). McGovern had earned a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern and had been a professor at Dakota Wesleyan University before entering politics. Unlike many politicians, he knew what academic work is all about.

  There was intense interest in the course when it was announced. McGovern had run campaigns for the Senate and for president that were well supported on our liberal campus. A huge classroom was set aside for him, and many teaching assistants were happy to sign up to help him with the grading and discussion groups. Despite this large enrollment, McGovern did what many, perhaps most, politicians do when they return to the academy. He began by telling inside stories of the Senate and recounting anecdotes from his various campaigns. But when his stock of tales ran out, he did not know where to go, and students began streaming out of the course. The teaching assistants were left with nothing to do.

  Politicians live for contact with people. They lose the gift for contemplation, or research, or simple reading. Being alone with a book is a way to die for many of them. Dukakis was the great exception—and, I presume, still is—since he was always a professor, not a politician.

  Bush I

  I reported the 1980 campaign for Time, and did the cover story on then-vice president Bush. After flying around on his campaign plane, I went to interview Barbara Bush at the vice president’s residence. She graciously showed me around the Naval Observatory and we talked of her family. What she most wanted to dwell on was a book she had just completed and admired intensely: Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Then I went to interview Bush at his office in the West Wing of the White House. After talk of the campaign and of his war service, I asked him what book had influenced him most. He said, “I must admit I’m not much of a reader. I have so many reports and papers to read, I get little time for actual books. Of course, one read the classics in school—Moby-Dick. One book made a big impact on me in prep school, Catcher in the Rye.” Bush graduated from the Phillips Academy in 1942. Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. He was so devoid of personal reading memories that he must have remembered his sons’ talk of the novel when they were in prep school.

  Before I left, Bush said that next week the Democrats would hold their convention, and he did not want to watch them, so “Bar gave me a book to read instead. But unhh, it’s so big!” Here he mimed taking a book so heavy that his hands sank like a plummet. What was this huge tome? Bonfire of the Vanities. Later, after he was elected president, he was asked at times what he was reading. He said he was making his way through Bonfire of the Vanities. When George W. Bush became president, his close adviser Karl Rove claimed that he was a voracious reader. Rove was always telling George W. not to be like his father.

  NOTES

  1 Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 32.

  2 Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), p. 14.

  3 Carter, op. cit.

  10

  Clintons

  I was still writing for Time when Bill Clinton ran for office. I spent weeks in Little Rock interviewing the Clintons and their acquaintances. I went to see Clinton’s mother and brother. I wrote a profile of James Carville for the New Yorker after visiting his mother (“Miz Nippy”) and sisters in New Orleans. When I had spent some time with Clinton, I got around to asking him for the book that had made the deepest impression on him. He hesitated for a while, and then asked, “What had the most impact on you?” I assured him that was not the game. He is such a politician that I suspected he was taking his time to choose the work that would make me admire him. When he finally came up with a title, I was sure I had been right.

  Weeks before, when he asked what I was working on, other than the campaign, I said that I had a long-term project on the Confessions of Saint Augustine. So at length he came up with
his answer: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Dee Dee Myers, his press aide who was sitting in to tape the interview, looked stunned. And sure enough, when we went out of the office, she said to the rest of the staff in the next room, “You’ll never guess what he just called his favorite book!” After Clinton was elected, a cheap paperback of the Meditations came out with a banner on it saying, “President Clinton’s Favorite Book.” This should surprise anyone who knows that ascetical treatise, which condemns any yielding to sexual indulgence. At one point it calls intercourse “an internal rubbing with the squirting of slime.”

  When I asked Hillary Clinton for her favorite book, she did not hesitate for an instant. “The Brothers Karamazov.” Why? “I read it in high school, and it opened ranges of spirituality I never dreamed of.” I came to know her fairly well, and to like her a lot. She drove me around Little Rock. We ate lunches at a restaurant and in the governor’s mansion. She has a wonderful sense of humor, along with a gift (also shared by Barack Obama) of imitating the voices of people when she tells stories, as when she told me of a case she took when she was teaching at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She did pro bono work off campus, and one day she got a phone call from a small town in the north Arkansas hills. There was a black woman being held there without legal representation. Could she come? Her fellow professor and future husband, Bill, had their one car that day, so she got a law student to take her to the town in his truck.