CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1976-1980
A little more than two weeks before I first met Jimmy Carter in Georgia, he had unveiled his views on health care in a speech to African-American medical students. It was obviously tailored to the hopes of the United Auto Workers as expressed by the late Walter Reuther. Carter declared that coverage should be universal and mandatory. Later he told reporters that his plan was nearly identical to the one I had been shaping with Congressman James Corman of California. I had my doubts. He was certainly paying lip service to "universal" and "mandatory" coverage, but he never talked specifics. My father had a great rule of thumb: bet on what you think a man will do rather than what he says he'll do and you'll be right more often than not. I just wasn't sure with Carter.
My suspicion deepened, and was essentially confirmed, once Carter took office. He announced soon after the inauguration that his first priority was an energy bill; health care would have to come later. "Later" proved to be an understatement. The president assigned Joseph Califano, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, the responsibility to draft a plan. It seemed to me unlikely that the administration would have a bill ready for the 1977 Congress, but I did not slow my own Committee's efforts in moving forward.
My staff and I worked hard to craft a plan that would be capable of having broad-based support. Specifically, we negotiated long and hard in 1977 to persuade Lane Kirkland, the secretary of the AFL-CIO, and Doug Fraser, president of the UAW, to compromise on their strong commitment to a single-payer system, where health care providers would be paid from a single national fund like Medicare--and agree instead to support a plan built on our existing system of private insurance provided that coverage was mandatory and universal. I had personally supported single payer in the past and understood the benefits of it, but I also knew that it would be politically impossible to pass.
In November 1977, Califano finally presented a series of options on national health care to the president. We then had extensive discussions between his staff and mine, incorporating the work we had done earlier in reaching agreement with Kirkland and Fraser. But there were tensions between HEW and our position. They seemed to be putting a negative spin on our proposal, and despite our efforts, Carter made it clear that he had no intention of bringing us into the process to work with his team to hammer out a legislative proposal. Instead, he told us he needed to take a month-and-a-half here and a few weeks there to have meetings and read memos and more discussions with his Cabinet officers and staff. Then, he'd get back to us and we'd have a chance to make comments on what they'd decided. I thought that was a recipe for failure.
The moment called for bold leadership and swift action built around a single piece of legislation. We continued to work toward that end. And Carter continued to slow down the process. By the summer of 1978, I felt that the president was squandering a real opportunity to get something done. The Jimmy Carter who had declared that he wanted mandatory and universal coverage and had a plan that was nearly identical to mine had now been replaced by the President Carter who wanted to approach health insurance in incremental steps, over time, if certain cost containment benchmarks were met--and after the 1978 midterm elections. According to my notes, I spoke with Carter by phone on June 26, 1978, and was very direct in laying out how politically untenable his position was: "I don't think you can go to an elderly group and say, 'You're in... the second phase [of coverage], but if we pass the first [phase] and if hospitals keep their costs down and the economy doesn't go so much into a deficit, then you might be phased in.'"
When I met with Carter and his team two days later, he continued to pay lip service to the desirability of a single bill, but he clearly had no intention of going in that direction. He wanted to move slowly, through a series of small bills. After leaving the meeting, I knew he wasn't committed, and I didn't plan to wait around. The issue was too important to me. I called Califano to let him know that I was being besieged with calls about our meeting and was going to have a press conference explaining my differences with the White House. As I learned later, Carter regarded my efforts as a platform to challenge him for the presidency. If that's why he slowed things down, then he made a poor political calculation. If we had passed comprehensive national health insurance together, it would have been a huge victory for Carter. And it would have been much more difficult for me to have challenged him for the nomination, as I ultimately did.
Clearly, President Carter was a difficult man to convince--of anything. One reason for this was that he did not really listen. He loved to give the appearance of listening. He made a point, for example, of bringing eminent people to the White House for colloquies in the summertime. You'd arrive about 6:00 or 6:30 p.m., and the first thing you would be reminded of, in case you needed reminding, was that he and Rosalynn had removed all the liquor in the White House. No liquor was ever served during Jimmy Carter's term. He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living.
He apparently considered boating a luxury and a sign of worldly living as well: in April 1977 he sold at auction the presidential yacht Sequoia. I knew Sequoia as a magnificent 104-foot teak vessel that had been built in 1925, bought by the Commerce Department six years later, and first used by a president in 1933, when Herbert Hoover borrowed her for fishing getaways. Sequoia had served as a floating retreat for every president since then. Jack had held strategy meetings aboard her during the Cuban Missile Crisis and had celebrated his last birthday aboard her. After Carter got rid of her in the name of frugality, she endured many undignified years of changed ownership, lawsuits, and dereliction until she was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987.
At any rate, if you were a guest at one of these gatherings you would get to the White House, and you would mill around, and you'd go through the buffet line and eat quickly. And then for the next three hours Jimmy Carter would conduct a seminar: on Africa, for instance. He would let you know that he knew every country in Africa and the name of every president of every country in Africa. He would have the secretaries of state and defense talk about what was happening in these regions that would affect the globe. He could count on about a third of the Senate in the room every time, and about thirty members of the House.
I will not deny that it was well worth attending these events. They were informational--you could say they were nothing if not informational. But they were so broad-gauged as to not be of much specific importance. They were personal tours de force, and every one of my colleagues recognized them as such, designed to impress us that the president knew so much about the minutiae. In contrast, when you read about Franklin Roosevelt, you realize that he was the master of the situation he needed to know about. He didn't know every name and every place, but he knew what was worth knowing: the key people, and what motivated them, and why they were doing what they were doing.
Through all this, I told reporters, and myself as well, that I expected President Carter to be renominated and reelected in 1980, and that I intended to support him. I informed Carter himself of this intention.
On Christmas Eve 1977, I embarked on my first and only visit to China. I brought along a large entourage that included Joan; our three children; Eunice; Caroline and Michael Kennedy (both were then sophomores at Harvard); the Harvard law professor Jerome Alan Cohen; and some aides and reporters. Joan had moved out of our McLean house that fall and into our old Beacon Street apartment in Boston, but we still traveled as a family. I had notified the government of the People's Republic that I wanted to meet with the vice premier and de facto leader of the country, Deng Xiaoping. A tough-minded survivor of political purges by Mao Zedong, and little known in the West, Deng was just then making his mark as an architect of China's recovery from the calamitous Cultural Revolution. His Four Modernizations, in agriculture, industry, science, and technology, would soon transform the vast country, earn him recognition as Time's Man of the Year for 1978, and propel China's economic rise.
My main mission was to serve as an unofficial ambassador for the United States: specifically, to try to firm up diplomatic relations with China despite the United States' refusal to acknowledge the People's Republic's claim to Taiwan. At the same time, I hoped to secure a commitment that the mainland would not use arms to enforce its claims upon the island nation of sixteen million people. As in Moscow in 1974, I brought a list of detained people--twenty-two Chinese, in this case--who sought to leave the country. And Joan encouraged several members of the Beijing Symphony to request permission to study the following summer with the Boston Symphony.
The trip produced no significant breakthroughs, certainly not in the matter of Taiwan's hopes for independence. But I was happy to hear one high-ranking diplomat strongly hint to me that the island could expect "a peaceful and prosperous future."
By the summer of 1978 my associates and staff had done their consensus-building job well, and we had in place the elements to move ahead on the comprehensive health program. And so I began negotiations with Joe Califano, the president's secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Like his boss, Califano wanted to pass legislation that would be sequenced: when a bill was passed to cover one element of our plan, we would have to come back to Congress to initiate another one. I saw that approach as completely unworkable. It was too risky; it gave Congress too many chances to say no. I spoke to Carter himself about this in late July, but I could not convince him. The failure signaled that on health care, at least, the president and I were irrevocably on separate tracks.
Still, I remained committed to his reelection.
My commitment buckled a bit in the fall of 1978, when some friends of mine inside the administration leaked to me some portions of Carter's proposed budget requests. It was clear that in the name of harnessing inflation, the president intended to starve some important domestic programs that mattered a great deal to me. Health care legislation was clearly among those endangered programs.
I had the chance to express my outrage at this timidity shortly afterward, at a December symposium on health care in Memphis. It was part of the Democratic "mini-convention" that attracted twenty-five hundred grassroots stalwarts of the party, such as campaign workers, teachers, union people, and officeholders from the cities and states--people who passionately embraced the traditional core principles of our party.
"There could be few more divisive issues for America and for our party," I told the receptive audience, "than a Democratic policy of drastic slashes at the expense of the elderly, the poor, the black, the cities, and the unemployed." Rebuking the tactic of presidential pandering to the presumed selfishness of the middle class, I chose an abiding metaphor from my life as a sailor. "Sometimes," I declared to the crowd, "a party must sail against the wind!"
The phrase drew cheers and applause from the crowd. The symposium's chairman, the young governor-elect of Arkansas Bill Clinton, later said he had never experienced anything like the crowd's reaction.
I returned to the Soviet Union in September 1978. Again, Brezhnev welcomed me on a Saturday morning, despite the fact that I'd sent him a series of rather blunt but private messages stating my wish for further easing of restraints against dissidents. I took his willingness to meet as a positive sign, particularly since he was not feeling well and had declined to meet with President Carter's representative the day before.
When I arrived, I presented him with gifts of native foods we had acquired on our travels--bread from Tashkent, melon from Samarkand, and apples from Alma Ata. We had been able to carry the crate of fruit into Brezhnev's office and set it down on his desk without so much as a question from his security guards. He expressed delight in receiving what he described as the best food in the Soviet Union.
Brezhnev showed how little he really understood about our country in general and me in particular when he tried to separate me and President Carter for his own political advantage. "Concern about human rights has become an unclean political game," he declared, a spurious attempt to bring pressure on Russia. I felt obliged to reply that American demands for human rights were legitimate; I reminded him that I shared them, and warned that no real breakthroughs in arms control could be achieved unless this area could be resolved.
I could see that I was putting him to sleep--literally. As the aging leader's eyes grew heavy and unfocused, his aides signaled to me, in essence, that it was time to end this phase of the negotiations because the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was ready for a nap.
Back home, I began to deal with the reality that yet another presidential election cycle was nearing, and that speculation among Democrats once again centered on me. I had not seriously considered running against the president in 1980. For his part, late that same year, Carter invited me to lunch and asked me to make a "Shermanesque statement"--that under no circumstances would I run for president or accept a draft from my party. I declined to do that.
If give-and-take is a sign of a healthy alliance, which I believe it is, ours was not healthy. A good example of the president's refusal to offer reciprocity of any sort involved Archibald Cox, the superlative lawyer and noble figure of Watergate. When a vacancy came up on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in March 1979, as head of the Judiciary Committee I strongly favored the former special prosecutor whose firing by President Nixon further sealed Nixon's demise. Shortly afterward, Attorney General Griffin Bell telephoned me and said, "The president isn't going to do it." I replied that I wanted to talk to Carter personally about it. "It won't do you any good," Bell warned. I said I still wanted to talk to him.
Carter invited me into the Oval Office and we had our conversation about Cox, or the appearance of a conversation about Cox. He certainly allotted a generous amount of time. Expecting a fifteen-minute talk, I found myself spending close to an hour with the president. But as it developed, he wanted to talk about several other matters: health, the economy. When we did finally get around to the topic at hand, Carter told me bluntly and preemptively why he could never, ever support Cox for the First Circuit. In later years, Carter would claim that it was Cox's age--he was nearly sixty-seven then--that made him an unacceptable choice. That is not the way the president represented it to me in his office. He could never, ever support Archibald Cox, he said, because Cox had supported Morris Udall (instead of Carter) in the 1976 Democratic primary.
I had witnessed a lot of political grudges in Washington, and I knew that though they generally led to punishment of some sort, overt revenge was far from the only means of settling them. I pressed on: "Well, that was back then, and you defeated Udall. Cox's support for him certainly does not mean he has no admiration for you." Carter shrugged and said he knew that Cox had been close to the Kennedy family and to Jack in particular, and that made some difference to him, but not enough. (Reflecting on this later, I suspected that it made the wrong kind of difference.) I then framed the nomination from a political context: Cox, I pointed out to Carter, is the most respected lawyer in the country. Putting him on the First Circuit would be a "ten" for you. It would be a "nine" for me recommending him, but it would be a "ten" for you.
Jimmy Carter gave me an icy stare. He said, "Even that isn't going to override my strong feelings against Archibald Cox for supporting Udall." His words had a certain ring that I have always remembered. It seemed as though Carter was experiencing real pleasure in telling me that he was not going to support Archibald Cox. As for the other subjects that we covered, I always felt that he wanted credit for talking to me for an hour, rather than just fifteen or twenty minutes, so he could claim to have reached out to me. But whatever his reasons, it was clear he wasn't really interested in my views on Cox.
Any thoughts I still held about supporting Jimmy Carter in a reelection bid I put firmly to rest on July 15, 1979. On that evening the president appeared on the three major television networks to deliver the most self-destructive address of his administration.
Fatigued from the rigors of a recent economic summit in Tokyo and, just before that, a round of touchy negotiations on arms limitations with Leonid Brezhnev; distressed by American outrage over the energy crisis gas lines that had driven his approval ratings down to 25 percent; and badly shaken by an alarmist memo from his pollster Pat Caddell that warned him of a sharp decline in the nation's trust in him, Carter looked into the camera lens and fulfilled Caddell's prophecy. He lectured the people of the nation on their contribution to what he called "a fundamental threat to American democracy." This contribution, he declared, was a collapse of confidence and of faith, in government and in themselves.
"It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will," Carter intoned. "We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
"The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America."
This was the address that would become famous as Carter's "malaise" speech, although the president did not use that word in his remarks. (It had appeared in Caddell's memo.) It was a speech born of panic, as the details of its genesis soon made clear: the product of a ten-day "domestic summit meeting," as the press called it, at Camp David earlier in the month. Battalions of advisers and experts from various fields, plus his wife, Rosalynn, barraged the president with advice on how he might reverse declining poll numbers, a perceived erosion of national confidence, and his own image as a leader. "It became a question of saving his presidency," an aide admitted to the New York Times soon afterward.
I watched the televised talk with mounting incredulousness and outrage. This message was contrary to--it was in conflict with--all the ideals of the Democratic Party that I cherished. It was in conflict with what the country was about. I tried to imagine President Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy ever abandoning their optimism in the face of adversity and giving vent to sentiments remotely this melancholy. If this message was truly reflective of Carter's feelings, I couldn't see how he was really going to address the central problems we were facing, both in the economy and foreign policy.
It was in the aftershocks of this speech that I began thinking seriously about running for the presidency in 1980.
Inflation, a malady of the past several years, was at double digits now, and the president in my view had abdicated his responsibility to deal with this issue. As for health care reform, he had had nearly three years to demonstrate the commitment implied by his campaign promises, and had either misrepresented or misstated what that commitment would be.
Crowning all these was the overall leadership issue: what the Democratic Party historically stood for, what I had seen it stand for. This president had said that he believed that the spirit of America was in crisis. I recognized that Jimmy Carter, although he was of my own party, held an inherently different view of America from mine.
In late August Ronald Reagan edged ahead of Carter for the first time in the presidential preference polls. Those same polls showed me with a lead over Carter, among Democrats, of 62 to 24 percent. They also indicated that I would defeat Reagan handily.
First, though, there was the matter of actually defeating Jimmy Carter. I believed that I could do this. But even before my campaign officially got started, I ran into some unpromising harbingers.
For me, getting up to speed in a political campaign has always taken time. There are many good campaigners who can leave the Senate floor on a late afternoon and be red-hot on the campaign trail that night. Not me: it takes me two or three days to get warmed up and into the mood. For some reason, in 1979 and early 1980 it took even longer than usual for me to get going.
One of the most damaging indicators of my sluggish start was the now famous two-part interview I taped with Roger Mudd of CBS News in September and October 1979. The edited interview ran as an hourlong news special on Sunday night, November 4, just three days before I announced my candidacy.
Mudd himself dwells on this interview in his 2008 memoir. He observes, correctly, that he and I had known one another socially in past years. "Because of these connections," Mudd writes, "perhaps there was in 1979 the assumption by the senator and his staff that this would be a softball documentary." He correctly notes that the filming took place weeks before I declared my candidacy.
Mudd, as he recalls, wanted two sit-down interviews, one at my Cape Cod house "about family and personal matters" and one at my office or at McLean "about senatorial matters." I consented to allow a CBS crew to follow me around for several days, filming me on Capitol Hill, in my office, in Hyannis Port, and in other informal situations.
I remember the circumstances of that interview a little differently. I recall, for example, that I'd granted the interview to Mudd as a personal favor, during a critical moment in his CBS News career. I had run into Roger at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in June of that year, when I attended a reception for the president of Mexico, Jose Lopez Portillo y Pacheco. As I walked out of the hotel at about 10 p.m., Roger approached me and said--I cannot recall the words verbatim--"I'm in this contest with Dan Rather for the anchor position at CBS News, and I'd love to get an interview with your mother." (It was common knowledge that Mudd had been expected to replace Walter Cronkite when he hit the age of mandatory retirement at CBS, but Rather was giving him a serious run for his money.)
I replied, "Well, my mother doesn't do interviews. She's older, and she just isn't up to the demands. But let me think about it, and I'll get back to you." Roger said, "It would make a big, big difference if I could ever do that interview down at Cape Cod. Everybody's always wanted that interview with your mother."
I talked to my mother and my sisters about it. We decided that Mudd could do the interview with Mother as they walked along the beach, but I would have to be with them. The two of them could chat back and forth, but we just didn't want to have a sit-down or to leave Mother on her own. Roger said that was fine. I added, "Our children are going to the Cape, so that's going to be the setting." Roger said that was fine too.
A day or two before the scheduled interview, my mother fell ill and left the Cape for Boston. At about that same time, Kara received an invitation from the Hopi tribe in Arizona, the only matriarchal tribe in the country. They asked her, as one interested in Native American culture, to come there and be a part of a large ceremony they were planning. Kara wanted to go, and so she was out of the interview tableau. And finally, for a reason I can't recall, Teddy said he could not be available either. That left Patrick, who had just turned twelve, and me.
I telephoned Roger, explained the situation, and tried to put off the interview. "Oh, no," he replied. "That'll be all right. I'll come on down. We'll do you and the sea and Cape Cod, and what the sea has meant." I thought I could easily talk about that: how I used the sea as a place of rest and reflection, and what this place meant to me and the family.
Roger and his crew arrived and set up for the interview at Squaw Island, the area half a mile west of the Cape house where I owned a seaside cottage. I had asked no staff members to be present, and I had done no preparation for an interview that dealt with political or personal topics. The agreement, as I'd understood it, was that our topic was to be the sea, and the connections between the Cape and the Kennedy family. I should have had my political antennae up. In retrospect, it is almost inconceivable to me that I did not.
As we took our chairs out in front of the house, the camera rolled, and we talked for some forty minutes about the sea and the Cape. During a break, I looked at the time, and said, "That's about it, isn't it?" Mudd replied, "Yes, just about." I turned to my twelve-year-old son, who was watching, and said, "Patrick, why don't you go down and get the boat and pick me up? I'll see these people to their van."
When Patrick had disappeared, Roger excused himself and consulted with two CBS executives, who'd accompanied him and had stood nearby, watching our interview. Then Roger walked back to me and surprised me by asking, "Can we do one more segment?"
I replied, "Well, I'd really like to go. I think we've done it." "No," he said. "We'd really like to do just one more." And so I agreed to do one more. (Mudd later wrote that he and the other two newsmen had compared notes on the conversation thus far and pronounced it a "disaster.")
The cameraman put in a fresh roll of film and Roger resumed his questions. The first had to do with Chappaquiddick. Then he asked about my marriage. My discomfort and unhappiness with the line of questioning was more than apparent on my face and in my halting answers. I was further distracted by my awareness that Patrick was on the water by himself, struggling with a twenty-five-foot sailboat. I needed to go down there and help him.
At last it ended, and the CBS crew packed its equipment, Mudd and I shook hands, and they drove away.
When Patrick and I were on the water I told him my sense of the interview: a disaster.
I telephoned Mudd the next day and said, "Look, if we're going to do this thing, I want another crack at it." Mudd agreed. Our understanding called for two sessions anyway; and so on October 12 we sat down again, this time in my Senate office in Washington. The cameraman signaled that the film was rolling, and Roger Mudd asked:
"Why do you want to be president?"
I had not yet publicly declared my intention to challenge President Carter and had no intention of announcing my candidacy in this interview with Roger Mudd. I wrestled in my mind with just how far to go. After a long pause, I began:
"Well, I'm--were I to make the announcement, and to run, the reasons I would run is because I have a great belief in this country. That it is--there's more natural resources than any nation in the world; there's the greatest educated population in the world; the greatest technology of any country in the world; the greatest capacity for innovation in the world; and the greatest political system in the world. And yet I see at the current time that most of the industrial nations of the world are exceeding us in terms of productivity and are doing better than us in terms of meeting the problems of inflation..." and on in that vein for 336 words, by courtesy of Roger's own count--of which CBS used the first 242.
My displeasure with Roger Mudd unfortunately spilled over into my interview performance. I regret that. If I had already declared my candidacy, I suppose I would have had a more polished answer to Mudd's question, but the essence would have been the same.
On November 4, 1979, the same day as the airing of the Mudd interview, Iranian Islamist revolutionaries seized fifty-two U.S. diplomats at the American embassy in Tehran. The nation plunged into shock. At the time, none of us could have anticipated that this crisis would continue for 444 days.
On Wednesday, November 7, I went ahead with my plans to announce my candidacy for my party's nomination as president of the United States. As I stood quietly behind the lectern in Faneuil Hall, I was enveloped in the moment. My personal past, my family's past, the Boston past, the American past--it had all coalesced in this room, where patriots had once gathered before the Revolutionary War to shape the American future. Honey Fitz had pointed to this building and told me its stories as we strolled past it on those long-ago Sundays. Jack had made his final 1960 campaign appearance here. I was forty-seven years old, one year older than Jack when he died. Jackie smiled at me from the audience of some 350 friends and relatives--three generations of my family, from my mother to my children--and half again as many reporters.
And so now here I stood. I'd chosen not to make my announcement from the Senate Caucus Room in Washington, where both Jack and Bobby had delivered theirs. This setting symbolized my wish to be understood not as the third Kennedy brother in a line of succession, but as a candidate entirely of my own volition and purposes.
My announcement speech was brief, just a little over fifteen minutes. Emphasizing my strong antipathy toward Carter's view of a weakened American spirit, I stressed my belief in the hope and daring that had made the country great, and cautioned against "the myth that we cannot move." At the conclusion, to warm applause, I embraced my family, who had joined me at the lectern. And then it was down to business. I hit the campaign trail at once.
Jimmy Carter was waiting for me. In fact, he had been cleverly using the power of the presidency to pick off my potential supporters before I even announced. His operatives canvassed work programs around the country that had received operational funding. They told the people in those programs they had to vote for Carter because he could guarantee their funding. They reached out to mayors and local leaders in these towns and cities that were important electorally. They asked these people, "What do you need? What are you asking for?"
When I was in Washington just after I announced, the Illinois congressman Dan Rostenkowski came over and said, "We're going to do the same for you in Chicago that we did for John Kennedy. You can relax. You can depend on me to do it." About ten days later, at a gathering of Democratic congressional leaders at the White House, I spotted Rostenkowski. It seemed that he was avoiding me. I called him up the next day, but I couldn't get him. Four days later, he announced for Carter, who had pushed through funding for Chicago's transit system.
Some of the other supporters I was counting on were simply missing in action. At Eunice's Special Olympics in New York State, Pat Moynihan had made a big point of pulling me over and saying I had to run. He'd said he'd do anything for me. In a New York meeting, Hugh Carey had said the same thing: I had to run. He'd do anything for me. But once my campaign got started, I never heard from either of them again.
Then my campaign funding took a serious hit after my defeat in the Iowa caucuses. On January 21, 1980, in our first head-to-head contest, Jimmy Carter won the caucuses by an unexpected two-to-one margin.
Iowa was a learning experience for me as a grassroots campaigner. Unfortunately, the lessons I learned came too late.
The sluggish start that I mentioned showed up in the initial fuzziness of my message, but it hurt in other ways as well. We were slow in organizing, and the campaign had a jump-start feel in the early weeks. My campaign manager and close friend Steve Smith worked capably, but he was burdened by angst about my safety and the question of adequate security. We were not quick to realize how the hostage crisis had changed the whole electoral atmosphere and strengthened support for the president.
My nephew Joe Kennedy II, later elected as a congressman from Massachusetts, saw the debacle coming. He was the one person on my team who sensed that Iowa was going to be a bigger-than-life state, and that it was not in my pocket despite the good poll numbers. After he visited there he told us, "This is not a caucus. This is a primary state. There's so much activity and involvement."
No one really paid sufficient attention to him. We did Iowa the oldfashioned way, from the top down: we located the state's local Democratic leaders who were leaning toward us and counted on them to turn out the voters on caucus night. I made a strenuous tour of the towns, hitting many of them two, even three times. I noticed that the turnouts were not gigantic--quite small in some cases--but attributed that to the thin population.
On the evening of January 21, we counted more Democrats in our column than had shown up in either of the previous two presidential races. I looked at the numbers and said, "I'm going to win this thing. I'm going to win it."
I didn't win it. We'd misread that surge of Democrats who favored me. They were a minority faction in one of the largest turnouts in Iowa history, more than a hundred thousand people. And most of them declared for Carter, by a margin of roughly 60 percent to 30.
I could not believe it at first. I had campaigned with everything I had. I'd visited Iowa's cities and towns again and again--Ottumwa, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Council Bluffs. What had gone wrong?
I finally got the answer from Harold Hughes, the former governor and senator from the state. Hughes was a supporter, but other obligations had kept him away from my campaign. "I'll tell you why you lost," Hughes said. "The reason was, you'd arrive in one of these little towns, and there'd be a hundred people waiting for you at the church or the meeting hall. But you'd bring twenty Secret Service agents with you, and they would be pushing people around, telling them to sit over there. And then there would be thirty TV cameras.
"Now, when I campaigned in Iowa," Hughes went on, "I would drive into, say, Ames myself, at the wheel of a car or a pickup truck. I'd get out, and I'd go into the meeting hall by myself, and I'd shake everybody's hand and tell them my name. Then I'd write their names down. And after my talk I would go back to the motel, and I'd take that list of names out, and I'd write a note to everyone on it. That's what you have to do when you campaign in Iowa."
Hughes's folksy approach made sense to me. Unfortunately in my case, it was an impossibility. The Secret Service agents and the mass of TV people were following me around, on the assumption that I was a marked man. And so the heavy Secret Service was assigned. And the television crews were along to preserve it for posterity should it happen.
Was I worried about my physical safety? I suppose so. But I never brooded about it. I could not live my life dwelling on that kind of thing. Threatening letters are regularly sent to my office. We deal with them in a professional way, but I don't read them. I choose not even to know about them unless absolutely necessary. I've decided that I would not live out my life in fear of the shadows.
I flew back home from Iowa to McLean, where I listened to the results. When it became clear that Carter had carried the caucuses, I braced myself for a very unhappy duty. I knew I had to call my mother and tell her the bad news, that I was the first Kennedy who had lost an election. Her voice came on the phone, and I broke it to her as gently as I could. And I received one of Rose Kennedy's priceless, endearing reality checks.
"Oh, that's all right, Teddy dear," she replied. "I'm sure you'll work hard and it'll get better."
And then: "Teddy, do you know that nice blue sweater I gave you at Christmastime? Do you remember that?" I said I remembered it, yes. It was a turtleneck, and it had a small pocket on the front. It had been made in France.
"Have you worn it?" I said, "Well, I'm not sure that I've worn it." She said, "Is there something special about it? Because I just got the bill for it, and it was two hundred and twenty dollars. Will you check it out, Teddy? And if you haven't worn it, will you send it back, because I've got another blue one here that I think is just as nice and is not nearly as expensive."
By the next morning, I was ready to go into battle again. I was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University in less than a week, on January 28. I decided that if people were waiting for a strong message, they were going to hear it that night. No more fumbling or fuzziness.
From my opening words that night at Georgetown, I took the fight directly to Jimmy Carter. Specifically, I assailed what I saw as the futile stridency in the "Carter Doctrine" that he'd unveiled five days earlier, in his State of the Union address. The doctrine was a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, which had triggered shock and anxiety throughout the free world.
Citing Carter's remark that he was "surprised" by the Soviets' strike, I pointed to the warning signals that the president had missed: the obvious Russian buildup of forces, and the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan while Soviet military advisers looked on.
I drew attention to the hostage crisis in Iran. The Muslim students' detaining of American diplomats there, in retaliation for the U.S. admission of the deposed shah for medical treatment, was in its eighty-sixth day. "This is a crisis that never should have happened," I told the audience, because the administration had been warned of exactly this response to allowing the hated shah inside our borders. "The president considered those warnings and rejected them in secret."
Expanding from there, I rebuked the president for his failure to resolve a number of issues affecting ordinary Americans as he groped for a coherent foreign policy: rising inflation, unemployment, and energy prices. I called for gasoline rationing and for freezes, followed by controls, on prices, wages, profits, dividends, interest rates, and rents.
"Today," I concluded, "I reaffirm my candidacy for president of the United States. I intend to stay the course. I believe we must not permit the dream of social progress to be shattered by those whose promises have failed."
Press reaction in the following days ratified my sense that the speech had infused my campaign with the snap and focus it had so far lacked. "He gave some real reasons for running, based on issues," Anthony Lewis declared in the New York Times of January 31. "And he sounded like a man who wanted to run."
Contrary to all doubts that might have arisen at the time or since, I did want to run. I did want to be president. The bad news, though, was that the campaign coffers were running on empty. We were nearly broke. The big money began to fade away after the Iowa caucuses.
There were some on my team who wanted it to end. My two hundred campaign aides had worked without pay since mid-January, but pay was not the issue for them. They were willing to continue, and did. Their concerns were not for themselves, but for my political future.
I can remember Steve Smith telling me on that night, "Look, no money now. We're in debt. If you get out now, no one will really blame you. You took a crack. Your career is still intact. If you go back to the Senate, it's not a real blemish on your record. But if you stay in... I have the poll here from Massachusetts. You're getting beaten by twenty-five points in your home state. If Carter beats you in Massachusetts, your career is gone. Finished. That's what you're looking at. You have no money, and I don't know what's going to turn this thing around."
That was a very tough conversation. I remember walking around outside for a while after Steve spoke his mind. I'd told him, "I think I'll just wait a couple of days before I make my mind up." After a couple days, I said, "I'm staying in it."
My reasons were not complicated. I genuinely cared about the issues I was running on, and I knew that my team did as well. I felt we could get traction with our message and win some of the upcoming primaries and keep faith with our supporters around the country.
There was hardly any shortage of issues to care about in that year: health care, the economy, foreign policy. One frustrating problem in propounding my stand on these issues was simply being heard. I competed for airtime (and often lost) on the evening news with the Iran hostage crisis and then the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Some in the press continued to raise the issue of Chappaquiddick.
We won some. We lost some. We won some more.
We were in constant need of funds, but delighted with creative sources. Politically engaged artists created lithographs for us to sell on behalf of the campaign. James Rosenquist. Jamie Wyeth. Andy Warhol. Bob Rauschenberg. These artists probably raised a couple of million dollars for us. They kept us going.
As the weeks and months went on, I was able to refine my message in interviews and speeches, yet that did not neutralize the media obstacles to getting that message out on a daily basis. Several times, I challenged Carter to a public debate. In late May I even offered to drop out of the race and release my delegates if the president would debate me before the convention. Carter and his people deflected these offers, perhaps finding it impossible to believe that I would leave the race if my beliefs for the party received an adequate hearing.
We broke new ground in campaigning openly for gay rights. Toward the end of the campaign, I was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser at the Hollywood Hills home of a couple named Clyde Cairns and John Carlson. As my entourage made its way toward the party, someone informed me that it had been declared off-limits to the news media. I asked all the cars in the caravan to stop while my staff phoned up news outlets in the city and invited them to come along. We were overwhelmed by TV cameras. No major-party candidate had ever appeared at a fund-raiser organized by gay supporters.
I opened up a question-and-answer session at the event, and the complexity of some of the questions really fascinated me. One person wanted to know whether a partner from another country without legal status to remain in the United States would face deportation. Others raised fairness issues about the tax code and health care. I did a lot more listening than answering that night, and left with greater awareness of issues lawmakers were not yet confronting.
I met with Carter at the White House on June 5, to discuss the campaign and a way that we might go forward. We sat opposite each other in front of the fireplace, with a vase of flowers between us.
I tried to set a formal tone. I told him I certainly understood that, mathematically, I didn't have the delegates to win the nomination. But I felt that I was representing the concerns of millions of Americans who deserved to have their voices heard. The president had ducked debating me for the entire primary season, and as a result the people in our own party had been deprived of a give-and-take on the issues that mattered to them. I said that I was concerned about the economic issues facing our country and wanted to have a public dialogue with him about them. I also said that I was in the process of making decisions about how I was going to proceed in the next few weeks as we moved toward the convention, and that what I was most interested in was this dialogue. Finally, I told him that if we had a debate on economic issues and were able to make some progress through good-faith, constructive efforts on both our parts, then I would say that I would support the party's nominee.
It was a respectful exchange, about fifteen minutes. He listened to what I had to say, and raised only a few points of contention. After I told him that I was not interested in being divisive, he criticized the "harsh" tone of my campaign rhetoric and said he had never attacked me personally.
I responded, "Mr. President, those ads of yours aren't handling me with kid gloves."
At one point, he said, "You know, I too grew up in a family that was political, and we were very combative."
When I raised the prospect of a debate, Carter asserted that no incumbent had ever debated in the history of our country. Besides, he said, people understood our policy differences. Ultimately, his response was: You present your views to the platform committee. I'll present mine. And we'll stay in touch through our people. No debate.
As our conversation drew to a close, he asked me whether there was any part of the campaign I had enjoyed. I said it was least satisfactory when things were electronic, rather than person-to-person. He said he couldn't agree more.
The 1980 Democratic convention was set to begin on August 10 in New York. I maintained my candidacy through the convention, so that I could speak to the issues and address the delegates and the people I'd been fighting for. We had been on the trail for nine months, 100,000 miles, through forty states, and we were not victorious. But neither were we defeated.
Our cause, I declared, was the same as it had been since the days of Thomas Jefferson: the cause of the common man and the common woman. Our commitment had remained, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers."
I spoke out of a deep belief in the ideals of the Democratic Party, I went on, and in the potential of that party and of a president to make a difference. I offered the promise of the dignity of useful work to those who were idle in the cities and industries of America. I called for the reindustrialization of America. I asked for a resolution against the risk that prosperity be purchased by poisoning the air, the rivers, and the great natural resources of the continent. I affirmed the need to defeat inflation, reshape the unfair tax structure.
And finally, avowing that we cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society, I reaffirmed my stand for national health insurance: "We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level."
I congratulated President Carter on his victory, and voiced my confidence that the Democratic Party would reunite on the basis of Democratic principles. "And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith....
"For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
The delegates' response was warm and generous. NBC News said they were still cheering after forty-five minutes. I didn't know it was that long. But it was gratifying. Our message got through.
I returned for the final night of the convention to be on the stage after President Carter's speech. I reached the convention floor shortly after the speech ended, but a whole crowd of other Democrats were already there. The cheering after the speech had not gone as long as some had expected, so the platform was filling up earlier than anticipated. Tip O'Neill was right behind me, and behind him was the former party chairman Bob Strauss, and then Fritz and Joan Mondale, and party leaders of all kinds.
I shook the president's hand, and then Mrs. Carter's hand. I did not elevate his hand, and he made no effort to elevate mine. But then the press began to point out that I had not elevated Jimmy's hand, and that became a sore spot that has lasted, I suppose, to this day.
I thought that what we did on the podium was proper enough. Had he made an effort to raise our hands together I certainly would not have resisted. It just wasn't a big deal--certainly it wasn't as if we'd just gone fifteen rounds in the ring for a heavyweight championship.
President Carter continues to believe that I weakened him for the general election and caused him to lose the presidency to Ronald Reagan. In fact, he makes a point of saying so frequently, especially when he speaks in Boston. But I'm not really sure he needed any help from me.
Carter's approval rating in the summer of 1979--before his "malaise" speech--was 25 percent lower than Richard Nixon's after Watergate. The nation was suffering through an energy crisis and double-digit inflation. The American people were looking for new leadership. And Ronald Reagan was capturing the imagination of the American people with his sunny optimism. Having said that, President Carter was still quite successful against me. His political strategy worked. And my improvement in the closing weeks was too little too late.
What would have happened had I gained the nomination?
Frankly, I don't know that I could have beaten Ronald Reagan. He was more than a candidate at that time; he was a movement.
After the election, I phoned President Carter on December 15, as his administration was nearing its end. He asked me if I was looking forward to the new administration.
I answered, "Not one day sooner than they take office."
He said he would be staying in the White House until the last possible day. (There had been reports that Mrs. Reagan had suggested the Carters should vacate the residence prior to January 20, 1980.)
I thanked him for nominating the former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, Stephen Breyer, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The president said he didn't know Breyer personally but had heard a lot of good things about him.
It wasn't a long conversation. He asked me about Reagan's cabinet nominees, and I said they would not be subject to much dispute, except, possibly, Alexander Haig. We also talked about the status of fair housing legislation. And skiing. (We both had trips planned for the holidays.)
Then we wished each other a Merry Christmas and said we hoped to stay in touch.