The Kennedy Half-Century (65 page)

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In the previous century only two presidents have had a shorter tenure of office than JFK’s two years and ten months. Warren Harding served about two years and five months before dying on August 2, 1923, while Gerald Ford occupied the Oval Office for about two years and six months, beginning August 9, 1974.

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Church ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976.

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The Carters and the Kennedys: Democratic Hatfields and McCoys

Not long after John Kennedy’s assassination, Democrats almost everywhere began to assume that at some point there would be a “Kennedy restoration”—another Kennedy in the White House. Bobby was the natural successor, but after his murder, all eyes turned to Edward. However, in 1968, while in mourning, and in 1972, following Chappaquiddick, Ted declined to run, much to the delight of Richard Nixon. To the surprise of many, burdened by family responsibilities, scandal’s hangover, and probably concern for his own safety, Teddy refused to run in 1976, too. This was Kennedy’s great missed opportunity to be president. While Chappaquiddick would still have been a considerable impediment for him, Richard Nixon’s fall, a bad economy, and a weak, appointed GOP president might have given him enough openings to win.

Instead, a little-known former one-term governor of Georgia burst onto the scene with narrow wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, and before anyone knew all that much about him, Jimmy Carter was the Democratic candidate for president and the favorite to win in November. Carter’s amazing rise was a product of the public’s intense desire to find someone who was untainted by scandal and unfamiliar with the sordid ways of Washington. In that sense, Carter represented a clean break with the past.

Carter could not be called the inheritor of the JFK mantle in any tangible sense. If anything, the election of a man from the South recalled Lyndon Johnson, and the outcome contradicted the widespread expectation since Kennedy’s assassination that somehow, some way, the next Democratic president would reinstate and continue what had been lost on November 22, 1963. Perhaps Carter’s inability to fill the bill made his conflict with the Kennedys inevitable. Unavoidable or not, it came, and helped to destroy the Carter White House in time.

Carter’s one true—if slight—connection to John Kennedy was through his
mother, Lillian. She had been an alternate delegate to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and brought home the very emotional story of RFK’s tribute to his assassinated brother. “My mother was very deeply committed to the Kennedys, much more than I was, I have to say,” Carter told me during a recent interview. “My favorite president in my lifetime was Truman.” At age sixty-eight, “Miss Lillian,” as she was known, joined JFK’s Peace Corps and spent two years in a small village in India between 1966 and 1968. And as preposterous as it sounds today, the younger Jimmy Carter had often been compared to John Kennedy.
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From certain angles there was a slight resemblance in hair, face, and smile, and a practiced gesture or two, which Carter and his supporters were more than happy to emphasize. Nothing has changed since; most Democrats who have run for president in the past half century have tried to evoke Kennedy comparisons.

Astonishingly, Carter had never even met a Democratic president when he was elected, and he felt no real obligation to defend their administrations. Carter put distance between himself and the immediate past president from his party, the still-unpopular Johnson—which necessitated a call of apology to his widow, Lady Bird Johnson (Carter was quoted in
Playboy
as saying, “I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did—lying, cheating and distorting the truth …”).
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By contrast, Carter was more willing to embrace John Kennedy. Despite recent revelations about his private life, Kennedy retained the affections of much of the public. More important, JFK’s story met Carter’s political needs in 1976. Many of the attacks on Carter were reminiscent of those on Kennedy, such as those centered on religion. Carter’s fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity was as alien to many Americans in 1976 as Catholicism had been for most Protestants in 1960. Given the JFK precedent, and the arguments Catholics made during the Kennedy-Nixon contest, it was a special irony that Catholics appeared especially suspicious of the Baptist Carter. In attempting to assuage Catholics, Carter cited Kennedy’s campaign address to the Protestant ministers in Houston. Speaking to a meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities in early October 1976, Carter said Kennedy’s prediction that one day a Jew or a Baptist would also be questioned because of his faith “has come to pass. I welcome the scrutiny, and I have not the slightest doubt that this year, once again, our national tradition of tolerance and fairness will prevail …”
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Carter also invoked President Kennedy to rebut the “inexperience” charge, reminding voters that JFK was viewed as not ready for the presidency and insufficiently trained in senior office. Like Kennedy in 1960, Carter was relatively young (fifty-two), and eleven years younger than President Ford. From his acceptance address at the Democratic National Convention to stump
speeches around the nation, Carter echoed Kennedy’s call to “get the nation moving again.”
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In addition, Carter used Kennedy to ease the concerns of Northern liberals about electing a Southerner from a state with a troubling history on race. Carter’s predecessor as governor had been the segregationist clown Lester Maddox, who won election in 1966 mainly on the strength of barring African Americans from his chicken restaurant.
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So Carter reminded audiences around the country that Georgia had provided an even larger percentage of the vote for Kennedy than Massachusetts (62.5 percent, more than two points higher than the Bay State). Of course, this was due to Georgia’s diehard, post–Civil War devotion to the Democratic Party, not a love for JFK. The Democratic streak in the Peach State ended in 1964, when Georgia became one of only six states to choose Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson.

Even as he was praising John Kennedy and using him for his own purposes, Jimmy Carter was clashing with other Kennedys. One of Carter’s opponents for the Democratic nomination was JFK’s brother-in-law R. Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps. Shriver naturally claimed the Kennedy mantle when announcing on September 20, 1975.
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Surrounded by Kennedy relatives, Shriver invoked JFK’s legacy and made clear that, with Ted Kennedy out of the race, he was the closest thing to a Kennedy in the ring. There were no memorable confrontations with Carter, though, since Shriver’s bid was as uninspiring as it was brief. Shriver garnered only 8 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and he was quickly out of the contest.
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There were other “Kennedy moments” during the 1976 campaign. Jackie Kennedy, who had avoided most overtly political events since Robert Kennedy’s assassination, made an appearance at the Democratic National Convention, not to give a speech but simply to sit in the VIP section. Bedlam ensued, and practically the entire convention assemblage, on the floor and the bleachers, moved as one thunderstruck herd in her direction.
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An early indication of the friction that would define Carter’s relationship with Senator Edward Kennedy emerged. Perhaps feeling a bit of replacement envy, Kennedy charged Carter with being “intentionally … indefinite and imprecise” on a host of issues.
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Carter responded by asserting that he “didn’t have to kowtow to anyone” to get the Democratic presidential nomination. Carter also all but admitted that he had used some salty language privately in rebutting Ted Kennedy: “I don’t have to kiss his ass.”
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Senator Kennedy no doubt remembered that exchange. He may also have taken note of the occasional odd statement by Carter about President Kennedy. For instance, in a widely publicized July 1976 interview in the
Atlantic Monthly
, Carter made this comment: “I can see in retrospect what President Kennedy meant to the deprived people
in this country and abroad … He never really did that much for them, but he made them think he cared.”
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The Kennedy clan was not the sort to let an insult pass without eventual retribution.

Meanwhile, Carter found John Kennedy helpful in yet another critical way. He studied the 1960 debate tapes for tips to use in his four encounters with President Ford.
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Ford carefully reviewed the JFK-Nixon face-offs, too. After all, these were the only presidential debates in American history up to that time, and the precedent had led Ford and Carter to their own debate pact. The relatively green Carter needed to show he could endure high-pressured scrutiny and stand toe to toe with the incumbent, and Ford was desperate to regain some ground after every poll showed him well behind Carter after Labor Day.
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Contemporaneous notes and reports indicate that both men studied the gestures, facial expressions, and other visual cues of the 1960 candidates closely.
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The lesson of Kennedy’s debate triumph—achieved as much by style as substance—had not been lost in the ensuing sixteen years. Meanwhile, Nixon still served as an example of what not to do.

Just as JFK would not have been elected without his face-offs with Nixon, Jimmy Carter might well have lost his close battle with Ford had it not been for the incumbent president’s “free Poland” gaffe in a mid-October debate. Thanks to an improved economy and fading memories of the Nixon pardon, Ford had been gaining steadily on Carter, but his mistake in appearing to suggest the Soviet Union did not control Eastern Europe derailed the Republican’s momentum. Ford’s own polling showed how badly the mistake, and his refusal to clarify it quickly, cost him.
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Some observers believed that if the campaign had been a week or so longer, Ford would have had time to recover fully and surpass Carter, at least in the Electoral College.

Like John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter gained the White House on a thin mandate. On November 2, 1976, Carter was elected with just 50.2 percent of the national vote and a close Electoral College margin of 297–240 over President Ford. His majority was built on a sweep of the South (save Virginia) plus all the Dixie Border States except Oklahoma. Twenty states were decided by five percentage points or less—the hallmark of a highly competitive, truly national contest.
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What had seemed an easy prospective victory in the summer became a nail-biter in the fall, and Carter recognized he had not done as well as he had hoped or expected. When Mississippi finally fell into his column and put him over the top in the wee hours of election night, Carter pledged to be a better president than he had been a candidate.
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Almost all Democrats in the House and most in the Senate had won easily,
far outpacing Carter’s vote totals, and so they felt no special obligation to the new president they barely knew.
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Despite a long campaign, Carter was nearly unknown to Washington when he arrived to take the oath of office in January 1977. He would need the help of longtime Capitol Hill power brokers, including Ted Kennedy, to succeed, but more often than not, Carter did not receive the assistance—or failed to ask in time-honored Washington ways. The thirty-ninth president didn’t enjoy after-hours schmoozing with legislative barons, and even worse, he thought of the U.S. Congress as a national version of the part-time Georgia legislature. As Carter would learn to his dismay, he could not dictate even to a heavily Democratic Congress, especially when he was a stranger in their midst. Many members of Congress, including Ted Kennedy, were much more liberal than Carter and, now that Democrats again ruled the roost in Washington, they were determined to extend the New Deal and Great Society in ways that a budget-balancing Carter disliked. The seeds of conflict were sown even before Carter had unpacked his bags.

Little of this was apparent on January 20, 1977, as Carter began his presidency in a moment of hope and good feelings, but also amid stark national limitations that did not seem evident at John Kennedy’s inauguration sixteen years earlier. JFK’s boldness and high-flying rhetoric at a time when the United States was utterly preeminent in the world were replaced by Carter’s subdued delivery, his modest goals of governmental competence and simple ethics, and the admonition that “we cannot afford to do everything.”
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Vietnam, Watergate, oil shocks, and inflation had humbled America and the presidency itself. The most memorable part of the day was not Carter’s address but his open walk with the entire Carter family from the Capitol all the way to the White House—a decision that worried, indeed horrified, the Secret Service.
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Once he reached the Oval Office for the first time as president, Carter was surprised to find that the desk was not the one he had seen in pictures from John Kennedy’s time. In his memoirs, Carter recalled that his first decision as chief executive was to restore the Kennedy era’s “Resolute desk,” the nineteenth-century gift from Queen Victoria to America; it was stored at the Smithsonian but was quickly brought to the White House.
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President Carter’s White House staff was dominated by his “Georgia Mafia,” including campaign aides Hamilton Jordan (appointed chief of staff) and Jody Powell (press secretary). Yet the new Democratic president also needed experienced hands, and he relied on at least a few recycled appointees from the Kennedy years. JFK’s secretary of the Army, Cyrus Vance, became Carter’s secretary of state, for example, and Harold Brown, who held a
middle-rank post in Kennedy’s Defense Department, became Carter’s secretary of defense. Probably the best known of the Kennedy aides tapped by Carter was the JFK counselor and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, designated now to be director of the CIA. Alas, this appointment was not to be.