The Kennedy Half-Century (66 page)

Sorensen had backed Carter and helped to smooth tensions with liberals, and Carter was clearly grateful. But prior to confirmation, it was revealed that Sorensen had registered for the military draft as a conscientious objector who would serve only in a noncombat role. Another charge was that he had removed classified papers from the White House at the end of the Kennedy administration. Carter quickly withdrew the nomination,
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a decision that still rankled Sorensen more than three decades later: “Do not exaggerate [Carter’s] admiration of me, inasmuch as he pulled the rug out from under me soon after appointing me …”
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With these few exceptions, though, Jimmy Carter’s time in the White House marked a considerable change from the struggles that had gripped JFK and his three immediate successors. America seemed ready for a blank slate, and the nation appeared determined to move on. Events, however, tugged the nation backward. A persistent energy crisis that began in the Nixon-Ford years deepened and dragged the economy lower. The Watergate-inspired end to the imperial presidency kept Carter on a shorter leash than his predecessors, and he was stripped of some of the majesty of the executive office. After the multitude of Nixon scandals, Carter had to be very sensitive to any appointee’s behavior that could be construed as unethical. In addition, the Vietnam hangover made Americans wary of any attempt by Carter to take military action and commit the country to prolonged involvement abroad. If not real isolationism, the public’s sentiment was akin to fear of flying after a rough crash landing. Most citizens had had their fill both of the world and of politicians, and were far less inclined to “ask what they could do for their country.”

At first Carter believed that a large Democratic Senate majority would help speed his programs to passage. But he hadn’t counted on the determined opposition of Ted Kennedy as his term wore on. “The first year that I was in office Kennedy had the best voting record of any member of the House or Senate in supporting my proposals,” Carter recalled. In time, however, Kennedy began derailing bills that had originated in the Oval Office—even some he mostly agreed with in principle. President Carter cited Medicare as a major example. “The last two years I was in office he was always opposing anything I did, even including comprehensive health care. He blocked my effort to apply Medicare to all ages step-by-step, which would have been, and still is, the best approach to comprehensive medical care. I had the money to move Medicare to cover not only old people, but also the first number of years of life, like [ages] one to five, and then I had a step-by-step proposal to cover
every age group in the nation. It was a very good program and we had the money to do it then. But he blocked it and he was powerful enough that his opposition prevailed.” President Carter didn’t sugarcoat his view of his erstwhile foe from Massachusetts: “Ted Kennedy was a pain in my ass the last two years I was in office—the worst problem I had [during] the last two years.”
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Kennedy’s obstructionism notwithstanding, Carter’s personal failures, such as an uninspiring oratorical style, the inability to deal successfully with Congress on many big agenda items, and his devotion to minutiae in the Oval Office (including assigning use of the White House tennis courts), did not help his presidency. But mainly Carter was overcome by events that spun far out of his control, from high inflation, interest rates, and unemployment to the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter appeared incapable of dealing with these problems, and the United States took on the image once more of the pitiful, helpless giant. Jimmy Carter was vulnerable in 1980, and politicians in both parties sensed it.

Into the breach stepped Ted Kennedy. After having refused to run for president in the three previous elections, he startled the political world by announcing his candidacy on November 7, 1979. It was easy to see why Kennedy made the race: Most liberals and labor unions were clamoring for him to oust Carter, and virtually every national poll for a year or so had shown Kennedy defeating Carter handily, often by as much as two to one.
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President Carter’s popularity had fallen into the twenties, and he was widely seen as an ineffective leader. By August 1979 Kennedy had made the decision to challenge Carter, and some Democrats made the incorrect assumption that it was all over but the shouting. Instead, a feisty Carter focused again on Ted Kennedy’s posterior. Having asserted in 1976 that he did not have to kiss Kennedy’s ass to become president, Carter now said privately (at a White House breakfast with some Democratic members of Congress) that he would “whip his ass.” “When I went to Alaska, the governor gave me a whip,” Carter remembered with a chuckle.
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The president proceeded to do just that in a difficult primary campaign. The personal antagonism between Carter and Kennedy would grow to the point where it directly contributed to Carter’s landslide defeat in the fall of 1980. As Carter harshly sized it up, he was running against someone who “felt entitled to be president because of the tragic legacy of his brothers” but had done little to earn the office on his own.
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After a lunch with Vice President Walter Mondale, Carter wrote down his view of Ted Kennedy in a diary: “As a student he was kicked out of college; he’s my age but unsuccessful; as majority
whip in the Senate, he was defeated after his first term; his preoccupation [is] with national health insurance while never able to get the bill out of his own subcommittee in twelve years …”
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A special moment intervened before the battle commenced, an opportunity for President Carter to use his shared office with John Kennedy to draw distinctions with Ted—and perhaps to assert why the incumbent was a more fitting White House occupant than JFK’s brother. On October 20, 1979, the John F. Kennedy Library was dedicated in Boston, and as tradition dictates at these occasions, the sitting president was the main orator. In rare form, Jimmy Carter rose to the rhetorical challenge in front of a strongly pro-Edward Kennedy assemblage. Every inch the president, he gave a moving address. Carter first tweaked Ted with the words of Jack, to the loud laughter of the gathered dignitaries, including Ted:

In a press conference in March 1962, when the ravages of being president were beginning to show on his face, he was asked this two-part question: “Mr. President, your brother Ted said recently on television that after seeing the cares of office on you, he wasn’t sure he would ever be interested in being president.” And the questioner continued, “I wonder if you could tell us whether, first, if you had it to do over again, you would work for the presidency and, second, whether you can recommend this job to others?” The president replied, “Well, the answer to the first question is yes, and the second is no. I do not recommend it to others—at least for a while.” As you can well see, President Kennedy’s wit and also his wisdom is certainly as relevant today as it was then.
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Carter skillfully wove together Kennedy’s great goals of civil rights at home and peace abroad with his own emphasis on human rights and arms control. He also pointed out the main difference created by the energy crisis, economic scarcity, and the public reaction to Vietnam: America could no longer do whatever it wanted, and the nation’s president had far less maneuverability than in John Kennedy’s time. The abundant resources and optimistic national character that defined JFK’s years were absent in the 1970s. Perhaps again with Ted in mind, Carter insisted, “The world of 1980 is as different from what it was in 1960 as the world of 1960 was from that of 1940.” Carter continued,

But … the essence of President Kennedy’s message—the appeal for unselfish dedication to the common good—is more urgent than it ever was. The spirit that he evoked—the spirit of sacrifice, of patriotism, of unstinting dedication—is the same spirit that will bring us safely through the adversities that we face today. The overarching purpose of this nation remains the same: to build a just society in a secure America living at peace with the other nations of the world.
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The crowd was hushed as the usually unemotional Carter told an intimate story about November 22, 1963:

On that November day, almost sixteen years ago, a terrible moment was frozen in the lives of many of us here. I remember that I climbed down from the seat of a tractor, unhooked a farm trailer, and walked into my warehouse to weigh a load of grain. I was told by a group of farmers that the president had been shot. I went outside, knelt on the steps, and began to pray. In a few minutes, I learned that he had not lived. It was a grievous personal loss—my president. I wept openly for the first time in more than ten years—for the first time since the day my own father died. People wept in Boston and in Paris, in Atlanta and in Warsaw, in San Francisco and in New Delhi. More than anyone had realized before that day, the spirit of this young American president had taken hold of the hearts and the imaginations of countless millions of people all over the world.

At the time, the tragedy in Dallas seemed an isolated convulsion of madness. But in retrospect, it appears near the beginning of a time of darkness. From Vietnam to Cambodia, from Los Angeles to Memphis, from Kent State to Watergate, the American spirit suffered under one shock after another, and the confidence of our people was deeply shaken.
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Had Carter been this eloquent regularly, had he more often explained the forces shaping the United States and the globe persuasively, his presidency might have thrived to a much greater degree, with or without the opposition of Ted Kennedy.

Even at this intentionally unifying event, there were overt signs of the Carter-Kennedy feud. “I remember when I went to the Kennedy library, it was my Southern custom that when I met a woman, I went to kiss her on the cheek,” President Carter observed. But when he reached out to Jackie in that way, “She flinched away from me. And that may have been because of the women’s liberation movement or something like that. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but one of the
Washington Post
reporters wrote an article about it. And one of Robert Kennedy’s sons, before I spoke, had some fairly negative things to say
about me. But I was president, I just grinned and ignored it. I felt that maybe I didn’t need to respond to that.”
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Edward Moore Kennedy formally announced for president in Boston’s Faneuil Hall on November 7, but he had damaged himself a few days earlier in an interview on CBS with the journalist and Kennedy family friend Roger Mudd, when the senator could not seem to answer in a coherent fashion a simple question: “Why do you want to be president?”
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Nonetheless, Kennedy came galloping out of the gate when he attacked Carter’s leadership in his announcement: “For many months we have been sinking into crisis. Yet, we hear no clear summons from the center of power. Aims are not set; the means of realizing them are neglected. Conflicts in directions confuse our purpose. Government falters. Fears spread that our leaders have resigned themselves to retreat. This country is not prepared to sound retreat. It is ready to advance. It is willing to make a stand. And so am I.” Kennedy’s candidacy launch was given massive coverage, as would be expected, but—perhaps anticipating an eventual showdown with Carter—reporters had swarmed Kennedy’s public events for much of the president’s term. “He became an almost constant problem for me,” Carter noted. “Every time Kennedy spoke he got more coverage than I did as president. You know, the Kennedy family had [broad] access to the news media, and still does, as a matter of fact.”
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Yet despite a lifetime of political experience, Kennedy had forgotten that a candidate looks best before he becomes a formal contender; the above-the-fray statesman being pursued by partisan admirers who hope he will run is always superior to the grubby politician lusting after high office while soliciting votes in the trenches. Ted Kennedy was also well to the left of an American electorate growing more conservative in the late 1970s. This gave Carter the opportunity to claim that he, not Ted, was the true inheritor of John Kennedy’s moderate-conservative political philosophy, which included fiscal responsibility and a strong defense. While Carter acknowledged Ted was “blood kin” to Jack, he asserted that, based on critical issues facing America, “I feel a very close kinship with President Kennedy also.” As Carter put it, in retrospect, “There’s no doubt that John Kennedy was more [of a] pragmatist than Ted Kennedy. I think Ted was more of a pure liberal. I was very conservative on improving the military and on balancing the budget. But I was deeply committed to human rights, so I had kind of a mixture. So I was much more compatible with John Kennedy’s basic philosophy than Ted’s.”
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Carter supporters and many news organizations were soon reviewing the unflattering story of Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. The character issue generated by Chappaquiddick and many whispered reports of Kennedy’s extramarital activities would follow the candidate every day of the campaign, just as he had always feared. And passions ran so high
that the Secret Service took extraordinary precautions to try to preserve Kennedy’s life. A pair of bulletproof vests—one built into a raincoat and the other constructed as an undergarment—became a frequent part of Kennedy’s wardrobe, especially in parades.
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While Kennedy remained safe, his candidacy was mortally wounded by an event no one could have foreseen. Just three days before Kennedy announced, American hostages were taken in Tehran. Few understood at the time how this would work against Kennedy, in combination with the late-December Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The twin foreign crises gave Carter the excuse to run a presidential “Rose Garden” campaign, as he ignored Kennedy’s attacks and created nonpartisan headlines with regular White House briefings about vital international concerns. In the first months, as is usually the case, the public rallied around the commander in chief while he focused on battling foreign enemies, not Ted Kennedy. The weekly “death to Carter” rallies in Iran had the unintended effect of elevating a previously unpopular president.