The Kennedy Half-Century (67 page)

Sure enough, Carter rode the Rose Garden wave through Iowa in January, where the caucuses gave Carter a landslide 59 percent victory, and New Hampshire in February, where Carter defeated Kennedy 47 to 37 percent in a state next door to Massachusetts. Carter proceeded to sweep the South in March and even won critical Illinois, where Kennedy once seemed to have had a large edge, by 65 to 30 percent on March 18. Early on, it appeared that Kennedy had failed and Carter would be renominated—a realization that conversely freed up Democrats to express their underlying unhappiness with the president. On March 25, aided by Jewish support generated by a Carter administration vote in the United Nations against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Kennedy shocked Carter by capturing New York, 59 to 41 percent, and he won neighboring Connecticut as well. A small but significant Kennedy win in Pennsylvania followed in April. Even though Carter won almost all of the May primaries in friendlier territory, the season ended on a disastrous note for the president. On June 3 Ted Kennedy won California by 8 percentage points and New Jersey by 18, as well as New Mexico, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. Overall, Carter had garnered 9.6 million votes in the primary contests (51 percent of the total) to Kennedy’s almost 7 million (37 percent), and Carter had far more than the minimum number of delegates needed to secure the nomination, but the senator’s strong finish gave him the incentive to refuse to withdraw. Instead of quitting, Kennedy launched a new campaign to have the Democratic National Convention pass a rule to “unpledge” the delegates—that is, free them up to “vote their conscience” in an open convention.
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It was yet another nightmare for President Carter, an extension of the divisive internecine battle all the way to the edge of the general
election, with little time for the wounds to heal before he faced the Reagan challenge. The Republican had cleanly wrapped up his nomination in May, when his most serious challenger, former CIA director George H. W. Bush, gave way. Reagan had not completely reunited the GOP, but the party’s delight at President Carter’s continuing troubles—and its sense that victory was possible—kept dissension to a minimum.

This was hardly the only worry on Carter’s plate. The U.S. economy continued to exhibit severe weakness, and his efforts to free the hostages in Iran took a tragic turn.
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Convinced that the leaders of Iran were not seriously pursuing negotiations, Carter gave his approval to a secret April 1980 rescue mission. The well-trained troops never reached Tehran, though, because of a terrible helicopter accident in the Iranian desert, which killed eight men, aborted the mission, and gave a huge propaganda victory to the hostage takers.
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Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had become disenchanted with Carter and opposed the mission as reckless, resigned in protest.
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Discouraged by the disaster in the desert and understanding he needed to take responsibility, Carter asked press secretary Jody Powell to get him the speech President Kennedy had made after the Bay of Pigs invasion.
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In a press conference at the end of April, Carter delivered a statement not unlike that of JFK: “It was my responsibility as president to launch this mission. It was my responsibility to terminate the mission when it ended … There is a deeper failure than that of incomplete success, and that is the failure to attempt a worthy effort, a failure to try. This is a sentiment shared by the men who went on the mission.”
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Long afterward, Carter would say, when asked to name his regrets about his presidency, he most wished he had sent along an extra helicopter on the rescue mission. Whether that would have resulted in a successful hostage rescue will forever be unknown, but this incident, as much as any in Carter’s last year, solidified his image as that of a struggling leader whose bad luck or incompetence made solving the country’s deep-seated problems all but impossible.

Carter’s summer of misery culminated at the mid-August Democratic Convention in New York. What should have been a celebration of a hard-earned nomination instead became a soap opera about Ted Kennedy. The entire first day was devoted to the Kennedy effort to open up the convention, which was ultimately defeated. The convention’s second day was consumed by speculation about how Kennedy would handle the end of his campaign. That night, Kennedy gave his answer in a fiery speech; along with his 1968 eulogy of his brother Bobby, it may have been his best. Recounting his views of what the Democratic Party stood for, Kennedy mounted a rhetorical tour de force that concluded with these lines: “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.”
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The Kennedy delegates went wild, and the convention was at a standstill for a lengthy period. While Kennedy had run an ineffective campaign and had often been an inarticulate candidate, his final effort exceeded anything Carter could deliver in his acceptance address.

As expected, Carter’s speech at the convention’s conclusion was mainly forgettable. Worse, Kennedy decided to sulk about his defeat, and he put his pique on display that evening in an exceptionally damaging way. Having missed Carter’s address, Kennedy drove over from his hotel for the traditional end-of-convention love feast on stage, when all the party’s grandees, whatever their real feelings, are expected to join hands in victory salutes and give unity smiles to network cameras and voters at home. With balloons and confetti falling, Carter spied Kennedy on the platform and sought him out for the traditional raising of the arms. Embarrassingly, the incumbent president chased the vanquished challenger all over the stage but never got what he sought. TV anchormen detailed every humiliating second for the millions watching, as Carter’s convention finale flopped. Here is how Carter himself later described it: “Ostentatiously, Kennedy refused to shake my extended hand, and this became one of the main news stories from the convention … [A]fter much reflection, I have concluded that there is little I could have done to prevent Kennedy’s attempt to remove me from the political office that he considered his justifiable family heritage.” Carter confirmed this opinion during our 2013 conversation: “Ted Kennedy just felt that he should have been president, that he was the descendant of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and therefore he deserved to be president.”
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President Carter was never able to put the pieces of the Democratic coalition back together. Senator Kennedy campaigned for Carter and the Democratic ticket as the autumn wore on, and a “Carter-Kennedy Unity Celebration” was held in mid-October at which nice things were said and pleasant gestures were made. Just as at the JFK Library dedication a year earlier, Carter made John Kennedy one of the prime subjects of his address, in an attempt to woo Edward Kennedy and his followers. Carter even presented a watercolor of JFK, given to Carter by artist Jamie Wyeth during the 1976 campaign, as a gift for the JFK Library. But nothing could soften Kennedy’s negative view of the president. “After I got the nomination, I met with Ted Kennedy twice privately, to see what he wanted, what I could do to assuage him, how I could get him to support me,” Carter remembered. “And he was very cool toward me personally. He was determined, after he lost the nomination, that I would not be elected. I think Kennedy was very happy when Reagan was elected. Kennedy was very bitter toward me for the rest of his life.”
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The electoral damage done by Kennedy’s split with Carter was lasting.
Many Kennedy Democrats defected to Republican Reagan or the moderate independent candidate, Congressman John Anderson of Illinois, which partially explains Reagan’s carrying of Massachusetts and a host of normally liberal Northeastern and Midwestern states. Just 61 percent of Kennedy’s voters from the Democratic primaries stayed with the party and backed Carter in November. A remarkably high 28 percent cast a ballot for Reagan, and 11 percent voted for Anderson. Voting studies indicated that Anderson took votes from both Carter and Reagan, uniting some Democrats and Independents disappointed with the president’s performance as well as some Republicans who believed Reagan was too conservative. Overall, however, Anderson’s presence was probably more damaging to Carter; the independent often joined Reagan to double-team the incumbent, who seemed increasingly enfeebled.
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One question that can never be definitively answered is whether Ted Kennedy, America’s foremost liberal, was secretly pleased that his nemesis Carter, a moderate, lost to Reagan, the most conservative president in generations. In a 1980 diary entry, Carter puzzled about the truth of Kennedy’s intentions, asking, “We were uncertain about Kennedy’s ultimate goal. Was it to be elected himself, or did he just want to prevent my reelection?”
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While Kennedy fought Reagan’s programs and nominees with relish throughout the Californian’s White House years, aides of both men noted their warm personal relationship for most of that time.
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If the personal is the political, then we have our answer.

Whatever the truth about Ted Kennedy’s outlook, it is difficult to dispute that the Kennedys had played a role in the destruction of the two Democratic presidencies succeeding JFK. For Jimmy Carter, one nagging question remained: How did Ted Kennedy manage to block key Carter initiatives in the Senate? The president offered an intriguing theory, that Senator Kennedy had a private alliance with Democratic Majority Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia. “My impression is that Kennedy promised Bob Byrd that if he was elected president that he would appoint Byrd to the Supreme Court.”
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Both Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter came to be seen by the Kennedy clan as usurpers. Policy was ostensibly at the heart of the opposition provided by both Robert and Edward Kennedy to LBJ and Carter, yet some measure of jealousy and resentment may also have been motivations. The elite band of national players, certainly including the Kennedys, is not known for small egos and tiny vanities. That a Kennedy could help to end a Democratic presidency in 1980 was a measure of the continuing power of the name; that a Kennedy would once again fail to attain the highest office suggests the limitations of the family name. Perhaps an unintended consequence of John F. Kennedy’s large legacy in the popular imagination was that no other, lesser Kennedy seemed worthy of the White House.

In a comparative way, the manifest failures and deep unpopularity of the Carter presidency enhanced the memory of the Kennedy White House. Whereas Kennedy presided over a soaring, preeminent American economy, Carter represented a nation whose financial system could no longer produce the bounty of the 1960s. JFK scored a foreign policy triumph for the ages in the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Carter’s longest-lasting international episode was the humiliating Iran hostage saga. (The Panama Canal treaty and the Camp David peace between Israel and Egypt were Carter coups, but most Americans have to search their memories for them, while the wounds from Iran remain fresh thirty years later.)

John Kennedy’s rhetoric and policies inspired the people of his time and generations to come; despite many notable achievements, little of what Jimmy Carter did or said as president is remembered. Doom and gloom, and a weary, exhausted persona, came to define Carter in his time. Fortunately for Carter, his lengthy post-presidency, filled with humanitarian acts and global efforts to conquer disease and strengthen human rights, have added considerable luster to his record. In 2002 the former president received the Nobel Peace Prize. Partly, the award came to Carter because of his many peace-keeping and election-supervising missions abroad, which are often potentially perilous, putting him at greater risk than he felt he was as president. “I have had two or three threats to my life after I came home [to Georgia] from the White House. When I go on an overseas trip almost invariably, I get a report from the Secret Service that where I’m going is very dangerous,” Carter revealed. “And sometimes they ask me not to go, and I go anyway. They and I both just laugh about it. So I have been more concerned about my safety in doing the Carter Center’s business overseas than I ever was in the White House.”
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President Carter was the fourth arguably unsuccessful chief executive to follow JFK, and the combined calamities of LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter elevated Kennedy’s mainly successful tenure further. Could no one else get it right? Ronald Reagan would finally provide an answer that pleased most Americans. Few would have thought at the outset that a sixty-nine-year-old conservative Republican would eventually offer the closest approximation to Kennedy’s White House, but the conventional wisdom would be transformed during the 1980s.

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Compare this to the mere four states decided by 5 percent or less in the 2012 presidential contest between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

17
Reagan and Kennedy: Opposites Attract

At first glance, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan might appear to have had little in common other than the presidency. Democrat Kennedy was the youngest elected president and Republican Reagan the oldest. Kennedy came from inherited wealth, while Reagan grew up poor. Kennedy’s whole adult lifetime was devoted to politics, while Reagan had a long first career in Hollywood. Kennedy was a pragmatic, generic Democrat, while Reagan was the leader of an ideological crusade among conservatives to take control of the Republican Party.