It is a very alluring vision, and nobody understands this better than Jimmy Carter. The electorate feels a need to be cleansed, reassured, and revitalized. The underdogs of yesteryear have had their day, and they blew it. The radicals and reformers of the Sixties promised peace, but they turned out to be nothing but incompetent troublemakers. Their plans that had looked so fine on paper led to chaos and disaster when hack politicians tried to implement them. The promise of civil rights turned into the nightmare of busing. The call for law and order led straight to Watergate. And the long struggle between the Hawks and the Doves caused violence in the streets and a military disaster in Vietnam. Nobody won, in the end, and when the dust finally settled, “extremists” at both ends of the political spectrum were thoroughly discredited. And by the time the 1976 presidential campaign got under way, the high ground was all in the middle of the road.
Jimmy Carter understands this, and he has tailored his campaign image to fit the new mood almost perfectly . . . But back in May of ’74 when he flew up to Athens to make his “remarks” at the Law Day ceremonies, he was not as concerned with preserving his moderate image as he is now. He was thinking more about all the trouble he’d had with judges, lawyers, lobbyists, and other minions of the Georgia establishment while he was governor—and now, with only six more months in the office, he wanted to have a few words with these people.
There was not much anger in his voice when he started talking, but halfway through the speech it was too obvious for anybody in the room to ignore. But there was no way to cut him short, and he knew it. It was the anger in his voice that first caught my attention, I think, but what sent me back out to the trunk to get my tape recorder instead of another drink was the spectacle of a southern politician telling a crowd of southern judges and lawyers that “I’m not qualified to talk to you about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I’m an engineer and nuclear physicist, not a lawyer . . . But I read a lot and I listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equities is from Reinhold Niebuhr. The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. Listening to his records about ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.”
At first I wasn’t sure I was hearing him right, and I looked over at Jimmy King. “What the hell did I just hear?” I asked.
King smiled and looked at Paul Kirk, who leaned across the table and whispered, “He said his top two advisers are Bob Dylan and Reinhold Niebuhr.”
I nodded and got up to go outside for my tape recorder. I could tell by the rising anger in Carter’s voice that we were in for an interesting ride . . . And by the time I got back, he was whipping on the crowd about judges who took bribes in return for reduced prison sentences, lawyers who deliberately cheated illiterate blacks, and cops who abused people’s rights with something they called a “consent warrant.”
“I had lunch this week with the members of the Judicial Selection Committee, and they were talking about a ‘consent search warrant,’ ” he said. “I didn’t know what a consent search warrant was. They said, ‘Well, that’s when two policemen go to a house. One of them goes to the front door and knocks on it, and the other one runs around to the back door and yells ‘come in.’ ”
The crowd got a laugh out of that one, but Carter was just warming up, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes, his voice was the only sound in the room. Kennedy was sitting just a few feet to Carter’s left, listening carefully but never changing the thoughtful expression on his face as Carter railed and bitched about a system of criminal justice that allows the rich and the privileged to escape punishment for their crimes and sends poor people to prison because they can’t afford to bribe the judge . . .
(Jesus Babbling Christ! The phone is ringing again, and this time I know what it is for sure. Last time it was the land commissioner of Texas threatening to have my legs broken because of something I wrote about him . . . But now it is the grim reaper; he has come for my final page, and in exactly thirteen minutes that goddamn Mojo Wire across the room will erupt in a frenzy of beeping and I will have to feed it again . . . But before I leave this filthy sweatbox that is costing me $39 a day, I am going to deal with that rotten Mojo Wire. I have dreamed of smashing that fucker for five long years, but . . . Okay, okay, twelve more minutes and . . . yes . . .)
So this will have to be it . . . I would need a lot more time and space than I have to properly describe either the reality or the reaction to Jimmy Carter’s Law Day speech, which was and still is the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician. It was the voice of an angry agrarian populist, extremely precise in its judgments and laced with some of the most original, brilliant, and occasionally bizarre political metaphors anybody in that room will ever be likely to hear.
The final turn of the screw was another ugly example of crime and degradation in the legal profession, and this time Carter went right to the top. Nixon had just released his own, self-serving version of “the White House tapes,” and Carter was shocked when he read the transcripts. “The Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be,” he said. And then, after a long pause, he went on: “Well . . . I have read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I’ve seen the proud statement of a former attorney general who protected his boss, and now brags of the fact that he tiptoed through a minefield and came out . . . quote, clean, unquote.” Another pause, and then: “You know, I can’t imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a minefield on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterward . . .”
Forty-five minutes later, on our way back to Atlanta in the governor’s small plane, I told Carter I wanted a transcript of his speech.
“There is no transcript,” he said.
I smiled, thinking he was putting me on. The speech had sounded like a product of five or six tortured drafts . . . But he showed me a page and a half of scrawled notes in his legal pad and said that was all he had.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “That was one of the damnedest things I’ve ever heard. You mean you just winged it all the way through?”
He shrugged and smiled faintly. “Well,” he said, “I had a pretty good idea what I was going to say before I came up here—but I guess I was a little surprised at how it came out.”
Kennedy didn’t have much to say about the speech. He said he’d “enjoyed it,” but he still seemed uncomfortable and preoccupied for some reason. Carter and I talked about the time he invited Dylan and some of his friends out to the governor’s mansion after a concert in Atlanta. “I really enjoyed it,” he said with a big grin. “It was a real honor to have him visit my home.”
I had already decided, by then, that I liked Jimmy Carter—but I had no idea that he’d made up his mind, a few months earlier, to run for the presidency in 1976. And if he had told me his little secret that day on the plane back to Atlanta, I’m not sure I’d have taken him seriously . . . But if he had told me and if I had taken him seriously, I would probably have said that he could have my vote, for no other reason except the speech I’d just heard.
The Law Day speech is not the kind of thing that would have much appeal to the mind of a skilled technician, and that kind of mind is perhaps the only common denominator among the strategists, organizers, and advisers at the staff-command level of Carter’s campaign. Very few of them seem to have much interest in why Jimmy wants to be president, or even in what he might do after he wins: their job and their meal ticket is to put Jimmy Carter in the White House, that is all they know and all they need to know—and so far they are doing their job pretty well. According to political oddsmaker Billy the Geek, Carter is now a solid three-to-two bet to win the November electio
n—up from fifty to one less than six months ago.
“Awesome” is the mildest word I can think of to describe a campaign that can take an almost totally unknown ex-governor of Georgia with no national reputation, no power base in the Democratic Party, and not the slightest reluctance to tell Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and anyone else who asks that “the most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ” and to have him securely positioned, after only nine of thirty-two primaries, as an almost prohibitive favorite to win the presidential nomination of the nation’s majority political party, and an even bet to win the November election against a relatively popular GOP president who has managed somehow to convince both Big Labor and Big Business that he has just rescued the country from economic disaster. If the presidential election were held tomorrow I would not bet more than three empty beer cans on Gerald Ford’s chances of beating Jimmy Carter in November.
. . . What? No, cancel that bet. The Screech on the telephone just informed me that Time has just released a poll—on the day after the Texas primary—saying Carter would beat Ford by 48 percent to 38 percent if the election were held now. Seven weeks ago, according to Time via The Screech, the current figures were almost exactly reversed . . . I have never been much with math, but a quick shuffling of these figures seems to mean that Carter has picked up 20 points in seven weeks, and Ford has lost 20.
If this is true, then it is definitely time to call Billy the Geek and get something like ten cases of 66 proof Sloat ale down on Carter, and forget those three empty beer cans.
In other words, the panic is on and the last survivors of the ill-fated Stop Carter Movement are out in the streets shedding their uniforms and stacking their weapons on street corners all over Washington . . . And now another phone call from CBS correspondent Ed Bradley—who is covering Carter now after starting the ’76 campaign with Birch Bayh—saying Bayh will announce at a press conference in Washington tomorrow that he has decided to endorse Jimmy Carter.
Well . . . how about that, eh? Never let it be said that a wharf rat can get off a sinking ship any faster than an 87 percent ADA liberal.
But this is no time for cruel jokes about liberals and wharf rats. Neither species has ever been known for blind courage or stubborn devotion to principle, so let the rotten go wherever they feel even temporarily comfortable . . . Meanwhile, it is beginning to look like the time has come for the rest of us to get our business straight, because the only man who is going to keep Jimmy Carter out of the White House now is Jimmy Carter.
Which might happen, but it is a hard kind of thing to bet on, because there is no precedent in the annals of presidential politics for a situation like this: with more than half the primaries still ahead of him, Carter is now running virtually unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and—barring some queer and unlikely development—he is going to have to spend the next two months in a holding action until he can go to New York in July and pick up the nomination.
I will probably nurse a few doubts of my own between now and July, for that matter, but unless something happens to convince me that I should waste any more time than I already have brooding on the evil potential that lurks, invariably, in the mind of just about anybody whose ego has become so dangerously swollen that he really wants to be president of the United States, I don’t plan to spend much time worrying about the prospect of seeing Jimmy Carter in the White House. There is not a hell of a lot I can do about it, for one thing; and for another, I have spent enough time with Carter in the past two years to feel I have a pretty good sense of his candidacy.
I went down to Plains, Georgia, to spend a few days with him on his own turf and to hopefully find out who Jimmy Carter really was before the campaign shroud came down on him, and he started talking like a candidate instead of a human being. Once a presidential aspirant gets out on the campaign trail and starts seeing visions of himself hunkered down behind that big desk in the Oval Office, the idea of sitting down in his own living room and talking openly with some foul-mouthed, argumentative journalist carrying a tape recorder in one hand and a bottle of Wild Turkey in the other is totally out of the question.
But it was almost a year before the ’76 New Hampshire primary when I talked to Carter at his home in Plains, and I came away from that weekend with six hours of taped conversation with him on subjects ranging all the way from the Allman Brothers, stock car racing, and our strongly conflicting views on the use of undercover agents in law enforcement, to nuclear submarines, the war in Vietnam, and the treachery of Richard Nixon. When I listened to the tapes again last week, I noticed a lot of things that I had not paid much attention to at the time, and the most obvious of these was the extremely detailed precision of his answers to some of the questions that he is now accused of being either unable or unwilling to answer. There is no question in my mind, after hearing him talk on the tapes, that I was dealing with a candidate who had already done a massive amount of research on things like tax reform, national defense, and the structure of the American political system by the time he announced his decision to run for president. Nor is there any question that there are a lot of things Jimmy Carter and I will never agree on. I had warned him, before we sat down with the tape recorder for the first time, that—although I appreciated his hospitality and felt surprisingly relaxed and comfortable in his home—I was also a journalist and that some of the questions I knew I was going to ask him might seem unfriendly or even downright hostile. Because of this, I said, I wanted him to be able to stop the tape recorder by means of a remote-pause button if the talk got too heavy. But he said he would just as soon not have to bother turning the tape on and off, which surprised me at the time. But now that I listen to the tapes, I realize that loose talk and bent humor are not among Jimmy Carter’s vices.
They are definitely among mine, however, and since I had stayed up most of the night drinking and talking in the living room with his sons Jack and Chip Carter and their wives—and then by myself in the guest room over the garage—I was still feeling weird around noon, when we started talking “seriously,” and the tape of that first conversation is liberally sprinkled with my own twisted comments about “rotten fascist bastards,” “thieving cocksuckers who peddle their assess all over Washington,” and “these goddamn brainless fools who refuse to serve liquor in the Atlanta airport on Sunday.”
It was nothing more than my normal way of talking, and Carter was already familiar with it, but there are strange and awkward pauses here and there on the tape where I can almost hear Carter gritting his teeth and wondering whether to laugh or get angry at things I wasn’t even conscious of saying at the time, but which sound on the tape like random outbursts of hostility or pure madness from the throat of a paranoid psychotic. Most of the conversation is intensely rational, but every once in a while it slips over the line, and all I can hear is the sound of my own voice yelling something like “Jesus Christ! What’s that filthy smell?”
Both Carter and his wife have always been amazingly tolerant of my behavior, and on one or two occasions they have had to deal with me in a noticeably bent condition. I have always been careful not to commit any felonies right in front of them, but other than that I have never made much of an effort to adjust my behavior around Jimmy Carter or anyone else in his family—including his seventy-eight-year-old mother, Miss Lillian, who is the only member of the Carter family I could comfortably endorse for the presidency, right now, with no reservations at all.
Whoops! Well . . . we will get to that in a moment. Right now I have other things to deal with, and . . . No, what the hell? Let’s get to it now, because time is running out and so is that goddamn Sloat; so now is the time to come to grips with my own “Carter Question.”
It has taken me almost a year to reach this point, and I am still not sure how to cope with it . . . But I am getting there fast, thanks mainly to all the help I’ve been getting from my friends in the liberal community. I took more abuse from these petulant linthead bastards during the New Hampshire
and Massachusetts primaries than I have ever taken from my friends on any political question since the first days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and that was nearly twelve years ago . . . I felt the same way about the first wild, violent days of the FSM as I still feel about Jimmy Carter. In both cases my initial reaction was positive, and I have lived too long on my instincts to start questioning them now. At least, not until I get a good reason, and so far nobody has been able to give me any good reason for junking my first instinctive reaction to Jimmy Carter, which was that I liked him . . . And if the editors of Time magazine and the friends of Hubert Humphrey consider that “bizarre,” fuck them. I liked Jimmy Carter the first time I met him, and in the two years that have passed since that Law Day in Georgia I have come to know him a hell of a lot better than I knew George McGovern at this point in the ’72 campaign, and I still like Jimmy Carter. He is one of the most intelligent politicians I’ve ever met, and also one of the strangest. I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feeling for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright . . . Or maybe “stupid” is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don’t bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness either. But as long as I know there’s a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.