Ever since then I have not been inclined to take many risks while traveling in strange territory with politicians. Even the very few who might feel a bit guilty about leaving me behind would have to do it anyway, because they are all enslaved by their schedules, and when it comes to a choice between getting to the airport on time or waiting for a journalist who has wandered off to seek booze, they will shrug and race off to the airport.
This is particularly true when you travel with Kennedy, who moves at all times with a speedy, split-second precision on a schedule that nobobdy except a perfectly organized presidential candidate would even try to keep pace with. When he is traveling with a detail of Secret Service agents, the caravan stops for nothing and waits for nobody. . . The SS agents assigned to Kennedy are hypersensitive about anything that might jack up the risk factor, and they move on the theory that safety increases with speed.
There was no need for King and Kirk to warn me that the SS detail would have a collective nervous breakdown at the prospect of taking Senator Kennedy and the governor of Georgia through the streets of downtown Athens -- or any other city, for that matter -- to search for some notoriously criminal journalist who might be in any one of the half-dozen bars and beer parlors on the edge of the campus.
So there was nothing to do except sit there in the university cafeteria, slumped in my chair at a table right next to Dean Rusk's, and drink one tall glass after another of straight Wild Turkey until the Law Day luncheon ceremonies were finished. After my third trip out to the trunk, the SS driver apparently decided that it was easier to just let me keep the car keys instead of causing a disturbance every 15 or 20 minutes by passing them back and forth. . . Which made a certain kind of fatalistic sense, because I'd already had plenty of time to do just about anything I wanted to with the savage contents of his trunk, so why start worrying now? We had, after all, been together for the better part of two days, and the agents were beginning to understand that there was no need to reach for their weapons every time I started talking about the blood on Dean Rusk's hands, or how easily I could reach over and cut off his ears with my steak knife. Most Secret Service agents have led a sheltered life, and they tend to get edgy when they hear that kind of talk from a large stranger in their midst who has managed to stash an apparently endless supply of powerful whiskey right in the middle of their trunk arsenal. That is not one of your normal, everyday situations in the SS life; and especially not when this drunkard who keeps talking about taking a steak knife to the head of a former secretary of state has a red flag on his file in the Washington SS headquarters in addition to having the keys to the SS car in his pocket.
Carter was already speaking when I came back from my fourth or fifth trip out to the car. I had been careful all along to keep the slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, so it looked like all the other iced-tea glasses in the room. But Jimmy King was beginning to get nervous about the smell. "Goddamnit Hunter, this whole end of the room smells like a distillery," he said.
"Balls," I said. "That's blood you're smelling."
King winced and I thought I saw Rusk's head start to swing around on me, but apparently he thought better of it. For at least two hours he'd been hearing all this ugly talk about blood coming over his shoulder from what he knew was "the Kennedy table" right behind him. But why would a group of Secret Service agents and Senator Kennedy's personal staff be talking about him like that? And why was this powerful stench of whiskey hanging around his head? Were they all drunk?
Not all -- but I was rapidly closing the gap and the others had been subjected to the fumes for so long that I could tell by the sound of their laughter that even the SS agents were acting a little weird. Maybe it was a contact drunk of some kind, acting in combination with the fumes and fiendish drone of the speeches. We were trapped in that place, and nobody else at the table liked it any better than I did.
I am still not sure when I began listening to what Carter was saying, but at some point about ten minutes into his remarks I noticed a marked difference in the style and tone of the noise coming from the speakers' table and I found myself listening, for the first time all day. Carter had started off with a few quiet jokes about people feeling honored to pay ten or twelve dollars a head to hear Kennedy speak, but the only way he could get people to listen to him was to toss in a free lunch along with his remarks. The audience laughed politely a few times, but after he'd been talking for about 15 minutes I noticed a general uneasiness in the atmosphere of the room, and nobody was laughing anymore. At that point we were all still under the impression that Carter's "remarks" would consist of a few minutes of friendly talk about the law school, a bit of praise for Rusk, an introduction to Kennedy, and that would be it. . .
But we were wrong, and the tension in the room kept increasing as more and more people realized it. Very few if any of them had supported Carter when he won the governorship, and now that he was just about finished with his four-year term and barred by law from running again, they expected him to bow out gracefully and go back to raising peanuts. If he had chosen that occasion to announce that he'd decided to run for president in 1976, the reaction would almost certainly have been a ripple of polite laughter, because they would know he was kidding. Carter had not been a bad governor, but so what? We were, after all, in Georgia; and besides that, the South already had one governor running for president. . . Back in the spring of 1974 George Wallace was a national power; he had rattled the hell out of that big cage called the Democratic National Committee in '72, and when he said he planned to do it again in '76 he was taken very seriously.
So I would probably have chuckled along with the others if Carter had said something about running for president at the beginning of his "remarks" that day, but I would not have chuckled if he'd said it at the end. . . Because it was a king hell bastard of a speech, and by the time it was over he had rung every bell in the room. Nobody seemed to know exactly what to make of it, but they knew it was sure as hell not what they'd come to hear.
I have heard hundreds of speeches by all kinds of candidates and politicians -- usually against my will and for generally the same reasons I got trapped into hearing this one -- but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974. It ran about 45 minutes, climbing through five very distinct gear changes while the audience muttered uneasily and raised their eyebrows at each other, and one of the most remarkable things about the speech is that it is such a rare piece of oratorical artwork that it remains vastly impressive, even if you don't necessarily believe Carter was sincere and truthful in all the things he said. Viewed purely in the context of rhetorical drama and political theater, it ranks with General Douglas MacArthur's "old soldiers never die" address to the Congress in 1951 -- which still stands as a masterpiece of insane bullshit, if nothing else.
There were, however, a lot of people who believed every word and sigh of MacArthur's speech, and they wanted to make him president -- just as a lot of people who are still uncertain about Jimmy Carter would want to make him president if he could figure out some way to deliver a contemporary version of his 1974 Law Day speech on network TV. . . Or, hell, even the same identical speech; a national audience might be slightly puzzled by some of the references to obscure judges, grade-school teachers and backwoods Georgia courthouses, but I think the totality of the speech would have the same impact today as it did two years ago.
But there is not much chance of it happening. . . And that brings up another remarkable aspect of the law Day speech: it had virtually no impact at all when he delivered it except on the people who heard it, and most of them were more stunned and puzzled by it than impressed. They had not come there to hear lawyers denounced as running dogs of the status quo, and there is still some question in my own mind -- and in Carter's too, I suspect -- about what he came there to say. There was no written text of the speech, no press to report it, no audience hungry to hear
it, and no real reason for giving it -- except that Jimmy Carter had a few serious things on his mind that day, and he figured it was about time to unload them, whether the audience liked it or not. . .
Which gets to another interesting point of the speech: although Carter himself now says, "That was probably the best speech I ever made," he has yet to make another like it -- not even to the extent of lifting some of the best images and ideas of incorporation into his current speeches -- and his campaign staff attached so little importance to it that Carter's only tape recording of his Law Day remarks got lost somewhere in the files and, until about two months ago, the only existing tape of the speech was the one I made and carried around with me for two years, playing it in some extremely unlikely situations for people who would look at me like I was finally over the hump into terminal brain damage when I'd say they were going to have to spend the next 45 minutes listening to a political speech by some ex-governor of Georgia.
It was not until I showed up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts for the '76 primaries and started playing my tape of the Law Day speech for a few friends, journalists and even some of Carter's top staff people who'd never heard it that Pat Caddell noticed that almost everybody who heard the speech was as impressed by it as I was. . . But even now, after Caddell arranged to dub 50 tape copies off of my copy, nobody in Carter's brain trust has figured out what to do with them.
I am not quite sure what I would do with them, myself, if I were Carter, because it is entirely possible that the very qualities that made the Law Day speech so impressive for me would have exactly the opposite effect on Carter's new national constituency. The voice I hear on my tape is the same one all those good conservative folk out there on the campaign trail have found so appealing, but very few of them would find anything familiar in what the voice is saying. The Jimmy Carter who has waltzed so triumphantly down the middle of the road through one Democratic primary after another is a cautious, conservative and vaguely ethereal Baptist Sunday school teacher who seems to promise, above all else, a return to normalcy, a resurrection of the national self-esteem, and a painless redemption from all the horrors and disillusion of Watergate. With President Carter's firm hand on the helm, the ship of state will once again sail a true and steady course, all the crooks and liars and thieves who somehow got control of the government during the turmoil of the Sixties will be driven out of the temple once and for all, and the White House will be so overflowing with honesty, decency, justice, love and compassion that it might even glow in the dark.
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 trouble-makers. 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 20 or 30 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 13 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 machine. I have dreamed of smashing that fucker for five long years, but. . . Okay, okay, 12 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, an
d 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 afterwards. . ."
Forty-five minutes latter, 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 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.