True Compass (40 page)

Carter invited me into the Oval Office and we had our conversation about Cox, or the appearance of a conversation about Cox. He certainly allotted a generous amount of time. Expecting a fifteen-minute talk, I found myself spending close to an hour with the president. But as it developed, he wanted to talk about several other matters: health, the economy. When we did finally get around to the topic at hand, Carter told me bluntly and preemptively why he could never, ever support Cox for the First Circuit. In later years, Carter would claim that it was Cox's age--he was nearly sixty-seven then--that made him an unacceptable choice. That is not the way the president represented it to me in his office. He could never, ever support Archibald Cox, he said, because Cox had supported Morris Udall (instead of Carter) in the 1976 Democratic primary.

I had witnessed a lot of political grudges in Washington, and I knew that though they generally led to punishment of some sort, overt revenge was far from the only means of settling them. I pressed on: "Well, that was back then, and you defeated Udall. Cox's support for him certainly does not mean he has no admiration for you." Carter shrugged and said he knew that Cox had been close to the Kennedy family and to Jack in particular, and that made some difference to him, but not enough. (Reflecting on this later, I suspected that it made the wrong kind of difference.) I then framed the nomination from a political context: Cox, I pointed out to Carter, is the most respected lawyer in the country. Putting him on the First Circuit would be a "ten" for you. It would be a "nine" for me recommending him, but it would be a "ten" for you.

Jimmy Carter gave me an icy stare. He said, "Even that isn't going to override my strong feelings against Archibald Cox for supporting Udall." His words had a certain ring that I have always remembered. It seemed as though Carter was experiencing real pleasure in telling me that he was not going to support Archibald Cox. As for the other subjects that we covered, I always felt that he wanted credit for talking to me for an hour, rather than just fifteen or twenty minutes, so he could claim to have reached out to me. But whatever his reasons, it was clear he wasn't really interested in my views on Cox.

Any thoughts I still held about supporting Jimmy Carter in a reelection bid I put firmly to rest on July 15, 1979. On that evening the president appeared on the three major television networks to deliver the most self-destructive address of his administration.

Fatigued from the rigors of a recent economic summit in Tokyo and, just before that, a round of touchy negotiations on arms limitations with Leonid Brezhnev; distressed by American outrage over the energy crisis gas lines that had driven his approval ratings down to 25 percent; and badly shaken by an alarmist memo from his pollster Pat Caddell that warned him of a sharp decline in the nation's trust in him, Carter looked into the camera lens and fulfilled Caddell's prophecy. He lectured the people of the nation on their contribution to what he called "a fundamental threat to American democracy." This contribution, he declared, was a collapse of confidence and of faith, in government and in themselves.

"It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will," Carter intoned. "We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

"The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America."

This was the address that would become famous as Carter's "malaise" speech, although the president did not use that word in his remarks. (It had appeared in Caddell's memo.) It was a speech born of panic, as the details of its genesis soon made clear: the product of a ten-day "domestic summit meeting," as the press called it, at Camp David earlier in the month. Battalions of advisers and experts from various fields, plus his wife, Rosalynn, barraged the president with advice on how he might reverse declining poll numbers, a perceived erosion of national confidence, and his own image as a leader. "It became a question of saving his presidency," an aide admitted to the
New York Times
soon afterward.

I watched the televised talk with mounting incredulousness and outrage. This message was contrary to--it was in conflict with--all the ideals of the Democratic Party that I cherished. It was in conflict with what the country was about. I tried to imagine President Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy ever abandoning their optimism in the face of adversity and giving vent to sentiments remotely this melancholy. If this message was truly reflective of Carter's feelings, I couldn't see how he was really going to address the central problems we were facing, both in the economy and foreign policy.

It was in the aftershocks of this speech that I began thinking seriously about running for the presidency in 1980.

Inflation, a malady of the past several years, was at double digits now, and the president in my view had abdicated his responsibility to deal with this issue. As for health care reform, he had had nearly three years to demonstrate the commitment implied by his campaign promises, and had either misrepresented or misstated what that commitment would be.

Crowning all these was the overall leadership issue: what the Democratic Party historically stood for, what I had
seen
it stand for. This president had said that he believed that the spirit of America was in crisis. I recognized that Jimmy Carter, although he was of my own party, held an inherently different view of America from mine.

In late August Ronald Reagan edged ahead of Carter for the first time in the presidential preference polls. Those same polls showed me with a lead over Carter, among Democrats, of 62 to 24 percent. They also indicated that I would defeat Reagan handily.

First, though, there was the matter of actually defeating Jimmy Carter. I believed that I could do this. But even before my campaign officially got started, I ran into some unpromising harbingers.

For me, getting up to speed in a political campaign has always taken time. There are many good campaigners who can leave the Senate floor on a late afternoon and be red-hot on the campaign trail that night. Not me: it takes me two or three days to get warmed up and into the mood. For some reason, in 1979 and early 1980 it took even longer than usual for me to get going.

One of the most damaging indicators of my sluggish start was the now famous two-part interview I taped with Roger Mudd of CBS News in September and October 1979. The edited interview ran as an hourlong news special on Sunday night, November 4, just three days before I announced my candidacy.

Mudd himself dwells on this interview in his 2008 memoir. He observes, correctly, that he and I had known one another socially in past years. "Because of these connections," Mudd writes, "perhaps there was in 1979 the assumption by the senator and his staff that this would be a softball documentary." He correctly notes that the filming took place weeks before I declared my candidacy.

Mudd, as he recalls, wanted two sit-down interviews, one at my Cape Cod house "about family and personal matters" and one at my office or at McLean "about senatorial matters." I consented to allow a CBS crew to follow me around for several days, filming me on Capitol Hill, in my office, in Hyannis Port, and in other informal situations.

I remember the circumstances of that interview a little differently. I recall, for example, that I'd granted the interview to Mudd as a personal favor, during a critical moment in his CBS News career. I had run into Roger at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in June of that year, when I attended a reception for the president of Mexico, Jose Lopez Portillo y Pacheco. As I walked out of the hotel at about 10 p.m., Roger approached me and said--I cannot recall the words verbatim--"I'm in this contest with Dan Rather for the anchor position at CBS News, and I'd love to get an interview with your mother." (It was common knowledge that Mudd had been expected to replace Walter Cronkite when he hit the age of mandatory retirement at CBS, but Rather was giving him a serious run for his money.)

I replied, "Well, my mother doesn't do interviews. She's older, and she just isn't up to the demands. But let me think about it, and I'll get back to you." Roger said, "It would make a big, big difference if I could ever do that interview down at Cape Cod. Everybody's always wanted that interview with your mother."

I talked to my mother and my sisters about it. We decided that Mudd could do the interview with Mother as they walked along the beach, but I would have to be with them. The two of them could chat back and forth, but we just didn't want to have a sit-down or to leave Mother on her own. Roger said that was fine. I added, "Our children are going to the Cape, so that's going to be the setting." Roger said that was fine too.

A day or two before the scheduled interview, my mother fell ill and left the Cape for Boston. At about that same time, Kara received an invitation from the Hopi tribe in Arizona, the only matriarchal tribe in the country. They asked her, as one interested in Native American culture, to come there and be a part of a large ceremony they were planning. Kara wanted to go, and so she was out of the interview tableau. And finally, for a reason I can't recall, Teddy said he could not be available either. That left Patrick, who had just turned twelve, and me.

I telephoned Roger, explained the situation, and tried to put off the interview. "Oh, no," he replied. "That'll be all right. I'll come on down. We'll do you and the sea and Cape Cod, and what the sea has meant." I thought I could easily talk about that: how I used the sea as a place of rest and reflection, and what this place meant to me and the family.

Roger and his crew arrived and set up for the interview at Squaw Island, the area half a mile west of the Cape house where I owned a seaside cottage. I had asked no staff members to be present, and I had done no preparation for an interview that dealt with political or personal topics. The agreement, as I'd understood it, was that our topic was to be the sea, and the connections between the Cape and the Kennedy family. I should have had my political antennae up. In retrospect, it is almost inconceivable to me that I did not.

As we took our chairs out in front of the house, the camera rolled, and we talked for some forty minutes about the sea and the Cape. During a break, I looked at the time, and said, "That's about it, isn't it?" Mudd replied, "Yes, just about." I turned to my twelve-year-old son, who was watching, and said, "Patrick, why don't you go down and get the boat and pick me up? I'll see these people to their van."

When Patrick had disappeared, Roger excused himself and consulted with two CBS executives, who'd accompanied him and had stood nearby, watching our interview. Then Roger walked back to me and surprised me by asking, "Can we do one more segment?"

I replied, "Well, I'd really like to go. I think we've done it." "No," he said. "We'd really like to do just one more." And so I agreed to do one more. (Mudd later wrote that he and the other two newsmen had compared notes on the conversation thus far and pronounced it a "disaster.")

The cameraman put in a fresh roll of film and Roger resumed his questions. The first had to do with Chappaquiddick. Then he asked about my marriage. My discomfort and unhappiness with the line of questioning was more than apparent on my face and in my halting answers. I was further distracted by my awareness that Patrick was on the water by himself, struggling with a twenty-five-foot sailboat. I needed to go down there and help him.

At last it ended, and the CBS crew packed its equipment, Mudd and I shook hands, and they drove away.

When Patrick and I were on the water I told him my sense of the interview: a disaster.

I telephoned Mudd the next day and said, "Look, if we're going to do this thing, I want another crack at it." Mudd agreed. Our understanding called for two sessions anyway; and so on October 12 we sat down again, this time in my Senate office in Washington. The cameraman signaled that the film was rolling, and Roger Mudd asked:

"Why do you want to be president?"

I had not yet publicly declared my intention to challenge President Carter and had no intention of announcing my candidacy in this interview with Roger Mudd. I wrestled in my mind with just how far to go. After a long pause, I began:

"Well, I'm--were I to make the announcement, and to run, the reasons I would run is because I have a great belief in this country. That it is--there's more natural resources than any nation in the world; there's the greatest educated population in the world; the greatest technology of any country in the world; the greatest capacity for innovation in the world; and the greatest political system in the world. And yet I see at the current time that most of the industrial nations of the world are exceeding us in terms of productivity and are doing better than us in terms of meeting the problems of inflation..." and on in that vein for 336 words, by courtesy of Roger's own count--of which CBS used the first 242.

My displeasure with Roger Mudd unfortunately spilled over into my interview performance. I regret that. If I had already declared my candidacy, I suppose I would have had a more polished answer to Mudd's question, but the essence would have been the same.

On November 4, 1979, the same day as the airing of the Mudd interview, Iranian Islamist revolutionaries seized fifty-two U.S. diplomats at the American embassy in Tehran. The nation plunged into shock. At the time, none of us could have anticipated that this crisis would continue for 444 days.

On Wednesday, November 7, I went ahead with my plans to announce my candidacy for my party's nomination as president of the United States. As I stood quietly behind the lectern in Faneuil Hall, I was enveloped in the moment. My personal past, my family's past, the Boston past, the American past--it had all coalesced in this room, where patriots had once gathered before the Revolutionary War to shape the American future. Honey Fitz had pointed to this building and told me its stories as we strolled past it on those long-ago Sundays. Jack had made his final 1960 campaign appearance here. I was forty-seven years old, one year older than Jack when he died. Jackie smiled at me from the audience of some 350 friends and relatives--three generations of my family, from my mother to my children--and half again as many reporters.