A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (15 page)

When we moved into the governor’s mansion we found that all the servants and yard workers were “trusties” from the state penitentiary. They were intelligent and dedicated to this assignment as a positive alternative to spending their days behind bars. Within a few weeks one of the cooks, named Pearl, came to Rosalynn and asked to borrow $250, claiming that she had been sentenced to life imprisonment unless she could pay a fine of $750 and had already served four years. This was almost unbelievable, but she had a letter that indicated she could be released from prison with this final payment to the court in her hometown. I investigated the case and found that her husband had been an abusive drunkard, who was at home only on her paydays as a dental assistant, that he beat her and took almost all the money. One day she fought back, and in the scuffle she killed him with a butcher knife. Immediately after her trial, her court-appointed lawyer was getting married and the judge wanted to go on vacation. They decided that she should go to prison only until she paid a fine of $750, but while she was an inmate her mother had been able to raise only $500. I had the attorney general intercede, and Pearl was set free within a few days.

We learned about an even more egregious case on a visit to Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. We had lunch with an affluent African-American couple, friends of ours. The husband had worked for Air France for almost twenty years, and they owned one of the rare private dwellings on the large and isolated island. He told me of a servant who lived on the mainland who had lost possession of fifty acres of land that had been in her family for several generations. She had needed some money to put up bail for her son who was charged with a minor crime, and the justice of the peace offered to give her a loan of $225. She was illiterate and put her mark on what she was told was a promissory note with her property as collateral. When she went to repay the loan, she learned that she had signed a warranty deed and in fact had sold her land, for $4.50 an acre! I took a boat over to the Camden County courthouse
and found that the report was accurate but that there was a pending legal case and it would be improper for the governor to intercede. The Georgia Supreme Court later ruled against the woman, and she lost her property.

One of the most competent and attractive servants at the mansion was a young woman named Mary Prince, who helped care for our three-year-old daughter, Amy. She was serving a life sentence, but she convinced us of her innocence. She had lived in the city of Columbus in Southwest Georgia and had visited her cousin in nearby Lumpkin. There was an altercation one night, and a man was shot and killed. As the only nonresident there, Mary was accused of the crime, although several observers knew that she was not guilty. They were not asked to testify. According to the mandate of the
Gideon v. Wainwright
ruling, she was assigned an attorney, whom she never saw until they met at the courthouse for her trial. He advised her to plead guilty and promised that she would receive a light sentence. She took his advice, and her penalty was life in prison. The trial judge happened to be Tom Marshall, a friend of mine who had graduated from the Naval Academy before resigning from the navy and going to law school—and the same one who had wiped our names off the ballot the night before the senate election. When I was elected president, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles approved my request to be assigned as Mary’s parole officer and to take her to Washington with us. By then Tom Marshall was chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. Eventually, a retrial was ordered, and the authorities were persuaded that Mary was innocent. She was granted a full pardon and since that time has been an integral part of our family.

I had known that one of my fellow Georgia senators, although not a lawyer, was earning a tidy income by collecting twenty-five dollars monthly from a large number of poor families who could not afford an attorney but had succumbed to his promise of getting one of their relatives out of prison by using his influence with the pardon and parole board. Whenever an inmate was released through normal procedures, usually without any involvement of his, he would claim credit in a letter to his “customers.” There were several lawyers in Atlanta who preyed on the state prisoners whom they knew were eligible for parole by charging
one-time fees similar to the monthly ones collected by my senate colleague. Rosalynn went to the women’s prison and collected the names of these attorneys, and I reported them to the bar association. They were censured but not fined or disqualified. The excessive punishment of prisoners and the use of the death penalty in the United States, alone in the developed world, have continued to fall most heavily on the poor, mentally ill, and people of color. It was on this subject that I made the best speech of my life.

The state constitution limited me to a single four-year term, but those four years were some of my most pleasant and productive. The Georgia governor is known to be the most powerful in America. The legislature can be in session only thirty-five or forty-five days on alternating years, and I could veto bills with almost no possibility of a legislative override. Georgia is required to have a balanced budget (unless we are threatened with invasion from another state), and I could strike out any line items in the final budget bill. The lieutenant governor’s authority was limited to managing some issues in the senate, and the second in command in the executive department was my executive secretary, Hamilton Jordan, whom I appointed without legislative involvement. When I traveled, he acted with full authority on my behalf. My personal choice of cabinet officers was final. Although they covered a wide range on the political spectrum, more than 95 percent of house and senate members were Democrats. I took full advantage of this authority to restructure the antiquated government.

I went to Washington early in my term to attend a National Governors Association conference, and all of us were invited to an evening banquet at the White House. Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, George Wallace, and most others were more famous than I, so I was surprised that President Nixon shouted out my name as soon as I entered the East Room. Billy Graham was standing at his side and reached out to shake my hand. He said, “I have always wanted to thank you personally ever since you headed my campaign so successfully in Americus, Georgia. May I have the honor of introducing you to the president?” Nixon was the first president I met.

After months of study by experts and panels of distinguished citizens and then a long series of legislative battles, we were able before I left office to reduce more than three hundred state agencies and departments to twenty-two, and to consolidate almost twenty issuers of bonds to just one. Ever since that time, Georgia has enjoyed triple-A bond ratings. My biggest headache was that former governor Lester Maddox had been elected lieutenant governor, since he was limited to one four-year term as governor. We were not compatible, and his influence in the senate made many legislative victories more difficult than they should have been. Still, I was able to meet many of the needs in education, health care, taxation, and the environment that I had determined to be important during my recent campaign and two terms as senator. Being especially interested in international affairs, I expanded Georgia’s relations with foreign countries, brought more foreign diplomats to Atlanta, persuaded Asian and European companies to invest in new businesses in our state, and established Georgia trade offices in Canada, Japan, Germany, Belgium, and Brazil. We visited these and other countries, including Israel and the West Bank, where General Yitzhak Rabin and Prime Minister Golda Meir welcomed us as personal guests. I even hosted a rare annual session outside Washington of the Organization of American States. I was asked to serve as a member of the Trilateral Commission and learned as much as possible about international issues.

I knew the potential presidential candidates, including my fellow governors Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, George Wallace, Jerry Brown, Terry Sanford, and Milton Shapp, and as the 1972 presidential campaign year evolved, I invited other presidential hopefuls to visit Atlanta, the trade and communications center of the Southeast. These included Senators Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, George McGovern, and Eugene McCarthy. All these Democrats spent nights with us at the beautiful new governor’s mansion. They were eager to talk about their own plans, and I asked them questions about important domestic and foreign issues. Most of them had traveled overseas less often than I, and it was obvious that other governors and I who were implementing laws relating to welfare, education, taxation, and
transportation were more familiar with these issues than senators who may have drafted or voted on the legislation several years earlier.

Senator Jackson asked me to nominate him at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, and I was honored to do so. George McGovern was an admirable man and the favored Democratic candidate, but all of us Southern governors knew that he would have little support in our states. When he was nominated, that consideration did not prevent me and other governors from desiring to be chosen as his vice presidential running mate and pledging to support him in the general election. He offered the position to Ted Kennedy and several other liberal Democrats, who declined. After a chaotic voting procedure, McGovern chose Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who was finally approved. He was forced to resign when it was revealed that he suffered from depression and was on psychiatric medication, and Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was chosen. McGovern and Shriver received 37 percent of the total popular vote against Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, with less than 25 percent in Georgia.

My political adviser and publicist, Jerry Rafshoon, and Dr. Peter Bourne, a psychiatrist and prolific author who was my “drug czar” in Georgia, took the initiative in shaping my future political career. In late 1972, Peter outlined in some detail how we might mount a campaign for president in 1976, with the presumption that I would fill the political middle ground between the expected Democratic opponents, conservative George Wallace and liberal Ted Kennedy. I shared this letter with my press secretary, Jody Powell, and Hamilton Jordan. Rosalynn and I decided to have some private discussions that also included Charles Kirbo, attorneys Landon Butler and Philip Alston, and my cousin Don Carter. We had several meetings to discuss how a campaign might be mounted despite little name recognition, and without any prospect of raising much money for the
primary contest. We would have to use the same strategy that had been successful in the 1970 race for governor: maximum personal contact with voters, recruitment of new political activists, and the committed involvement of other family members. After these early discussions I was still somewhat embarrassed by and leery of the whole idea. As I remember, we never used the word “president” but just referred to “national office.”

One morning I received a call from Dean Rusk, our most distinguished Georgian. He had served as secretary of state under both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and was now in semiretirement in Athens, Georgia, where he was teaching international law at the University of Georgia. He wanted to come and talk to me, and I invited him to the governor’s office. He responded that the subject of his discussion was not appropriate for an official location, so we arranged for him to come to the governor’s mansion late that afternoon. We sat in rocking chairs on our back veranda and shared an appropriate Southern libation. Without any introduction, he began the conversation by saying, “Governor, I think you should run for president in 1976.” I knew him to be an intimate friend of the Kennedy family and thoroughly knowledgeable about national politics, and was taken aback. I didn’t let him know that we had been talking about that possibility but listened intently as he outlined a carefully planned, step-by-step procedure that he thought I should follow.

I didn’t make any positive response but just said I would consider his ideas, and then made careful notes and shared them with Rosalynn and the few other conspirators. The encouragement from Dean Rusk removed our remaining doubts, and we began to study the new Democratic Party rules for primaries, the political situations in all fifty states, the names and attitudes of key news reporters, potential sources of funding, and possible competitors. At my request, Hamilton Jordan put together a seventy-page strategic notebook, encompassing all our tentative and highly secret plans. At the same time, I continued my all-out effort to reorganize the state government.

In March 1973, as time for the 1974 campaigns for governors, senators, and congressmen approached, National Democratic Party Chairman
Robert Strauss came to Atlanta to give a speech and asked if he could talk to me. Charles Kirbo had become my closest friend and adviser and was serving as chairman of the state Democratic Party, and he joined us at the governor’s mansion. Strauss asked if I might consider being responsible for the nationwide effort to elect candidates of our party. Concealing my interest, I listened as he explained how I would be thoroughly instructed by experts in all facets of running a campaign, informed about the most important contests, and could send one of my assistants to Washington to join in top-level strategy sessions of the Democratic Party. I could accommodate my own schedule in choosing the candidates I would personally assist. The national party would, of course, pay all my expenses.

I agreed without much delay, sent Hamilton Jordan to Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, and appointed Frank Moore as my executive secretary in Georgia. I began my duties as campaign coordinator during days I could be spared from the governor’s office. By election time in November, I had participated in thirty-seven campaigns throughout the country, with excellent results. Undoubtedly helped by the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation, we Democrats gained four senators and forty-nine representatives, giving us a two-thirds majority in the House. I learned a lot and made hundreds of valuable contacts. Just before I announced publicly my plans to run for president, there was a Democratic “mini-convention” designed to adopt a new charter for the party that made the primary system much more transparent and democratic. We prepared one thousand color campaign pamphlets that cost a dollar each and distributed them to key Democrats. George Gallup had recently published a public opinion poll that contained thirty-two names of potential Democratic nominees. Mine was not included. We had a lot of work to do.