Kati Marton (41 page)

Just months after the Mideast Camp David triumph, the Carter presidency had lost its way. He had lost the support of the media and academic elites who had helped elect him and did not have the political skills to reach the people without them. The pall of failure hung over the White House. “I saw real despair there,” Mondale remembered. “Jimmy Carter was an eighteen-hours-a-day man, but nothing he did seemed to be working.” A relative stranger to defeat, Carter was also new to Washington’s appetite for consuming the vulnerable. Rosalynn remembered 1979 and 1980 as a period of never-ending crises. “Big ones and small ones, potential disasters and mere annoyances.” The downward spiral seemed irreversible and emboldened Carter’s two most dangerous political enemies, Edward Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. The Malaise Speech became the Carter presidency’s epitaph. It provided his many enemies and detractors, inside and outside his party, with the sword they were looking to finish him with. Carter had never played by their rules and did not take sufficient care of their sensibilities. The man who thought he could change Washington’s culture was crushed by it.

The photograph that became the metaphor for the waning days of the Carter presidency perfectly illustrated this. His face drained, arms limp, the president is shown running a marathon near Camp David, straining for breath but still pushing mightily to cross some imaginary finish line. His aides had begged him not to run. “But there he was, running harder and longer than he should have,” Mondale said, “and it was just typical of Jimmy Carter and the administration.” So much effort, so much exertion, to so little effect.

And so it came down to the crisis that sealed the fate of his presidency: the Iran hostage crisis. The face of the Carter presidency morphed from gasoline lines to the far more alarming blindfolded Americans.
Carter’s humanitarian gesture, in granting the Shah of Iran temporary asylum in the United States for medical care, had boomeranged. When Iranian terrorists seized the American embassy in Teheran and held fifty-two American diplomats captive, it seemed a personal strike against the hapless president. “America Held Hostage” became a media slogan. (The name, in fact, of the ABC late-night news program that became
Nightline).
Carter could do nothing to free the hostages or to change his now fixed image as an inept, if morally pure, chief of state.

As Carter spent sleepless nights negotiating for the hostages’ release over the next year, Rosalynn campaigned for his nomination and reelection. Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s challenge for the Democratic nomination was a fatal blow. The simple verities that worked for the Carters four years earlier, authenticity and humility, no longer appealed to a country yearning to feel good again. Kennedy hurt Carter, and Ronald Reagan exuded rugged, unshakable confidence. Suddenly the Carters looked small and dangerously naive. Jimmy’s voice now seemed reed thin, his personality, when compared to Reagan’s manly assertiveness and sunny certainties, too tentative.

While Jimmy followed a “Rose Garden Strategy” of barely leaving the White House during the bitter primary fight with Kennedy, Rosalynn was his designated voice. She still believed she could break through to the people in a way the president could not. Where he was surrounded by his jet stream of advisers, she traveled light. She could have real conversations with people and be a conduit to Jimmy. She was also completely exposed to the media’s scrutiny of her every expression, every furrowed brow of distress. “I bring greetings from Jimmy,” she began each stop on her relentless tour—Chicago; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Fort Worth; and Fresno. “I want you to know he’s healthy and we’re having a wonderful time at the White House.” She meant to reassure people after the damaging image of the marathon. But it had the opposite effect.

Reporters dubbed her the nurse, him the patient. Now her strength exposed his weakness. Her fear of public speaking long conquered, her self-assurance on the stump was used against him. “She gets coy about her role as adviser …. And the public continues to believe that she is a major influence on her husband,” the
Washington Post
reported, “maybe
too major.” With the scent of failure lingering over Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the sharks circled.

Returning to the White House, she urged her husband to “do something.” Like what, he wearily asked her. Mine the harbors of Iran, she entreated. Jimmy patiently explained why that would be rash and probably lead to the death of the hostages. When her frustration boiled over, her husband told her she should quit campaigning. But after nearly a lifetime of following his lead, Rosalynn was in the game as much as he was.

So Rosalynn set off on another round of stumping, shaking every hand. Very rarely did her iron composure slip. Her aide Paul Costello recalled one night during the long summer campaign, aboard Rosalynn’s DC-9 military aircraft. “We had started taxiing out and the Secret Service came to get her. ‘Mrs. Carter, the president wants to speak to you.’ So …. we taxied back to the gate and she went to a land line and took the call from the president. After she came back and while we were having dinner, she said, ‘Jimmy wanted to know how things were going. So I told him, ‘It’s really rough. Everybody’s beating up on you.’ And he just cut me off. ‘Rosalynn, I don’t want to hear any of this.’ So I told him, ‘You can just go to hell.’ And I hung up.”

ELECTION DAY 1980
coincided with the first anniversary of the hostage crisis. “All the understandable disillusionment of the American people,” Rosalynn later wrote, “fell on us …. Damn, damn Khomeini!” Determined and defiant until the very last day, Rosalynn vowed, “We’ll just show them like we have so many times before.”

But it was too late. Reagan swept to victory by a humiliating margin: 51…. percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent. Not only did the Republicans take possession of the White House but, for the first time in twenty-eight years, they gained control of the Senate as well.

On a weekend shortly before Reagan’s inauguration, Rosalynn invited her staff to Camp David. It was a day to unwind, to swim, skeet-shoot and bike-ride around the breathtaking Catoctin Mountain trails. Rosalynn struggled desperately to put a bright face on her misery. “But it felt as if we were on a plank,” a member of her staff recalled, “waiting to be pushed. She was just flabbergasted that this incredible man—her husband—had been rejected by the country.” Rosalynn blamed the times, the opposition, her own side’s inability to get their message out. But she found no fault with Jimmy. Jimmy was still the brightest star she had ever come across, the handsome young man in his navy whites who had rescued the young girl from Plains.

The Carters ride a bicycle built for two in Plains, Georgia, on Christmas Eve, 1980. Defeated by Reagan, they have less than a month left in office.

The Carters stayed as close, as exemplary and as singular in their behavior in private life as they had in the White House. Jimmy continued his biblical quest to end wars and eradicate disease with barely a nod to political or practical considerations. His office walls at the Carter Presidential Library feature such suspected war criminals as the Bosnian war lord Radovan Karadzic, whom Carter sees not as a mass murderer but as a soul to save. When President George Bush prepared to mount Operation Desert Storm, Carter wrote every member of the United Nations Security Council urging them not to support Washington.

The Carters were a transitional first couple, a bridge between the traditional and the postfeminist eras. Rosalynn tried to carve out new territory as first lady but came under tremendous criticism, in part because,
unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, she had neither the credentials nor a strong enough political base. Her public identity was as a mate and not as a political partner. Two decades later, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was still pondering whether to run for the United States Senate, someone asked Rosalynn why she had never run for the Senate. “What would I have done in Washington,” she asked, “with Jimmy in Georgia?”

V
IRTUALLY
P
ERFECT

THE CHANGE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE DRAMATIC. THE PRESIDENCY NOW
passed from a man who zealously controlled its most minute components to a man whose motto was “Show me an executive who works long overtime hours, and I’ll show you a bad executive.” But those who thought Ronald Reagan would be a pleasant figurehead and his wife a lady who merely lunched were equally far off the mark. Nancy Reagan was the most powerful first lady in terms of influence on the president since Edith Wilson; she was not the most creative nor the most compassionate first lady, but probably the most indispensable to her husband.

Politics, the great wedge between many political couples, drew the Reagans closer. They shared every step of his rise. By the end of their remarkable partnership—always presented to the public as a Hollywoodstyle love story—Ronnie and Nancy had effectively fused into a single persona, completing each other almost seamlessly.

Reagan radiated optimism and a return to simple American values. This, of course, is a truism. What is less well understood is that his wife acted as a sentry guarding him, guarding the gate to power, enabling him to present his sunny face. Nancy was far more transparent in her ambitions and motives than Ronnie, whose determination was camouflaged by a self-deprecating smile, a one-liner or a witty anecdote. His wife was the lightning rod, he the magician. As the Reagans made their way from Hollywood to Sacramento to Washington, this arrangement worked with astonishing success.

As president, he saw his job essentially as being Ronald Reagan, acting like a president (FDR, of course, being his role model). An intuitive politician, he was dependent on his wife’s analytical sense. Policy was what his staff did. He summarized his management philosophy as “Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority and don’t interfere.” Reagan usually treated the office simply as a ceremonial one, trusting his lieutenants to carry out his intentions. “He listened, acquiesced, played his role,” in the words of one of his chiefs of staff, Don Regan, “and waited for the next act to be written.”