Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (13 page)

Senator Kennedy also had to ponder whether he wanted to endure renewed scrutiny over his fiasco at Chappaquiddick in 1969, when an attractive young
woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned under mysterious circumstances in a car that Kennedy drove off a small bridge late one summer evening. The unanswered questions about Chappaquiddick would haunt a Kennedy presidential campaign.

In addition, he needed to consider the scrutiny his wife, Joan, a sad alcoholic, would have to face. They had been living apart for several years and their uneasy marriage would be put under the microscope, as would his rumored dalliances with other women. She blamed her alcoholism on his philandering.
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Teddy also liked the sauce. A prominent Boston politician whose family had known the Kennedys for years was in Washington on business and had lunch with the senator. Prior to dining, Kennedy polished off a couple of highballs, then plowed through an exceptional amount of wine during their meal and afterward downed a couple of snifters of Courvoisier. Kennedy's guest, himself no stranger to drink, was nonetheless aghast at the senator's prodigious noontime thirst and asked Kennedy, “Do you do this every day?” Kennedy sheepishly replied, “Yeah, pretty much.”
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The senator did have the Kennedy name, which conjured nostalgia for Camelot. But Ted was different from his brothers. JFK was smooth and reserved and RFK was intense and passionate, but Teddy was a bearish backslapper in the ward-heeler mode. He laughed easily and loudly, was given to silly pranks, and he always needed a haircut. Although forty-seven, the youngest Kennedy brother seemed pathologically boyish. If he entered the race, he would not be running just against Carter. He would also be running against ghosts: the memory of Jack and Bobby, who, especially after the dispiriting presidencies of LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, maintained a deep hold on the American imagination.

According to Walter Mondale, the memory of his brothers did not dissuade Kennedy from running for president. In fact, it may have compelled him to enter the race. “All this pressure was on Ted to fulfill the family tradition,” Mondale recalled. “He really felt he was the holder of something precious in the Kennedy legacy.”
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Mondale always felt that Kennedy was forcing Carter's hand to give himself the reason to dive in to the race.

There was certainly little love lost between Carter and Kennedy. Real cultural and ideological difference separated the two men. Carter found Kennedy's undisciplined morals repugnant and Kennedy thought Carter sanctimonious. In addition, Carter, inside his party, was seen by doctrinaire liberals as a “mugwump”—someone who had broken faith with their party. Carter's preachy sermons about holding the line on spending and morality were not in keeping with the modern sensibilities of liberalism. They also disagreed about national health insurance, a pet Kennedy issue: Carter wanted it phased in slowly, while Kennedy
demanded its immediate enactment. There was personal animosity as well: Congress had directed a gold medal struck commemorating the life of Robert F. Kennedy, but Carter refused to order it cast. The family of long memories would never forget this slight by Carter.

During the summer of 1979, Kennedy reportedly dropped twenty pounds (in part because he gave up ice cream), which was seen as another sign that he was moving toward a challenge of the president.
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He was still trouncing Carter by more than 2–1 in the national polls.
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The president of the United States was an underdog in his own party. This in and of itself was astonishing. In the twentieth century, this could only be said of William Howard Taft in 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt came out of retirement and beat Taft in nine GOP primaries. Yet because Taft, as the incumbent, controlled the levers of power at the national committee and the national convention, he, not Roosevelt, was nominated.

With the reforms of the Democratic Party that began after 1968, there would be no such “back-room deals”; primary voters in the various states would select the delegates almost entirely. This seemed to spell political death for Carter, whose national approval rating fell to 19 percent—even lower than Richard Nixon's the day before his resignation.
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The national media were ready to crown Kennedy. According to many stories, Kennedy would have the advantage not only against Carter but also, in a general election, over Ronald Reagan. Unlike Reagan, Kennedy would appeal to young voters and to the middle. The other Republican candidates encouraged this thinking, making the case that they matched up better against Kennedy than did Reagan.

According to the media, it didn't matter that the Massachusetts senator would be getting a late start on the campaign. He was well positioned to perform in the primaries, thanks to a “well-oiled Kennedy machine” that would be run by “old Kennedy hands.” Jack Germond and Jules Witcover quoted “one old hand” saying, “You don't have that tooling up time with Kennedy.”
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Another “old hand” was more realistic when he told the columnists, “A few years out of it is a long time. That clock rolls around pretty fast for campaigners.”
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The laws governing federal campaigns had changed greatly, too, and Joseph P. Kennedy was no longer around to write unlimited checks.

It also seemed that the Kennedy “machine” was not so well oiled. Michael McShane, a Mondale aide whose father had once worked for JFK, said, “I remember … talking to some of the Kennedy staffers that these guys would walk in 9:30, 10, they'd make a couple of phone calls, and then they'd go to lunch.”
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In the early fall of 1979, after months of cagily telling the media that he “expected” that he would support Carter,
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Ted Kennedy dropped the pretense.
Stephen E. Smith, Kennedy's brother-in-law, family confidant, and all-around utility infielder for the clan, announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee to begin the organizational efforts. A date was announced, November 7, for the third Kennedy to formally declare his intentions to run for president of the United States. The headquarters was on 22nd Street NW in Washington, in what once was a Cadillac dealership.
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In retrospect, it should have been an Edsel dealership.

T
HE
CBS
TELEVISION NETWORK
announced that it would broadcast a one-hour documentary on Senator Kennedy. Called
CBS Reports: Teddy
, it would air on Sunday, November 4, at 10
P.M.
eastern time. The executives at CBS rushed to get the show on the air before Kennedy officially announced his candidacy to prevent any “equal-time” claims from the others running for president.
⁹⁸

The Carter White House complained bitterly to CBS about the special, which had been in the works since the previous May, when it was becoming clear that Kennedy might indeed run for president. Carter aides believed that the show would be one giant wet kiss for Kennedy, especially since the host was Roger Mudd, an old friend of the Kennedy family.

Anyone who thought that CBS or Mudd would grovel before Teddy was sorely mistaken. The hourlong special was an unmitigated disaster for Kennedy. The interview began with Mudd asking Kennedy about the state of his marriage. The senator stammered: “It's—I would say that it's—it's—it's—I'm delighted that we're able to—to share the time and the relationship that we—that we do share.” Several more questions dealt with his wife's alcoholism and Kennedy stumbled through these as well.
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Mudd later completely unnerved Kennedy with a simple yet devastating question: “Why do you want to be president?”

Kennedy, with a stunned look on his face, fumbled and bumbled and mumbled. “Well … I'm, … were I to make the announcement … and to run … the reasons that I would run is because I have great belief in this country … that it is … there's more natural resources than any nation of the world … there's the greatest educated population in the world … greatest technology of any country in the world … and the greatest political system in the world.”
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It went downhill from there.

Mudd was appalled that his old friend was so poorly prepared. He debated whether he should even bother to continue the interview.
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The rest of the special was almost as excruciating to watch. Mudd asked Kennedy whether he thought anyone would ever believe his version of the story
about Chappaquiddick. Kennedy responded, “Oh, there's, the problem is, from that night, I, I found the conduct, the behavior almost beyond belief myself. I mean that's why it's been, but I think that's the way it was. Now I find that as I have stated that I have found the conduct that in, in that evening and in, in the, as a result of the accident of the, and the sense of loss, the sense of hope, and the, and the sense of tragedy, and the whole set of circumstances, that the behavior was inexplicable. So I find that those, those, types of questions as they apply to that, questions of my own soul, as well. But that happens to be the way it was.”
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Kennedy, the vaunted public speaker, came across as babbling, dissembling, and unprepared. Chatter over his poor performance dominated Washington, the media, and Democratic circles for days, and shattered his legions of fans.

The Carter people could not believe their good luck. They were so delighted with how badly the special turned out that they copied the transcript and handed it out to anybody and everybody.

Kennedy moved on to Chicago and was promptly pelted with an egg.

One day after Kennedy's plunge into the campaign, Jerry Brown entered the race. He promised to “protect the earth, serve the people and explore the universe” and to “sense our unity in the spirit on this small speck of universal time.”
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“Governor Moonbeam” was at it again.

T
HE SAME DAY THAT
Kennedy's disastrous interview with Mudd aired, events thousands of miles away would conspire to prevent Kennedy from winning the Democratic nomination and would reinvigorate, for a time, the fortunes of Jimmy Carter. On November 4, 1979, radical Islamic “students” charged the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took sixty-six Americans hostages.

The capture of the American hostages was ordered by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had also commanded the overthrow of the shah back in February. As his country's leading cleric, Khomeini had more power than what passed for the new government in Iran, and he was whipping up anti-American sentiment. Each night, Americans watched rallies by terrorists whom the media kept referring to as “students.” The daily frenzy would not be complete without the ritualistic burning of an American flag and chants of “Death to America.” The American hostages were bound and blindfolded and paraded before the manic protesters so they could mock and threaten them, all for the benefit of the gaggle of Western reporters and cameras.

The hostage crisis allowed Carter to dominate the national stage. For months he had been dealing with reports about his sinking presidency, leaks about his dysfunctional
White House, and rumors that his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, was using cocaine, but now he had an opportunity to display real leadership. Carter made it known to the ayatollah how much these Americans meant to him, which temporarily made him “look presidential.”

Though Carter's performance over the course of the crisis could only be described as dithering—each and every day, new attempts to negotiate with the terrorists would spring forth—Kennedy went him one better. The senator inexplicably attacked the exiled shah, who was now battling cancer, and not the man who was holding the American hostages. Kennedy was widely denounced for “injecting politics” into the sensitive matter.

The only one who seemed to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of American politics was the ayatollah, when he released the thirteen American women and blacks being held.

President Carter was soon getting the support of 70 percent of the American people for his handling of the crisis in Iran, because most believed he was doing all he could to secure the release of the hostages.
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He now looked like the strong, decisive leader while Kennedy looked like the sad sack.

Such are the fortunes of war and politics.

“
What am I supposed to do, skip rope through the neighborhood?
”

R
onald Reagan's third drive for the White House was sputtering along as one old loyalist after another took a powder on the Gipper, mostly over the imperious management style of John Sears. Sears had become manager once again—over the protests of many—mainly because he had Mike Deaver's backing, which in turn meant that he had Nancy Reagan's backing. Now many Reaganites were being left out, ignored, or demoted as Sears and the campaign's national political director, Charlie Black, opted for “more important” state Republican operatives than the ones who had actually won primaries for Reagan in 1976.
¹
In Texas, for example, Ernie Angelo, Ron Dear, and Ray Barnhart, who had beaten the GOP establishment in 1976, winning all one hundred delegates at a critical time for Reagan, had been demoted for the 1980 effort. All were crestfallen, especially the fiercely competitive Angelo.
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Sears had once wanted to be a psychiatrist. He was able to glean insights into people's pathologies, which gave him a distinct advantage in politics. The night before Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, Sears bet some drinking buddies from the media that the “Trickster” would mention his mother in his pitiful remarks before departing the White House. Sears collected on his bet.
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