The Highest Calling, page 32
DR: The president has the opportunity to pick his own vice president. Why does Ford pick Nelson Rockefeller?
RNS: There were there were three names submitted to the FBI. George H. W. Bush was a very close runner-up. Don Rumsfeld was also on that list. Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller. Classic opposites attract. Gerald Ford had spent a life on Capitol Hill, so didn’t want someone from Capitol Hill. Nelson Rockefeller had been governor of New York State for 15 years. He had unlimited access to talent. There was an exodus, some voluntary, some not so voluntary, from the Nixon White House staff. What Ford miscalculated was just how much of a red flag Rockefeller would be to the right wing of his party.
DR: He runs for election, and his opponent is Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee. Why does Ford get rid of Rockefeller in favor of Bob Dole?
RNS: Because he wanted to get renominated, and he’d become convinced that his renomination against Ronald Reagan was seriously in doubt if he kept Nelson Rockefeller as his VP.
DR: Who does he pick as his campaign manager to beat Reagan?
RNS: He went through several people and then finally settled on Jim Baker, who had been a junior-level official with the Commerce Department and then distinguished himself as the chief delegate counter. It was a very hard-fought convention. Then Baker took over the fall campaign. Ford was 30 points behind going into the general election race. He finished two points behind on election day.
DR: Did Reagan promise to campaign for Ford?
RNS: Let’s say there was no love lost between the two or their wives. One thing that contributed to the bad blood between the two men was Ford’s belief that Reagan did not fulfill promises to campaign for Ford.
DR: Carter wins the election. Is there any chance that had Ford’s voice not given out and he could have talked for the last week, it would have made a difference?
RNS: Let me tell you my theory. There was a Gallup poll on the Friday before the election that showed Ford had caught up. Against all odds, he actually had a one-point lead. My theory—and I’m not alone, the late, great campaign strategist Doug Bailey is my source for this—we both felt instinctively that this poll hurt Ford.
During the campaign the assumption was that Carter’s going to win in a walk. Bailey’s theory was that if the question on Election Day is “Do we know enough about Jimmy Carter? Are we comfortable with Jimmy Carter?” then Ford will win. If, however, the question is “Does Gerald Ford deserve a full term?” then Jimmy Carter would win. The exit polls showed two-thirds of undecided voters broke for Carter.
DR: During the campaign, Carter and Ford debate three times. In the second one, Ford is asked, “Do you think the Soviets are dominating the Poles?” And he said, “No, the Poles are not dominated by the Soviets.” Why did he say that? And why did he take so long to correct that?
RNS: By all the polls, he won the first debate. The second debate was on foreign policy, and the assumption was that this would be Ford’s strong suit. He was programmed to answer another question. I won’t get into that, but the fact is the problem wasn’t so much what he said. Because the snap poll right afterwards showed Ford won the debate. What happened was that TV kept repeating the clip overnight. And by next morning, the poll showed Ford lost.
DR: What Ford meant to say was what?
RNS: What Ford meant to say was, “I’ve been to Poland, I’ve been to Romania, I’ve been to Yugoslavia. I’ve looked into these people’s eyes. They don’t think they’re dominated by the Soviet Union.” But he didn’t say that.
DR: And he didn’t want to correct it for a while.
RNS: Ford was a very stubborn guy. It took him three days to correct what could have been corrected the next morning.
DR: So he loses the election.
RNS: Nine thousand votes in two states would have changed the outcome. Ford says to a weeping admirer, “I’ve got to give him the White House in better shape than I got it.” No talk about resisting. Or recounts. That day he gave orders to his entire administration: “This is going to be the smoothest transition in American history, by contrast with what I had to go through.” And that’s what they did. On Inauguration Day, as they’re in the helicopter on the way to the airport, Ford asked the pilot to circle back around the Capitol Dome, and he pointed down and said, “That’s my real home.”
DR: He goes to California and Colorado, and he builds a library and so forth. But then, four years later, does he think about running for president again?
RNS: He thinks about it, briefly. But Mrs. Ford had had her addiction intervention and was embarking on this wonderful new life, was beginning planning for the Betty Ford Center. He felt guilty. I don’t think he seriously thought about it. Ronald Reagan comes to see him in the desert and asked him—this is three weeks before the Republican Convention in 1980—to be his running mate. And Ford hears him out, but he says all the reasons why it’s not a good idea, and he recommends George H. W. Bush instead.
At the convention, the idea resurfaces. Ford agrees to negotiate. There are two negotiating teams. Now, I can’t prove this, but I believe this, based on what he told me. He has the famous interview with Walter Cronkite, and it’s not Ford who talks about a copresidency, it’s Walter Cronkite who characterizes it like that. And Ford didn’t stop him. By that time, it was Wednesday night. It was late. Basically, the convention was getting out of control. The rumor was spreading on the floor that there was a Reagan-Ford ticket. Ford had decided once and for all it wouldn’t work. He went to see Governor Reagan. They agreed. They shook hands. They parted, genuinely friends.
Time’s run out. So Reagan picks up the phone and calls George H. W. Bush. Two days later, Ford is getting on the plane with staffers, one of whom says, “What do you think?” Ford said, “All in all I’d say it was a pretty good convention. I gave a good speech and we got Bush for vice president.” For the staffer, suddenly a light went off. He said, “Were you playing games?” In other words, were you stringing this along with the desired result of forcing Reagan to pick Ford’s candidate for vice president? And Ford never gave him an answer.
DR: Ford then retires for good in Rancho Mirage, and also in Beaver Creek.
RNS: He helped out Jimmy Carter on the Panama Canal treaties. Carter needed Republican votes to pass them and Ford, rather graciously, got on the phone and lobbied his fellow Republicans. But they were not friends until the Anwar Sadat funeral. Ronald Reagan sent the three living former presidents to Cairo, and on the flight back, Nixon had an itinerary of his own. So it’s just Ford and Carter flying all the way back to Washington. They discovered many things they had in common. It was the start of a friendship that is akin to that of Adams and Jefferson in their later years. They also had an understanding that whichever one survived would eulogize his friend at his funeral. Which is what happened in Grand Rapids.
15 KAI BIRD
on Jimmy Carter
(b. 1924; president from 1977 to 1981)
Jimmy Carter might best be remembered for reinventing the postpresidency. Rather than stay out of the way of a current president, relax, write a memoir, and build a presidential library, Carter stayed actively engaged in solving health-care and democracy-related problems. As a result, he worked to eliminate the scourge of river blindness in Africa, and essentially eradicate the Guinea worm disease that has afflicted so many in Africa and other parts of the world; he monitored elections around the world; he tried to negotiate solutions to geopolitical challenges in places like Haiti and North Korea; and he became a prolific author of 32 books. He did all this while maintaining the simple lifestyle of a Plains, Georgia, resident, living in the house he built in 1960, and avoiding the effort to make large sums of money or be something other than the plainspoken, Sunday school–teaching proselytizer for Christian values, peace, humility, and sacrifice.
Jimmy Carter had many years to do all that he did, since he left the presidency in 1981. He has been a former president for a longer period than any other president—forty-three years. He has also lived longer than any other president—99 years and counting.
Prior to his presidency, Carter also broke the mold in many ways. He ran a campaign for president that defied the odds. He was a Southerner; a former governor who did not leave office that popular in Georgia; more conservative than the base of the Democratic Party; had no real money (and thus had to stay in supporters’ homes when campaigning, hotels being beyond the budget); not liked by the Democratic Party establishment in Washington; not a favorite of organized labor; and had a staff that included a number of young, inexperienced Georgians. But it clicked, as the party’s more liberal base was unable to unify behind a candidate who could beat him for the nomination. By the time liberals united behind Congressman Mo Udall, it was too late to stop Carter.
Although Carter started the general election campaign way ahead of Ford, the election of 1976 was essentially a tossup toward the end, as a result of the increasing public uneasiness with someone not well-known throughout the country and sufficiently experienced in the ways of Washington. But Ford’s pardon of Nixon, and mistakenly saying that Poland was not under the domination of the Soviet Union in a debate, helped Carter achieve a narrow victory.
As president, Carter seemed to have an enormous amount of bad luck, which lowered his approval ratings and made him unpopular both in his party and the country. Within the party, he was seen as insufficiently liberal and unwilling to adopt many of the traditional Democratic Party programs, like a form of national health care. His failure to support such a program prompted Senator Ted Kennedy to challenge him for the Democratic Party nomination in 1980, and while Carter won the nomination, he was never able to subsequently unite the party or bring Kennedy and his supporters into the fold.
Outside of his party, he had other problems, not all of his own making. The inflation inherited from the Ford years worsened, forcing Carter to appoint Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve; Volcker dramatically increased interest rates, slowing the economy significantly. Despite his preference, Carter allowed the former shah of Iran into the U.S. for medical treatment, resulting in the capture of 66 hostages from within the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a more than yearlong struggle to free them (and, as well, a more than yearlong reminder of Carter’s inability to do so). And long gas lines and high energy prices throughout the country reminded everyone of our dependence on foreign oil and our inability to become energy-independent, despite Carter’s repeated efforts to do so.
In addition to these problems, Carter was widely seen as overmatched for the job—a micromanager when the job called for a visionary leader. He was also seen as someone who did not select priorities well. He was so interested in doing so many things, and tried to get them all done, that he overwhelmed Congress, which could not process and approve everything that he wanted. And failing to get Congress to approve all his programs made him seem weak and not quite in command of the government.
The irony was that Carter was able to get an enormous number of his programs approved. (Today, getting a debt limit bill and twelve appropriations bills passed is seen as a mammoth undertaking.) Carter got Congress to approve the Panama Canal Treaty; civil service reform; much of his energy program; airline and trucking deregulation; and the creation of the Departments of Energy and Education.
But that was not enough to give citizens a sense that Carter was firmly in control and taking the country to the right place. Indeed, he delayed a proposed energy speech for nearly two weeks as he brought leaders to Camp David to talk about the country’s ills and needs. That confused the public, as did his subsequent request for the resignation letters of his entire cabinet (and accepting a few of them).
Carter loved Camp David, in part because it allowed him to escape from Washington. It was also the scene of his greatest diplomatic achievement—the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that he painstakingly negotiated for nearly two weeks in near isolation from the rest of the world. That agreement is still in place.
I witnessed all this firsthand, as a young policy aide not sure what to make of it. Carter was highly intelligent, a workaholic and truly self-made, and in many ways also a Renaissance man (poet, artisan, author, fly-fishing expert, woodworker, classical music aficionado). He knew a great deal about almost every subject, and at times that may have been his undoing. He felt he was smart enough to understand every issue and would, like an engineer, try to develop the perfect solution. But in doing so he often ignored the politics of his perfect solution, for he abhorred the idea that he would be seen as doing something for political benefit. (Telling him something would help him politically absolutely ensured that he would not take that action.)
While I was a junior White House aide and not in Carter’s Georgia inner circle, I often traveled with him outside of Washington, and interacted with him a fair amount as the deputy to my boss, Stu Eizenstat, whom Carter relied on for advice in the domestic policy arena. I admired Carter’s ability to process enormous amounts of information, and his willingness to take on so many issues at once in order to develop a workable solution. But my admiration was not enough, of course, to ensure reelection. The country saw someone unable to tackle the country’s biggest problems, and felt a change was needed.
In recent years, Carter’s postpresidency has increasingly been recognized as significant. Too, many scholars and historians have written that the administration made more than a few unforced errors but that it achieved more than might have been appreciated at the time. The defeat of Carter by Reagan was so lopsided that he felt a bit disgraced, and the later success of the Reagan presidency seemed to further diminish Carter in the public’s view. But four decades later, there has been something of a reassessment. One of the books providing such a reassessment is The Outlier, by Kai Bird, a distinguished biographer and historian. I had a chance to interview him at the New-York Historical Society on June 11, 2021.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DM): I worked in the Carter White House, so I have some experience with President Carter myself, but I didn’t know as many things as I now know after reading your book.
KAI BIRD (KB): I worked on it for six years, so my job was to unearth a few stories that you didn’t know.
DR: What prompted you to want to write a book about Jimmy Carter now that his presidency is more than 40 years past?
KB: I had been thinking about Jimmy Carter for 30 years. When I finished my first biography, about John J. McCloy, an elusive Wall Street banker and lawyer, I had written a lot in that book about the Iran hostage crisis. That’s a dramatic chapter, which is filled with Jimmy Carter. It made me curious about Carter and his handling of the hostage crisis in the Iranian Revolution, so I dug into it.
This was 1990, only 10 years after he’d left the White House. I went down to Atlanta and interviewed a bunch of his aides. He had just begun building the Carter Center. I had an interview with him, and I wrote a magazine article about all the great things he was doing with his ex-presidency. I came away from that experience thinking that I was the wrong guy to do this, because I didn’t understand the South. It seemed like a foreign country to me, and I didn’t understand Southern Baptists. I thought I didn’t understand race in America, all the big issues that would be involved with Jimmy Carter, and I also realized that his papers were still closed.
But I continued to think about it. I went on to some other projects, and in 2015 I finally came back to it and sat down and wrote a proposal and sold it to a publisher. By that time, the presidential papers in the Carter Library had opened up, and it was a rich source of material.
DR: Did President Carter cooperate with you?
KB: He cooperated in that he would see me. We had a number of good interviews. In our very first interview, I asked him about the papers of his personal lawyer, Charlie Kirbo, who was a sort of mysterious behind-the-scenes character in the Carter White House. Kirbo was the closest adviser Carter had. They were the closest in age. Kirbo had known him since 1962, and I knew that Kirbo had written him hundreds of memos and letters, but they weren’t in the archive.
Carter was surprised when he heard this, and he ordered his aide to look around and see if he could find them. Three days later, I got a phone call saying that they’d found five boxes of Charlie Kirbo’s papers in the attic of his widow. And they gave me access to them. It’s a fantastic trove of material to give you an insight into Jimmy Carter’s mind.
DR: The conventional wisdom today is that Jimmy Carter was a failed president but an extraordinarily successful former president. Understandably, he doesn’t like that, because he doesn’t feel he was a failed president. You make the point that he was pretty successful in many things he did, not at everything. Is that a fair summary?
KB: That’s a fair summary. I argue that if you want to understand Jimmy Carter, it’s a seamless story from before the presidency, through the White House, to his ex-presidency. He’s this driven, committed individual who’s relentless and intelligent and slightly arrogant. He knows that he’s the smartest guy in the room, and this explains how he managed to come from nowhere to win the presidency. It also explains some of his political failings.
DR: Why did you pick The Outlier as your book title?
KB: I like punchy, short titles, and that seemed to describe Carter. He’s a political outlier. He was a liberal Southern white man from a small town—Plains, Georgia, population 680—and he was the only liberal in Plains, the only man who had a twenty-first-century sensibility about race. He was always sort of the odd duck, the outlier. When he came to Washington, he was the outlier. He was the president, but he routinely turned down dinner invitations from Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. He just didn’t think it was worth his time, socializing with the Georgetown set. So he was an outlier in his personal dealings with the Washington political establishment as well.
