Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Read Free Page A

with its doleful stoicism.
    Jimmy Carter was, it turns out, too much the smartest guy in a small town, a governor whose great virtue back in 1976 had been that he wasn’t incumbent Gerald Ford and that he was untainted by proximity to Nixon, Watergate, or Washington. His current rival,also originally a small-town boy, and a two-term governor, appeared to be a figure out of a different solar system, and not only because he’d been a Hollywood star. The much-anticipated, long-awaited debate between the two, when it finally came, took place in the political eleventh hour, just a week before Election Day. It happened in Cleveland, and was a game-changer, though not to the incumbent’s advantage.
    By the next afternoon after that debate, traveling with the president I could assess the very visible lack of excitement at upstate New York Democratic rallies. It amounted to negative reinforcement, telling me what I didn’t want to know about the results. Next to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter hadn’t, with all his sincerity and earnestness, been able to seize a single advantage during the debate. There, at the Cleveland Convention Center, it had been Ronnie’s evening from beginning to end. He’d been calm, confident, and even a bit condescending.
    This time, the line of his that passed into history was the humorously reproachful“There you go again.” Triggered by prim Carter statements characterizing Reagan’s sometime stands on Social Security, Medicare, and the possibility of universal national health insurance, it said nothing and everything at the same time. Just four words, and it was all he needed to convey his message when it came to Carter’s own problems. The challenger was putting the incumbent in his place, and the effect was devastating.
    For Jimmy Carter, Iran had become a political wild card. When, at daybreak a year earlier, the American Embassy in Tehran had been stormed by militant students, with more than fifty diplomats and staff taken hostage, his calm handling of the crisis had initially brought strong public support. The effect, in this early period after the standoff began, was to make him invulnerable to the challenge to his renomination posed early on from the left by Senator EdwardKennedy. But as the months began turning into an entire year and the hostages remained in the control of their captors, the stagnant situation and the American powerlessness it came to symbolize became a reflection on Carter himself.
    It was hard to argue otherwise. The fact is, the Iranian government had given its support to an act of war committed against the United States. According to the State Department,“any attack on an embassy is considered an attack on the country it represents.” What could be clearer? For most Americans, the situation in Tehran was just one more example—along with rising OPEC oil prices and the then increasing domination of the American auto market by Japanese competition—of how our country was getting kicked around. But if there was an alternative to Carter’s course it wasn’t visible then and hasn’t revealed itself since.
    The final hope came in the early hours of Sunday morning, before the 1980 election. We had spent all Saturday campaigning in Texas, ending for the night in Chicago after a brief stopover in Milwaukee. Near midnight a local congressman had even convinced the president to make an appearance at a large Italian-American event, featuring sports heroes like Joe DiMaggio.
    It was a short night. Around 2 a.m. I was awakened by a noise in the hall. Recognizing the clipped, military inflection of the Secret Service, I knew something was up. I heard someone say “Deacon,” the president’s code name. I called the Situation Room on my white “signal” phone. The woman who answered connected me quickly to the National Security Council staff. Then the good news: what I heard sounded like the hostages in Tehran were close to release. As I listened, it struck me the