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

Ayatollah Khomeini’s latest conditions were no more exacting than those we’d already said we could meet.
    Once again, the same menacing wild card was back at the top of the deck. And, again, Jimmy Carter had no choice but to drawit. If he could manage to get the hostages out, he might still win reelection. If not, he probably couldn’t. And everyone in the country understood that this was so.
    Tragically for Carter, when later that Sunday the terms being demanded by Tehran became clear, the conditions that could determine his political fate, the news wasn’t good. All along, the squabbling mullahs had thrown stumbling blocks in the way and now they were at it again. The hostages would not be getting out before Election Day. When President Carter went on television that night to release the news, I watched and heard victory escaping, literally, through the airwaves. What I wished at the time was that he’d have talked tougher, showing himself to be righteously furious at the Iranians for daring to mess with an American election. But I was only a speechwriter, not the man at the head of the country. His instincts of caution—pure Jimmy Carter, when you came right down to it—were clearly defensible for a president with the lives of captured citizens at risk. Yet I dreaded what the impact would be on Tuesday.
    We awoke Monday, the final day before the election, to a speechwriters’ crisis. The index cards containing Carter’s election eve talking points—dictated to us by pollster Caddell and delivered, we thought, to the hallway outside press secretary Jody Powell’s office, had not gotten to him. Hendrik “Rick” Hertzberg, the chief speechwriter, had to transcribe them from the backup copies on Air Force One after takeoff.
    I could see the tension, exhaustion, and looming despair on the faces around me. The major polls—Gallup and the New York Times /CBS—were too close to call. The one countervailing red flag—and it was bright crimson—was the fact that Lou Harris, who’d made his name polling presidential elections since he’d worked for Jack Kennedy’s campaign back in 1960, had staked his reputation on Ronald Reagan as the winner.
    At the first stop—in Akron, Ohio—Carter got out there andramped up his attack on Reagan. First, he hit him for daring to quote Franklin Roosevelt; next, he belted him for saying “the New Deal was based on fascism.” Then he bashed him for a whole laundry list, from opposing the minimum wage to failing to back “every single nuclear arms limitation agreement since the Second World War.” After that, he swung at him for labeling Medicare “socialism and communism.”
    And once he’d gone this far, why not go all the way? So he did. He pronounced the campaign’s “overriding issue” to be “peace and the control of nuclear weapons and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorist countries.” The question facing the voter—he clearly implied—was peace or war. He was on one side, Carter made clear, while Ronald Reagan, his opponent, was on the other. The choice, for right-thinking voters, he implied, was an obvious one.
    This was precisely what Caddell had advised against. The goal for Carter’s last day of campaigning was to ignore Reagan and come across as “calm and presidential” in light of the latest news from Iran. Here was Carter making the explosive charge that his opponent’s election would mean “war.”
    At this point I was listening to the president while standing in the shadow of Air Force One. Standing nearby was Steve Weisman, a New York Times reporter and a friend, who saw the pain cross my face. He wanted to know what was bothering me. Rick Hertzberg, alert to the possibility of a story developing in which a White House speechwriter is revealed as depressed by his boss’s performance, pulled me aside. “Don’t show your feelings like that,” he cautioned.
    Once the president returned to Air Force One, Jody Powell, his close