Historical Myths The Kennedys Edition, Concluding: How the 'Inevitability' of Ted Kennedy Haunted Democratic Politics For Over A Decade And How His Challenge of Jimmy Carter ended it for Good

 

If both John and Bobby Kennedy’s aura was built more on their martyrdom than anything else, Ted Kennedy’s throughout the 1970s could be built on actual achievements. By the end of the 1970s few legislators had a record that rivaled Ted Kennedy’s in the Senate.

Ever since he helped boost his brothers Immigrations reform act, he’d been a force behind some of the greatest causes of liberalism; the Voting Rights Act; the Freedom of Information Act; selective service reform, OSHA, fair Housing; the deregulation of airline and trucking and his voting for both the 25^th and 26^th Amendments. Even being unable to achieve his lifelong ambition – universal health care – by the end of the seventies he had become the pillar of liberalism, even to his worst critics.

Of course what both those critics and most of the Democratic Party was going out of its way to ignore was one of the things that had been part of it: Chappaquiddick. We will never know why or for what reason Mary Jo Kopechne was in Kennedy’s car that July evening, nor why he emerged unscathed while she was drowning. But it says a lot about the era and the Democratic Party in the 1970s – none of it good – that so many people refused to consider any part of it a hamper on the ‘inevitability’ of Ted Kennedy becoming President. That desire to reclaim Camelot did a lot of damage to the Democratic hopes for three consecutive elections – and some of it you may not be aware of.

The fact that the death of a human being did not even cost Kennedy his Senate seat says far too much about the Kennedy name in Massachusetts and what journalism was like in the pre-Watergate era. Leading up to the 1972 election, everyone seemed certain that Edward Kennedy would be a formidable contender, regardless of Chappaquiddick and despite the fact that both his brothers had died. The fact that early in 1971 Kennedy announced he would not run for the President did not stop many political figures – including Richard Nixon – from thinking he would be a factor in the race. White House recordings show that Nixon was certain as late as May of 1972 that a deadlocked convention would turn to Kennedy over George McGovern.

The fact that Kennedy was not running did not mean he was any less a factor in the race for the nomination – quite the opposite. Well before the convention, George McGovern who was on the way to clinching the nomination against the will of the party bosses, made it very clear that his first choice for his Vice President would be Ted Kennedy. Kennedy continuously said he was not a candidate, but McGovern was clearly hoping so. And that hope may have played a role in dooming the already remote chance McGovern had of winning.

As the McGovern team met behind closed doors in what would be the most disastrous hunt for a running mate in the twentieth century, an already amateurish hunt for a Vice President kept getting messier and messier. The leading candidate emerged as Kevin White, the Mayor of Boston. After hours of confusion, White became the consensus candidate. All that was left was a perfunctory  clearance call to Ted Kennedy. As Theodore White reported in his Making of The President: 1972:

 

“Kennedy was cool to Kevin White, he wanted ‘time to think it over. Did Kennedy’s cryptic response mean that he was now reconsidering joining McGovern on the ticket? It was worth waiting to find out. White’s choice was also being met with strenuous objections from the Massachusetts delegation… which announced if White were chosen, the McGovern delegation would feel itself repudiated.”

 

When Kennedy called back, he announced he was not running and suggested Wilbur Mills. McGovern was irritated with Kennedy and rejected it. This led to the selection of Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. How that decision ended up being the final nail in McGovern’s coffin is an article for another day; suffice to say any real chance McGovern chance of victory was probably damaged irrevocably when Ted Kennedy, for whatever reason, chose to dither on Kevin White.

After Nixon won in a landslide and the disaster of Watergate unfolded, leading to his resignation, once again the Democratic Party was looking to Ted Kennedy to be its standard-bearer in 1976. Indeed, many other Democrats who were considering running for the nomination debated the possibility based on the likelihood of his running. How many chose not to run based on that will never be known, but when he decided against it in the summer of 1975, one obscure Democratic governor was disappointed – Jimmy Carter, who had thought he could increase his possibilities if indeed he could be Kennedy head to head.

Jimmy Carter’s primary path to victory for the Democratic nomination is an interesting one that will be discussed in some detail in articles about other politicians in this series. What is worth noting for now is that the Kennedy clan and advisers never thought particularly highly of him at any point, even when he became the nominee. Kennedy and Carter became estranged early, particularly when Kennedy critiqued Carter’s lack of detail on policy. Carter never seemed to care. “I’m glad I don’t have to kiss his ass,” he said. Kennedy did not play a role at the Democratic convention in 1976, the first time in twenty years that a Kennedy had not had a prominent role at a Democratic convention. The battle lines were already being drawn.

I have come the conclusion that Jimmy Carter was a far better president that history initially decided to consider him. His achievements overall were considerable – the Camp David Accords, the Salt II treaty, relinquishing American control of the Panama Canal, and the establish of the Department of Energy. He was one of the last presidents to work with consumer advocates such as Ralph Nader and appointed many qualified minorities to judiciary positions (though not the Supreme Court.) And as derided as his ‘crisis of confidence’ of speech was at the time, the fact is he may very well be the last President to argue against the idea of American exceptionalism.

But there were many factors working against him, some he couldn’t control, some he refused to try. The most important was the condition of the economy in which inflation and stagflation came almost simultaneously. However, these circumstance had started well before Carter came into office and would have been a problem for any President, Republican or Democrat to overcome after decades of growth. His belief in a balanced budget and against the federal deficit – something that seems quaint from our current era -  ended up hurting his public perception, even though it was the right course for the country. There was also the snobbery from so many of the Washington elite among the press corps who refused to accept the Southern drawl of their commander-in-chief and so many of his advisors.

A larger problem was how he dealt with Congress. Given the Democratic majorities he had in the House and Senate – many of whom, like Carter, had won election because of the national dissatisfaction with Washington – Carter should have an easy time getting legislation through Congress. But almost from the start of his arrival in DC, he went out of his way to alienate Democratic leaders in both house of Congress, including Speaker Tip O’Neill, with his inability to agree on a clear policy and a general refusal to try and go along with the normal ways and means of Washington. He refused to agree to pet projects with Senators and Congressmen who were in danger of losing their seats in exchange for their votes, more or less wanting them to do so because it ‘was the right thing to do’.  His more centrist style made him more sympathetic to Republicans than his own party – including Southern Democrats he should have had an easier rapport with – did not win him sympathy with his fellow Democrats, who ended up paying the prize by voting in favor of his ambitious agenda with little support from Carter in return.

By the time of the midterm convention in 1978 in Memphis, not just the public but Democratic representatives were losing faith in Carter going forward. At that convention, Kennedy gave a rousing speech where, in giving speech ostensibly about universal health care, he freely challenged Carter over inflation and a failure of leadership. His speech no doubt would have been enough of a threat to Carter, but considering how rousingly it was received by loyalists who should have had Carter’s back above all else, was an even clearer warning sign.

Kennedy was prepping for a primary challenge to Carter by that point, and the fact that so many Democrats were in awe of the Kennedy name that they seemed willing to go along with it not only spoke to Carter’s weakness, but to the clear flaws in both the challenge itself and Ted Kennedy as a candidate in particular.

There had been primary challenges against incumbent Presidents in the past – Eugene McCarthy’s in 1968 had to be on Ted Kennedy’s mind – but there had been a major issue about the direction of the country at the time. Reagan had in the previous cycle challenged Ford for the Republican nomination (Reagan will merit his own series of articles) but one could argue both that Ford had not won election to the Presidency and the change of the direction of the Republican party overall.

Ted Kennedy’s challenge was an outlier. Whatever problems with Carter’s leadership their were, they were more based on personal animosity towards Carter than any real problems with his policy. The Democrats wanted Kennedy to be the Democratic nominee as much because they thought they were headed for disaster in November and wanted to thwart it. Even before Kennedy took up the mantle, Jerry Brown would mount an even more disastrous run for the Democratic nomination and well after Kennedy’s challenge seemed over, party elders were hoping that someone like Edmund Muskie or Henry Jackson would take up the mantle.

Carter may not have been the best at personal leadership, but that did not justify what was little more than an intraparty coup that seemed to be based on the idea that after tearing the party apart during the primaries they could unify it to win in November. And all of this ignored the fact that well before Kennedy announced their should been red flags from the start.

First of all, there was the state Of Ted Kennedy’s marriage which has been disastrous for years. Joan, his first wife, was increasingly becoming an alcoholic by the early seventies. By this point, Kennedy was becoming known as a womanizer. In the fall of 1979, articles were being written about Kennedy’s reputation as a womanizer, including sending staff to approach young women and dismissing them after their encounters. This was becoming an issue in the early days of the campaign.

There was also the fact the new kind of political humor, which hadn’t even existed in the era of Jack and Bobby, was starting to go for the jugular. The National Lampoon, one of the most famous humor magazines in history ran an ‘ad’ for Volkswagen: “If Ted Kennedy had driven a Volkswagen, he’d be President today.” Another issue featured a mock cover of the famous EC magazine Tales from the Crypt that showed Kennedy accepting the Democratic nomination while a decomposed corpse of a woman held up the placard ‘Chappaquiddick.” And while I find Saturday Night Live’s reputation for doing anything that damaging to any politician, they have rarely anything as dark – or on target – as having Bill Murray play Kennedy – walking on stage for his Presidential announcement dripping wet with seaweed in his hair. Past Kennedy campaigns had been known for their appeal to the youth of America. Humor like this, which appealed specifically to the under thirty-five demographic, should have been a warning sign that it wasn’t going to be that easy for Kennedy.

And if Kennedy was under any allusions that the media was going to give him the velvet glove treatment his brothers had gotten, he should have known within the first days of November that things were going to be a disaster. The day after SNL aired their sketch of Kennedy’s announcement, he was interviewed by Roger Mudd, a family friend of the Kennedy family who’d given Bobby Kennedy his last official interview the night of his assassination.

The interview was a disaster from beginning to end. Mudd showed footage of Chappaquiddick, contradicting the public account of Kennedy of the incident. The interview, infamous for Kennedy’s inability to give a coherent answer as to why he wanted to be President, was actually doomed well before that. Mudd asked him point black whether the possibility of another trauma on the national psyche was a reason for him not to run, He couldn’t give a coherent discussion about the state of his marriage or anything about Chappaquiddick. It was such a horror show for Kennedy that Bob Dole, himself running for the Republican nomination, may have had his finest line of his doomed campaign when asked about it: (That night) seventy five percent of America watched Jaws, 25 percent watched Ted Kennedy, and neither audience could tell the difference.”

Of course, that same day in what was meant to be a student demonstration, the American Embassy in Teheran was besieged and sixty Americans were taken hostage. Meant to last seventy-two hours at most, it would become the defining incident of Carter’s presidency, utterly control his final year in office…and effectively ensure Kennedy’s challenge would be doomed.

The Carter campaign effectively staged the Rose Garden strategy, as a way for the President to avoid having to actively campaign or debate and face criticism for his approach to governing. As the nation rallied around its Commander-In-Chief, Kennedy was constrained by the national mood to directly attack Carter…something the Carter campaign had no problem with. And the fact that Kennedy was not initially as good a campaigner as his older brothers was a shadow that he could never truly overcome.

It didn’t help matters that because Kennedy had been overconfident in the early stages of 1979, sure of his polls and momentum, that he and his organizers had squandered much of the year when it came to building a campaign organization. The campaign had no clear authority as to how to run and was stuck on running based on the ways of his brothers not on the primaries.

It was not until April that Kennedy regained momentum and that was more to the dragging on of the crisis in Iran. When Kennedy won in New York and Connecticut on April 25^th , his campaign was reenergized. He would win a lion’s share of the primaries that remained, but by that point Carter had to a big margin in delegates to overcome. On June 3, the primary campaign ended and Carter had 1898 delegates to Kennedy’s 1220.

It was his actions after this that did more to doom the Democrats in November even more than his campaign. Rather than bow out gracefully, Kennedy called for ‘an open convention’, basically an idea to release all delegates from their obligations and ‘vote their consciences’, i.e. Ted Kennedy. This was more a style of the campaign of JFK in 1960 than the way elections worked these days. The struggle went on for a month and by the time of the convention in Madison Square Garden, the party and delegates were emotionally drained.

Then Ted Kennedy appeared on stage and gave one of the most memorable political speeches in modern political history. It utterly transformed Kennedy’s career from that point forward, and may have guaranteed his place in political history in the nearly thirty years until his death. What it did not do was endorse Jimmy Carter. And when Carter gave his stumbling acceptance speech a few hours later, he looked worse by comparison.

But the final images of the night doomed the Carter campaign. Kennedy had not been at the Garden for his speech. Bad planning by the Carter campaign delayed his arrival at the podium, and twenty minutes after Carter’s speech ended, Kennedy arrived. The crowd roared its approval…but Kennedy refused to do what every defeated opponent does at a political campaign; take the hand and embrace the man who beat him. The cameras caught every minute of Kennedy shaking Carter’s hand and then walking away, five separate times, practically groveling for him to do so. Kennedy left the stage with acknowledging him.

By the time all the battling was over, Carter could finally focus on beating his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, something he could have focused on more had he not spent the last two months – or indeed the past two years – dealing with Ted Kennedy.

To be clear, I seriously doubt that Carter could have won reelection under any circumstances. The hostage crisis had taken up most of the last year and would continue to detract from his focus. Much of his campaign in the fall would be known as verbal overkill and petty meanness. He refusal to debate Independent Candidate John Anderson in October – a challenge that Reagan was willing to accept – made him look petulant. And most of his campaign was based on coming up with reasons to vote AGAINST Reagan rather than for him. Combined with the condition of the economy, Carter’s reelection prospects would have been grim had he not undergone a primary challenge.

But the fact that Kennedy had done so much damage to Carter in that campaign did not help him, and it certainly didn’t help that in the fall campaign Kennedy was slow to come out to campaign and spent most of his time campaigning against Reagan rather than for Carter. And that’s before you consider that a Kennedy loyalist named Patrick Corbin signed on to the Reagan campaign after Kennedy lost.

Kennedy managed to become an elder statesman after his defeat in the 1980 campaign and the lion of the Senate. After his passing, he was revered by many as one of the last great titans in politics too. This may be a fair assessment. But that legacy was built as much on Chappaquiddick as anything else, and left aside that for the 1970s and until 1980, Ted Kennedy was as much a Kennedy as his brothers had been – determined to get what they wanted, no matter what the cost was to the party or the nation. That is as much the legacy of Camelot as the myth.