True Compass (41 page)

And so now here I stood. I'd chosen not to make my announcement from the Senate Caucus Room in Washington, where both Jack and Bobby had delivered theirs. This setting symbolized my wish to be understood not as the third Kennedy brother in a line of succession, but as a candidate entirely of my own volition and purposes.

My announcement speech was brief, just a little over fifteen minutes. Emphasizing my strong antipathy toward Carter's view of a weakened American spirit, I stressed my belief in the hope and daring that had made the country great, and cautioned against "the myth that we cannot move." At the conclusion, to warm applause, I embraced my family, who had joined me at the lectern. And then it was down to business. I hit the campaign trail at once.

Jimmy Carter was waiting for me. In fact, he had been cleverly using the power of the presidency to pick off my potential supporters before I even announced. His operatives canvassed work programs around the country that had received operational funding. They told the people in those programs they had to vote for Carter because he could guarantee their funding. They reached out to mayors and local leaders in these towns and cities that were important electorally. They asked these people, "What do you need? What are you asking for?"

When I was in Washington just after I announced, the Illinois congressman Dan Rostenkowski came over and said, "We're going to do the same for you in Chicago that we did for John Kennedy. You can relax. You can depend on me to do it." About ten days later, at a gathering of Democratic congressional leaders at the White House, I spotted Rostenkowski. It seemed that he was avoiding me. I called him up the next day, but I couldn't get him. Four days later, he announced for Carter, who had pushed through funding for Chicago's transit system.

Some of the other supporters I was counting on were simply missing in action. At Eunice's Special Olympics in New York State, Pat Moynihan had made a big point of pulling me over and saying I had to run. He'd said he'd do anything for me. In a New York meeting, Hugh Carey had said the same thing: I had to run. He'd do anything for me. But once my campaign got started, I never heard from either of them again.

Then my campaign funding took a serious hit after my defeat in the Iowa caucuses. On January 21, 1980, in our first head-to-head contest, Jimmy Carter won the caucuses by an unexpected two-to-one margin.

Iowa was a learning experience for me as a grassroots campaigner. Unfortunately, the lessons I learned came too late.

The sluggish start that I mentioned showed up in the initial fuzziness of my message, but it hurt in other ways as well. We were slow in organizing, and the campaign had a jump-start feel in the early weeks. My campaign manager and close friend Steve Smith worked capably, but he was burdened by angst about my safety and the question of adequate security. We were not quick to realize how the hostage crisis had changed the whole electoral atmosphere and strengthened support for the president.

My nephew Joe Kennedy II, later elected as a congressman from Massachusetts, saw the debacle coming. He was the one person on my team who sensed that Iowa was going to be a bigger-than-life state, and that it was not in my pocket despite the good poll numbers. After he visited there he told us, "This is not a caucus. This is a primary state. There's so much activity and involvement."

No one really paid sufficient attention to him. We did Iowa the oldfashioned way, from the top down: we located the state's local Democratic leaders who were leaning toward us and counted on them to turn out the voters on caucus night. I made a strenuous tour of the towns, hitting many of them two, even three times. I noticed that the turnouts were not gigantic--quite small in some cases--but attributed that to the thin population.

On the evening of January 21, we counted more Democrats in our column than had shown up in either of the previous two presidential races. I looked at the numbers and said, "I'm going to win this thing. I'm going to win it."

I didn't win it. We'd misread that surge of Democrats who favored me. They were a minority faction in one of the largest turnouts in Iowa history, more than a hundred thousand people. And most of them declared for Carter, by a margin of roughly 60 percent to 30.

I could not believe it at first. I had campaigned with everything I had. I'd visited Iowa's cities and towns again and again--Ottumwa, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Council Bluffs. What had gone wrong?

I finally got the answer from Harold Hughes, the former governor and senator from the state. Hughes was a supporter, but other obligations had kept him away from my campaign. "I'll tell you why you lost," Hughes said. "The reason was, you'd arrive in one of these little towns, and there'd be a hundred people waiting for you at the church or the meeting hall. But you'd bring twenty Secret Service agents with you, and they would be pushing people around, telling them to sit over there. And then there would be thirty TV cameras.

"Now, when I campaigned in Iowa," Hughes went on, "I would drive into, say, Ames myself, at the wheel of a car or a pickup truck. I'd get out, and I'd go into the meeting hall by myself, and I'd shake everybody's hand and tell them my name. Then I'd write their names down. And after my talk I would go back to the motel, and I'd take that list of names out, and I'd write a note to everyone on it. That's what you have to do when you campaign in Iowa."

Hughes's folksy approach made sense to me. Unfortunately in my case, it was an impossibility. The Secret Service agents and the mass of TV people were following me around, on the assumption that I was a marked man. And so the heavy Secret Service was assigned. And the television crews were along to preserve it for posterity should it happen.

Was I worried about my physical safety? I suppose so. But I never brooded about it. I could not live my life dwelling on that kind of thing. Threatening letters are regularly sent to my office. We deal with them in a professional way, but I don't read them. I choose not even to know about them unless absolutely necessary. I've decided that I would not live out my life in fear of the shadows.

I flew back home from Iowa to McLean, where I listened to the results. When it became clear that Carter had carried the caucuses, I braced myself for a very unhappy duty. I knew I had to call my mother and tell her the bad news, that I was the first Kennedy who had lost an election. Her voice came on the phone, and I broke it to her as gently as I could. And I received one of Rose Kennedy's priceless, endearing reality checks.

"Oh, that's all right, Teddy dear," she replied. "I'm sure you'll work hard and it'll get better."

And then: "Teddy, do you know that nice blue sweater I gave you at Christmastime? Do you remember that?" I said I remembered it, yes. It was a turtleneck, and it had a small pocket on the front. It had been made in France.

"Have you worn it?" I said, "Well, I'm not sure that I've worn it." She said, "Is there something special about it? Because I just got the bill for it, and it was two hundred and twenty dollars. Will you check it out, Teddy? And if you haven't worn it, will you send it back, because I've got another blue one here that I think is just as nice and is not nearly as expensive."

By the next morning, I was ready to go into battle again. I was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University in less than a week, on January 28. I decided that if people were waiting for a strong message, they were going to hear it that night. No more fumbling or fuzziness.

From my opening words that night at Georgetown, I took the fight directly to Jimmy Carter. Specifically, I assailed what I saw as the futile stridency in the "Carter Doctrine" that he'd unveiled five days earlier, in his State of the Union address. The doctrine was a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, which had triggered shock and anxiety throughout the free world.

Citing Carter's remark that he was "surprised" by the Soviets' strike, I pointed to the warning signals that the president had missed: the obvious Russian buildup of forces, and the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan while Soviet military advisers looked on.

I drew attention to the hostage crisis in Iran. The Muslim students' detaining of American diplomats there, in retaliation for the U.S. admission of the deposed shah for medical treatment, was in its eighty-sixth day. "This is a crisis that never should have happened," I told the audience, because the administration had been warned of exactly this response to allowing the hated shah inside our borders. "The president considered those warnings and rejected them in secret."

Expanding from there, I rebuked the president for his failure to resolve a number of issues affecting ordinary Americans as he groped for a coherent foreign policy: rising inflation, unemployment, and energy prices. I called for gasoline rationing and for freezes, followed by controls, on prices, wages, profits, dividends, interest rates, and rents.

"Today," I concluded, "I reaffirm my candidacy for president of the United States. I intend to stay the course. I believe we must not permit the dream of social progress to be shattered by those whose promises have failed."

Press reaction in the following days ratified my sense that the speech had infused my campaign with the snap and focus it had so far lacked. "He gave some real reasons for running, based on issues," Anthony Lewis declared in the
New York Times
of January 31. "And he sounded like a man who wanted to run."

Contrary to all doubts that might have arisen at the time or since, I did want to run. I did want to be president. The bad news, though, was that the campaign coffers were running on empty. We were nearly broke. The big money began to fade away after the Iowa caucuses.

There were some on my team who wanted it to end. My two hundred campaign aides had worked without pay since mid-January, but pay was not the issue for them. They were willing to continue, and did. Their concerns were not for themselves, but for my political future.

I can remember Steve Smith telling me on that night, "Look, no money now. We're in debt. If you get out now, no one will really blame you. You took a crack. Your career is still intact. If you go back to the Senate, it's not a real blemish on your record. But if you stay in... I have the poll here from Massachusetts. You're getting beaten by twenty-five points in your home state. If Carter beats you in Massachusetts, your career is gone. Finished. That's what you're looking at. You have no money, and I don't know what's going to turn this thing around."

That was a very tough conversation. I remember walking around outside for a while after Steve spoke his mind. I'd told him, "I think I'll just wait a couple of days before I make my mind up." After a couple days, I said, "I'm staying in it."

My reasons were not complicated. I genuinely cared about the issues I was running on, and I knew that my team did as well. I felt we could get traction with our message and win some of the upcoming primaries and keep faith with our supporters around the country.

There was hardly any shortage of issues to care about in that year: health care, the economy, foreign policy. One frustrating problem in propounding my stand on these issues was simply being heard. I competed for airtime (and often lost) on the evening news with the Iran hostage crisis and then the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Some in the press continued to raise the issue of Chappaquiddick.

We won some. We lost some. We won some more.

We were in constant need of funds, but delighted with creative sources. Politically engaged artists created lithographs for us to sell on behalf of the campaign. James Rosenquist. Jamie Wyeth. Andy Warhol. Bob Rauschenberg. These artists probably raised a couple of million dollars for us. They kept us going.

As the weeks and months went on, I was able to refine my message in interviews and speeches, yet that did not neutralize the media obstacles to getting that message out on a daily basis. Several times, I challenged Carter to a public debate. In late May I even offered to drop out of the race and release my delegates if the president would debate me before the convention. Carter and his people deflected these offers, perhaps finding it impossible to believe that I would leave the race if my beliefs for the party received an adequate hearing.

We broke new ground in campaigning openly for gay rights. Toward the end of the campaign, I was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser at the Hollywood Hills home of a couple named Clyde Cairns and John Carlson. As my entourage made its way toward the party, someone informed me that it had been declared off-limits to the news media. I asked all the cars in the caravan to stop while my staff phoned up news outlets in the city and invited them to come along. We were overwhelmed by TV cameras. No major-party candidate had ever appeared at a fund-raiser organized by gay supporters.

I opened up a question-and-answer session at the event, and the complexity of some of the questions really fascinated me. One person wanted to know whether a partner from another country without legal status to remain in the United States would face deportation. Others raised fairness issues about the tax code and health care. I did a lot more listening than answering that night, and left with greater awareness of issues lawmakers were not yet confronting.

I met with Carter at the White House on June 5, to discuss the campaign and a way that we might go forward. We sat opposite each other in front of the fireplace, with a vase of flowers between us.

I tried to set a formal tone. I told him I certainly understood that, mathematically, I didn't have the delegates to win the nomination. But I felt that I was representing the concerns of millions of Americans who deserved to have their voices heard. The president had ducked debating me for the entire primary season, and as a result the people in our own party had been deprived of a give-and-take on the issues that mattered to them. I said that I was concerned about the economic issues facing our country and wanted to have a public dialogue with him about them. I also said that I was in the process of making decisions about how I was going to proceed in the next few weeks as we moved toward the convention, and that what I was most interested in was this dialogue. Finally, I told him that if we had a debate on economic issues and were able to make some progress through good-faith, constructive efforts on both our parts, then I would say that I would support the party's nominee.