The Election that White Forgot
The United States tried something a little different on the 200th anniversary of its creation.The candidates for president that year were two men who had never before run for national office; in fact, the incumbent had never run for anything larger than a congressional district. The challenger had only run for state office on a couple of occasions, winning the second time to become a one-term governor of Georgia.
Something new was happening when it came to documenting that 1976 election, too: For the first time in 16 years, the premier writer of election histories, Theodore H. White, celebrated author of The Making Of The President series, was taking a break. He'd be back in 1980, but in the meantime, it was open-mike night for willing commentators. Jules Witcover does his best to fill White's breach by taking the nation's political temperature in dispassionate style.
Whether or not Marathon merits White's mantle, it certainly earns its title. At over 650 pages, it is one big book, even longer than White's typical efforts. Witcover, a reporter at the time for The Washington Post, had covered the election from before the state primaries and knew the major players on both sides.
This proves both a positive and a drawback. Marathon is a book about insiders by an insider, someone familiar with the backroom wheeling-dealing that made candidates front runners or underdogs before a single vote was counted. Witcover enjoyed the kind of access that allowed him to report on why Edward Kennedy, the most conspicuous non-candidate in the 1976 election, was at best a lukewarm supporter of his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver's candidacy. But it also made him more interested in reporting on such inside baseball than the actual nuts-and-bolts of the election itself: After some 640 pages of stage-setting, Witcover wraps up the election results in just a few measly paragraphs.
"Jimmy Carter was elected, but the result was hardly a rousing endorsement and certainly not the 'wide-ranging success among the electorate' that he had said before Labor Day was crucial to him to deal effectively as President with Congress," Witcover writes near the end. "Blacks, Protestants, Southerners of both races bailed him out."
It was a close race, as only two percentage points and 56 electoral votes separated Carter, the Democrat, from the incumbent, President Gerald R. Ford, the Republican. Still, it's hard to gin up much drama for this contest. Ford was an anomaly among U. S. presidents, the only one never elected to national office. Ford's experience in elections extended no farther than a Michigan congressional district. He also presided over the loss of a war, horrendous inflation, and the controversial pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, whom many Americans wanted to see rot in jail after the scandal of Watergate.
Needless to say, such an advantageous situation for Democrats led to a rather crowded field. Witcover shines brightest when he sets his focus on the Democratic primaries. It was a field made conspicuous by those like Ted Kennedy who were not running. (Other Democratic ghosts of elections past sitting this one out included George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey, though the latter did some dancing around that Witcover relates here in great detail.) Instead, Carter faced off against a second-tier group of liberals that included Shriver, Birch Bayh, Morris Udall, and Fred Harris; foreign-policy hawk Henry "Scoop" Jackson; and that wild card of wild cards, George Wallace, like Carter a governor from the South, but one who represented a different kind of South than Carter did.
Witcover profiles each of these men in sometimes enjoyably fleshy detail. Kicking off his campaign at his farm in Indiana, Bayh talks about feeling "closer to God" in such a rural setting, which causes much sneering from Witcover and the other reporters. Later, when asked about this "banal" comment, Bayh gamely replies he wouldn't say such a thing again – "at least to guys like you."
With such a finely-tuned gag reflex toward public piety, Witcover had a challenge with Carter, who made his rootsy Baptist faith a key plank in his campaign platform. Carter also positioned himself as the race's moderate, but exactly how moderate was a subject of much confusion. Whenever pressed about his positions on taxes, abortion, or defense spending, Carter tended to get rather fuzzy.
Witcover works to push through this by focusing on the candidate's inconsistencies, his unsettlingly smug personality, and some late friction with a liberal speechwriter, Robert Shrum, who resigned from the Carter campaign and called his former boss a bald-faced liar while Carter marketed himself as Mr. Honesty.
Shrum tells Witcover: "What made it hard was to listen to the stump speech: 'I will never lie to you; I will never mislead you,' said with fervor and passion, and seeing people believe it."
It's a revealing moment, as much for what it says about Witcover as it does about Carter. Here and elsewhere, whether dealing with trouble among the Mississippi delegation at the Republican convention or the to-and-fro behind Carter's selection of a liberal-enough running mate, you get an inside perspective that risks getting a little too inside, at the expense of the bigger picture. I found the going particularly tough when Witcover describes the high-jinks of his reporter comrades, including one involving a ewe in a hotel room that goes on and on.
The alternative may have required him to spend more time dealing with the sort of wildlife Witcover had less patience for: Republicans. He describes them as "antediluvian" and "Neanderthals" and saves his strongest opprobrium for Ford's challenger in the Republican primary, Ronald Reagan, whose candidacy draws expressions of incredulity from Witcover, especially when Reagan talks up Barry Goldwater as a role model.
"Sometimes I think moderation should be taken in moderation," Witcover quotes Reagan saying, which the author takes as an alarming "red flag" of Reagan's unelectability. At least in 1976, Witcover seemed to be right.
How Ford got so close to an upset in the end is a mystery Witcover doesn't explain too well. Perhaps people were more impressed than Witcover was by a man who ventured into large crowds after being targeted by two failed assassination attempts in the same month, and spoke with seeming passion about getting Americans to believe in their country again after the "long national nightmare" of Watergate. All Witcover can do is shake his head at the Nixon pardon and an apparent explanation for it offered by a White House aide, Bob Hartmann:
"Sometimes politicians don't do the smart thing, even when they know what it is. Sometimes they just do what they want to do, or what they feel they have to do."
Marathon is a smart book, but kind of soulless. In that sense it may well be the right document for remembering a rather soulless campaign between two men who didn't stand for anything more than basic niceness and decency. For all its heft, it comes off a bit shallow that way.
Something new was happening when it came to documenting that 1976 election, too: For the first time in 16 years, the premier writer of election histories, Theodore H. White, celebrated author of The Making Of The President series, was taking a break. He'd be back in 1980, but in the meantime, it was open-mike night for willing commentators. Jules Witcover does his best to fill White's breach by taking the nation's political temperature in dispassionate style.
Whether or not Marathon merits White's mantle, it certainly earns its title. At over 650 pages, it is one big book, even longer than White's typical efforts. Witcover, a reporter at the time for The Washington Post, had covered the election from before the state primaries and knew the major players on both sides.
This proves both a positive and a drawback. Marathon is a book about insiders by an insider, someone familiar with the backroom wheeling-dealing that made candidates front runners or underdogs before a single vote was counted. Witcover enjoyed the kind of access that allowed him to report on why Edward Kennedy, the most conspicuous non-candidate in the 1976 election, was at best a lukewarm supporter of his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver's candidacy. But it also made him more interested in reporting on such inside baseball than the actual nuts-and-bolts of the election itself: After some 640 pages of stage-setting, Witcover wraps up the election results in just a few measly paragraphs.
"Jimmy Carter was elected, but the result was hardly a rousing endorsement and certainly not the 'wide-ranging success among the electorate' that he had said before Labor Day was crucial to him to deal effectively as President with Congress," Witcover writes near the end. "Blacks, Protestants, Southerners of both races bailed him out."
It was a close race, as only two percentage points and 56 electoral votes separated Carter, the Democrat, from the incumbent, President Gerald R. Ford, the Republican. Still, it's hard to gin up much drama for this contest. Ford was an anomaly among U. S. presidents, the only one never elected to national office. Ford's experience in elections extended no farther than a Michigan congressional district. He also presided over the loss of a war, horrendous inflation, and the controversial pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, whom many Americans wanted to see rot in jail after the scandal of Watergate.
Needless to say, such an advantageous situation for Democrats led to a rather crowded field. Witcover shines brightest when he sets his focus on the Democratic primaries. It was a field made conspicuous by those like Ted Kennedy who were not running. (Other Democratic ghosts of elections past sitting this one out included George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey, though the latter did some dancing around that Witcover relates here in great detail.) Instead, Carter faced off against a second-tier group of liberals that included Shriver, Birch Bayh, Morris Udall, and Fred Harris; foreign-policy hawk Henry "Scoop" Jackson; and that wild card of wild cards, George Wallace, like Carter a governor from the South, but one who represented a different kind of South than Carter did.
Witcover profiles each of these men in sometimes enjoyably fleshy detail. Kicking off his campaign at his farm in Indiana, Bayh talks about feeling "closer to God" in such a rural setting, which causes much sneering from Witcover and the other reporters. Later, when asked about this "banal" comment, Bayh gamely replies he wouldn't say such a thing again – "at least to guys like you."
With such a finely-tuned gag reflex toward public piety, Witcover had a challenge with Carter, who made his rootsy Baptist faith a key plank in his campaign platform. Carter also positioned himself as the race's moderate, but exactly how moderate was a subject of much confusion. Whenever pressed about his positions on taxes, abortion, or defense spending, Carter tended to get rather fuzzy.
 |
| On September 23, 1976, Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter (on the left) and Republican President Gerald R. Ford (right) engaged in the first televised debate between presidential candidates since 1960. While Ford did well in this debate, Carter helped cement victory in the next one when Ford confusingly claimed Poland was not a Soviet satellite. [Image from www.history.com] |
Shrum tells Witcover: "What made it hard was to listen to the stump speech: 'I will never lie to you; I will never mislead you,' said with fervor and passion, and seeing people believe it."
It's a revealing moment, as much for what it says about Witcover as it does about Carter. Here and elsewhere, whether dealing with trouble among the Mississippi delegation at the Republican convention or the to-and-fro behind Carter's selection of a liberal-enough running mate, you get an inside perspective that risks getting a little too inside, at the expense of the bigger picture. I found the going particularly tough when Witcover describes the high-jinks of his reporter comrades, including one involving a ewe in a hotel room that goes on and on.
The alternative may have required him to spend more time dealing with the sort of wildlife Witcover had less patience for: Republicans. He describes them as "antediluvian" and "Neanderthals" and saves his strongest opprobrium for Ford's challenger in the Republican primary, Ronald Reagan, whose candidacy draws expressions of incredulity from Witcover, especially when Reagan talks up Barry Goldwater as a role model.
"Sometimes I think moderation should be taken in moderation," Witcover quotes Reagan saying, which the author takes as an alarming "red flag" of Reagan's unelectability. At least in 1976, Witcover seemed to be right.
How Ford got so close to an upset in the end is a mystery Witcover doesn't explain too well. Perhaps people were more impressed than Witcover was by a man who ventured into large crowds after being targeted by two failed assassination attempts in the same month, and spoke with seeming passion about getting Americans to believe in their country again after the "long national nightmare" of Watergate. All Witcover can do is shake his head at the Nixon pardon and an apparent explanation for it offered by a White House aide, Bob Hartmann:
"Sometimes politicians don't do the smart thing, even when they know what it is. Sometimes they just do what they want to do, or what they feel they have to do."
Marathon is a smart book, but kind of soulless. In that sense it may well be the right document for remembering a rather soulless campaign between two men who didn't stand for anything more than basic niceness and decency. For all its heft, it comes off a bit shallow that way.
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