PRESS: Covering Carter

...He was offering himself as a kind of litmus, a sensitive human observer whose reaction to Carter would tell us what sort of man he was...

...We can take this approach or leave it, as we will, but it raises again the question of how one properly ought to write about a presidential candidate...

...I forget the incident, now, but I remember the obsessive tedium with which it was unveiled...

...I was struck by it, but I also found myself wondering suspiciously where the reporter found that out...

...Thompson picked up a certain resonance in Carter's speech, the outer ranges of bass and treble lost through most amplifiers and speaker systems...

...I have heard a lot of criticism of this story, mostly from people who take Thompson more seriously as a writer than as a reporter...

...Thompson, of course, did not leave out Carter's speech (of which he has a tape) through simple in-advertance...

...Does the source of his funding matter more than his voting record in Congress...

...Most of the issues of the last decade still matter and are still pending...

...She tried to put it into a story, but lacking Thompson's luxuriant space for mood-setting, she captured only part of what she had told me herself...

...In particular, he was not going to lie, he was not going to make shallow promises, he was not going to run the government like a ward heeler handing out plum jobs...

...Did Carter tell him...

...What gives a candidate genuine size and stature...

...In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, his account of the 1972 election, he includes all sorts of irrelevant detail-what he had for breakfast (grapefruit and Wild Turkey), where he was standing when he interviewed George McGovern (in the next urinal), why Random House owed him a trip to Pennsylvania (their nightwatchman killed his snake), the performance characteristics of his rented car (fishtails on the curves), and so on...

...The account of their meeting in Thompson's story, publishing in Rolling Stone this spring, is less interesting for what he tells us directly-they had breakfast together, and later Thompson listened to Carter make a speech -than for Thompson's groping attempt to evoke Carter's character...

...But Carter seems to have eluded reporters all the same...

...I concede there's an issue in there somewhere, but reporters pounced on it and shook it by the neck until I began to wonder if Nixon and Watergate had turned them into some sort of predatory species...

...THOMAS POWERS...

...The reason, I suspect, is that they have been looking for him where he isn't...

...As it is, too many stories about Carter betray an anxiety of being taken in and gulled again, as if there were no ground, no stance to take, between the prosecutor's and the high-school cheerleader's...

...Forget the words, Thompson was saying...

...Fair enough...

...Thompson went after Carter in the same way, running on and on and on about Carter's speech without ever quite reaching the point where he felt free to tell us what Carter said...

...The answer, in a word, was yes...

...What did he mean...

...The last thing we need at this moment is a man on a horse, even if it's a white horse...

...But a lot of early reporting about Carter struck me as less skeptical than downright hostile...

...One whole series centered on his verbal blunder about "ethnic purity...

...But where to look for him...

...It wasn't what he said-she couldn't remember the words...

...Had he shown his true regional colors...

...When a man tells you he won't ever lie to you, it's natural to check his record to see if that's a lie...

...This is a dangerous approach, inviting such rude rejoinders as Who the hell are you?, etc., but up to a point it worked...

...More than one reporter recalled George Romney's "brainwashing" blunder in 1968, which certainly destroyed Romney as a candidate, but for all the wrong reasons, and without one reporter even realizing, so far as I remember, that it was for the wrong reasons...

...I wonder what Carter means to do, just like everyone else, but I am not sure there is much to be found out by dissecting what he says and rechecking the addition on his tax returns...

...It read a bit like the last published story (I hope it's not the last, but one begins to lose hope) of J. D. Salinger, which fiercely focused at uncompromising length on the precise meaning of a single incident in the early life of Seymour Glass...

...If we forget the details learned at such cost we're going to wake up at the beginning of some future decade and find it's 1960 again...

...Such claims and others like them have an artlessness which invites skepticism...

...Hunter Thompson went after him in the Georgia governor's mansion more than a year ago and brought back, much later, the oddest, and by a country mile the longest, of all Carter stories...

...In the North, it was reported, he would cite the great leaders of the recent past-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King...

...Much of this can be explained by Carter's position as the front-runner, but not all of it...

...Even so she managed to convey a good deal missing from stories sticking only to the issues...

...Did his press secretary...

...The case was always meticulous, citing chapter and verse, but it often struck me as having a faintly hysterical air...

...How important is the fact that he washes his socks and makes his bed on the campaign trail...

...It was the way he said it, the human emotion behind the words, a resonance of such richness it dispelled her suspicions...

...Carter said he reorganized 24 government agencies in Georgia, but the record shows he only reorganized 19: That sort of thing...

...So far Carter has won precious few cheerleaders...

...Some special resentment seemed to focus on Carter because of the central theme of his campaign, a promise that not just his administration but he was going to be different...

...even Hunter Thompson has refused to surrender his heart...

...Would the blacks desert him now...

...Several reporters I talked to in the early stage of the campaign spoke of Carter as if he were a charlatan and fraud unprecedented even in recent history, which is saying plenty...

...He picked up what he took to be the timbre of the man-a degree of human concern, an element of seriousness which went beyond a list of issues, a quality of desire beyond the usual politician's ambitions...

...You may get away with things down home, but up here we don't make allowances, and we're going to find you out...

...The solution is not to be uncritical, but to be critical in a new way...

...There was a similar reaction to the discovery that Carter was altering a reference in his basic campaign speech when he appeared in the South...

...The reporters following Carter were all loaded for bear and put questions to him about ethnic purity in broadsides...

...Buried within the irrelevant detail are one or two facts of fundamental and permanent historical value, like Thompson's answer to the long-troubling question of whether or not Richard Nixon really knew or cared a hoot about professional football...

...let me tell you what I heard...

...Was this the backdoor route to the busing issue...

...But the prosecutors have missed Carter by somehow asking the wrong questions, and then checking his answers too closely for perjury, while Carter himself proceeds toward the White House not as an enigma, but as an unknown...

...The reporters were trying to be properly skeptical, objective and acute, I know, but all the same their stories struck me as having a tone close to malicious...

...Did he see it himself...

...It was as if the press spoke in a crabbed, schoolmarm's voice, saying, We've got our eye on you, Carter...

...But in the South he was heard to leave King's name off the lists This did not make front pages the way ethnic purity did, but the controversy seemed to share the same relentless, carping, nit-picking tone...

...COVERING CARTER PRESS When The New York Times Index for 1976 is published next year it is going to contain thousands of references to Jimmy Carter and page on page of tiny, dense, eye-straining type describing his day-to-day progress toward the White House, whether or not he manages to make it all the way...

...The Carter stories I remember now, without going back through old clips, were stories which struck me as nit-picking stories, the very sort I might have written myself about the sock-washing report...

...The facts which Thompson gathers are abundant, as a rule, and practically all beside the point...

...In plain words, he was going to restore an element of honesty and simplicity to Washington...

...Does it matter...

...Thompson's story about Carter was of a different sort...

...When does a candidate betray himself -when he cries during a press conference, as Muskie did, or when he more or less declines to campaign at all, as Nixon did...

...No one but the proofreaders will ever read it all, but even if someone should I wonder if he will have gained much sense of just who Jimmy Carter is...

...he shows no signs of sharing the elusive, enigmatic quality of Richard Nixon, say, or Eugene McCarthy, the archetypal Sphinx of the election of 1968...

...What matters...

...Does Carter still wash his socks and make his bed, now that he's so much closer to the White House...

...Thompson himself is a man of such infinite variety that he is never truly boring, but in this case, his critics said, he had produced a five-pound box of chocolates, every last one with liquid cherry centers, a rich feast, perhaps, but too much for a single sitting...

...That is the very first thing I recall learning about Jimmy Carter...

...He was telling us, in a way far too roundabout for the columns of any conventional newspaper, that the facts didn't matter so much as their effect...

...Most stories about Carter seemed to miss the essence and seize on the trivial, until one of the reporters who had been critical in the beginning strangely echoed Thompson's story in Rolling Stone...

...What do the voters need to know, and how are reporters to find it out...

...Before she went to hear Carter in person she thought of him as some sort of Southern con artist pushing a political Ponzi scheme, but then he got up to speak and everything changed...

...Thompson had nothing to offer us but this: he liked the man, he trusted him, and he felt there was something to him...

...The problem does not appear to be Carter himself...

...I am not trying to take reporters to task for learning the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, although at moments, when the matter at hand is essentially trivial, I sometimes think the lessons have been learned too well...

...His interests are not the same as those of the reporters covering him, but that does not mean their relationship can be conducted only as an adversary proceeding...