Teddy White's Successor
OSHINSKY, DAVRO M.
Teddy White's Successors Campaign Journal: The Political Events of 1983-1984 By Elizabeth Drew Macmillan. 783 pp. $24.95. Ferraro: My Story By Geraldine Ferraro (with Linda Bird Francke)...
...West Virginia, a living symbol of poverty, backwardness, and dependency in the South...
...a lovely man in his seventies" had misadvised her on both counts...
...and prayed...
...at the personal attacks uponherfamilybyRupertMurdoch...
...For every identifiable problem, he appeared to look to government for the solution...
...Drew and Henry portray him as a decent man who seemed to be older than his years, confused by complex issues, and foggy about his reasons for seeking the Oval Office...
...275pp...
...When reporters confronted Jackson, he lied boldly before repenting at a synagogue in New Hampshire...
...Rhode Island, perhaps the most unionized and Democratic state in the Northeast...
...For those who care to relive it through her eyes, Ferraro: My Story is the obvious book to read...
...They supported alower defense budget, increased social spending, affirmative action programs, free choice on abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and higher taxes if necessary...
...Ironically, it was Jackson's "black talk" that got him into trouble...
...Their books, though quickly produced, have enlivened and illuminated one of the dreariest Presidential campaigns in modern memory...
...Henry provides some interesting details about the incident...
...In Henry's words, "to assign a white reporter would be to deny racism, to hold Jackson to the same standard as other candidates...
...I got down on my knees...
...Yet would that reporter understand the nuances of Jackson's rhetoric, or the culture in which he thrived...
...And when I sat on top of that booster down there, getting ready to go, it wasn't Star Trek or Star Wars, I can guarantee you that...
...Just get us through it...
...The whole episode was so sleazy that prominent white correspondents concluded—wrongly, it turned out—that Jackson was finished...
...So it goes, with Ferraro the feminist presenting herself as a woman who had no idea how her family did business, despite the fact that she was listed as an officer in several of her husband's companies...
...that they did not "fundamentally alter" Hart or undermine the validity of his political message...
...Elizabeth Drew describes him as "the master weaver of national myths," which undoubtedly was true...
...Hart delivered his message in generational terms...
...While two-thirds of the delegates labeled themselves liberals, only a third of the Democratic voters did...
...In a conversation with Milton Coleman, a black reporter for the Washington Post, Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown...
...He spoke about integrity, yet his speeches and anecdotes were laced with obvious untruths...
...Ronald Reagan, seeking his second term, is the central figure in these books...
...In the California primary, "Hart won more than half the votes from persons who used computers at home or at work, but he was beaten 3 to 1 among persons who had been unemployed in the previous year...
...Elizabeth Drew found him manipulative, withdrawn, suspicious, and unable to work well with others...
...In the words of James David Barber, a noted presidential scholar, "Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy...
...Minnesota, his running mate's home state...
...The main difference between ourselves and the other side," hesaid,"isthatweseean America where every day is the Fourth of July...
...the other was Colorado's Senator Gary Hart...
...Of all the Democratic hopefuls, only two attempted to reach beyond the party's traditional base...
...William Henry's Visions of America, a quirky, entertaining, of-len brilliant examination of our political culture today...
...Healonc spoke the language of the ghetto...
...He promised a new morality, yet he surrounded himself with characters like Anne Gorsuch, Raymond Donovan, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Presser, and Alfred Bloomingdale...
...Unlike Glenn, Senator Hart was dynamic, articulate and apparently interested in ideas...
...For another, "the Reagan people start with the assumption that 53 per cent of the people identify themselves w ith the Democrats and 35 percent with the Republicans...
...The Democratic front-runner in '84, Walter Mondale of Minnesota, was a politician who had been appointed to almost every office he ever held...
...Like a Norman Rockwell, he reassured millions of people that God, flag and family would be cherished in a nation under his care...
...Andrew Young, Coleman Young, Julian Bond, Benjamin Hooks, Coretta Scott King—all opposed his bid...
...I wasn't doing Hellcats of the Navy [a Reagan film] when I went through a hundred and forty-ninemissions...
...Numerous inconsistencies could be cited, of course...
...I was his wife...
...He appealed to young, affluent, well-educated voters—soon to bear the label of "yuppies"—who saw him reflecting their own pragmatic, nonideological stance...
...So were the journalists who covered the campaign...
...There was more to the Reagan phenomenon, however, than his winning personality or his reliance upon symbols and myths...
...The President spoke cheerfully about low interest rates, low inflation and low unemployment...
...The only evident blunder was Mondale's decision to oust National Committee Chairman Charles Manatt in favor of Bert Lance, "the bug-eyed, triple-chinned, oily-skinned" wheeler-dealer who reminded Henry of " the venal Boss Hogg on the TV series The Dukes of Haz-zard...
...The majority of Americans had not lived through the Great Depression...
...20.00...
...There was a presumption that because I was a lawyer, I should have known [these things...
...I wasn't John's lawyer...
...It took another week for the nation's news media to conclude that this was a major issue...
...They see an America where every day is April 15...
...Or had Gary Hart defended Third World dictatorships by implying that the United States, too, was ruled for years by a military regime...
...His charge that the Reagan Administration alone had not met face-to-face with the Russians was demolished when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko journeyed to the White House a few weeks before the election...
...As did most journalists, she stressed Hart's "rootless heritage," his rigid religious training, his name change (from Hart-pence), his age change (making himself a year younger...
...On the eve of the Democratic Convention, Mondale was running about 15 points behind Reagan in the polls...
...Ferraro has nothing new to tell us...
...The reviews have been withering, but that is hardly a surprise...
...Why did Glenn's Presidential dream turn into a nightmare...
...Maryland, the home state of Federal bureaucrats whose j ob security was threatened by Reagan's proposed cuts in government spending...
...Mondale may have been thinking the same thing...
...The President did not seem to notice...
...The child of Italian immigrants, she had worked her way through college and law school, raised a fine family, and served as a prosecutor before entering Congress in 1978...
...Perhaps a public weaned on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back could not get excited about a 62-year-old former astronaut who had circled the globe a few times in 1962...
...Nevertheless, the Democrats were cautiously optimistic about their chances in 1984...
...White has been replaced by a number of talented writers and scholars who possess his narrative skills, his access to sources and—the truth be told—a greater gift for analysis and observation...
...What about her husband's illegal activities as the conservator of an elderly widow's estate...
...It is difficult to believe the same courtesy would have been extended to a white candidate who referred to Chicago as "Coontown...
...Still, one cannot read this book without getting angry at some of the abuse she took—at the bashings from New York's Cardinal O'Connor over the abortion issue...
...17.95...
...Thus he lined up an impressive array of endorsements, including one from the AFL-CIO, which had never before blessed a Presidential candidate in advance of the nominating conventions...
...His campaign strategy was to portray himself as an inevitability, an obvious choice of important Democrats andthegroupstheyrepresented...
...There also was something magical about the man...
...He was the illegitimate child of a teenage mother, a member of the rural underclass of South Carolina, a man who could honestly say, "1 grew up under aparlheid.' Those who covered Jackson believed him to be the most char-ismalic and complicated of the candidates: part preacher, part revolutionary, pari con-man, pari bigot...
...He ran a decent campaign, yet he never had a chance...
...You have got to help us...
...17.95 Visions of America: How We Saw the 1984 Election By William A. Henry III Atlantic...
...The primary candidates who lost assured Walter Mondale of their loyalty, although Jackson upstaged him as an orator and Hart kept insisting that he alone could lead the Democrats to victory in November...
...After New Hampshire, Hart's was the freshest face on the political horizon...
...But reporters sensed the anger behind his smile, the desire to get even with whites...
...Coleman assumed no such thing...
...His attacks upon big government and costly social programs were popular, too, and his rhetoric was superb...
...He preached about family values, yet he showed little interest in his children or his grandchildren...
...More significantly, Mondale was overwhelmed by the four "p"s of Reagan's reign: peace, prosperity, patriotism, personality...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of History, Rutgers...
...And one day in her hotel room, writes Ferraro, "Ididsomethinglhaven'tdone since I was a little girl...
...The Election of 1984: Reports and Interpretations By Gerald Pomper et al...
...The President spoke proudly about expansion, opportunity and self-achievement...
...Hart, she wrote, "suggests a man who is constantly reinventing himself...
...The best of them include Elizabeth Drew's Campaign Journal, an elegant combination of interviews, political portraits and personal observations...
...More ominously, they worried that he was preaching black separatism and race hatred under the guise of self-reliance and black pride...
...Yes, "a friend of the family...
...As Henry reminds us, with the hindsight of someone who wrote his book after the 1984 disaster, the election of 1980 was more than a referendum on Jimmy Carter's report card...
...More bad advice from a friend...
...Even worse, these groups had a lot more influence upon the Democratic establishment than they did upon their own members or the public at large...
...As Henry sees it, Hart was undone by reporters who arrogantly depict their muggings as an exercise of conscience...
...Glenn was a genuine hero who liked to compare his own exploits with those of the actor-turned-President...
...Moreover, Mondale was aclassic New Dealer: a protege of Hubert Humphrey, an eloquent advocate of the old, the poor, the minorities, and the unions...
...Henry observes that Reagan first came along at a time when Americans were weary of hating their leaders, and he was a President they could genuinely admire...
...Democratic delegates agreed on almost all of the major issues...
...Bad advice from a friend...
...They considered him to be an unreliable self-promoter who would siphon off votes from Mondale, the white candidate most sympathetic to traditional black demands...
...Chatham House...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" For those mourning the passing of Theodore H. White's Making of the President series there is good news to report...
...For one thing, she wrote, the nature of Reagan's victory in 1980 had been misunderstood...
...of Delaware, and Governor Michael Dukakis S. of Massachusetts— sometimes called "Atari Democrats," because they emphasized the importance of technology and efficiency in a post-industrial era...
...A number of white reporters had heard similar slurs from Jackson, but apparently they ignored them in deference to his race...
...Furthermore, Henry points out, editors had to consider the public relations aspect of the situation: "If Jackson was demonstrating that blacks were ready to run for President, how could blacks not be ready tocoversucha race?'' The media solved this problem with a bira-cial arrangement that allowed Jackson to "talk black" to black reporters without losing the coverage of whites...
...She was bright and tough and funny...
...198 pp...
...As Gerald Pom-per notes in The Election of1984, "Hart was weak in the traditional constituency of the Democratic Party—blacks, union members and their families, the elderly, Catholics...
...They showed little empathy with those too poor or too immobile to abandon the smokestack industries," says Pomper...
...Jackson assumed he was talking off the record...
...What about her problems with back taxes and her congressional disclosure statements...
...They werede-tached from the battles of the past, compelled by visions of the future...
...And most American voters in 1984 obviously were weary of punching the clock...
...that they seemed rather trivial...
...A few weeks later, that face seemed less trustworthy and more unstable to the voters...
...asked Marvin Kalb...
...The end result was a huge boost for Mondale, who was soon alluding to Hart's neurotic underside, notwithstanding a friendship that went back a number of years...
...After years of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter, this was a major accomplishment...
...and The Election of 1984, a series of valuable essays by Gerald Pomper and five other political scientists about the campaign issues, the role of public opinion, and the meaning of the election...
...Finally, his hope that Reagan would commit some colossal blunder, encouraged by the President's poor showing in the first television debate, did not pan out...
...sat on the"Hymie" quotations for a week before burying them in a long profile on Jackson written by a white staffer, not by Milton Coleman...
...In this case, the press did not care that Hart's lapses had occurred long ago...
...This meant that Walter Mondale, the man of many endorsements, had a good chance of winning the Democratic nomination, but almost no chance of defeating Ronald Reagan in November...
...It worked well for a while...
...Are you strong enough to push the button...
...Like John Glenn, Gary Hart presented himself as a candidate who could attract enough independent voters to defeat Ronald Reagan in November...
...His selection of Ferraro appeared to hurt him more than it helped, although Ferraro's sex had little todowiththis.His attempts to register and mobilize black voters were outweighed by a flurry of white support for the incumbent, especially in the South...
...he alone spoke freely, and sympathetically, about Third World concerns...
...Feminists claimed that women were now rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies...
...The public may have wanted me to be a superwoman and all-knowing about John's business transactions," she writes...
...Do you cry a lot...
...It received good reviews, won a number of Oscars, and wound up as the biggest box-office bomb of the season...
...Jackson...
...Perhaps The Right Stuff reminded people that Glenn was something of a loser, a man who had not fulfilled the promise of his youth...
...The danger, Pomper points out, was that these delegates did not mirror the voting public, or even their party's rank and file...
...Ferraro was an American success story...
...The media establishment did not quite know how to cover Jackson'scampaign...
...They could not relate easily to a nation imperiled by poverty, unemployment and fear...
...His supporters were often hostile to labor...
...The press had such a field day with the Georgia banker that Mondale turned around and replaced him with poor Manatt, who sulked through the rest of the campaign as a wounded lame-duck...
...Hawaii, the only state with a nonwhite majority...
...Meanwhile, Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan threatened Coleman and his family with death...
...He belonged to a younger group of officeholders that included Senators Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Joseph R. Biden Jr...
...340 pp...
...No politician in recent memory was more adept at linking his own fortunes to the symbols and values of American life...
...He believes it was unfair and probably cost the Coloradan the Democratic nomination...
...It was representing the future of this country...
...When asked what Americans needed to know about a Presidential candidate, Mondale replied (on several occasions): "Whether he's sane...
...Please let us get through this campaign...
...For all of its well-publicized reforms of recent years, the party's problems seemed depressingly familiar...
...the challenger spoke earnestly about limits, fairness and sacrifice...
...asked Phil Donahue...
...There is clearly some truth to this, but hardly enough to sustain her dismissal of every allegation against the Zacar-ro-Ferraro family as either an innocent mistake or a nasty affront to women or liberals or Italian-Americans...
...Election surveys had revealed that women were more likely to vote Democratic than men...
...the challenger spoke bleakly about budget deficits, trade imbalances and higher taxes...
...Sydney Blumenthal, a guest political commentator on NBC throughout the campaign, may have summed up the Presidential contest better than any of the books it has produced...
...Dear God, please, please...
...The voters of 1984 may not have been as selfish as Henry suggests, but they did view New Deal liberalism as a dated philosophy, increasingly irrelevant to their needs...
...On the other hand, only 7 per cent of the delegates were self-identified conservatives, compared to a quarter of all Democrats...
...In addition, the Washington Pew...
...Their orientation was not toward meeting the human needs of individuals," writes Henry, "buttoward defining and solving problems of Amer-icaas an economic entity...
...The task of the Democratic candidate, therefore, was to encourage the natural instincts of Americans to vote Democratic in the Presidential election...
...Initially, the press played down Jackson's quirky statements and his links to extremists .Onecanonly imagine the result had Walter Mondale supported women's rights by stating, "If poor folks can survive three years of Ronald Reagan, surely a woman can guide this nation...
...at the stupid questions that media types would only direct at a woman running for high office...
...One was Ohio's John Glenn, the astronaut-turned-senator...
...His only election victories occurred when he was campaigning as an incumbent or as the running mate of Jimmy Carter in 1976...
...If anything, the film seemed to mirror the candidate's futility...
...it raised questions as well about the future of New Deal politics in a post-New Deal world: "Carter carried only Georgia, his home state...
...Jackson had come up the hard way...
...Ferraro: My Story By Geraldine Ferraro (with Linda Bird Francke) Bantam...
...Even the Kremlin knew who was going to win...
...The differences ranged from 5-10 per cent in the 1980 and '82 elections...
...Her book is largely a portrait of herself and her husband, John Zacarro, as the victims of a relentless smear campaign waged by the Republican Party, the Catholic Church and the news media, especially Rupert Murdoch's New York Post...
...What about her illegal loans in 1978...
...I went through two wars, and I know what it's like in combat," he said...
...Poor Glenn could not capture the public's imagination, even given the perfectly timed release of the movie The Right Stuff, which detailed his homespun heroics...
...Others argued that men had produced the gender gap by identifying with Reagan's policies and with his masculine image...
...Jackson had few friends within the black political establishment...
...Ronald Reagan praised the virtues of religion, yet he rarely went to church...
...He exuded so much optimism and good-natured sincerity that people found it difficult to blame him for their problems, or to accept the claims of his opponents—in the media and elsewhere—that he was a warmonger, or a simple-minded zealot, or an actor who cleverly obscured the truth...
...William Henry, by contrast, is appalled by the media's psychoanalytic treatment of Hart...
...He made them feel good about their country and about themselves...
...He did win a landslide in the electoral college, but he won only 51 per cent of the popular vole, and he carried many states narrowly...
...This fact not only added importance to the vice presidential selection, it also increased the chances that Mondale would choose a woman in order to exploit the growing "gender gap" in politics...
...He is a man of some charm, but no warmth...
...Elizabeth Drew devoted her journal entry of February 10 to the likelihood of a "close election...
...I am not praying to win...
...But I didn't...
...Hart was extremely unpopular with the people who covered the campaign...
...Campaign recollections are meant to be self-serving, and this one is no different from the rest...
...As the campaign wore on, and victory seemed impossible, Ferraro began to worry about her marriage, and her family, and the thought that she had embarrased Walter Mondale and let many people down...
...Only slowly," writesHenry, "didpolls begin to reveal that Jackson's black constituency did not share the white journalists' reverence for the pious niceties of political speech...
...The endorsements proved to be a mixed blessing, though, because they highlighted the charge that special interest groups were dominating the Mondale campaign...
...Ronald Reagan offered them an alternative vision where competition was healthy, where opportunity was boundless, where riches were richly deserved...
...and her astonishing demise became the biggest event of the Presidential campaign...
...He appeared to straddle a number of worlds—make believe and real, Hollywood and heartland America—without feeling a conscious sense of personal confusion...
...At one point she met with feminist leaders to discuss damage control—how to keep her candidacy from being blamed for the Republican landslide that now was inevitable...
...But this would not be easy, despite the cheerful math...
...responded by directing his campaign more specifically than before at his black brethren, above all on the campuses and in their churches.' Nonetheless, the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco was a harmonious event...
...cool and deliberately modern...
...In any event, Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate, and the choice was widely applauded...
...The wild card in the primary campaign was Jesse Jackson, the second black to seek the Democratic Presidential nomination—remember Shirley Chisholm?—but the first one to be taken seriously...
...Reagan is Miller Time, Mondale is the factory whistle," he said...
...and the District of Columbia, overwhelmingly black and accustomed to relying on Federal handouts even to pay its firefighters and police...
Vol. 68 • December 1985 • No. 16
