Jimmy Carter, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while working on his son Jack's Senate campaign in 2006, was Ted Kennedy's bitter political rival at a critical point in both their careers: Kennedy's challenge to Carter's renomination in 1980.
The Iranian Hostage Crisis that began in November 1979 months after the overthrow of the Shah was the 9/11 attack of its time; the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, which was seen as threatening both Iran and Pakistan as we were told that that power sought a "warm water port," was among the major defensive foreign policy crises of the latter 20th century. Carter had tacked to the right in response to these crises -- instituting mandatory draft registration and boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow -- and had never been an advocate of the expansive social welfare state that Kennedy favored. So Kennedy ran hard against him, was held off by a narrow margin, refused to shake clasp Carter's raised hand in unity on the stage after that great concession speech from the 1980 convention you keep hearing, and the acrimony from that race helped elect Ronald Reagan.
I have been looking forward to hearing Jimmy Carter's comments on Ted Kennedy. I've found them.
UPDATE: Because I don't have the problem of not being able to watch a video when I'm on this site, I tend to be insensitive to the fact that other people do. I have not been able to find a transcript of Carter's remarks, which were sadly not widely reported. I have to drop my daughter off at work and don't have time to write one. If any of you have time and would be willing to post a transcript as a reply to the tip jar, I would be very appreciative and will incorporate it into the diary text, with credit, when I'm able. [UPDATE 10:30 a.m. Sat. 8/29: I've now transcribed the comments, which took about 40 minutes that unfortunately I didn't have to spend yesterday before leaving for work, and have added them at the end of the diary.]
Carter's comments on Ted Kennedy's demise don't seem to have been published here or, so far as I can tell, widely circulated. So here they are. Carter, as usual for the past decades, does not disappoint.
Carter had been traveling overseas, as is his frequent practice, when news arose of Ted Kennedy's death. He gave this honest, kind, and unguarded interview with ABC; I haven't seen it posted here, but I think it's worth a view. In part, in just amazes me to realize that Carter is more than seven years older than Kennedy was -- he turns 83 on October 1 -- and he is as vibrant and vigorous as ever. He looks like he has a shot at hitting 150.
Carter and Kennedy had reconciled and regained a friendship in the years after the 1980 election. (Warning: ads precede the video.) I hadn't know that; if it's true, I'm pleased to hear it.
URGENT UPDATE: Some of the discussion that follows, an assessment of Ted Kennedy's actions in 1980, may strike some as ill-timed or inappropriate. Others think that they're fine. If you're not in the mood for any such critical evaluation, stop reading this now. Read it later, after the funeral, or even next year. The most important thing in this diary is to click that link to the first interview with Jimmy Carter, above, which is well worth your time.
What I never mentioned to my compatriots on the Carter for Senate campaign was that I had been a strong Kennedy partisan in 1980, being disgusted with Carter's imposition of draft registration, by which I was one of the oldest young men affected. (Who then thought it would still be around after 30 years?) I even met my wife at an anti-registration rally at our university that she had helped organize and I had helped publicize. Ted Kennedy is the first person for whom I ever voted to nominate for President.
But even in 1980, watching the convention, I thought that Kennedy's failure to reconcile with Carter on that Democratic Convention stage, once he had lost, was a low point in his political career rivaling Chappaquiddick. That is why I can never hear the "Dream Will Never Die" speech without remembering that the dream was comatose for several decades, aided partly by the actions immediately following those stirring words. Kennedy's failure there was a reminder to liberal activists everywhere: our responsibility is not simply to be right, but to win. Our responsibility is to keep, by whatever fair and legal means, our true opponents from taking power and ruining our nation.
Ted Kennedy was a great man; among the greatest, in fact. But he made a mistake, not in challenging Jimmy Carter, but in failing to reconcile with him when many in the Democratic Party looked to him for guidance. I don't know that he regretted it later; I can't remember ever seeing him interviewed on the point. But I would like to think that, with greater wisdom and greater perspective, he did. Had we re-elected Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- and down to the last weekend, before the seismic shift in public opinion after their debate and as the first anniversary of the hostage crisis arrived, it looked like we might -- the world would be a better place today.
De nisi bonum mortus, the saying goes: "say nothing but good of the dead." I don't intend this as violating that dictum, but as a reminder, while we are paying attention, of one of the great object lessons of Ted Kennedy's life.
I don't mean this diary as criticism of Ted Kennedy, my candidate in 1980. He was, among other things, famously human as well as humane, and to be human is to have flaws. But in celebrating his life at the time of his death, I hope that we will remember the lesson of reconciliation that his relations with Jimmy Carter in 1980 provided to us -- a lesson that Hillary Clinton had clearly learned, after a no-less-bitter fight, by August 2008. We should fight hard for the candidates and causes we favor, and then we must come together and support the victor. Ted Kennedy, for all his grace and glory, didn't do that when most it mattered. Jimmy Carter, for all his kind memories, no doubt remembers that. I'm glad that they reconciled in the following years -- as we endured Reagan and the years that followed. The lesson of their battle is ours to learn.
UPDATE: Jimmy Carter's comments, which I and I expect most people responding to this diary had seen before commenting in this discussion, appear below.]
Note: the warmth and sincerity of Carter’s facial expressions as he speaks is lost in the transcript, so please do view the video if you can. I know that he was overseas -- I don't know where, though I note that the reporter has a British accent -- and that probably explains why he reviews some rudimentary history here:
CARTER: Well, like all Americans, and I think people around the world, we’re just distressed at the death of a great man. I knew Ted Kennedy very well, on both sides of the fence – as a matter of fact in 1980 he ran against me for the Democratic Nomination when I was President and I was lucky enough to prevail.
But I think that among all the members of our U.S. Senate and the Congress of the United States he’s been pre-eminent. He’s been a staunch and honest and open and very able to express his views to the American people. And my own hope is that his deep commitment to a comprehensive health plan will be honored now by his contemporaries, by his peers, in the near future.
But we’ve already expressed, my wife and I, our condolences and our prayers to the family, and I don’t think there’s anybody that serves in the U.S. Congress now that could possibly be missed by the American people as much as Ted Kennedy.
INTERVIEWER: I think he was 47 years in the Senate, the third longest serving Senator ever. He pushed through a lot of big legislation. How did he change the American landscape?
CARTER: For the better. I think that Ted Kennedy, although he came from a very affluent family – a very prominent family, successful in politics – I think his first commitment was always to the people who were most in need, and he worked for those who were deprived in the American society, and not only did he work for them, but he was very effective in his legislative work. It was not just an idle commitment on his part. He was dedicated when the Senate was in session or out of session. Ted Kennedy, everyone knew, was fighting for the poor and deprived, those people in need in our community and our nation, and it was surprising how successful he was.
INTERVIEWER: It is a day to remember his achievements but also perhaps to ask the question of whether he might have achieved true political greatness were it not for his personal flaws. Would he have been President were it not for Chappaquiddick?
CARTER: Well, let me say that all of us have personal flaws and I don’t think that this is a time to concentrate on that. As a matter of fact, when he ran against me for President it was shortly after Chappaquiddick and, although I never mentioned it in the campaign, I think it was a detrimental factor, and had he not had that embarrassing experience in his younger life he would have been maybe more successful on the national scene. But he more than made up for that after 1980 and during the years that he served before in the Senate and after the Chappaquiddick event occurred. And I think he suffered from the consequences of it. He bore it like a man and he survived in the minds and hearts of the American people.