True Compass (42 page)

It was a respectful exchange, about fifteen minutes. He listened to what I had to say, and raised only a few points of contention. After I told him that I was not interested in being divisive, he criticized the "harsh" tone of my campaign rhetoric and said he had never attacked me personally.

I responded, "Mr. President, those ads of yours aren't handling me with kid gloves."

At one point, he said, "You know, I too grew up in a family that was political, and we were very combative."

When I raised the prospect of a debate, Carter asserted that no incumbent had ever debated in the history of our country. Besides, he said, people understood our policy differences. Ultimately, his response was: You present your views to the platform committee. I'll present mine. And we'll stay in touch through our people. No debate.

As our conversation drew to a close, he asked me whether there was any part of the campaign I had enjoyed. I said it was least satisfactory when things were electronic, rather than person-to-person. He said he couldn't agree more.

The 1980 Democratic convention was set to begin on August 10 in New York. I maintained my candidacy through the convention, so that I could speak to the issues and address the delegates and the people I'd been fighting for. We had been on the trail for nine months, 100,000 miles, through forty states, and we were not victorious. But neither were we defeated.

Our cause, I declared, was the same as it had been since the days of Thomas Jefferson: the cause of the common man and the common woman. Our commitment had remained, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers."

I spoke out of a deep belief in the ideals of the Democratic Party, I went on, and in the potential of that party and of a president to make a difference. I offered the promise of the dignity of useful work to those who were idle in the cities and industries of America. I called for the reindustrialization of America. I asked for a resolution against the risk that prosperity be purchased by poisoning the air, the rivers, and the great natural resources of the continent. I affirmed the need to defeat inflation, reshape the unfair tax structure.

And finally, avowing that we cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society, I reaffirmed my stand for national health insurance: "We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level."

I congratulated President Carter on his victory, and voiced my confidence that the Democratic Party would reunite on the basis of Democratic principles. "And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith....

"For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

The delegates' response was warm and generous. NBC News said they were still cheering after forty-five minutes. I didn't know it was that long. But it was gratifying. Our message got through.

I returned for the final night of the convention to be on the stage after President Carter's speech. I reached the convention floor shortly after the speech ended, but a whole crowd of other Democrats were already there. The cheering after the speech had not gone as long as some had expected, so the platform was filling up earlier than anticipated. Tip O'Neill was right behind me, and behind him was the former party chairman Bob Strauss, and then Fritz and Joan Mondale, and party leaders of all kinds.

I shook the president's hand, and then Mrs. Carter's hand. I did not elevate his hand, and he made no effort to elevate mine. But then the press began to point out that I had not elevated Jimmy's hand, and that became a sore spot that has lasted, I suppose, to this day.

I thought that what we did on the podium was proper enough. Had he made an effort to raise our hands together I certainly would not have resisted. It just wasn't a big deal--certainly it wasn't as if we'd just gone fifteen rounds in the ring for a heavyweight championship.

President Carter continues to believe that I weakened him for the general election and caused him to lose the presidency to Ronald Reagan. In fact, he makes a point of saying so frequently, especially when he speaks in Boston. But I'm not really sure he needed any help from me.

Carter's approval rating in the summer of 1979--before his "malaise" speech--was 25 percent lower than Richard Nixon's after Watergate. The nation was suffering through an energy crisis and double-digit inflation. The American people were looking for new leadership. And Ronald Reagan was capturing the imagination of the American people with his sunny optimism. Having said that, President Carter was still quite successful against me. His political strategy worked. And my improvement in the closing weeks was too little too late.

What would have happened had I gained the nomination?

Frankly, I don't know that I could have beaten Ronald Reagan. He was more than a candidate at that time; he was a movement.

After the election, I phoned President Carter on December 15, as his administration was nearing its end. He asked me if I was looking forward to the new administration.

I answered, "Not one day sooner than they take office."

He said he would be staying in the White House until the last possible day. (There had been reports that Mrs. Reagan had suggested the Carters should vacate the residence prior to January 20, 1980.)

I thanked him for nominating the former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, Stephen Breyer, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The president said he didn't know Breyer personally but had heard a lot of good things about him.

It wasn't a long conversation. He asked me about Reagan's cabinet nominees, and I said they would not be subject to much dispute, except, possibly, Alexander Haig. We also talked about the status of fair housing legislation. And skiing. (We both had trips planned for the holidays.)

Then we wished each other a Merry Christmas and said we hoped to stay in touch.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Reagan Years

1980-1988

One of my first encounters with President Ronald Reagan was on St. Patrick's Day in 1981 during a small luncheon at the Irish embassy. We were seated at the same table. He was warm and friendly, full of laughter and small talk.

He told us of his recent meetings with Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whom he described as a rather lonely man; and Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who showed Reagan his detailed doodlings of horses while expressing a desire to become a painter after his term ended.

When he was asked about British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan said, "I hope Senator Kennedy will excuse me here." Then the new president proceeded to tell us how Thatcher had advised him to enact his entire program at once; otherwise, opponents would nibble away at it. So, he told us, that was what he was going to do.

Toward the end of the meal, Reagan was asked whether he planned to travel much for the next three years, or whether he would host visitors. "You know, I just don't know the answer to that question," Reagan said. "I never get my schedule until five o'clock in the afternoon about what I'm going to do the next day. Here I am, the most powerful man in the country, and my wife has to tell me to take my coat off. But to tell you the honest to gospel truth, I really don't know what I'm doing the next day until I get my schedule at night."

Someone at our table said, "Well, you must have some idea."

Reagan responded, "Oh, I'm sure they've all got ideas about where to send me traveling or who I'm supposed to see; but, you know..." And then he just smiled and laughed. "To tell you the truth, they just come up and tell me about the trips."

The questioner at our table persisted. "Well, does this continue for the next three years?"

Reagan said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't even know the answer to that. I don't know if they do it more in the first year, or more in the third year. I'll have to find out more about that."

I realized at the outset that Reagan's ascendancy would require a fundamental adjustment of my role in the Senate. For the first time in my career I found myself in the minority party. More challenging still, many colleagues whom I'd counted as reliably liberal began to move rightward from the issues we had championed together over the years.

The action commenced almost at once. In February 1981, Reagan, laying the groundwork for his assault upon the tax code, announced his wish to consolidate eighty-eight federal programs into seven block grants targeted to states and communities. At the same time, he presented a plan to trim federal spending by 15 percent. He said he wanted to "reduce waste" and "give local governments more flexibility and control."

I thought this was nonsense, and came out on the attack. At a glance, it was clear that the powerful petroleum companies were going to be shielded from sacrifice, while the "flexibility and control" of individual families would shrivel, as states would continue their long-standing habits of spurning the poor, the helpless, and the hungry--especially hungry children.

I called on such allies as the liberal Republican Lowell Weicker on the Labor Committee to help me in opposing Reagan's block-grant proposals, and we were able to rescue a good deal of federal aid for health and education programs from dilution into block grants, though as in most other areas, we couldn't prevent slashes in spending.

Nor could we really stem the full onslaught of the Reagan revolution, though we fought on every battleground that opened up.

The administration's long-anticipated first full-scale offensive commenced in July, with the unveiling and swift enactment of the largest taxcut program in American history. Reagan's Economic Tax Recovery Act of 1981 called for $150 billion in tax reductions over the ensuing three years, and the president made clear that he would comb the federal budget for corresponding cuts in social (if not military) programs. I voted against this bill, one of a handful of senators to do so, and immediately launched out on a series of speeches and position papers excoriating its likely social effects. It was "scorched-earth economics," and would vitiate job training, elementary school education, unemployment compensation, cancer research, and science research in general, as it would cripple the National Science Foundation. Several months later, when these programs had indeed begun to achieve these effects, I groused to a meeting of Democratic loyalists that "Ronald Reagan must love the poor; he is making so many of them."

My objections to President Reagan's policies are far too vast to enumerate, but one of them seemed to me to be based more on science fiction than reality--and it required us to spend enormous sums of money that might otherwise have gone to addressing our domestic needs.

On March 23, 1983, the president took to the prime-time airwaves, raised the terrible specter of the Soviet Union launching a nuclear attack on America, and then asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"

This was the world's introduction to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, on which, a few weeks later, I hung the nickname by which it would be known: "Star Wars." (I admit it, I had gone to see the movie. At the time, I'd seen the evening as an escape from reality.) The idea was that "the scientific community" would "turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace" and "give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." Then we could change the course of human history.

I will avoid a long recitation of what the scientific community was expected to create--the extended-range interceptors and exoatmospheric reentry-vehicle interception systems and X-ray lasers and chemical lasers and neutral particle beams and the rest. Suffice it to say that although some of the technologies developed in the pursuit of this notion proved useful in other antiballistic missile applications, Star Wars never quite got off the ground. In 1993 President Clinton significantly trimmed back its scope and budget and renamed it the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (it's now known as the Missile Defense Agency). One legacy of the budget-trimming Reagan's vision is a continuation of space-based defense research that has totaled well in excess of one hundred billion dollars. But unlike the movie its nickname evokes, Reagan's Star Wars never really had a successful sequel.

On the question of American diplomacy in Northern Ireland, Reagan and I found a reason for some agreement. Reagan traced his ancestry to the village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, and visited there in the summer of his reelection campaign.

There was continued violence in Northern Ireland and, in my view, an underappreciation of the need to stop the violence on
both
sides of the conflict. We drafted a series of statements and got them out to Senate and House members of both parties, to keep their awareness high. Tip O'Neill was very strong. He began a series of Speaker's lunches, and invited President Reagan to attend. At the same time, a number of us persuaded the taoiseach (the Irish head of state) and other key officials that this was the time for them to come to the United States. One incentive was that they would have an opportunity to talk with President Reagan about policy, most likely at the Speaker's lunch. And so they began coming.

Reagan did not discuss policy at these lunches. That clearly was not his intention. The first few times he came, his aides told all of us very clearly that we were simply there to tell funny stories. Reagan would lead off by telling a couple of tales, and then Tip would call on people around the room. At first the president called only on the Americans at the table--our Irish guests must have wondered what they were doing there--but gradually as time went on, he would call on some of the Irish. They would dutifully tell their stories, but they'd also manage to sneak in some comments about the situation in the North.

Eventually those lunches evolved into occasions for serious talk about substantive issues. They became an important and significant framework for dialogue, and continue today. Just as important, the luncheons helped motivate Reagan to prevail on his close friend Margaret Thatcher to somewhat soften her stance toward the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. Thatcher had coldly responded to the Hunger Strike of 1981, but in1985, she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Republic of Ireland a role in the affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time.

Tip O'Neill privately joked with me that he doubted Reagan was really Irish because he could never take any of his kidding. Once, Tip ran into the president at a party to celebrate the launch of
USA Today
. Tip said to him, "Why don't you give me a call sometime, Mr. President, and have me come on down? I'll straighten out all those mistakes that you've made in the past two years." Tip was just joking, but he could see Reagan's fists getting clenched.

On a personal level, I found myself among the countless people who enjoyed Reagan's company. In November 1981, I accompanied my mother and Ethel Kennedy to a White House visit with President and Nancy Reagan to express appreciation for a medal given to Ethel in memory of Bobby. In the car on the way over to the White House, I showed Mother a gift I intended to give to the Reagans, some of Jack's handwritten notes about football and politics. Mother was more concerned with knowing the whereabouts of the medal, in case she was asked any questions about it.

When we entered the Oval Office, the president said to Mother, "I'm sure you recognize the desk over there."

Mother said, "What about it?"

"That's President Kennedy's desk," Reagan said, "with the little doors where John played."

The president seemed genuinely interested in Jack's handwritten notes as I read parts to him. Then he said he had a gift for us too, but that it wasn't nearly as nice or personal.

He presented us with a jar of jelly beans, noting the improvements in the quality of the candy in recent years. They used to taste a little bit differently according to the colors, he told us, but now there were jelly beans that tasted like steak and peas and other sophisticated flavors. "You can reach into a jar and pick up a whole meal," he joked.

Mrs. Reagan added, "I wish we had bought stock in the company."

He lit up a room, and he could summon laughter, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, sometimes it was hard to tell whether his whimsical side was intentional. The best examples of this were the times we met in the Oval Office to discuss whether to protect the American shoe industry from imports, and ended up discussing... shoes.

The question of import quotas on consumer products was a critical issue in the 1980s. Massachusetts was among the states whose industries were struggling the hardest to compete with the flow of cheap foreign goods. Our shoe and textile industries especially were hurting.

I was involved in drawing up legislation to curb imports on these products. My bill, like the two-hundred-odd similar bills floating around Congress, was strongly opposed by the White House. Reagan in fact vetoed two quota bills during his presidency, even as shoe imports soared toward a 90 percent penetration of the market.

Several senators and I asked to speak with the president to press our cases, and he agreed to a meeting. About ten of us were on hand. John Danforth, the Missouri Republican whose state was hemorrhaging its small shoe plants and who favored some quotas, was present, as was the Missouri governor, Kit Bond. Strom Thurmond sat glowering as a defender of free enterprise to the bitter end. The president's response to our various presentations, everyone felt, could go far in determining the future of his administration's policy. And so we were all steeped in preparation.

The president strode briskly into the Oval Office with his famous armswinging gait after we'd all arrived, and took a seat right next to me. His aides told us that we would have half an hour, total, to present our cases. John Danforth was chosen to go first. He got only as far as, "Good morning, Mr. President." Reagan was looking me over. He said, "Ted, you've got shoes on, haven't you?" I replied, truthfully, "Yes, I do, Mr. President." He studied them and said, "They look like Bostonians." I glanced down at the shoes on my feet. Bostonians? I wasn't sure. Why hadn't I checked the label on my shoes before I put them on that morning? But the president was moving on ahead.

"Bostonians," he repeated. "That's incredible. Do they still make the Bostonian shoes around here?"

I had no idea, but I ventured, "I believe so, Mr. President."

Reagan seemed to want hard facts. "Does anybody know where the Bostonian shoes are made?" he demanded of the gathering at large.

Kit Bond cleared his throat and said, "I know they produce shoes just like them down in Missouri."

Someone else said, "You know, you can get the best shoes, shoes that are better than those shoes, if you come on up to Maine. They've got good shoes up there."

Reagan said, "They do have good shoes up there, don't they? Do they give them a real good polish?"

"Yes, Mr. President, they give them a good polish."

Reagan said, "You know, my father owned a shoe store, and I used to sell shoes. So I know all about them. To measure the length of the foot, you go across the top, like this." He began to demonstrate how to measure people's feet for shoes. "You can also put them in the foot measurer, and you turn the knob like this until you know exactly what size shoe will fit. And then to break them in, you take the heel in one hand, and the toe in the other, and you push toward the middle. That gets the leather to soften and bend, you see."

He went on in this vein for twenty minutes. Several of us began conspicuously to glance at our watches. At some point, I tried politely to intervene: "Uh, Mr. President, we've only got, uh--I mean, while you're here, we'd like a chance to--"