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Jimmy Carter
I
had been back in Atlanta for a matter of
weeks when a new friend, Jack Watson, invited me to have lunch
with one of the candidates running for governor, Jimmy Carter.
The gubernatorial race at that stage was dominated by former
governor Carl Sanders, who left office with impressively high
popularity ratings, but was prevented under Georgia law from
serving two consecutive terms. Having sat out for four years,
but carefully staying in the public eye, Sanders was now ready
to reclaim his old job. I was surprised that Jack, former
marine, Harvard law school graduate, and a rising star in the
Atlanta legal community, was not supporting the urbane Sanders.
In fact, Jack, knew Sanders who had approached him, (after a
game of handball together), to join his campaign. Jack had
surprisingly demurred. Originally Jack’s reasons had been
simple. His mentor and patron at the law firm of King and
Spaulding was Charles Kirbo, a shrewd corporate lawyer, who
disingenuously maintained the style and demeanor of his rural
Southwest Georgia origins. Kirbo had represented Jimmy Carter in
a disputed election for the state senate in 1962 and after
winning the case had become a close friend and advisor, playing
an active role in Carter’s unsuccessful bid for the governorship
in 1966.
While Jack’s initial support for Carter was
out of deference to Kirbo, he responded to Carter’s invitation
to visit his home in Plains and built their own relationship.
Jack told me that the more he had gotten to know Carter, the
more he admired his personal characteristics- -infinite
self-discipline, tenacity, highly organized, on a constant quest
for knowledge and self-improvement, religious but deeply
concerned about living up to the teachings of Christianity
rather than the demands of the organized church, and his ability
to make you feel you had his undivided attention and that what
you said was of vital interest to him. “I saw in him” Jack told
me “everything I had aspired to be and wanted to have people
admire in me.” Beginning with that lunch, my own relationship
with Carter would be based on much those same feelings. I was in
awe of him from the beginning. Initially I was flattered that
someone running for governor would feel it worth their while to
have lunch with me. I had worried that I might need to conceal
my involvement with the civil rights community or even that my
professional life was largely devoted to providing care for the
residents of one of the most impoverished areas of the city, not
to mention my participation in the anti-war movement. To my
great surprise, Carter, who came from the most hard
core-segregationist part of the state, made it clear from the
start of our lunch that he was determined to preside over the
dismantling of racism in Georgia. After all the years of
struggle and frustration, I had suddenly found a soft-spoken,
white Georgian who shared my feelings on segregation but, more
importantly, was potentially going to be in a position to do
something about it.
I was thoroughly excited as I left the
lunch. For all of the frustration and sometimes agony of my
involvement with the civil rights issue over the years I now saw
not only vindication on the horizon, but also the possibility of
participating with Carter in accomplishing the dramatic
political and social change that I and my friends had long
dreamed of. In my own mind so much of the rationale for moving
back to Atlanta had to do with becoming involved in politics,
even though I had profound doubt about finding anyone in a
position of power with whom I would be compatible. Suddenly
here was the opportunity I had fantasized about. Perhaps most
importantly I not only liked Carter immensely and felt there was
a curious attraction and compatibility between us. In retrospect
I felt that both of us had similar strong idealistic beliefs
(perhaps shaped by early exposure to Christian ideals) but we
both wanted to remain under the umbrella of the establishment
because only with power could you hope to achieve those goals.
Having asked what I could do to help, I was
referred to an Emory political science professor, who was
commissioning position papers for the Carter campaign. I wrote
an analysis of the healthcare needs in Georgia. I would have
liked to do more, but my free time was limited and I did not how
to go about attaching myself to the state-wide operational
aspects of the campaign. That fall I also went to a number of
small events for Andrew Young, who was making a bid to become
the first black congressman from the Deep South since
Reconstruction. He failed that year, but would win Atlanta’s 5th
Congressional seat in 1972. I followed Carter’s progress closely
in the media and at times found his ambiguous statements about
race disconcerting. I was, however, reassured that these were a
necessary concession in order to get elected and by my
conviction that they did not reflect his true feelings. He won
against overwhelming odds, in large part because the rural
electorate did not know what he really believed.
In his inaugural address Carter removed
all doubt about where he stood on race by stating:
“...Based on the knowledge of Georgians
north and south, rural and urban, liberal and conservative, I
say to you quite frankly the time for racial discrimination is
over.”
It was a historic turning point and quite
unprecedented for any Southern politician to make such a
definitive statement. Carter received nationwide media attention
and eventually his picture would appear on the cover of Time
featuring him as emblematic of a new breed of Southern
governors. Many white Georgians felt he had misled and betrayed
them. Yet there was also widespread understanding that change
was inevitable and by taking a clear position, amid people’s
fear and confusion, Carter was perceived as providing strong
leadership.
Within a few weeks of his becoming
governor, Carter called and asked if Rosalynn could come to
visit my mental health center. Instrumental in this was a woman
named Beverly Long, a friend of Rosalynn’s, who as president
of the Georgia Mental Health Association, had worked with me to
obtain federal funding for my program and was one of my most
ardent supporters. When Rosalynn arrived in a neat red business
suit, with security people and accompanied by a reporter from
the Atlanta Constitution, I, quite inexperienced in
dealing at such a high level, felt overwhelmed. After touring
the facility we went to my office where we had prepared
refreshments. Rosalynn, on the surface very shy but with a
goal-driven tenacity, told me that she had decided to make
mental illness her area of interest while her husband was
governor and asked if I would help her set up a Governor’s
Commission on Mental Health, which I agreed to do.
Over the next year I made regular trips to
the mansion to help Rosalynn in her mental health ventures. What
I did not know at the time was how unprepared she felt for the
role she was being expected to fulfill. In everything from
public speaking to cooking or supervising the preparation of a
formal meal for official guests, she felt quite inadequate. In a
manner that was typical for her, she went about systematically
remedying each of her shortcomings, but she became depressed.
Her condition was compounded by the fact that Jimmy not only
expected everyone around him to be entirely self-reliant, but he
himself worked sixteen or eighteen hour days, with little family
time that was not directly related to his role as governor. None
of Rosalynn’s unhappiness was apparent to me when I was with
them. They invited me to meals and treated me warmly, almost
like a family member.
Because I had worked in emergency rooms in
California and at the Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic during
the height of the “hippie movement” including during the “Summer
of love,” I had become very familiar with the medical aspects of
drug abuse. I did not particularly consider myself an expert in
the field, but upon returning to Georgia I found that was how I
was viewed. I was at least the one-eyed man in the land of the
blind. Frequently I was asked to speak on the subject to both
medical and lay audiences. Using the pseudonym of Dr Aquarius, I
also wrote a weekly column for Atlanta’s alternative newspaper,
The Great Speckled Bird, giving advice to drug users. Over
the July 4th weekend in 1970, a rock concert was
organized in fields in the tiny community of Byron, not far from
Macon in central Georgia. Woodstock was still fresh in people’s
minds and the organizers wanted to replicate that
experience--very much a cultural milestone of those times. A
recording company, Capricorn Records, was flourishing in Macon
and several of the leading bands of the day including the Allman
Brothers and Fleetwood Mac were associated with it. The owner,
Phil Walden and others were the driving force behind organizing
the pop festival. With as many as a hundred thousand expected
to attend the three day event, the provision of medical care
became an essential part of the planning. I, along with eight
other progressive physicians and a number of nurses and other
health professionals, volunteered our services and organized
three medical centers housed in tents, similar to military field
hospitals. My Viet Nam experience served me well and, in fact, I
wore my green jungle fatigues, having hastily snipped off the
army medical and captain’s insignia on the lapels..
I can well understand why people who were
at Woodstock viewed it as a defining moment of their lives, as
in many ways it was for America as a whole. Byron similarly
proved one of the most enduring memories of my life. Three
hundred thousand people, in fact, came to Byron. The
temperatures were in the mid-nineties and the access roads were
quickly clogged. I had to abandon my car and walk the last mile.
I had planned to go home each night. It was impossible, both
because you could not get in or out and because the demand on
our services was so great. There is something emotionally
arousing about being part of such a massive throng of people,
especially when the spirit is so strongly positive. Add to that
the blasting sound of Jimmy Hendrix and other top rock stars
around the clock, plus the effect of a vast quantity of
psychoactive drugs (mostly putting people in a very mellow
state) and you had what was a surreal experience. There were
hippies and other experienced drug takers in the crowd. There
were also south Georgia “good old boys” more familiar with six
packs of beer than psychedelics. One whom I treated for an
overdose told me he had bought “one of every kind of pill I
could buy and ate them all.” One of the doctors I had recruited
took, upon arrival, some LSD “to see what it was like” then gave
the keys to his car, which he never saw again, to a complete
stranger. He vanished, leaving us short-handed for the rest of
the weekend. Heat prostration was the major problem and we
transfused hundreds of gallons of fluid into people who in a
state of alcohol or drug intoxication, had ignored the sun and
sweated themselves into oblivion. There were large numbers of
adverse drug reactions, overdoses and panic attacks, mostly
involving first time users. Hundreds of people cut their bare
feet and a few broke bones. We worked around the clock until
late on the Monday evening. All together in the three medical
tents we treated more than 7,000 people. We arranged the
evacuation by helicopter to the Macon hospital of about a dozen
seriously ill or injured people. No one died and we delivered
three babies. For that weekend, Byron had a population exceeding
all but two of Georgia’s cities and they probably had access to
better health care than if they had remained at home. The only
sour note was sounded by a fat red-neck man who wandered into
the tent and identified himself to me as a “Narcotics Agent with
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.” He asked about the
patients I was treating and then began questioning me concerning
my pseudonymous column in The Great Speckled Bird. It was
clear he felt I was too charitable in my attitude to drug users.
“Sooner or later we’re going to get you,” he said menacingly,
and left. Over the years I had become used to such hostility
from segregationists, supporters of the Viet Nam war, “pro-life”
activists, and those who resented me just because I did not
speak with a Georgia accent. In the South, however the specter
of violence was never very far from the surface.
Because there were a number of heroin
addicts in the community that my mental health center served, I
established a methadone maintenance program for which I had to
obtain a special license from the Food and Drug Administration.
I was one of only three physicians in Georgia with such a
license. By mid-1971 the steady intrusion of drug use into
Georgia had become an increasingly important political issue and
Carter felt obliged to take some action. In early June I
received a call from Landon Butler on Carter’s staff, to say
that Carter wanted to know if I would accompany him to a Senate
hearing in Washington as well as help draft the testimony he
would give on the drug issue. I had no idea about the format,
the length, the tone, or the specificity usual in such a
presentation or for that matter what in the world Carter might
want to say. The role of the staff assistant to a powerful
political figure was completely new and unfamiliar to me. Landon
explained that the governor trusted me and would say pretty much
whatever I advised. He said that Carter would like it if the
testimony left the impression that he had a deep understanding
of the subject, that there was no need to offer any concrete
solutions to the problem, and that great emphasis should be
placed on the need for the federal government to give the states
more funding.
On the day of the testimony I was to meet
Carter at the governor’s mansion at 7:00 am and ride with him to
the airport. At the time I thought of it as one of the most
thrilling days of my life, but as dawn was breaking and I was
making the short drive there, I realized I had slightly
misjudged the time and I was likely to get there a few minutes
late. I drove furiously and pulled in just as Carter was
emerging from the mansion to get into his limousine. “I thought
perhaps you had decided not to come,” he said caustically
without smiling. I had learned he was a tough taskmaster and
that such comments were common. In his mind they also reflected
his special form of dry humor, but it took a long time for me to
appreciate that. What I did know was that he was obsessed with
punctuality and had I been two minutes later he would have left
without me. I would see him do it to others. Reflecting on the
incident in later years I realized that had I been left behind
that morning, the rest of life would have been totally
different. I also wondered whether I had some self-doubt or
unconscious urge for self-destruction in allowing myself to come
so close to jeopardizing my whole relationship with him.
In Washington we went first to the Pentagon
accompanied by a Republican congressman from Virginia named
Marsh, who had set up a series of meetings with military
officials for Carter to discuss the drug issue in the military
and some problems he had been having with the US Corps of
Engineers. It was a reflection of how few people Carter knew in
Washington that he had asked a Republican with whom he was only
slightly acquainted and from another state to help set up the
meetings with the military.
On our way to Capitol Hill we drove past
the Department of the Interior. Carter pointed it out to me and
commented “the only cabinet job I would ever have an interest in
would be Secretary of the Interior.” It was the first inkling I
had that Carter might see a political future for himself in
Washington after his mandatory one term as governor.
The hearing of the Senate Government
Operations Committee was chaired by Senator Lawton Chiles, of
Florida. Jacob Javits of New York and several others who were
famous names to me but whom I had never seen in person were also
on the committee. Carter read the prepared testimony that he had
pored over on the plane ride from Atlanta and about which he had
questioned me in great detail. He employed what I was learning
to know as a characteristic technique of asking progressively
harder and harder questions until you came to a point where
there was something to which you had to admit you did not know
the answer. I always thought it was his way of reminding you
that no matter how much you might think you were an expert on a
subject, you were not perfect. His delivery of the prepared
statement was a little flat but he was sparkling during the
questioning. However, he began increasingly to turn questions
over to me as I sat at his side. Hearing my accent with its
traces of English and even my parents’ Australian, Senator
Chiles said to me “You do not sound as though you are from the
South.” Carter quickly jumped in, to ensuing laughter, “Senator,
he’s from the New South”--the term by which Carter and the crop
of Dixie governors elected in 1970 were being regularly referred
to in the press.
I had arranged that we would spend the
afternoon at the District of Columbia Narcotic Treatment
Program, then considered a national model for heroin addiction.
It was run by Dr Robert DuPont, an undergraduate classmate of
mine at Emory who had gone on to medical school at Harvard. We
had stayed in contact over the years and, as a native Georgian,
Bob was particularly happy to receive Carter and myself. For two
hours Carter talked to addicts and to the staff. He took a
particular interest in the computer system that kept track of
the several thousand addicts in the system. On the plane back to
Atlanta Carter told me that he would like to set up a similar
program in Georgia and asked if I thought it was possible. He
also asked me to draw up a plan and a rough budget for such a
project.
I labored on it over the next week. It was
becoming increasingly clear that someone would have to be hired
to run such a program and that I was the natural candidate. In
part it was because to implement a program quickly, it would
have to be one of the three of us who already held a license for
prescribing methadone from the FDA, and I knew the other two
were either uninterested or unavailable. Landon Butler and
Carter’s executive assistant, Hamilton Jordan, implied as much
to me. In many ways the timing for me was ideal. I had reached a
point of almost unbearable frustration at the health center. I
was caught in the middle of a vicious power struggle between the
black community and Emory. Black leaders both inside and outside
the Center with federal money and Washington’s sympathy were
emboldened and understandably intoxicated with the discovery of
the substantial power they now commanded for the first time in
their lives. They had not yet learned how to wield it with any
degree of subtlety or how to modulate it as part of a strategy
to achieve real benefits for the community. At the same time,
the administrators at Emory as overseers of the program, who did
not realize how their power was ebbing away, stayed on campus
and never had to speak directly to a black person. They issued
edicts that had to be conveyed to the community by
intermediaries like me. Accessible whites, as opposed to the
real culprits, became targets for attack. In a major palace
coup, the black employees managed to get the white director of
the health center ousted and replaced by a black physician. I
knew sooner or later I was destined for the same fate. The only
thing saving me was that they could not find a black
psychiatrist and although increasingly less important than the
color of my skin, I was liked and regarded as sympathetic to
their cause. I was on the verge of accepting a position in the
medical school at the University of Pennsylvania even though I
did not want to leave Atlanta. This potential job offer could
not have come at a better time.
I was, nevertheless, worried. My life since
I returned to Atlanta had involved one volatile issue after
another all of which I felt sure would preclude Carter, once he
knew fully about them, from appointing me. Having a personal
friendship and talking to me to pick my brain was one thing;
appointing me to a highly visible position in the state
government was something else. My involvement in the Byron pop
festival and with the Great Speckled Bird were well
known. I was active as a leader of the Viet Nam Veterans against
the war and regularly used my medical credentials to certify
individuals as unfit for the draft. In late April I had been one
of the organizers of a March against Racism and Fascism led by
Ralph Abernathy, organized to oppose continuing racist practices
across the South. Over three days we marched forty miles in
insufferable heat from Fort Valley along the rural byways of
Georgia to the capital picking up countless additional marchers
and racist taunts as we went. FBI and Georgia Bureau of
Investigation agents with cameras lined the route. We were
joined on the last day by national figures including Sen. George
McGovern, Leonard Woodcock, the head of the UAW and Coretta
Scott King. The march was bitterly criticized by white leaders
in Georgia, especially in the legislature. One of my close
friends, “Ruste” Kitfield, was the head of the Georgia ACLU. The
organization had invited as honored guests for its annual fund
raising dinner both McGovern and Jane Fonda. “Ruste” decided
that I was the ideal person to be Jane Fonda’s host during her
two day visit to Atlanta, her first to the city. Fonda was, at
the time, adored and reviled for her outspoken opposition to the
Viet Nam war. When I went to the airport to meet her flight, I
found an FBI agent also waiting for her at the gate. The FBI
agents shadowed us, without much subtlety, throughout her visit,
including sitting in a car outside our apartment when Judy and I
hosted a buffet dinner for her. In addition, my closest friend
in Atlanta was Alabaman Charles Morgan, the famous civil rights
lawyer and the Southern Regional Director of the ACLU, who had
argued and won countless key decisions on behalf of black
plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was an anathema to
whites across the region.
My biggest concern, however, had to do with
the abortion issue. While teaching at San Jose State School of
Nursing, Judith, previously quite apolitical, was outraged by
the tragic death of one of her patients as a result of a botched
illegal abortion. Shortly after we arrived in Atlanta she joined
a group “Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion” (GCHA) and
quickly became its legislative chairman for the upcoming
session. Unlike those states that had an outright ban on
abortion, Georgia was one with so-called liberal laws that
permitted abortion albeit with onerous and almost insurmountable
restrictions. GCHA’s goal was to get the restrictions in the law
removed. Just before the legislative session began, GCHA’s
president, Alan Bonser, dramatically and tragically committed
suicide by jumping off the twenty-first floor of the famous
interior atrium of the Regency Hyatt House. Judith was elected
to succeed him. In the legislative session her bill, sponsored
by two of the tiny group of Republican legislators (Republicans
were the progressives in that era) and endorsed by the
Atlanta Constitution, was defeated in committee by one vote.
Judith immediately announced that GCHA would seek donations to
send Georgia women to Washington, D.C. where a recent court
decision had made abortions more easily obtainable We were
inundated with calls from women around the state begging our
help in getting them abortions.
Judith also announced a new strategy to
challenge the Georgia law in the courts. With backing from “Ruste”
Kitfield and the Georgia ACLU we found a lawyer, Marjorie Hames, who
was willing to undertake such a challenge and recruit other lawyers
to work on the case. We also began looking for an appropriate
plaintiff. We found one in Sandra Bensing, a 22 year-old married
mother of three with a history of hospitalization in the state
mental hospital, and a husband who had been arrested several times
for child molestation. A patient at my health center, she was
pregnant for the fourth time and severely depressed; she had been
denied the right to an abortion under Georgia’s restrictive system.
I became her physician of record as our lawyers filed a
thirteen-page brief in federal district court for the Northern
District of Georgia. Now with the pseudonym “Mary Doe,” Sandra
Bensing and I headed a list of twenty-four individual and two
organizational plaintiffs (eight more physicians, seven nurses, five
ministers, and two social workers together with GCHA and Planned
Parenthood of Atlanta) against Georgia’s Attorney General, Arthur K.
Bolton, Fulton County District Attorney, Lewis Slaton (whom I had
despised since his involvement in a notorious raid on a coffee house
in 1959), and Atlanta Chief of Police Herbert T. Jenkins. We won the
case although the state of Georgia appealed it all the way to the
Supreme Court. There were several cases that year from different
states challenging different aspects of the abortion laws that
reached the court, but the justices eventually chose a Texas case,
Roe v Wade, and our case, Doe v Bolton, as the two
test cases they would hear. It was an unexpected but memorable
moment when, on December 13th, 1971, we attended the
hearing at the Supreme Court together with the plaintiffs and
lawyers from the Texas case, as well as the leaders of the abortion
reform movement from across the country. We did not fully appreciate
then that we were on the verge of a historic accomplishment that
would for ever change the lives of women throughout America..
More than anything, my experience in our
victory with the abortion laws made me realize that a small handful
of people with determination and a belief that they had right on
their side could bring about dramatic social change. What had
happened too, with success in the civil rights and anti-war
movements, and attitudes towards drug use, all of which I had played
some role, was a further re-enforcement of my feelings that I
personally could significantly impact society to improve the life of
everyone, and that no challenge was too great. It also made me feel
very good about America. I had come to believe fervently that
whatever the country’s shortcomings, there was an opportunity to
improve the imperfections in a way that existed nowhere else in the
world. I was not only filled with self-confidence, but believed the
only limit to what I could achieve was the inadequacy of my own
vision. I also felt that my education and experience had prepared me
uniquely for whatever I wanted to accomplish. All of this would play
a critical role in my relationship with Jimmy Carter.
The case against the State of Georgia was still
pending when Jimmy Carter called me on the morning of June 25th,
1971. He asked if I would be willing to take a leave of absence from
my faculty position and come to work for him in the Governor’s
office, setting up a statewide narcotic treatment program. That he
was willing to hire me, knowing what he must have known, convinced
me further of what an admirable person he must be. I am sure no
other Georgia governor, before or since, would have taken that kind
of risk. It made me feel very warmly towards him as well as thinking
that he must share my views to an even greater degree than I had
suspected.
Carter had created a new state agency for
me to run. He was able to transfer some discretionary funds for
the program, but the bulk of the required resources needed to
come in the form of a multi-million dollar grant from the
federal government. I was the only one who knew about the
details of the application process, I had no staff and the
proposal was due in Washington on June 30th. I worked
straight through for three days and two nights to get it
written, to gather the necessary documentation and to obtain
endorsement letters from agency heads, state officials and
Atlanta’s mayor Sam Massell. Carter wrote a powerful letter of
endorsement to accompany the proposal, which assured its
funding.
The next four months were perhaps the most
intense of my life. I set up a network of treatment centers,
both out-patient and residential, in every major community in
the state. I hired several hundred people, negotiated countless
rental agreements, set up a computer system (highly novel and
groundbreaking at the time) to track every drug abuse patient in
the state, and gave 187 speeches around the state promoting the
program. There was intense media interest to which I was
constantly trying to respond. By the end of the year we went
from having zero patients in treatment to having close to
10,000. I did not take a day off, the only time that I was not
working was when I was sleeping, and the amount of time for that
was seriously curtailed. My years as an intern and resident
made this seem a not unusual thing to do, whereas I believe
someone without that prior experience would have found such
intensity and sleep deprivation unthinkable.
The Supreme Court in their ruling would combine together the two
cases using Roe v Wade (by which the two cases are now
usually jointly referred to) to establish a woman’s
fundamental right to abortion and Doe v Bolton to prevent
states imposing procedural obstructions. The full story of our
struggle is told in meticulous detail in David J. Garrow’s book
Liberty and
Sexuality, Lisa Drew Books/Macmillan, New York, 1994.
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Carter would frequently call me,
often shortly after 7:00 am, the time he arrived in the
Governor’s office. “Did I wake you up?” he would ask as
a form of one-ups-manship to let me know he was already
at his desk while I was still eating breakfast at home.
He had a disdain for small talk and the calls often
lasted less than thirty seconds. He rarely identified
himself, expecting me to recognize his voice. “Can you
come to see me this afternoon?” “Yes” I would reply and
he would hang up before I could utter anything else.
The centerpiece of Carter’s
governorship was the reorganization, streamlining and
modernization of state government. To accomplish his
goals, Carter had placed himself in serious conflict
with an array of entrenched interests especially in the
State bureaucracy. This meant that I too, with my novel
operation and closely identified in people’s minds with
Carter, became the target of many who wanted to see me
fail. The State Board of Health, which Carter had
already signaled his intention to abolish or
dramatically reform, was infuriated that my agency was
reporting directly to him rather than being placed under
the Department of Health. They commanded me to appear
before them. Carter, whom I knew felt badly about
dropping me in this crossfire, asked lawyer, friend and
advisor Robert Lipshutz as well as Rosalynn to accompany
me to the hearing. Lipshutz was able to deflect the
legal issues while Rosalynn’s presence signaled the
Carters’ strong personal backing for me and served to
restrain the board members from making direct personal
attacks on Jimmy. Carter regularly invited me to
accompany him to events around the state, to football
games, speeches to sheriff’s associations and similar
groups, man-made and natural disasters where he felt his
presence was critical, and social events. In part it was
another way of showing his backing for me as I swam in
difficult had unfamiliar waters, but it also reflected
the growing personal relationship between us. After one
of our first meetings he took me out to his appointments
secretary, Mary Beazley and said “Peter can come in to
see me any time he wants to.” It placed me in a small
select group around the governor. Over Christmas 1971 I
went to see my mother in Britain. While there I bought
an excavated Roman glass bottle and on my return gave it
as a gift to Carter, an avid collector of old bottles,
with a note “You will never find one of these in the
clay of South Georgia.” He encouraged me to go to Plains
and spend a day with his mother and brother Billy. For
much of the morning Jimmy’s brother Billy drove me
around their land in a pick-up. Late in the afternoon
when I went to maverick, white-haired Miss Lillian’s
home, she asked if I wanted a drink and I said coffee
would be fine. She asked ”What about a real drink?”
Wanting to be appropriate to the situation I suggested,
perhaps a scotch. Ever after I had the unjustified
reputation in the Carter family of having a weakness for
scotch. I also enjoyed his sons in their twenties,
especially James, known as “Chip.” I developed great
affection for the whole
family.
One day when I had flown with
Carter and other State officials to Savannah, we were
touring a paper mill. We were spread out across the
factory floor and I sensed Carter looking at me from
quite some distance away. Our eyes met. I sensed in that
moment, in ways I cannot explain, that we had a special
affinity. I had a powerful sense of shared destiny. I
was always conscious of the promise I had made to myself
on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic
convention that in four years I would be inside the
convention hall, and four years after that I would be
back with my own candidate. Now I believed that
candidate must somehow be Carter. A few weeks later when
we were riding together in the back of his car to a
meeting in Atlanta I asked, with some trepidation, “Have
you ever thought about running for president?” “No” he
replied, adding “but if I did, I would do it like I ran
for governor, going to the people and trying to shake
hands with everyone in the state.” That was enough to
convince me that I was not just creating a total
fantasy. I was beginning to feel that fate had brought
us together and that destiny was controlling our lives.
Carter had all the attributes I felt were necessary to
become president, including, although he was coy about
it, the driving ambition. I was the only one around him
who could help him overcome his cautious reluctance to
do something that on the face of it was preposterous and
absurd in the political context of the time. I believed
deeply that I could be the catalytic force to make it
happen. It seemed not only miraculous, but a product of
a force far greater than my own, that I should be in
that position. I had come back to Georgia with something
like this very much in mind, but that I should find
someone ready, with all the necessary qualities, for
whom I had the greatest admiration as a human being, and
to be in the position of influence I now was, seemed
incredible to me.
I would meet with Carter in the
formal setting of his office with its deep pile royal
blue carpet and incongruous chrome and black leather
chairs on an average of once a week. I quickly learned
to come with a concise list of the concerns on which I
needed decisions. I would lay out the issue in a minute
or less, cite the options, and with only occasionally
additional questions, Carter would make a crisp
decision. Perhaps it was his military training. We would
go through a list of a dozen or more items in fifteen
minutes. He was a pleasure to work with. He told me
early on that he would not be peering over my shoulder
all the time and he would judge what I had accomplished
by the end of year, not each day or each week. He also
said that he expected me to make mistakes. What he
required, he said, was that I be right at least fifty
percent of the time.
In late 1971, lured by the
excitement of the political arena, I began to spend
increasing amounts of time around the governor’s office.
I developed a growing friendship with Hamilton Jordan,
Carter’s “executive assistant.” Rotund and friendly,
Hamilton, four years younger than me, had devoted
virtually all of his adult life to Carter. If Carter was
committed to me, then so was he. Hamilton loved the
wheeling and dealing of politics but was not an
administrator and was highly disorganized. He loved the
wheeling and dealing of politics. He was an inveterate
strategizer both in his head and on paper, but he had
great difficulty returning phone calls or following
through on commitments, both of which tended to
undermine the good will he built in other ways. His
relationship with his wife Nancy was unraveling, and
visiting their apartment was like being in war zone.
Lansing Lee, a recent graduate from the University of
Georgia, tried, as Hamilton’s part-time assistant, to
bring order out of the chaos. Wafting in and out of the
office was tall, grey-haired Charles Kirbo with the
honorific title of “chief of staff.” Running a full-time
law practice he appeared only when there were major
decisions to be made being present, however, almost all
the time during the forty days the legislature was in
session. I had a special affinity with a man named Cloyd
Hall whom Carter sent in to deal with crises–usually
involving serious racial conflicts–around the state.
Cloyd was representative of a category of white
Southerners, like Carter, who had long been clear in
their own minds that segregation was wrong and in their
own quiet ways had worked against it. Until the late
sixties most of these people had been too intimidated to
open their mouths. The only person around Carter with
whom I had a strained relationship was his press
secretary Jody Powell. Powell, like Jordan a few years
younger than me, was competent at his job but had a
caustic style. He always sought to portray himself as
the closest to Carter and was most sensitive to others
seeming to usurp that role. I felt in his heart he was
still a part of the unreconstructed South and we
disagreed on most matters of substance. He had been
forced to withdraw from the Air Force academy after an
honor code violation making my role as a decorated Viet
Nam veteran a source of resentment. Our relationship was
further strained later when a headline in the
Washington Post quoted Carter generously saying
“Peter Bourne is my closest friend in the whole world.”
It was an object lesson in how potent a force jealousy
can be in politics. Overall, partly because of my
relationship with Carter, my slight age advantage, my
education and my vastly greater experience in the world,
I was, as the one real outsider, treated well with a
surprising level of acceptance.
Carter was committed, as part of
his reorganization plan for state government, to
combining the health and social services programs into
one “Department of Human Resources.” With my health
background, I played an increasing role as an “in-house”
expert in planning the new department, including writing
articles about it in professional journals. I received
an additional title as “Health Advisor to the Governor”.
In that capacity I also helped launch an initiative
labelled the “Cripplers and Killers Program” that
identified the top causes of mortality and morbidity in
the state and implemented strategies to deal with them.
I also convinced Carter to create a “Governor’s
Commission on Alcoholism” and place my friend Jack
Watson as the head of it. Carter had staked his
political life on the passage of his reorganization plan
and when it passed the State Senate by one vote, it was
the justification for an afternoon of intense
celebration.
My own personal life was in
difficulty. I had been ambivalent about marrying Judith
from the start. My year away in Viet Nam had not helped.
Although we worked well together and had few day-to-day
conflicts, I was not happy and neither was she. We
agreed to separate. A few weeks later she discovered she
was pregnant. After agonizing discussions, we decided
that staying together for that reason alone was not in
the interests of the child or of ourselves. In the
eighth month, Judith stopped feeling the baby moving,
and her obstetrician told her it would be still-born.
The last few weeks before delivery was a nightmare with
people, usually strangers trying to be friendly, asking
her when the bay was due. The crib and baby clothes she
had bought had to be put away. I stayed with her in the
hospital throughout her labor, but instead of being one
of the happiest days of our lives it was one of the
saddest. I thought about the hundreds of women I had sat
with during labor earlier in my career leading to great
joy, but with my own child there was only misery.
A few months after the statewide
drug treatment program was set up, the Southern
Governors Conference held its annual meeting in Atlanta.
Carter proudly brought Governors John West (South
Carolina), Reuben Askew (Florida) and Dale Bumpers
(Arkansas) to tour the system’s main patient intake
center in Atlanta. “You should set up something like
this in your states,” Carter told them. “ I agree,” said
Bumpers “But where would I get a Peter Bourne?” The
flattery was a memorable boost to my ego. I was
gratified that Carter was proudly showing off my
accomplishment but more important to me was the
opportunity to size up these others Democratic leaders
of the “New South.” All were competent, pleasant and
progressive, but with none did I feel the electricity my
relationship with Carter stirred nor the sense that I
was with someone truly extraordinary.
The race for the Democratic
nomination for president began to heat up in late 1971.
Ed Muskie was the clear front runner and when Landon
Butler was invited to be his campaign director in
Georgia, I told him “take it. I don’t see how you can go
wrong.” It was poor advice; Muskie’s candidacy would
collapse without garnering a single delegate from
Georgia. My natural inclination was to support Senator
George McGovern. His anti-war stance and generally
liberal position on most issues appealed to me. I had
also met him at the ACLU event with Jane Fonda and
during the “March Against Racism and Fascism” where, as
he was preparing to address the marchers at Morehouse
College, I had told him how much I hoped he would run.
I, however, wanted more than anything to be part of
whatever Carter planned to do. He wanted to be a visible
player and power broker, so had avoided endorsing any
candidate, rebuffing several approaches from
segregationist George Wallace, the preferred candidate
of the overwhelming majority of white Georgians. Under
unprecedented new rules, delegates to the party
convention in Miami were to be elected at caucuses, held
on March 11th 1972, in each congressional
district. I ran as a delegate in the fifth congressional
district. I ran “uncommitted” meaning I was not publicly
identified with any of the presidential candidates. As a
“Carter loyalist” I would be able at the convention to
vote however he directed me. Having his own block of
“uncommitted” delegates would give him enhanced
bargaining power at the convention. In this unfamiliar
procedure black and white liberal activists were able to
turn out their supporters and sweep the field. I lost to
a young African-American student committed to
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Kirbo lost and Carter
running in his southwest Georgia district narrowly
pulled out a victory.
Early on in my relationship with
Carter I had assumed there was a group of senior
grey-haired sages whose advice Carter relied upon in
making key political decisions. I quickly realized that
apart from Kirbo, there were no such people. Kirbo, like
those in their twenties around Carter were expert at
tactical issues within the context of Georgia politics
but lacked any broad strategic vison or much
understanding of what was happening in the nation as a
whole. My experience in the military, my training as a
physician, my time in Seattle, California and Washington
and outside the United States, especially southeast
Asia, as well as my exposure to a diverse array of
people, cultures and political movements, not to mention
my childhood in Britain, gave me an informed perspective
that no one else close to Carter had. Gradually I came
to understand that this was one reason why Carter
listened to me. Even before I left California I had
seen how the tectonic plates of history were moving. The
civil rights and anti-war movements, the upheaval on
college campuses and a broad desire for change had
spawned a populism across the country with a vast new
segment of society demanding a role in the political
process. Reforms, especially in the Democratic party,
made it possible for activists to play a quite
unprecedented part in shaping national politics. The
South, as a result of the civil rights movement and
legislation of the mid sixties, was on the verge of
being accepted back into mainstream of America. Its long
tradition of populism was very compatible with what had
happened in the rest of the country throughout the
sixties. I had observed with great interest the success
of George Wallace’s appeal to the disaffected in
northern states in 1964 and 1968. I was convinced the
stage was set for a Southern populist without the burden
of segregation to emerge on the national scene. I saw it
all with great clarity and absolute self-confidence that
I knew as well as anyone what was happening in the
country. It was that perspective that I kept conveying
to Carter.
Although I had not been elected as
a delegate to the convention, the fact that I had run
helped to entrench me as part of the Carter political
team. Over the next several weeks, McGovern began to
emerge as the probable Democratic nominee and I was the
only person in the governor’s office with strong
connections to key McGovern supporters both in Georgia
and nationally. I was the only one at that point, Carter
included, who actually knew McGovern, which considerably
enhanced my political capital. The Southern Governors
Conference in 1972 took place shortly before the
Democratic convention. It was held at the Hilton Head
Resort in South Carolina, mainly so that the governors,
who did not have a great deal of pressing business to
transact over the three day weekend, could spend much of
the time on the golf course and in other recreational
activities. By now I had a good relationship with most
of these men. Carter, who did not play golf and could
never stand to feel he was not being productive, decided
rather than sit around the lavish resort, to visit
nearby impoverished Buford and Jasper counties. Mary
King, a major figure in the civil-rights movement whom I
would later marry, was the project overseer in
Washington for the federal funding of my health center
as well as that of a similar program in these counties.
She came to organize the visit. This area in the
so-called low country of South Carolina had recently
received heavy national attention because of its extreme
poverty, widespread malnutrition, ill-health and
parasite infestation in a high percentage of children
comparable to the Third World. Carter was eagerly
followed by the press corps desperate for some story out
of an otherwise newsless weekend. Carter’s genuine
compassion and concern as he talked to people in their
homes, in a little café, and on the streets further
endeared me to him. He had palpable empathy that he had
with these poor suffering black people. The resultant
publicity, especially in The New York Times,
generated some problems for Carter. It looked like
grandstanding, and to draw attention to the stark
poverty in an adjacent state (there was also plenty in
Georgia) when he was a guest of that state’s governor
seemed ungracious. Governor West, however, a man of
generous spirit and a good friend to Carter, waved away
any criticism. It did serve to distinguish Carter from
his fellow governors. The media coverage was also
a way of catching the eye of McGovern, who came to join
the governors on the final night of the meeting and who
had previously chaired the senate committee that had
investigated the state of affairs in Jasper and Buford
counties.
By now it was clear that I would be
part of Carter’s delegation going to Miami. In my eyes
it made eminent sense for the liberal McGovern to choose
a fiscally conservative and integrationist Southerner to
run with him. I talked with Kirbo, Jordan, Powell and
Landon Butler about launching a strategy to convince
McGovern to pick Carter. While Jordan expressed some
cautious enthusiasm, others saw it as a quixotic notion
that could backfire, making Carter, not yet at the
halfway point of his term, look foolishly ambitious,
jeopardizing his agenda with the legislature and
antagonizing most Georgians. Carter himself was
skillfully cryptic in his response. He would not endorse
the idea, but at the same time did not oppose it, which
all of us knew was a green light to go ahead. Landon
Butler, who was not coming to Miami, obtained a letter
extolling Carter’s virtues from a friend who had been an
aide to Robert Kennedy for me to give to McGovern’s
campaign director, Gary Hart. In the meantime, at
Carter’s invitation, McGovern stayed at the mansion on
his way to Miami.
Carter had a problem. He wanted the
national visibility of a prime time speech from the
podium. George Wallace had asked if he would nominate
him, but, while it would have been well received in
Georgia, it would only do damage to Carter nationally.
In addition, I flew to Miami on the same flight with my
friend Julian Bond, elected as a Shirley Chisholm
delegate, who told me he was filing a complaint with the
credentials committee over the racial composition of the
Georgia delegation. Carter certainly did not need to be
in a public dispute with Julian Bond. Shortly after we
arrived in Miami, Carter received a call from Senator
Henry “Scoop” Jackson asking if he would nominate him.
Carter promised a response later in the day. That
evening Hamilton Jordan and I were driving to a
restaurant in his car ( because of a phobia of flying,
Jordan had driven to Miami) when Carter called on a
two-way radio. He said to tell Jackson that he would
give the nominating speech. We stopped in a service
station to use the pay phone but neither of us had any
change. Eventually we convinced a passer-by to give us a
dime and the call was made.
The following morning a racial
formula was worked out to resolve the credentials
committee dispute. It resulted in Carter being able to
appoint two more people loyal to him to the delegation,
but they needed to be individuals who had run in the
original caucuses in March. I was one of the only two
people with Carter in Miami who fitted those criteria.
At a meeting of Carter’s supporters on the delegation,
he seemed curiously resistant to putting my name
forward. I was upset and did not know whether, because
of our personal friendship, he felt it would look like
favoritism, whether he worried that not being a native
Georgian, the xenophobia of some rural delegates might
be a problem, or whether he wanted to come up with
someone of political consequence in the state who would
later feel indebted to him. It was Hamilton Jordan who
took my side, pointing out that I was the obvious
choice. I was voted onto the delegation and thus would
fulfill my longstanding promise to myself that I would
be on the floor of the convention in
1972.
Walking out on the floor of the
convention on the opening night, I always recall as one
of the peak experiences of my life. I felt sense of
destiny coming true even if I had been forced to work
very hard to make it happen. The bright lights, the
band, the noise, the balloons and the chance to rub
shoulders with so many famous figures that I had seen
only in magazines or on television met all the
expectations of the dream I had been holding for four
years. I would attend several later Democratic
conventions but none would have the same emotional
impact on me. Politically it was more sobering. The
convention was dominated by McGovern delegates who
despised both Wallace and Jackson. Nominating Jackson
was not going to win Carter many friends with this
audience.
The convention stayed in session
until the early hours of the morning as it would every
day that week. I nevertheless got up early and drafted a
nominating speech for Carter that payed scant attention
to Jackson until the very last paragraph. It did,
however, lay out a political viewpoint for Carter to
articulate that I thought would appeal to the audience.
It focused significantly on identifying Carter with Ted
Kennedy who, although not a candidate, was widely viewed
as the dominant leader in the party at the time. I gave
the speech to Jordan to pass on to Carter, but when I
saw Carter later in the day he said he had not received
it. I found Jordan in his room and asked what had
happened to my speech. He sheepishly pulled it out of
the desk draw. It was clear that he had not read it but,
more significantly, had decided not to give it to
Carter. It was both an important revelation for me and a
significant turning point in my relations with other
members of Carter’s staff. I was the only person around
Carter who could draft such a speech in the required
time frame and with a full understanding of the
convention audience (or equally pertinently, the TV
audience.) However, by doing so I was encroaching on the
territory of his political staff, who were happy to be
friendly and helpful as long as I posed no threat to
them. From then on this would always be a problem. I
took the speech and gave it directly to Carter, who
delivered it almost verbatim except for a couple of
small changes made by his public relations assistant
Gerry Rafshoon and Senator Jackson.
I tried to deliver the letter from
Landon Butler’s friend to Gary Hart, but the best I
could do was to hand it to someone in McGovern’s suite
who promised that both Hart and McGovern would see it.
Through my friend Chuck Morgan of the ACLU, I was able
to arrange for Jordan and myself to have breakfast with
Bill Dougherty, the lieutenant governor of South Dakota
and a McGovern intimate. He was cordial and seemed to be
giving us some encouragement that Carter might be picked
for the ticket. McGovern formally won the nomination in
the early hours of Wednesday night, July 13th.
The following afternoon he was to announce his vice
presidential choice. We gathered in the Carters’ suite,
eager to be there if the fateful phone call should come.
No one dared put it in words. Someone rang with the
rumor that Congressman Wilbur Mills had been chosen and
then finally we heard that it was, in fact, Senator Tom
Eagleton whom McGovern had chosen.
The final night of the convention
was one of high emotion, with rousing speeches by
McGovern and Kennedy. Dawn was breaking as we walked
back to our hotel. Totally exhausted from a week during
which I had averaged only two to three hours sleep a
night, I spent most of the day in bed. Late in the
afternoon I went to sit by the swimming pool, where I
found Hamilton Jordan. We talked through the events of
the previous five days. Hamilton was mildly discouraged
by the experience, feeling that we had been unrealistic
and naive to believe that we could promote Carter to a
national role. Perhaps all we had accomplished was to
make him look foolishly ambitious, especially back
home. As always, the frame of reference for him and
others around Carter was Georgia. They found it hard to
envision a larger landscape. It was He thought it was a
preposterous presumption, given the bias towards the
South ever since the civil war, to think that anyone,
especially a politician restricted by law to one term as
governor and with no experience outside the state could
be taken seriously as having aspirations beyond the
region.
I saw it quite differently. Here, I
thought was an unparalleled opportunity to break the
imposed isolation that had kept the deep South out of
the American cultural and political mainstream for more
than one hundred years. Increasingly I had a feeling of
predestination convinced that Carter would become
president, an utter conviction from which nothing would
deter me over the next four years. I rode to the airport
with Eleanor Clift and Joe Fleming of the Atlanta bureau
of Newsweek. “You must be disappointed that
Carter was not picked for the ticket,” Eleanor said to
me. I had an overwhelming desire to respond “We will be
back in four years and Carter will be the nominee.” But
I just kept my mouth shut.
Back in Atlanta, I began to work on
a memo to Carter laying out my analysis of how the
political landscape had been changed by the new rules
for delegate selection and fund raising making it, for
the first time, possible for a relative unknown such as
he to run successfully for the presidency. I not only
strongly urged him to run but stressed the need for an
early decision detailing the initial steps I believed he
should take. In the meantime revelations about
Eagleton’s history of mental illness forced McGovern to
drop him from the ticket. Rosalynn Carter called asking
to meet me and stressing that she would come to my house
even though I volunteered to go to the mansion as I had
always done. The purpose of her visit was ask me if I
might be able to use my influence with people in the
McGovern camp to get them to consider Jimmy as
Eagleton’s replacement. My efforts to do so quickly hit
a brick wall, but it convinced me that my memo would not
fall on deaf ears. The following Monday I walked into
Carter’s office and handed him the memo.
Several days passed and I heard
nothing. Then Hamilton Jordan spoke to me. “Jimmy has
shown me your memo,” he said “Rosalynn has seen it too.”
He was non-committal about its merits and I was not sure
whether he thought I was trying to impose my own
delusions of grandeur on Carter or whether he felt I was
trying to usurp his role as Carter’s primary political
advisor. Three days later Carter invited the two of us
together with Landon Butler and his public relations
expert, Gerald Rafshoon, to meet him after dinner at the
governor’s mansion.
The meeting started uneasily with
Jordan, by now fully supportive of my vision, saying
“Governor, as you know we are here to talk about your
future.” The enormous pretentiousness of what was on all
our minds made it very difficult to put the goal into
precise words. “We think you should run for higher
office,” he continued euphemistically. Of course, there
was really only one higher office--president of the
United States, but it was too momentous to actually say.
Carter then began to talk about my memo and what such a
venture would entail. Once the ice had been broken, we
all relaxed and spent the next several hours discussing
in detail the ramifications of what a decision to run
would mean. There was no road map. No one, we thought,
had run and won from such obscurity before. Certainly no
candidate had begun planning and implementing so
meticulously, so early. But under the new rules it was
not only suddenly possible suddenly for a rank outsider
to get the nomination, starting to work actively years
ahead was the only way to do it. I knew I was one of the
only people in the country who had really understood
that.
Throughout the meeting Carter had kept
the conversation in the speculative realm, never giving an
ironclad assurance that he had made the final decision.
After we left him around midnight the four of us stood by
our cars in the parking area. “Do you think he will run,”
Rafshoon asked. Yes, we all agreed was the answer. -
See also my book Jimmy Carter: From Plains to the
Post-Presidency, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1995.
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