Free Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died by Edward Klein

could study it more. And then without letting us know, he scheduled his own. 6
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    A S EARLY AS September 1978—more than two years before the 1980 presidential election—Carter’s aides began warning him of an almost certain primary challenge by Ted Kennedy. On September 28, Hubert “Herky” Harris, assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, a handwritten note:
I understand [Kennedy] people held meetings in Boston this weekend regarding the campaign…. The meetings were to discuss the alternative courses open to Kennedy depending on what you representing the President might do. Best I can tell it was a strategy/tactics session, discussing various best case-worst case scenarios, and how Kennedy’s campaign could best react. The questions were posed “If I were Ham Jordan, and ‘such & such’ occurred, what would I do? How would I respond? Etc.”
My source is reliable, but this report is for info only. I don’t know of any decisions made or specific conclusions drawn. They are clearly planning . 7
    On December 9, 1978, Herky Harris’s warning seemed to be borne out when Ted Kennedy delivered a speech to an overflow crowd in Memphis, Tennessee, that was widely interpreted as his opening shot for the 1980 Democratic nomination against a sitting president of his own party. Ted did not try to disguise his anger over Carter’s plan to increase the military budget and cut back social spending.
    “Sometimes a party must sail against the wind,” Ted said. “We cannot afford to drift or lie at anchor. We cannot heed the call of those who say it is time to furl the sail.”
    The audience went wild. But two men standing in the back of the auditorium—Hamilton Jordan and Pat Caddell, President Carter’s pollster—did not join in the cheering. When Ted’s speech was over, Jordan turned to Caddell and said, “That’s it. He’s running.” 8
    But Ted hadn’t quite made up his mind yet. In March 1979, shortly after he celebrated his forty-seventh birthday, Ted visited Carter in the White House. Ted’s weight, his flyaway hair, and his Benjamin Franklin-style reading glasses made him look as old as Carter, who was eight years Ted’s senior. Carter greeted Ted with a tight, condescending smile, and the two men retired behind closed doors to discuss the knotty issue of national health care. When they were finished, Ted looked at Carter and told him that he had “tentatively” decided to support him for reelection in 1980.
    Carter didn’t believe him. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else in Washington. In June 1979, the subject of a potential Carter-Kennedy face-off came up at a White House dinner for members of the House of Representatives.
    “We are having a good time with the president,” recalled Congressman Tom Downey of New York, “and [Carter] comes and joins us…. And the conversation turned to the primaries, and Toby [Moffett, a congressman from Connecticut] asked about the Kennedy campaign. And Carter turned to him and said, ‘If Ted Kennedy runs in [the] New Hampshire [primary], I’ll whip his ass.’”
    A ND SO, BY the early summer of 1979, Jimmy Carter was poised for an all-out war against Ted Kennedy. But Carter wasn’t prepared for what happened next. In the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which toppled the shah and installed the radical Ayatollah Khomeini, the price of crude oil doubled, the supply of oil fell, and long lines of cars began appearing at gas stations all across America.
    The energy crisis of 1979 exacerbated the widespread feeling that the country was adrift under Jimmy Carter. All the opinion polls confirmed that impression; they showed that Democrats now preferred Ted Kennedy over Jimmy Carter by a margin of 53 percent to 16 percent.
    Carter’s presidency appeared to be in a free fall. To save it, he went on television to deliver a fireside chat to the nation. He wore a cardigan to illustrate the