The Title Of My Forthcoming Book Is …
We have both a title AND a release date for the book that I’ve been working on since 2013!
Before I let you in on the title, a quick aside about the fact that it’s been a five-plus years process. I probably could have written this book in two years, maybe three, if I’d been single-mindedly focused on it.
But since January of 2013, our family has gone from three kids to five, with babies born in March of 2014 and November 2015. In the fall of 2014 I moved from Huffington Post to Yahoo News. And covering the 2016 election certainly took up a lot of time.
I wouldn’t have been able to do this without a lot of patience and support from my better half, my wife Alison.
So, without further ado, here it is. On January 8, 2019, Twelve Books will release “CAMELOT’S END: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party.” The news was first broken by Politico’s Michael Calderone in his “Morning Media” column today.
The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com or at your favorite local book store. For example, it’s available on the website for East City Books on Capitol Hill at this link. Please support your local book store!
As a supplement to the book, I’ll be producing a podcast that takes you inside a dozen or so of the most interesting stories in the book. It’ll be a mix of historical archives, combined with other research and my own interviews, to bring the book to life in a different way. More details on that to come.
Here’s the cover image, and below that I’ll give you a little glimpse into why I decided to write the book in the first place.
Here’s how I got started on this project. I wrote this particular version of the origin story in October of 2014:
I didn’t know that Jimmy Carter chased a drunken Ted Kennedy around a stage at Madison Square Garden in front of a national TV audience. When two veteran Democratic operatives mentioned it during a casual conversation in January 2013, I was intrigued. We were at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee and the Rules Committee had just broken up after a long session. I had paid little attention to the proceedings. I was there to fish for gossip and contacts and I had just run into Jeff Berman, a small, intense, white-bearded man with a meticulous knowledge of Democratic party rules and a constant supply of stories. He introduced me to Elaine Kamarck, who became famous in the 90’s for her Clinton-Gore “reinventing government” initiative. Berman told me that he had first met Kamarck when she was working for Jimmy Carter. And then he mentioned the infamous stage scene. My mouth fell open.
Kennedy had been dead for four years, and his legacy was that of an elder statesman, a lion of the Senate. His last major political move had been a momentum-swinging endorsement of the first black president in American history. The idea of a young Teddy, liquored up and running roughshod over an incumbent president from his own party, in primetime, was a Teddy I was not familiar with. I had just finished covering the 2012 presidential election for The Huffington Post, traveling repeatedly to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Ohio and other swing states for nearly two years. I had covered the White House and national politics for six years by that point. But my background was in literature, not in history or political science. I was 35, of a generation for whom the Kennedys were relics, not political gods.
I was in the Ambassador ballroom, in the basement of the Omni Shoreham Hotel, which, if Wes Anderson were ever to shoot a movie in Washington, would be one of his filming locations. FDR had held his first inaugural ball there in 1933. Bill Clinton had played the sax there at his first inaugural ball. Just off the Rock Creek Parkway, down the hill on Connecticut Avenue from the National Zoo, the Omni is part of old Washington. As I listened to Berman and Kamarck tell tales of the Kennedy-Carter battle, I half expected Teddy to walk through the grand lobby and past our table.
After talking to Berman and Kamarck, I wandered into the Shoreham’s main ballroom where I bumped into Anita Dunn, a savvy Democratic campaign operative and a close adviser to the president. I mentioned to Dunn my conversation with Berman and Kamarck. She excitedly told me that her first job in politics had been answering phones in the West Wing for Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff. Dunn had been an unpaid intern because Carter had cut the White House staff to save money.
Dunn told me that the 1980 election had been a training ground for many of the Democratic party’s best operatives. But, she added, the fallout from 1980 had been devastating, and the acrimony between the Carter and Kennedy camps lasted for over a decade, until Bill Clinton’s 1992 win.
The idea of a Democratic party at war with itself was discordant with the moment. Barack Obama had just been reelected. Democrats were riding high, and the Republican party was hopelessly lost. But the story of Democrats in a dark hour spoke to the cyclical nature of politics. The fact that a third Kennedy had run for president in such dramatic fashion, driven by history and biography — and that it was largely forgotten — proved a story worth reexamining.
And while looking back through my archives, I stumbled across this sort of diary entry about the book. It’s me trying to overcome early days of discouragement, before the proposal was even written, long before it was bought by Twelve in January of 2015.
I wrote this on June 9, 2013.
As I’ve tried to turn my attention back — over the last five or six days — to the Kennedy/Carter book proposal, it’s been dispiriting. On Thursday night and Friday night, I had the opportunity to work on it, but did not. Thursday I just sat looking at my computer and poking around the internet. Friday I went out, bought a bottle of wine, some ice cream, and came home and watched a zombie show with Ali. At least that was time well spent.
I cannot get over the hump of, ‘why should I read this book?’
So here’s a try at writing to the modern reader about why they should care about my book:
Names are symbols. Kennedy stands for grandeur, strength, glory, and political legend. Carter is basically the opposite. Mention that name, and words like weak, failed, and loser come to mind. At least that’s the way it was for me when I started writing this book.
Studying the epic 1980 clash between the youngest Kennedy brother and the peanut farmer from Georgia, however, brings the two names into a different focus. Vestiges of moss and decay appear on the name previously associated with greatness. And a certain grit and toughness emerge in the portrait of Carter that we see in this story.
The 1980 battle had many significant political outcomes: chiefly, it transitioned the Kennedy name out of its status as a political force and toward that of a historical relic, it set up Ronald Reagan for a two-term presidency by weakening an already vulnerable Carter, and it divided the Democratic party for a decade.
But it also revealed a side of these two men that is often overlooked by the modern eye. History and time can be brutal oversimplifiers. And a few events, or a win or loss, can shape perceptions for decades.
This book will challenge your ideas about who these two men were. You will learn about the role that this moment in time played in the Democratic party, and in American politics. But those are the subplots. What we all want to know, more than anything, is the measure of a man or woman. Who are they? We learn much about Teddy Kennedy, and about Jimmy Carter, by studying their hand to hand combat, which was one of the most bitter intra party fights in the 20th century, and led to the very last contested convention in American politics.
For those with little to no familiarity with American politics, let me back up another step or two and put this in cinematic terms. This is the story of what happens when a man is so besieged and imprisoned by his own family’s success — by the weight of expectations that he become what others want and expect him to become — that in attempting to break out of his confinement, he wreaks massive havoc and destruction. And it’s the tale of another man who possessed great talents, and who was for a short time a national hero, only to see himself dethroned and cast aside as an embarrassment because he did not fit the stereotype of what modern American culture demands in its leaders.
Surprisingly, this story has gone largely unexamined by historians and American political culture. 80 is synonymous with Reagan. Victors get to write the history books, largely. And Carter has been an after thought in this year. We prefer our losers to disappear quietly. So that goes doubly for Kennedy’s 1980 escapade. Nobody would want to forget this story more than he would, in large part because it is easily overlooked. Carter was an incumbent. He must stand and fight this battle, and explain himself. Kennedy moved on through the years, hoping that if he piled up enough legislative accomplishments, that would combine with time to obscure his reckless, selfish kamikaze mission of 1980.
But while some characters in this story have passed on from this life, many have not. Kennedy is, sadly, gone. But Carter is not. Major political figures of today, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, were involved in this campaign. And some of the top operatives for both sides have became power players in the Democratic party. Tom Donilon, who rose to become Obama’s national security director, helped design the primary schedule so it favored Carter and oversaw Carter’s delegate operation at the hard fought convention. He, and others, have never been asked to reflect back on what happened during this epic fight, and what it meant for the two candidates, and for their party.
Eased, too, is the pain of losing, and the anger and resentment that festered between the Kennedy and Carter camps. But for over a decade, this fight ran hot through the Democratic party, bitterly dividing those who ran the party during a period when they remained out of power and without direction. This is a largely untold story of how, on a personal level, at cocktail parties and political receptions, and even at people’s homes in Washington, the scars of 1980 continued to drive a wedge between people of the same party.
Gerry Rafshoon, a top Carter adviser, told me the story over lunch recently of Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, physically elbowing his wife out of a conversation years after the election.
“The acrimony was almost impossible to describe,” said Anita Dunn, who was at the time a young Carter staffer and who came up in Democratic politics when this feud was at its height.
CAMELOT’S END is the story of the last time an incumbent United States president received a serious challenge from within his own party, something that has happened only a handful of times in American history. And it is the tale of the last contested convention, marking a transition into a modern political era where party conventions have become TV episodes rather than political dramas.
