Jimmy Carter in Africa

Race and the Cold War

Nancy Mitchell

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780804799188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

In the mid-1970s, the Cold War had frozen into a nuclear stalemate in Europe and retreated from the headlines in Asia. As Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter fought for the presidency in late 1976, the superpower struggle overseas seemed to take a backseat to more contentious domestic issues of race relations and rising unemployment. There was one continent, however, where the Cold War was on the point of flaring hot: Africa.

Jimmy Carter in Africa opens just after Henry Kissinger's failed 1975 plot in Angola, as Carter launches his presidential campaign. The Civil Rights Act was only a decade old, and issues of racial justice remained contentious. Racism at home undermined Americans' efforts to "win hearts and minds" abroad and provided potent propaganda to the Kremlin. As President Carter confronted Africa, the essence of American foreign policy—stopping Soviet expansion—slammed up against the most explosive and raw aspect of American domestic politics—racism.

Drawing on candid interviews with Carter, as well as key U.S. and foreign diplomats, and on a dazzling array of international archival sources, Nancy Mitchell offers a timely reevaluation of the Carter administration and of the man himself. In the face of two major tests, in Rhodesia and the Horn of Africa, Carter grappled with questions of Cold War competition, domestic politics, personal loyalty, and decision-making style. Mitchell reveals an administration not beset by weakness and indecision, as is too commonly assumed, but rather constrained by Cold War dynamics and by the president's own temperament as he wrestled with a divided public and his own human failings. Jimmy Carter in Africa presents a stark portrait of how deeply Cold War politics and racial justice were intertwined.

1. Campaigns and Negotiations

The rhythmic whirr of helicopter blades was the sound of the early 1970s. American television reporters in Vietnam positioned themselves near the giant birds as the cameras rolled. The war correspondents ducked, their hair blowing in gusts, and yelled over the din of the ubiquitous Hueys landing or taking off. Until 1973, when the peace treaty ending the war was finally signed, Americans knew that if they turned on their televisions and heard a chopper, it was a report about the war in Vietnam.

It was fitting, therefore, that the final image of President Richard Nixon would be framed by a helicopter. On August 9, 1974, television showed Nixon, tearful after bidding a maudlin farewell to his staff, walking from the East Room of the White House to a Sikorsky helicopter waiting on the South Lawn. The former president climbed the steps of the Sikorsky and turned to the cameras. He raised both arms in an awkward victory sign. Then he turned, and the door closed behind him. The roar of the chopper carrying the disgraced president to seclusion in California marked the end of the long Watergate saga.¹

Gerald Ford had been president for less than nine months when helicopters again seared themselves onto the American psyche. On April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese launched their final assault on Saigon. After more than two decades in Vietnam, this—like so much about that country—caught the Americans by surprise.

That Tuesday night, the NBC Evening News opened with John Chancellor in the New York studio, a giant picture of three helicopters behind him. In a flat, urgent voice, he told of the collapse of Saigon and the chaotic evacuation of Americans from the city. There was no live video from Vietnam; that technology was still a few years away. Instead, Chancellor stared into the camera and tried to paint word pictures.²

“The people leaving were clawed at by desperate South Vietnamese trying to leave with them and fired on by enraged South Vietnamese soldiers who felt that the United States had abandoned them,” Chancellor explained. He cut to audio from Brian Barron, a BBC journalist in downtown Saigon. With the screen showing a montage of still photos of helicopters hovering above Saigon, viewers could hear tension in Barron’s disembodied voice: “As dusk falls, there are still Americans at the embassy complex. US marines in full combat gear are standing on the embassy walls keeping back crowds of Vietnamese at gunpoint. Some of these desperate individuals are attempting to climb barbed wire barriers into the embassy.” Cutting back to the studio, Chancellor repeated Barron’s description of the desperate South Vietnamese climbing the ten-foot-tall embassy walls, and added that reporter Jim Laurie had seen them “having their fingers mashed away with rifles and pistol butts wielded by American Marines and embassy civilians.” The broadcast turned to Arthur Lord, who had flown out of Saigon that morning, before the evacuation had begun. Lord had carried film to Bangkok, where it could be processed and uploaded to a satellite. The grainy images showed Saigon being pummeled by rockets and explosions and fires; frantic Vietnamese were running through the streets, carrying babies and suitcases and baskets filled to the brim. “In downtown Saigon,” Lord said, “the noise of the bombs exploding, and the shooting, started a panic. People ran wildly through the streets without knowing what they were running from. . . . South Vietnamese soldiers shot at each other, and they shot at Americans who were trying to organize them. The South Vietnamese Air Force did not launch one single fixed-wing aircraft to suppress the enemy fire. They seemed leaderless. . . . It’s probably only a matter of hours before the North Vietnamese walk into town and take over. Right now, there’s nothing to stop them.”

After advertisements for Lifebuoy soap and Geritol, the news cut to Henry Kissinger standing behind a podium. “We got out . . . without panic,” the man who was serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser declared in his thick German accent. “Objectives were achieved and carried out successfully.”

What were the viewers meant to think? That the chaotic flight of Americans from Saigon—leaving their allies on rooftops, scanning the skies for a helicopter to save them—was success? That after almost 60,000 Americans had been killed and more than 300,000 had been wounded, and at least $150 billion in US tax dollars had been spent, US objectives had been achieved? Of course, Kissinger was parsing his words; he did not say all objectives. He was deliberately vague and precise at the same time. Americans watching these events unroll on television that dismal night in April 1975 did not react with shock. They felt, instead, the dull, sickening, horrible thud of the familiar.

The Giant Killer

On the evening of March 9, 1976, not quite a year after the fall of Saigon, Jimmy Carter arrived at his hotel room in Orlando, Florida. He had spent the day campaigning in North Carolina while his wife, Rosalynn, held down the fort in Florida. That was a key to their strategy: the campaign was a family affair. Since early 1975, Rosalynn, the Carters’ three grown sons and daughters-in-law, and Carter’s mother Lillian had fanned out across the country to spread the good news about Jimmy. It kept costs low. After 137 trips to Florida, Rosalynn had shaken off her shyness to become a persuasive campaigner.³

Carter had made his decision to run for president in 1972, while he was governor of Georgia. He was barred by state law from running for the governorship again, and he would be only fifty years old when he completed his four-year term in 1975. As much as he loved his hometown of Plains, neither he nor Rosalynn relished the thought of returning to live in that sleepy hamlet. For all his love of fly-fishing and solitude, Carter was no Thoreau. He had propelled himself out of Plains to the US Naval Academy in 1943, served as a career naval officer until 1953 and as a state senator from 1963 to 1966, and launched himself into the governor’s office in 1971. Jimmy Carter wanted a big stage.

But what were his options after he stepped down? Business—he had run the family farm and peanut warehouse after his father’s death in 1953—or politics. However, his chances of winning the Senate were slim: Georgia’s senior senator, the Old South segregationist Herman Talmadge, would be running for his fourth term in 1974, and Carter doubted that he could beat him in a primary.

A number of Carter aides—Peter Bourne and Hamilton Jordan in particular—take credit for planting the idea of running for president in their boss’s head, but Carter was already there. He got a taste of national acclaim in May 1971 when Time magazine had put the newly elected governor on its cover under the banner “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.” The article described the rise of a vibrant, progressive, and proud South; it led with a sentence from Governor Carter’s inaugural address: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.” Time commented, “A promise so long coming, spoken at last.”⁴

In the governor’s mansion, the Carters had hosted a number of Democratic hopefuls—senators Ed Muskie of Maine, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington—as they trooped through Georgia on their way, they hoped, to the 1972 nomination. Before these encounters, Carter said, he had been in awe of presidents (although he “despised” Richard Nixon), who for him were figures in history books. These would-be presidents, however, who relaxed at the mansion and drank too much, underwhelmed Carter. He was, he thought, better.⁵

That 1972 campaign exposed Carter to national politics. In June, he joined other Democratic governors to stop McGovern because, he said, a ticket headed by the liberal South Dakotan would “risk decimating” the ranks of Democrats in Congress and state houses. Then, at the Democratic convention in Miami—the first presidential convention he attended—Carter nominated Scoop Jackson, but behind the scenes he was lobbying the McGovern camp hard for the vice-presidential nod.⁶

From that point on, Carter made a beeline to the White House. Few people noticed it at the time, but with hindsight his trajectory is unmistakable. Following a brilliant strategy laid out in a seventy-two-page memo by Hamilton Jordan, Carter first sought national recognition and then, once he left the governor’s office in January 1975, he began to campaign quietly in every state. Jordan had hitched his wagon to Carter early, volunteering as a college kid in 1966 during Carter’s first unsuccessful run for governor. Jordan came from a Georgia family with deep political roots, he was smart, and he impressed Carter. Four years later, when Carter again sought the governorship, he hired Jordan as his campaign manager. For the next eleven years, the two men were inseparable. Jordan was “short, ruddy faced, with a Cheshire Cat smile . . . and a thrusting personality,” a British official noted.⁷ He was a southern boy—he had grown up in Albany, Georgia, not far from Plains—and proud of it. His confidence and youth—thirty-one years old in 1976—exuded the rising New South.

The key to Jordan’s strategy was that Carter would contest every primary and establish early, in Iowa and New Hampshire, that he could appeal beyond the South. Then, building on this momentum, in Florida he would try to beat George Wallace, the racist symbol of the Old South who was serving his third term as governor of Alabama. It was audacious. As columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote in November 1975, “little Jimmy Carter” intended to be the “giant-killer. . . . No sane Democrat would bet a plugged nickel on Carter’s humiliation of Wallace” in the Florida primary.⁸ In late January 1976, just six weeks before the Florida primary, Carter was still a very dark horse; Gallup reported that he was the first choice of fewer than 5 percent of Democrats.⁹

The strategy, however, was working. In New Hampshire, on February 24, 1976, Carter won 28 percent of the vote, significantly more than any other candidate on a crowded slate.¹⁰ This landed him on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. “It’s now quite possible,” he said, reflecting on his victory, “that I can beat Wallace in Florida.”¹¹

Sitting on the sofa in their hotel room in Orlando two weeks later, Jimmy and Rosalynn listened as the Florida returns came in. By 8:20 P.M., it was clear: Carter had slain the giant. George Wallace, who had received 42 percent of the vote four years earlier, now culled just 31 percent, as Carter rolled to victory with 35 percent. Wallace was crushed and—more important—from that night forward Carter was the Democrat to beat.

How had he done it?

First, Carter worked harder than any other candidate. He had campaigned in Florida for fifteen months, visiting it thirty-four times. “An ordinary man,” wrote a journalist trying to keep up with the candidate, “would die of exhaustion.”¹² Carter’s aides, young men who had no experience with presidential primaries, and his family also threw themselves into the campaign.

Second, Carter and his team were politically savvy. The fluid politics of race in the New South helped the southern governor. In 1972, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), Jackson, Muskie, and McGovern had split the anti-Wallace vote. Four years later, the Democratic Party had easily persuaded Carter’s rivals for the nomination to bow out of Florida, leaving the bruising and expensive fight to “little Jimmy,” whom they underestimated. (Pennsylvania Governor Milton Schapp was the only Democrat other than Carter and Wallace who campaigned actively in the state, and Jackson—after unexpectedly winning the Massachusetts primary—launched a late drive in the Miami area. Mo Udall [D-AZ] was on the ballot but did not campaign.¹³) It was this framing of the contest as anti-Wallace rather than pro-Carter that persuaded the prominent African American leaders Andrew Young and Martin Luther King Sr.—Georgians both—to campaign for Carter in Florida. “They made it clear to me,” Carter remembered, “that they just wanted George Wallace defeated.”¹⁴

Young had been one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest aides; he had played a key role in the civil rights struggles in Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma, and was with King in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He is one of the men on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in the iconic photograph, pointing to indicate the direction of the bullet, while King lay dying. After King’s assassination, Young ran for Congress, and his mostly white district in Atlanta elected him to the House of Representatives three times, with increasingly wide margins. Young was the first African American elected to Congress from the Deep South since 1894.¹⁵

In the 1976 presidential race, Young planned to support a liberal from Congress—Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Representative Mo Udall of Arizona, or Hubert Humphrey—but his first order of business was to crush the bane of the New South, George Wallace. If the old-style segregationist lost one southern state, the idea that he was the true representative of the South might be debunked. Young calculated that the best battlefield would be Florida and the best competitor would be Carter. But he harbored doubts. “It was hard for a black civil rights leader to feel close to a Georgia governor,” he admitted.¹⁶

This was particularly true when the governor hailed from the most racist region of the state, Sumter County. “Martin Luther King used to say that the sheriff there, Fred Chappell, was the meanest man in the world,” Young remembered.¹⁷ Young recalled that on his first trip to Plains to see Governor Carter, he had been nervous. “As we passed the courthouse, the sheriff’s car pulled out, and I began to tremble a little bit.”¹⁸ Upon meeting Carter, Young “told him that the only experience I’d had of Sumter C...