Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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The death of Flora MacDonald is a reminder of a Canada where Red Tories were decent people, not mortal enemies to be engaged in endless ideological combat with

I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario from the late 1950s through the mid-­1970s. I was 13 when provincial Progressive Conservative “Big Blue Machine” leader Bill Davis (a.k.a. “Brampton Billy”), who is now 85, succeeded to the premiership in 1971, a job which had had been in the party’s hands since the days of George Drew, who had become premier in 1943. I wouldn’t have considered Davis anything but an establishment Conservative in those days, certainly not a Red Tory. But politics can be an exercise in relativity, both real-time and historically, as much as principle, sometimes more, and this was after all 35 years before Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power federally.

In 1971, Ed Broadbent, not yet federal NDP leader, having lost that year to David Lewis, was still a backbench opposition MP for the federal riding of Oshawa­-Whitby, elected by a 15­-vote plurality in June 1968, during the spring and summer of Liberal “Trudeaumania” for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, as Broadbent, now 79, dispatched seven-­term Progressive Conservative incumbent Mike Starr, a former federal labour minister, and Canada’s first federal cabinet minister of Ukrainian descent, along with Liberal challenger Des Newman, now 84, who had been elected as the youngest mayor in the history of Town of Whitby two years earlier in 1966.

As my parents liked to point out, Ed Broadbent had been their Oshawa Times paper boy, I believe in the late 1940s, when they rented a red Insulbrick asphalt-siding duplex near the top of Church Street (now part of Centre Street), and within sight of the south-facing Adelaide Avenue green wooden fence of Parkwood, where Sam McLaughlin, the Canadian automotive pioneer and later philanthropist, who turned 100 in September 1971, still lived. Adelaide was the name of his wife, who had died in 1958.

“Colonel Sam,” honorary colonel­-for­-life of the Ontario Regiment, had been president of the family­-owned McLaughlin Motor Car Company, which started in 1908 and was sold a decade later in 1918 to facilitate the formation of the Canadian operation of General Motors of Canada. Sam McLaughlin was named president of GM Canada and remained in the job until 1945 when he stepped down and was named chairman of the board, a position that he held until his death in 1972.

My dad, William Marshall Barker, on the other hand was an hourly-rated General Motors of Canada employee, and proud member of what was then Local 222 of the United Autoworkers of America (UAW). He always drove a GM car. Of course, you couldn’t buy a Ford, much less any other kind, new in Oshawa from a dealership when I was a kid. There were only General Motors dealerships, although in time a Ford dealership did open just across the municipal boundary in Whitby. During the lengthy fall strike of 1970, we carried on, which meant steak-and-fried onions for dinner every Saturday night, even if we had to tighten our belts elsewhere. My dad knew the difference between the “company” and the “union.” Between “white collar” and “blue collar.” He never had any confusion on those points. But at the same time, I never heard him have a bad word to say about our Parkwood neighbour up the street, Colonel Sam, also know as “Mr. Sam.” Such were the complexities of class relations in the world I became a teenager in in the early 1970s.

And it was also the world that Flora MacDonald in October 1972 won her first federal election in, as a Progressive Conservative for the riding of Kingston and the Islands, the riding represented by Sir John A. Macdonald a century before, and the only woman among the 107 Tories elected and one of only three women in the House of Commons during the Liberal minority government of Pierre Trudeau. She held the seat until her defeat by Liberal Peter Milliken in November 1988.

Milliken, now 68, it should be noted, a lawyer by profession and chosen by his peers to serve as speaker of the House of Commons from January 2001 until his retirement as an MP in June 2011, over that decade was one of the finest speakers Parliament has been served by. In a historic ruling on April 27, 2010, he adopted a Dec. 10, 2009 order of the  Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan compelling the Harper Tories to produce documents regarding Afghan detainees, which the government had previously refused to turn over to Parliament on national security grounds.

It was not the first time Milliken had acted decisively in making important decisions from the speaker’s chair. In November 2007, he issued the first speaker’s warrant, compelling Karlheinz Schreiber to appear before the House of Commons ethics committee to testify on his business dealings with former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, since February 1913 when R.C. Miller, of the Diamond Light and Heating Company in Montreal, was compelled to appear before the public accounts committee to testify about $41,000 in heating contracts. Miller, who refused to testify, was summoned before the Bar of the House of Commons, a brass rod extending across the floor of the chamber inside its south entrance and beyond which non-members or House officials are not normally allowed. He was found in contempt of Parliament and jailed in the Carleton County jail for the duration of the session until Parliament was prorogued about three and a half months later.

As well, on May 19, 2005 Milliken cast the-tie breaking vote on a confidence motion determining whether the Liberal minority government of then prime minister Paul Martin, who is now 76, would continue or fall when the House of Commons was deadlocked 152 to 152. The speaker only votes in the case of a tie.

With classic precision and reserve, Milliken explained his vote simply by saying, “The speaker should vote, whenever possible, for continuation of debate on a question that cannot be decided by the House.”

Flora MacDonald, who was born in June 1926 in North Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island, died yesterday in Ottawa at the age of 89. You can read all kinds of well­-written obituaries,
tributes and other remembrances of her today online at places like the Globe and Mail
(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/conservative­trailblazer­flora­macdonald­dies-
aged­89/article25714535/) and The Whig­-Standard in Kingston
(http://www.thewhig.com/2015/07/26/macdonald­a­true­pioneer)

Lots of ink will be quite properly spilled today on how MacDonald rose from being a proudly-trained secretary from Empire Business College in Sydney and a bank teller with the Bank of Nova Scotia to being appointed by former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark as Canada’s first female secretary of state for external affairs in June 1979. While the Clark minority government was short-lived, MacDonald played a pivotal, but at the time secret, role early in the Iran Hostage Crisis in Tehran from November 1979 to January 1980, authorizing false Canadian passports and money transfers for the six American diplomats ­­ Robert Anders, Cora Amburn­-Lijek, Mark Lijek, Joseph Stafford, Kathleen Stafford and Lee Schatz ­­ being sheltered by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and John Sheardown, former first secretary at the Canadian embassy in Tehran.

Flora MacDonald’s death represents part of the inevitable passing from our midst of a generation of Canadian politicians from an era in all parties when they could disagree with each other with civility, and us with them, as voters, without being disagreeable and when not every utterance was calculated for its value as ideological blood sport. MacDonald, her father a trans-Atlantic telegraph operator, grew up during the Depression in one of Canada’s poorest areas. By the time MacDonald came of age, Red Tory was a label worn as a badge of honour, not a Scarlet Letter, and the word “progressive” actually proudly preceded “conservative” in the old Progressive Conservative Party. Even some of us who are more likely to be thought of as democratic socialists miss those days.

While the Canadian political system does little to encourage or reward voters who depart from partisan voting along party lines to support candidates seeking office as MPs federally or MLAs, MPPs or MNAs provincially, I’ve often thought, as heretical as it sounds even to me, that had I lived in Kingston and the Islands when Flora MacDonald was MP, say in the 1979, 1980 or 1984 federal general elections, I’d have quite likely been marking my “x” beside a PC candidate for the first time.

Mind you, Flora MacDonald knew better than most Canadian politicians just how unpredictable actually getting that “x” on the ballot, when push comes to shove, can be. At the February 1976 PC leadership convention, where she lost to Joe Clark, tracking by her operatives and surveys by several television networks had found 325 delegates who insisted they would cast first ballot votes for her. Of the 325 delegates who entered the polling stations wearing “Vote-for-Flora” buttons, 111 of them cast ballots for someone else it was soon discovered when the votes were tallied. The phenomenon became known as the Flora Syndrome, and Clark, who is now 76, went onto to defeat Claude Wagner of Quebec on the fourth ballot.

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