Bob Shrum, New York City 1980

The legendary speechwriter depicts Ted Kennedy’s defiant run against incumbent Jimmy Carter, and tells why concession was late in coming.

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 14, 2008 at midnight

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Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky

Democratic consultant and speechwriter Bob Shrum

Photo by © United Press International file photo

Sen. Ted Kennedy, left, shakes hands with President Jimmy Carter at the October 1979 dedication of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

WASHINGTON — Democratic hearts shuddered on a Saturday morning in May.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, 76, patriarch of a partisan dynasty and conscience of the progressive movement, collapsed at his Hyannis Port home and was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital.

There was a somber pause in what was then a still-frenetic presidential primary season. New England held its breath awaiting more news. And it turned out to be grim.

Kennedy, though quickly back on his feet and characteristically upbeat, soon was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.

Tributes flowed from both ends of the political spectrum.

There were prayers from the man Kennedy had endorsed in the White House chase, Sen. Barack Obama; from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton; and from Sen. John McCain. For once, all the candidates agreed on something: Kennedy is a living legend.

President Bush praised Kennedy’s “courage” and “powerful spirit.” A more substantial tribute came later that week when the president signed into law yet another piece of legislation Kennedy had championed.

Just before Super Tuesday, Kennedy had endorsed the upstart Obama, in effect passing him the torch of “Camelot” lighted by his brothers, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

But the Obama-Clinton fight stayed close. It grew increasingly bitter. And as the contest showed no signs of ending, it gave those with long political memories a flashback.

Kennedy’s appearances on the stump served as a constant reminder of another hard-fought battle 28 years ago that didn’t end so well for Democrats.

In 1980, Ted Kennedy had been the “change” candidate, challenging his party’s standard-bearer, President Jimmy Carter, with a hard-fought primary while the country was mired in a “malaise” over a worsening economy, gasoline shortages, the Iran hostage crisis and a Cold War flare-up over the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

That year, Kennedy continued his battle long after the delegate math looked impossible to overcome, and he fought all the way to the Democratic National Convention.

It was a convenient analogy in 2008 when Clinton threatened to do the same.

That 1980 convention at Madison Square Garden was precisely the sort of unharmonious spectacle that win- starved Democrats want to avoid this summer in Denver. After all, Republican Ronald Reagan trounced a weakened Carter.

For seven election cycles, some hard feelings lingered. But suddenly, on a Saturday morning in May, memories shifted.

As Democrats paused to pray, they also remembered how Kennedy burnished his image as a relentless fighter with his most famous words at that most tumultuous convention.

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end,” Kennedy had told the crowd. “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

* * *

Bob Shrum had a fuller head of hair when he helped write that speech.

He was in his mid-30s in 1980, already a veteran speechwriter from George McGovern’s “children’s crusade” of 1972. Like other McGovern “kids,” he’d been inspired into public service by John and Robert Kennedy “and by that whole Kennedy tradition,” he said.

In 1976, Shrum spent 10 days writing for Carter’s first presidential campaign. But soon he wrote a resignation letter, telling Carter, “Your strategy is largely designed to conceal your true convictions, whatever they may be,” according to Shrum’s memoir, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner.

In late 1979, Shrum barely hesitated before joining Ted Kennedy’s bid to replace the beleaguered Democratic president. In an interview with the Rocky in Washington, Shrum said he thought Kennedy could revive the country, renew the party’s strength and boost progressive causes.

Besides, “I . . . thought Carter was going to lose and didn’t have a very good sense of where to take the country,” Shrum said. “I think he has been an excellent ex-president. I just wish he could have skipped the intermediate step.”

As Carter’s reelection campaign approached, his challenger looked like the favorite.

Kennedy pitched his progressive politics as an antidote to the downbeat, almost sullen messages emanating from the White House.

In the summer of ’79, while the country was facing inflation, gas lines and other economic woes, Carter faced the American public to talk about a “crisis.”

He said he’d been told, “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government.” Some Cabinet members didn’t seem loyal. A wholesale staff shake-up was in the offing.

Carter told the country he’d tried to put campaign promises into law “and, I have to admit, with just mixed success.”

The bottom line: “It is a crisis of confidence,” he said. And he gave a laundry list of proposals to change course.

But it was the ultimate downer. Some Democrats worried he’d pull the party down.

So Kennedy made plans to run — and Shrum jumped on board.

“Well, he was destined to lose,” Shrum said of Carter. “And there were huge differences of principle and ideology and politics.”

Kennedy led the initial polls. But just before his official launch, on Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took about 70 Americans hostage. At the time, nobody knew how the crisis would stretch until the very last day of the Carter presidency, changing the dynamics of the election year.

* * *

The first contest was in Iowa, a place where Carter helped put once-obscure caucuses on the map with a surprise win in 1976. He repeated the feat in 1980, drubbing Kennedy.

Some advisers thought Kennedy should quit right then, Shrum recalled. “He never did.” An inner circle of advisers voted. It was 4-4. Kennedy vowed to fight on.

Until then, Kennedy had run a cautious, front-runner’s campaign. In defeat, he found his voice, much like Clinton did in 2008 after losing Iowa.

“I know Sen. Kennedy wanted to go out there and say what he really thought and really go out and fight on the issues he really cared about,” Shrum said. “So that’s what he did.”

Kennedy grew more vocal attacking Carter on economic policy, health-care programs, his handling of the hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Carter still racked up several big wins. Soon the delegate math made him look like a shoo-in. But Kennedy persisted.

As the New York and Connecticut primaries approached, polls showed Kennedy trailing again. Shrum was told to start drafting a concession speech.

“So I wrote it and I was so depressed that I walked from 63rd Street down to the bottom of Manhattan, stopped in a couple of bookstores along the way, walked back . . .” he said.

But back at the campaign’s hotel, exit polls provided a stunner. Kennedy was on the verge of winning both New York and Connecticut. Shrum wrote a new victory speech. “Can you believe this?” Kennedy said.

* * *

It was all-out war now — one that made the Obama-Clinton contest look like a tea party.

Actor Carroll O’Connor made an Archie Bunker-style television ad calling Carter “the most Republican president since Herbert Hoover.” He said Carter “may give us a depression that will make Hoover’s look like prosperity.”

Carter’s ads raised the specter of “trust” and “character” issues — interpreted as ominous references to Kennedy’s 1969 auto accident at Chappaquiddick, which ended in a young woman’s drowning.

The last big showdown was a sort of Super Tuesday, when California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Ohio would vote. Kennedy needed a near sweep — and by huge margins. He didn’t quite get it.

Running “on fumes” financially, Kennedy won California and other states. But he lost Ohio by 7 percentage points. Under proportional representation, delegates were split. Carter had enough to clinch.

Still, Kennedy vowed to fight to the convention, where he tried to repeal what his campaign dubbed “the robot rule” — regulations requiring delegates to vote as they had previously pledged. If he prevailed, delegates could switch sides, throwing the convention wide open.

“They would say to Kennedy, ‘The numbers don’t add up,’ ” Shrum said. “And he’d say, ‘Let me tell you the numbers that concern me: the numbers of unemployed in this country, the numbers of people without health insurance, . . . the number of people who can’t afford to buy a home or can’t afford to send their kids to college. That’s what concerns me, and I’m going to carry their cause to this convention.’ ”

* * *

Carter had no guarantee of being renominated until after a series of platform challenges and then a vote upholding the “robot rule.”

Kennedy’s gambit failed. It was over.

Shrum and longtime Kennedy aide Carey Parker shifted to writing a concession-ish speech. Shrum wove in some of what he’d drafted before the surprise New York win.

They dug through Republican nominee Ronald Reagan’s past statements, like when Reagan called unemployment insurance a “prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders,” when he proposed making Social Security voluntary, and when he claimed, “Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.”

To this day, Shrum thinks it was a good road map for how Carter could have attacked.

The script included a concession: “I congratulate President Carter on his victory here.” But when practicing the speech, Kennedy couldn’t say it. He just rolled his finger in circles, telling the TelePrompTer operator to move on, Shrum said.

Finally, Kennedy took to the stage at Madison Square Garden.

“I am asking you to renew our commitment to a fair and lasting prosperity that can put America back to work,” Kennedy said. “This is the cause that brought me into the campaign and that sustained me for nine months across 100,000 miles in 40 different states. We had our losses, but the pain of our defeats is far, far less than the pain of the people that I have met.”

He scoffed at Republicans’ “crocodile tears.” He ripped Reagan. He made that brief statement acknowledging Carter’s win.

But the speech is best-remembered for its dramatic closing, which included Kennedy’s rare reference to his slain siblings. He read words from Tennyson “that my brothers quoted and loved and that have special meaning to me now.”

I am part of all that I have met

Tho much is taken, much abides

That which we are, we are —

One equal temper of heroic hearts

Strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And then he concluded with the passage that became “Teddy’s” signature and badge of courage: “The dream shall never die.”

To Shrum, “it was an embodiment, an expression of hope, an affirmation that the Democratic Party actually did have a mission and a vision for where the country should go.” It’s the same sentiment he thinks Obama and other Democrats need to convey this year in Denver.

But to others, including Carter’s running mate, then-Vice President Walter Mondale, the speech was less than helpful.

“His speech at our 1980 convention was not a plea for unity, not a plea for the reelection of Carter,” Mondale said in an interview (days before Kennedy’s hospitalization). “It was a plea to Americans not to forget how good they were and how their day would come. The dream would never die and all that stuff.”

Kennedy later campaigned for the Carter-Mondale ticket. But it would have helped if the party unified earlier, Mondale said.

On the night Carter gave his acceptance speech, the president’s campaign wanted Kennedy to wait until afterward before making his way to Madison Square Garden. The plan was for Kennedy to take the stage and raise Carter’s hand triumphantly in the air.

But it didn’t happen that way. Kennedy and his team were delayed by traffic. By the time the senator got to the stage, it was crowded with dignitaries. He had trouble finding Carter in the mob. On television, it looked as if the two men were avoiding each other.

They finally met and shook hands, Shrum said. But Kennedy never raised Carter’s hand. It was seen as another sign of disunity. It wouldn’t have mattered, Shrum insists.

“It was very hard to go to the country in 1980 and say, ‘We have inflation, interest rates at 17, 18, 19 percent, a recession, hostages in Iran, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, draft registration and, by the way, reelect me.’ ”

* * *

In less than two weeks, the party plans to celebrate the legacy of Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy at its convention in Denver.

That 1980 contest could have left Kennedy as a Democratic pariah. Instead, he became a defiant symbol of Democrats who fight for their core values.

Kennedy is the ultimate partisan but also the ultimate deal-maker. When the current President Bush needed help advancing education reform or immigration reform, he teamed up with Kennedy. Time and again, the liberal icon is at the center of bipartisan compromise.

“He may be the most productive legislator of all time,” Shrum says.

These days, Shrum is retired from speechwriting and consulting. People ask whether he can resist coming to Denver. He plays coy but hints that there’s one old boss he couldn’t turn down.

“He’s my friend,” Shrum said of Kennedy. “And if he wants me to do something, I do it.”

sprengelmeyerm@shns.com

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