The best bed in Washington
An American election campaign officially lasts ten months. From the early Iowa caucuses in January until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November when the die is cast. It is a long and winding campaign, by land, sea and air. Continental dimension and worldwide repercussion. After having covered three campaigns on the ground (the first in 1980), and some more as an analyst, commentator or contertulum in the distance, you come to the conclusion that the long rosary of meetings, primaries, conventions, debates and proposals of all kinds are locked into two keys: leadership and spectacle. If a candidate is not capable of fulfilling both, he will have thrown away the dream of his life and hundreds of millions of dollars in the rubbish of history. It is a high-risk game. Fame and money go hand in hand in a gamble that can be lost even if it wins more votes than the other (as happened to Hillary Clinton against Trump) or won against the odds (as the actor Reagan managed with unexpected help from the ayatollahs).
Expectant and always surprised, every four years the whole world watches how the US electoral machinery needs a whole year to decipher the profile of the man who will influence the fate of the planet like no other. The longest of the campaigns, which began amidst the snows in Iowa, culminates in November, leaving a pile of political corpses on the tortuous path, and a winner, most of the time unexpected or at least surprising: a Catholic president in the country of the Protestants (Kennedy). A farmer in the capital of professional politicians (Carter). An actor in the world of maneuvers (Reagan). A son of a president, inheriting office (the Bushes). A black man in the White House (Obama). An unscrupulous businessman, with no party affiliation (Trump). Everything is possible in American politics. And in order for this impossible to become a reality, it is necessary to cover a scavenger hunt of fifty states over ten mees before reaching that Tuesday of glory or of pain. For the journalist, it is as exhausting as it is fascinating.
Every campaign is different, even if the ritual of primaries, conventions and debates marks common milestones. In any case, the appearance of the coronavirus and of a personality as unpredictable as the King of the Brick in New York as president have blown away any predictions about what might happen. Even the peaceful surrender of power if he is a loser has been called into question by the current occupant of the White House, throwing away the last remaining essences of democracy in the American system.
Before Trump forced any normal scheme to the limit, the most unusual post-war campaign was experienced when an actor ended up jumping onto the world's biggest political stage, the White House. Ronald Reagan swept away President Jimmy Carter despite seeming to have everything against him. That campaign of 1980 was undoubtedly the beginning of a new model of electoral politics, which continues to this day with the new dressing of the digital media that are now as decisive as the all-powerful television was. Now that Trump is playing the trump card of the Middle East in order to relaunch a candidacy in the low hours (establishment of relations between Israel and its Arab "enemies" and threatened with new sanctions on Iran), it should be remembered that Carter carried on his back the stigma of the seizure of the American embassy in Teheran by Khomeinist revolutionary guards just one year before the election date. The epilogue was truly shocking: while Reagan was sworn in on the steps of the Capitol in front of a distraught Jimmy Carter, the hostages were released and flew off to the United States. The external factor was playing, and very strongly, in the internal campaign. In between evenings, it would happen again with the appearance of the Russian hand in the election of Donald Trump and the surprise fall of Hillary.
After a first visit in the magical year of the bicentennial, my life as a correspondent in the United States began in 1979, a year in which the so-called "incumbent" (incumbent president) always has the upper hand. With his name in diminutive (no James!), and his background in peanut growing, Jimmy Earl Carter had come to the presidency to finally get it away from the stench of Nixon's Watergate and coleo with his heir vice president Gerald Ford. He brought an air of simplicity and cleanliness to a degraded and corrupt Washington. What would the Republicans be up to in an attempt to regain lost power?
I landed at Washington's futuristic Dulles Airport on January 2. My ankles still feel the chill of the wind in the middle of a snow-covered city. The taxi that was driving me to the hotel crossed in front of the White House inhabited by a Jimmy Carter in his best days, without guessing yet the tensions and turbulences that would come and that would be the food for my chronicles for Radio Nacional de España. The truth is that I barely lived a year in the federal capital before moving to my desired correspondent's post in New York, N.Y., to replace my teacher and colleague Cirilo Rodriguez, coincidentally both native Segovians. But the first few months in Washington - a city I would return to repeatedly on the back of the airlift - were crucial in introducing me to the political geography of the first power. A world of embassies, civil servants, lobbyists, high-spirited secretaries and politicians of various stripes that finally converged on the National Press Building at 529 14th Street, where we journalists had our offices and where you rubbed shoulders with politicians and civil servants in their classic dining room and at the big news meetings.
A house in Georgetown
In that vast capital, with its huge avenues and immense powers, the narrowness of the White House press room was surprising. The then veteran Helen Thomas, dean of the accredited, opened and closed the presidential press conferences, and gave an example of punditry and objectivity in the coverage of the most powerful enclosure on earth. Two great pillars of Spanish journalism who were then a couple, Juan Roldán as a delegate from the EFE agency and Curry Valenzuela who wrote for Cambio 16, were my tutors on arrival in the great Washington. The current correspondent of La Vanguardia in London, Rafael Ramos, who was from my farm and who was doing his journalistic work at the agency, was my companion in the evenings in the Georgetown neighbourhood. To give you an idea of the technological gap with today's digital world, I remember how the "agencieros" would punch their news texts on the telex, generating a yellow ribbon with little Braille holes. Once the writing was finished, it was rolled up between two fingers creating a butterfly remedy so that when it was placed on the transmission device it would not get stuck. Even the fax machine had not been invented... None of them saw Carter as unbeatable at the time, but he didn't seem very threatened either.
Neither did any of them believe my luck to find a house (and a good price) in the very heart of the city, in Georgetown: "Where did you say? Wisconsin with an M?" Impossible. It's the centre of the neighbourhood. Something like Gran Vía with Alcalá. The semi-detached house I found on a snowy day, behind a bush that covered the door, had a small garden at the entrance, two floors with historic windows and a back alley. It was in the fall of Wisconsin towards the Potomac River past the C. and O. canal, a unique spot where you could sometimes see fireflies. The luxuries of that great little Washington that had not yet taken off into the air of imperial capital that it would take with it in the eighties. The only problem with the location was that it lacked a metro entrance, although it undoubtedly passed under the city's most chic neighbourhood, and was the residence of senators and senior administration officials. Even then it was said that the new and spectacular Washington underground did not stop there "so that it would not be filled with blacks". Obama was not even imagined on the political horizon at the end of the seventies...
Our journalistic life took place on 14th Street, a stone's throw from the White House, where I set up the first office of Radio Nacional de España in Washington, as was mandatory, because the only correspondent until then had always been in New York. Following the usual pattern, the door of the office was inscribed by the National Press Club workers with the obligatory golden letters with the name of the company. It really looked like a movie. My closest neighbour was the first correspondent of El País in the United States, Juan González Yuste, of whom I had references from the world of culture and communication in Madrid. Juan died sadly, alone, years later, on his return from the Balkan War from a heart attack in a hotel room in Barcelona. Big, with black glasses, a sly good mood and a love of the world of new pop culture, Juan and his wife were also good companions in those days of Carter that seemed a backwater and ended up dismantled.
For the next presidential inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2021, Jimmy Carter will be there once again with the sworn-in president. With permission from his alliance with longevity, he will only be four years away from turning 100. He will have attended - after his own - the inaugurations of Reagan, Bush senior, Clinton, Bush junior, Obama and Trump. A historic record. With his air of a man of peace and tranquillity in the face of adversity, he will not be able to stop thinking of that January 20, 1981, when he passed the baton to Ronald Reagan, at the same time as the odyssey of the embassy hostages came to an end. The blackest point in his term of office that would dominate his campaign for re-election. A volunteer in activities to help those in need, Carter had already left a clear mark of solidarity activism in those years that dominated American politics, creating the non-existent departments of Energy and Education, and strengthening legislation on environmental protection.
A film was released in Georgetown's cinemas at the time, which proved to be premonitory and its effects would be felt in the immediate election campaign. The China Syndrome, with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas playing television reporters. The script focused on an accident at a nuclear power plant, the eventual explosion of which would cause - they literally said - a hole in the ground that would reach the other side of the planet, all the way to China. The real hole did not occur, but the leakage of radioactivity into the water and atmosphere soon became a reality in the accident at Three Mile Island in nearby Pennsylvania. Immediately the anti-nuclear movement "No nukes" appeared with massive demonstrations in the great Washington Mall, and later in southern Manhattan, in the area where the land where the Twin Towers were built was cleared and artists were used for temporary creations in what was called "Art in the beach".
The bland, civil servant Washington had suddenly become the centre of mass protests not seen since Vietnam and the racial movements. We had new and fresh material for the chronicles of this America that was awakening to ecology, the defence of the environment, clean energies..., when there were already few embers left from the anti-Vietnam era. At the same time, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was released, which swept the Oscars of the year with five statuettes and brought to the table in all its rawness the wounds opened by that distant war that had brought many physical and psychological mutilations back home. Meryl Streep made her first starring appearance with the inevitable Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken. Her impact was tremendous. The hangover from Vietnam became more evident. Cimino became a cult director and the film is now one of the best in history. In 1996 the Library of Congress listed it as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" and it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was also, its local part, in Pennsylvania, in the Harrisburg area, a traditionally Democratic feud for its steelworkers, which Trump managed to attract to his candidacy in order to get his promotion to the presidency. These elements were creating a new background for the imminent re-election campaign. Carter and his team were embracing these new ideas, which were a clash with the interests of large corporations. Clean energy, less weapons, peace agreements, ... It seemed that the 1968 protest was becoming institutionalised and that Carter was their good shepherd.
Among the curious visitors of those hungover Washington years, there appeared one day the cartoonist, illustrator, humorist and artist Juan Carlos Eguillor. His cartoons of the old ladies on the table of Triunfo magazine always caused me surprise and delight. Eguillor was a big boy, full of concerns, with a desire to assault the other side of reality. He had come to the East Coast to "see America and embrace it completely". He wanted to take a trip from coast to coast. A knock-knock sounded in the glass door of the radio office, and there Eguillor's glasses appeared again, but he was transformed. His clothes matched the big glasses. He had dressed in a shirt with a clergyman's collar, as a priest, and we weren't at Halloween... And what was the reason for this outfit? Her strategy was clear. "Look, I'm going to make the trip to California on Greyhound (the buses that cover the mainland) and I thought that, in order to avoid assaults or scares of any kind, the best thing to do is to impose respect, and I think this outfit will do that. In short, he had made a comic of himself to preserve his identity... Beyond my laughter at seeing him, his image led me to that of the young priest in The Exorcist with Max von Sido. William Friedkind's film had caused a great stir not long ago and had one of its most striking settings right in the neighborhood where I lived now, in Georgetown, with the steep stairs leading down from the end of the well-known Jesuit university, where the future King Philip VI would graduate. Eguillor wanted to project a respectable image to the fauna he encountered in his American odyssey. And to avoid a robbery.
One of the main keys for a presidential candidate is to generate an aura of respect, within a climate of trust. Jimmy Carter was in the middle of the scale. A good man for some, a weak man for others. The Republican camp was analysing his weak sides in order to present him with a battle in the imminent elections. Iowa was already the target for January 1980. Carter stepped up his foreign policy action under the leadership of an impeccable Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the sale of his achievements through his neat spokesmen: Hodding Carter and Jody Powell. They were launched. There was no shortage of material for the chronicles. Suddenly, from the always tense and arid Middle East or Near East, which we wrote about day in and day out, they brought an unthinkable fruit from the desert with the Camp David agreements. Arafat in America, turned into a cover with the Israeli hawk Menachem Begin. The strangest couple, now united. You had to see it to believe it. He also signed the controversial transfer of the Canal to Panama's sovereignty, negotiated the SALT II treaty for missile reduction with the Soviet Union and completed the process initiated by Nixon by establishing full diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. The external flank was well protected to face a campaign against a probable Republican novice on these issues. With the strength of the years on screen, Walter Cronkite recounted this new face of America every night in his 30 minutes on CBS. Before his "And that's the way it is", we were witnessing a reshaping of America's foreign action and a growing shift in the demands of the American streets. The hangover from Vietnam and Watergate was evaporating. It was the most frequent news item.
In between stories, my Georgetown house was a parade of mattresses of all sizes, and none of them could help me sleep. I had left the Lombardi Towers-hotel halfway between the 1700 White House on Pennsylvania Avenue and my Georgetown home-on a Saturday, to make the move to my brand-new semi-detached house to coincide with the arrival of my bed purchased from a large specialty store. On the first floor of the red brick building there was a living room with a fireplace that overlooked the small garden at the entrance and the elbow room at the back. A two-flight staircase led to the upper floor where there were two other rooms. In the one that looked at Wisconsin through three windows that opened with a crank. I was going to install the biggest bed I had ever enjoyed, a king size.
Early in the morning, I moved into what was already my empty house and waited, looking out the window, for the arrival of the delivery truck. Two muscular black men appeared, first carrying the bed base and then the mattress. They left them at the entrance and something was wrong when they tried to climb the small stairs. The mattress or bed base was not flexible and the staircase with its low ceiling and the upward swing did not allow that volume to enter. There was no way. The two pieces had to be returned, because the mattress did not even manage to cross that threshold. I had no choice but to immediately buy a folding bed so that I could sleep at home from that night on and wait for a smaller bed to be brought in the following Saturday: the Queen size.
Neither the king nor the queen (the sizes American beds are measured in) were willing to live in my little house on Wisconsin Avenue near the Potomac. The queen didn't manage to climb the stairs either. And the third week was the charm, consoling me with a twin size mattress, which did not give to stretch much but at least had good springs compared to the tiny folding bed that I rock my first Washingtonian nights.
For me it was a nightmare, but for Jimmy Carter what was coming was a nightmare. When summer came back I had to forget about my beautiful Washington corner and look for a house in Manhattan. The change didn't hurt. Thanks to Teresa Shelley I found a flat in Greenwich Village and I rented it even though I had only seen it at night and without electricity. It was the neighbourhood where I had to be. I had left behind a Washington where the noise of electoral swords was increasingly loud. Something seemed to explode, like when the city's atmosphere is filled with extreme humidity and you can't see the moment when the storm finally blows over. One of those summer storms kept my plane standing for hours on the runway and took me to New York at night with no time to see my new living space in natural light. Through a window I could see the Empire State Building lit up in white, red and blue, and it was enough of an attraction to accept the space that would be my home for almost seven more years.
The Republicans wanted to come back and launched an avalanche of candidates. George Bush was in the lead. The Texas oil man didn't like the current president's ecological vagaries. Carter's team was confident that they would be able to stand up to a man with a long curriculum but a lack of verbiage and charisma. Bush had presided over the CIA, had been the first ambassador to China. He was well prepared, but with an unattractive physical profile and a sharp speech.
What was regarded as a distant affair-although so closely linked to the source of oil-as was the revolution that had taken place in Iran and forced the Shah into exile, would come to have a crucial influence on the elections that were approaching. Carter agreed to the Shah of Persia receiving medical treatment in the United States and the Iranian radicals made a further turn of the screw, accentuating the extreme Islamist line that continues to this day.
What began as a riot, after a first attack on the American Embassy, became the news of a never-ending crisis. "America taken hostage" was the title of a special news programme at an unheard of hour, 11 p.m., presented by one of the most prominent journalists of the ABC network, Ted Coppel. It went from special to regular news. Every day a new date was added to the days of captivity. Nightline was the final name of the programme, followed by Day 23, Day 57, Day 128... The news spread to the world. It was a hot topic every day and every hour. If you went out to dinner with friends, you had to stay connected, go with the radio headset on and tuned in to 1010 WINS, the All News station. ("You give us 20 minutes and we give you the world") because at any moment the outcome was expected. Carter attempted a failed rescue before the helicopters arrived in Tehran. The end point would not come until the election campaign was completely over. Such was the calculation that the Iranians had made that they were beginning to take the measure of the all-powerful "American Empire", as Bin Laden would take it years later.
The election campaign of 1980 broke down. Carter was a wounded candidate. The Republicans pressed with a ticket composed of the loquacious and telegenic Reagan and the calculating shadow maneuverer George Bush senior. In addition, someone placed a third Republican candidate with traces of independent John Anderson to try to steal Democratic votes. Around the summer of 1980 Carter continued to light his foreign policy torch to bolster the imminent election campaign and made a tour of Europe on the occasion of the G7 summit in Venice. It was my first presidential trip, and I watched in my favorite seat the spectacle of seeing the entire White House flying from country to country. All the usual Washington services were moved from one capital to the next. There was little sleep because we left before the president to cover the arrival of Air Force One and we covered all the events, photo calls, press conferences... without missing a detail. There were the then mythical names in world politics already swept away by the wind of history: Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Helmund Schmidt, Cossiga, Trudeau... and Margaret Thacher.
In Venice the best hotels were for the American press. For the Europeans in the caboose they left us the Hotel des Bains. A marvel of the time, where Visconti filmed Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and where I could not resist the temptation to forget the historic key to the room with the flexes in my jacket pocket and make the trip back to America with me. Rafael Ortega, the Italian correspondent of Radio Nacional, and we did that coverage together, reunited after the two of us had been on the programme Siete Días. Great days of Transition radio, which made us comrades, friends and accomplices of so many changes at that time. We were part of the correspondent's circle that was broadcast for a long time - at least twenty minutes - every morning on "España a las Ocho". Asunción Valdés in Bonn, Mariano González Aboín or Carlos Blanco in London, Carlos Castillo in Paris, Paco Eguiagaray in Moscow... We had our talks in private, before and after being on the air, and we made a pineapple, a family on the air helping each other and commenting on the ups and downs of the "loneliness of the foreign correspondent". Cirilo Rodriguez had returned to Madrid and was coordinating the round table.
The Kennedy oratory
Not even the European scales, to reinforce its image as a world leader, could strengthen Carter. The President's star had paled. He arrived at the New York convention in the torrid summer of 1980 with enough delegates to achieve the nomination, but with his prestige dwindling. The rising star, who could manage to save the furniture in the face of the growing Republican threat, was the third Kennedy. I still have a pin with the word "OPEN" which was the most popular at that convention, where I also discovered what a teleprompter was by snooping around the speakers' podium and finding those two crystals placed on either side of the podium on which the speeches were projected, so that the speaker could read and be noticed. In keeping with the family tradition, Edward Kennedy delivered a speech with a brilliant and enormous level of oratory, in keeping with the size of Madison Square Garden.
The numbers denied him the option of following the path of his brothers, and the pins with OPEN were the last word to cling to in desperation to save the candidacy, the party, and perhaps the country. They asked for the release of the delegates obtained, as the only formula to change the candidate. He met with his fervent supporters at the hotel across from Madison Square Garden for a final harangue. His flowing words, his smiling face, his big body pushing, Kennedy was making himself noticed and desired. It was the first time I saw him face to face, when I interviewed him for my then correspondent, Radio Nacional de España. He was full of hope, but with the right measure, that of a home-grown politician, in a saga that was more personal than the one that made him just the third Kennedy. But when he climbed onto the pedestal mounted on the MSG to deliver his harangue to the ecstatic delegates, friends, journalists and curious politicians, Edward Kennedy made it clear in the first minute, after endless applause of encouragement, that he was "not there to defend a candidacy but to reaffirm a cause".
He made a historic speech, considered today to be among the most appreciated of the great American political rhetoric, passionately laying out the keys of liberal and democratic politics, the closest to the working class of the two great parties, and denouncing the Reaganist policies that were coming. To close, he used some beautiful passages from the family's favourite poet. Tension:
"I am a part of all that I have met
To 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."
The verses taken from Alfred Tennyson's Ulysses resounded as a clear call to resistance, to put up a fight against all the elements. The discourse of a personal defeat had become the best harangue for confronting the common political enemy. Kennedy and his people did not succeed in getting the open convention, but they did manage to gain encouragement for the Democratic cause, to keep their hopes up for the political battle ahead. The magic of the last Kennedy was served up, to make it clear that putting one's heart into a fist by speaking from the heart is the art of the few. Senator Edward Kennedy thus demonstrated who he was and that he was ripe for the occasion. He had lost that battle, but he won the war for the control of the ideals that the Democratic Party would defend until now. His verb did triumph. But the 1980 campaign was doomed. Carter, as a president aspiring to a second term, with the White House at his service, did not give in.
That strange crossroads between Iran and the United States had made the American election campaign doubly attractive and attracted one of the most illustrious globetrotters of Spanish journalism to the election coverage, who was my election night companion in our Second Avenue office. Manu Leguineche, like everyone else, still believed in a last-minute miracle. We went down together to eat at his favourite restaurants, the Indians on Calle Siete, reviewing his Iranian experiences and making assumptions about the support of the states. California and New York would have to fall on Carter's side. Texas and Florida for Reagan. The bills were too tight, and the atmosphere was as spicy as the food.
On election night we looked at the screen that showed the map of the United States taking state by state an increasingly red colour, the colour of the Republicans, and their partner to defeat the Carter-Mondale ticket, with Reagan and Bush. Pedro Erquicia, then a correspondent for TVE, also made his debut with this election campaign and watched the night with his usual scepticism. We approached the Democratic Party party in a Times Square venue and found it half empty. Defeat was being chewed up. We returned to make our retransmissions at dawn in Madrid, their deliveries to the agency and we contemplated how the most powerful country in the world had been sabotaged by the ayatollahs, initiating a new era in whose wake we still live.
The presiding actor, or vice versa
A discredit, similar to the one supported by Trump, involved from the beginning the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, crossed out as ultra, old-fashioned, insolvent... for being kind in the adjectives. The Village was full of personalized posters ridiculing the "actor who wanted to become president". The truth is that Reagan treasured other qualities. Although as an actor he never got past the high school barrier, he was a union leader in his trade and then did marketing boards on stage as a spokesperson for General Electric. So when California Republicans sought a replacement for the longtime Republican Governor Brown in 1966, they thought of him. The decision had been made by the Sanhedrin of big business in the richest state in the Union. And without a doubt they were the heavyweights who supported him in his candidacy for the presidency, surpassing his well-positioned opponent George Bush senior, who finally accompanied him in the vice presidency.
When four years later we experienced the next campaign. Reagan had become a totem of the conservative revolution, along with Margaret Tathcher in England. His mastery of the scene was as spectacular as the turn he took in his policies. He is now regarded as one of the country's historic presidents. In the 1988 campaign, the Houston convention crowned him once again, while the Democrat Walter Mondale and the first woman on the presidential ticket, Geraldine Ferraro of New York, succumbed to the weight of the conservative steamroller. The baton finally passed to Vice-President George Bush, the father who would triumph over Mike Dukakis. Other campaigns to which we will return, and in which once again marketing bit at the essence of democracy in a process that sees no end.
Campaigns that are increasingly expensive, tense (such as the butterfly ballot count in Florida that finally gave Bush junior the Pyrrhic victory over Al Gore), and also more novel with the use of digital decoys (Obama). A tweet is now worth a handful of votes. Or so we are led to believe. Until Trump came along and broke all the moulds.
(To be continued)
Javier Martin-Domínguez was a correspondent in the United States from 1979 to 1989.