Camelot's End by Jon Ward

Author:Jon Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

It was break-the-glass time for Kennedy. He didn’t show signs of panic, however. In fact, he became a more effective candidate in those days after the Register poll was released, according to Drew’s firsthand account. He was looser, more himself, more energetic, and began connecting with audiences more. At his very next stop after the Drew interview, he rallied about a thousand people and praised the local high school basketball team, stretching words out with his northeastern drawl. “I bet you didn’t know that we knewwwww about the St. Mary’s team back in the United States Senate. But you’d be amaaaazed at what you learn when you run for president,” he bellowed.

Later that night, at his 11 p.m. rally in Davenport with three hundred caucus organizers, he mentioned Carter by name for maybe the first time all week, a sign that the gloves were coming off, finally, after he had held back from hitting the president all these weeks. “I refuse to accept the comments and the statements of Mr. Carter when he talks about ‘malaise,’” Kennedy said, overlooking the fact that Carter never actually used that term. “I say no malaise. No malaise!” He began voicing a more muscular, effective message in his stump speech.

But the shadow of the Register’s poll numbers hung over him. At each stop, and even when he returned to Dulles Airport in northern Virginia at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and was greeted by a hundred or so campaign workers, Kennedy couldn’t help but mention the survey, if only to say that “we’ll show them what a real Iowa poll is.”

Kennedy began lowering expectations, telling the press that Carter had to win 50 percent in Iowa for it to be a victory. And he continued to tear into the president more aggressively as the caucuses loomed ever closer. His campaign broadcast into Iowa homes a fifteen-minute speech by the senator in which he blasted Carter’s foreign policy as being “out of control.” The nation, he said, was “adrift, buffeted by events, tossed like a cork on uncertain and stormy seas. America’s prestige is at its lowest point since we became a world power.” Almost as if he were reading off of Pat Caddell’s memo to President Carter from the previous summer, he said, “Constantly, we seem to be reacting to events that take us by surprise.”

But the same day that Kennedy was beamed into Iowa homes, one week before the caucuses, Chappaquiddick surfaced again, with a vengeance. Reader’s Digest published an in-depth investigative article by John Barron that claimed Kennedy’s account of his swim across Edgartown harbor was false. One day later, the Washington Star—where Barron had previously worked—published a similar article.

The Reader’s Digest article claimed that based on an “elaborate scientific study,” they had concluded Kennedy was driving at thirty-four miles per hour when his car went off the Dike Bridge, not the twenty miles per hour he claimed. And they argued that the current in the water would have been far weaker than Kennedy claimed.

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