I Should Be Dead by Bob Beckel

Author:Bob Beckel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography / Political
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Although we had safely reached the goalpost of the nomination, we were badly beaten up by the time we arrived. We were out of money and had lost precious ground battling Hart and Jackson right up through the convention. And Reagan was gaining ground. The only solid good news, beyond the fact of the nomination itself, was Mondale’s choice of running mate.

Fritz had been interviewing vice-presidential candidates at his house in Minneapolis. (It was a Frank Lloyd Wright house, the most uncomfortable home I’ve ever been in in my life—everything squared off, the furniture built into the walls; it was terrible.) It was the same deal every time: The candidate came, went inside, came back out, met the press on the driveway, left… and the next one pulled up. It looked like a cattle call, and Mondale took a good deal of heat for that.

One day he called Johnson and me into the room and he said, “What do you think about naming a woman vice president?”

We both looked at him and said, “You know, that’s a great idea. But who are we going to pick?” This was about a week before he needed to make his announcement.

He told me to go out and check out a list of women candidates, which I did—and every one of them had a problem. There was Martha Layne Collins, who was governor of Kentucky, but she had some baggage; Dianne Feinstein, from California, who was a big Carter-Mondale supporter and a strong candidate, but there were financial questions about her and her husband, who was a wealthy investment banker. When you’re vetting a possible candidate for an office like vice president, the level of scrutiny is intense. It has to be. Not many people would make the cut, no matter how strong their qualifications.

Finally we looked at Gerry Ferraro—and she looked great. Solid Italian-American candidate, great background, public school teacher, worked in the New York DA’s office, good member of the House. She was Tip O’Neill’s choice, and it wasn’t hard to see why.

Mondale looked everything over and said, “All right, I’ve made my decision. We’re going with Ferraro. Don’t anybody say anything.” He’d made a truly smart choice.

We took a private plane out to New York to pick her up and fly her back into San Francisco. When they walked out onto the convention stage and Fritz introduced Ferraro, she shouted to the crowd, “If we can do this, we can do anything!” and the place went absolutely nuts. She was terrific, and it was a smash success. It got a fantastic amount of press attention. We couldn’t have asked for a better boost to our embattled campaign.

They went out and campaigned together for a short while, and everything was going great. Then we started setting Gerry up for her own campaign trip to California—when we ran into a problem.

In the process of vetting our VP candidates we had sent our lawyers to scour everyone’s background and make sure we knew everything we needed to know (which was everything, period).

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