November 24th, 1979
President Carter got into the limousine. He enjoyed reading to elementary school students as much as the next man, and he did firmly believe that the President should take the lead in promoting education… but this had been a stressful month. He was glad the event was over so he could get back to Washington and at least attempt to sort everything out.
As was being driven back to the airport, Carter made a mental checklist. The economy was a mess and there seemed to be no end in sight to stagflation, the fundamentalist nuts in Iran were holding dozens of Americans hostage, the Russians were making aggressive overtures toward Afghanistan…
The President liked to think he’d done his best to help heal America after her various national nightmares, but sometimes he thought it was all more trouble than it was worth. There was a lot about Washington he didn’t like, the pettiness and the factionalism, the squabbling interests and the downright mean-spiritedness. It was all so, so stressful.
At least the Republicans seemed set to nominate Ronald Reagan for the election next year. That’ll be a walkover, Carter thought to himself. It’ll be Johnson versus Goldwater all over again...
That’s when the Ford Pinto, barreling through a red light at approximately seventy miles an hour, struck the side of the presidential limousine.
November-December 1979
-Fortunately, President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter was not fatally wounded in his car crash in suburban Michigan, though sadly his driver and the operator of the other vehicle, who was confirmed by toxicology reports to have been heavily under the influence, had died. Unfortunately, he was paralyzed from the waist down, and would likely be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Of course it didn’t take long for people to note the irony that the fate that had befallen President Carter, a moderate Southern and representative of the New South, had previously struck Alabama Governor and frequent presidential contender George Wallace, who had been a once been champion of segregation. The President himself even noted this, and went as far as requested Wallace come visit him in the hospital.
The big question now, of course, was if Carter would step down. During the special press conference held on November 25th White House Press Secretary Jody Powell was so swamped with this query that the conference was famously interrupted by a clearly emotional Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, who denounced the reporters as “fucking horrible people.” In the meantime, Vice President Walter Mondale functioned as Acting President, the first time anyone had assumed this role under the guidelines of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
But ultimately, the country would not have to wait too long. In a televised address to the nation, Jimmy Carter announced on December 1st that he had sent a letter to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and President pro tempore Warren Magnuson declaring that he was ready to once again execute the office of the presidency. He had run it by Mondale and most of the rest of his cabinet to see if any of them doubted his condition, and Carter was “proud to say they are behind me, 100%.”
However, there was a caveat: though the President planned to serve out the rest of his term, he did not feel his condition would be well-suited to fill the office long-term. “In the words of another Southerner, ‘I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.’”
And that’s when the race for the White House in 1980 really began.
-Of course, Carter’s announcement that he was not seeking another term wasn’t the first big development in the Democratic primary race. Ted Kennedy, the Senator from Massachusetts the standard-bearer of the Kennedy political family, had already announced that he would challenge Carter for the nomination. But now, with no incumbent in the running, several other Democrats decided to make run for president.
Still, the fact that Kennedy was in the running, in addition to Vice President Walter Mondale, who made his formal announcement the day after Carter’s address, kept many Democratic heavyweights from running. Those who jumped in after the two initial front-runners either represented a constituency that neither Kennedy nor Mondale could, such as Lloyd Bentsen, or were just really, really ambitious – we’re looking at you, Jerry Brown.
The younger brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a veritable American icon, and Robert F. Kennedy, who was tragically assassinated during his own presidential bid in 1968, Ted had been under a lot of pressure to step up to the plate and run for president. However, his presidential ambitions were put on hold after the Chappaquiddick incident back in 1969. But now Kennedy felt it was his time. He was going to focus on sweeping his political base of liberals, Catholics, minorities, and unionized workers in order to tie up the nomination. Mondale, however, felt that as Vice President, he was the one entitled to his party’s nomination. He was arguably the one who best represented the ideals of the New Deal coalition, coming from the same background as liberal hero Hubert Humphrey. Mondale hoped to wall off the Midwest and other farming states in order to win at least a plurality of the delegates.
Then came the challengers. Lloyd Bentsen, Senator from Texas, was by far the most conservative in the field. Expecting to easily carry most of the South and West in the primaries, Bentsen hoped to expand his constituency to include blue collar workers in the Northeast and Midwest with talk of law-and-order (“the kinder, gentler George Wallace”, as one journalist put it). And then there was Jerry Brown. His campaign slogan –“Protect the Earth, Serve the People, and Explore the Universe” – encapsulated the lofty ideals the normally pragmatic Governor Brown strove for. When it came to campaigning, he hit upon a novel idea while campaigning in New England. Vermont Democratic activist Howard Dean eventually found himself an audience with Brown, and explained, as he put it, the “Fifty-State Strategy”. The other primary contenders were going to take many of the states they expected to be in their column for granted, campaigning in a relatively small number of high-profile primaries and caucuses. Dean’s plan called for bypassing these states entirely and campaigning in the other candidates’ home turfs, taking advantage of their complacency in hopes of some surprise wins. Brown thought it an intriguing idea, and worked to adopt parts of it. The list of contenders was rounded by William H. Meyer, former congressman from Vermont and founder of the socialist Liberty Union Party, and Cliff Finch, the populist Governor of Mississippi.
-Meanwhile, the race for the Republican nomination still seemed to be progressing, well, boringly. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan, actor-turned-politician and Barry Goldwater’s successor as leader of the conservative movement in America, held wide leads throughout 1979. Reagan had previously run for the Republican nomination in 1968 and 1976, the latter time narrowly defeating incumbent President Gerald Ford for the nod. In fact, many speculated that Ford, who had only been narrowly defeated by Carter in 1976, might decide to make another go at it, but in the end, this wasn’t to be so.
By the end of the year, none of those opposed to Reagan seemed to be making any headway. His main opposition seemed to have whittled down to John Connally, George Bush, and John Anderson. Connally was the former Democratic Governor of Texas and confidante to President Nixon, who hoped to eat away at Reagan’s advantage in the deeply conservative South. George Bush, the former Director of the CIA and congressman from Texas, had unwittingly adopted a version of Dean’s aforementioned “Fifty-State Strategy”, visiting countless little gatherings of Republicans in order to build himself up as a dark horse. And finally there was John Anderson, the previously little-known representative from Illinois who was making a name for himself by becoming the standard bearer of the moderate-to-liberal Rockefeller Republicans. Other Republicans, such Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and Phil Crane, were unable to build a constituency and dropped out very early in the process.
-Of course, neither the race for the White House nor President Carter’s accident was at the top of the minds of most Americans in late 1979. That distinction would have to go to the Iran hostage crisis. The fact that dozens of American embassy workers were being held hostage on the other side of the world both led to a surge of patriotism and became a source of national embarrassment. President Carter resisted calls to intervene militarily in the Islamic Republic and opted instead to negotiate. Carter’s leadership during the crisis would, compounded with his accident, lead to a noted improvement in his poll numbers (too, he was certainly helped by the “rally-‘round-the-flag” effect). He would later note that part of the reason he refused to seek reelection was so he could “devote every fiber of my soul, every bit of me, to rescuing those folks.”
However, Carter’s foreign policy attention would soon be divided, when Soviet tanks started rolling over the border into Afghanistan…
-The entertainment world was also abuzz in late 1979, though for a different reason. After a ten-year hiatus, Star Trek was back! Released on December 7th, Star Trek: The Motion Picture starts with an mysterious and dangerous alien space probe, Vejur, making its way toward planet Earth, destroying everything in its path. With the fate of the Federation in their hands, it’s up to Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest of the crew of the starship Enterprise (freshly refitted) to save the day.
Though the film was released to mixed reviews (many critics complained that the film was overly-long and too heavily focused on the special effects), it did very well commercially. Many box office analysts believed that this was at least partially due to the story of the “Argo caper” hitting newsstands in late January. This increased public fascination with and appreciation for science fiction, obviously benefitting Star Trek: The Motion Picture, increasing its ticket sales and allowing it to retroactively become retroactively the highest-grossing film of 1979, narrowly beating Kramer vs. Kramer for that spot.
Still, Paramount executives weren’t completely happy. Though making $115,000,000 at the box office was a great achievement, it was still nowhere near as good as the totals racked up by Stars Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Convinced that this was due to Roddenberry’s vision “spoiling the fun”, he was kicked upstairs, so to speak, without any input on how the next film in the series would turn out. Now Paramount needed somebody else to helm the franchise…
~~~
“The State of Ereymentau was one of the many nations created during the collapse the Soviet Union…
…recognized by the United Nations in 1995…
…founded by descendants of Volga Germans relocated east during Stalin’s purges, the state was named for the capital city after no suitable alternative was chosen…
…poor relations with the Kazakhs, who ‘refuse to recognize the claims of the Ereymentau Germans’…
...the Revival Party, which has been the majority party since the 1999 elections, has called for, as the name would imply, a revival of the German language and German culture in Ereymentau…”