TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/76elect/76elect.008

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                                                                                September 27, 1976 

POLITICS 

Out of a Cocoon


     In the midst of change that is vast and dramatic, the
South has emerged from the political cocoon in which it was
long imprisoned. But the transformation is still in transition.

     There is a new and rising class of politicians. They have
been eminently successful partly because Congress and the
courts have diminished the politics of racial fear, partly
because judicial decrees have, through reappointment,
distributed voting power more fairly. And with the nomination
of Jimmy Carter for President, the politics of frustration --
rooted in the knowledge that no Deep South politician, whatever
his talents, might reasonably aspire to his nation's highest
office -- seems to be ending too.

     These new politicians wince in honest horror at old-style
racist demagoguery. Mississippi's venomous little Theodore
("The Man") Bilbo stayed in power for more than three decades
by such tactics as describing one opponent as "begotten in a
nigger graveyard at midnight" or, in defending himself against
charges of religious bigotry, by declaring himself in favor of
"every damn Jew from Jesus Christ on down."

     "The politics of race has gone with the wind," proclaimed
Georgia's Governor George Busbee in his 1975 inaugural address.
But Busbee, who succeeded Carter, had reason to know that he
was not entirely right: his opponent in the Democratic primary
runoff, Lester Maddox, won 40% of the vote, mostly from diehard
segregationists, who, though they no longer elect statewide
candidates, hang on as an inhibiting political force.


THE BILL OF RIGHTS

     At the same time, the South's new leaders and potential
leaders, particularly the Democrats, are keenly aware that a
black vote counts every bit as much as a white one -- and that
there are many more black votes today than seemed conceivable
a decade ago. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the critical
turning point. Jimmy Carter has called it the most important
political event of his lifetime. Spurred through a divided
Congress by President Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the act, under
a complex voter-participation formula, gave federal authorities
the power to supervise, in most Southern states, "any voting
qualifications, or prerequisites to voting, or standard,
practices of procedure with respect to voting."

     When the act became law, only about 2 million blacks were
registered to vote. By last year that figure had risen to 3.8
million, and it seems certain to pass 4 million by Election Day
1976. Black registration now runs less than ten percentage
points below that of voting-age whites. Increased black
registration has given blacks a larger share of political
offices -- but only up to a point. As recently as 1970 there
were a mere 565 black elected officials in the eleven states of
the old Confederacy. By 1976 that number had more than tripled,
to 1,847. Impressive enough, but that is only 2.3% of a total
of 79,381 elective jobs in the South and falls far short of the
20.5% black share of the voting- age population.

     The elective positions held by Southern blacks are mostly
at low levels. Only three -- Georgia's Andrew Young,
Tennessee's Harold E. Ford and Texas' Barbara Jordan -- hold
seats in the House. There are 99 black state legislators,
ranging from Georgia's 22 to Virginia's two, out of a total of
1,782 seats available. Only one Southern black has been elected
to office by statewide vote; he is Joseph Hatchett, 44, a fruit
picker's son who won a place on the Florida Supreme Court. Last
week Howard Lee, a black former mayor of Chapel Hill, N.C., got
46% of the vote in a Democratic primary runoff for Lieutenant
Governor -- a good showing, but not enough. In Mississippi, Fred
Banks Jr., one of four blacks in the state legislature, says:
"It may take 20 years to get a black elected to statewide office
here."

     Such discouraging statistics and pessimistic views do not
take into account the electrifying effect that an expanded and
more diverse electorate has had on Southern white politicians.
Notes Georgia's Congressman Young: "It used to be Southern
politics was just `nigger' politics -- a question of which
candidate could `outnigger' the other. Then you registered 10%
to 15% in the community, and folks would start saying `Nigra."
Later you got 35% to 40% registered, and it was amazing how
quick they learned how to say `Nee-grow.' And now that we've got
50%, 60%, 70% of the black votes registered in the South,
everybody's proud to be associated with their black brothers and
sisters."


THE NEW CLASS

     An ambitious new generation of white, mostly Democratic,
Southern politicians swiftly spotted and responded to the signs
of change. That generation came into full flower in the early
1970s, with election of a remarkable group of progressive
Governors: Arkansas' Dale Bumpers, Florida's Reubin Askew,
Mississippi's William Waller, South Carolina's John West,
Louisiana's Edwin Edwards -- and Jimmy Carter. They have since
spawned a second generation. In Arkansas, Moderate David Pryor
succeeded Bumpers as Governor, defeating old Segregationist
Orval Faubus. In Mississippi, Cliff Finch, who uses a
workingman's lunch pail as his political symbol, has followed
Waller.

     Others are moving to the forefront. This year in North
Carolina, Lieutenant Governor James B. Hunt, 39, a former Peace
Corpsman who became head of the state's Young Democratic
organization, is favored to replace Republican Incumbent James
Holshouser (who is prohibited by law from succeeding himself).
In Tennessee, former Democratic State Chairman James R. Sasser,
39, who has a mop of hair and a smile reminiscent of John F.
Kennedy, is running an energetic campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Says he: "If I take a day off, I just get restless and run out
of the house to find a hand to shake." Sasser, a one-time
legislative assistant to the late liberal Senator Albert Gore,
is given a good chance against the man who unseated Gore in
1970: Republican Senator William Brock, 45, who is himself an
aggressive, well-financed campaigner.

     In Texas, Republican Representative Alan W. Steelman, 34,
who left a post as executive director of President Nixon's
advisory council on minority business enterprise to become, in
1973, the youngest member of the House, is now running for the
U.S. Senate against Democratic Incumbent Lloyd Bentsen.
Although Steelman is given little chance to win, he is making
his name known statewide and is someone to watch in the future.
Similarly, Texas Democratic Attorney General John Luke Hill, 52,
who rates between moderate and liberal in the state's political
spectrum and has been especially effective in in forcing
environmental laws, is a strong possibility for Governor in
1978.


PEOPLE OVER ISSUES

     Such men have much in common. They grew up in states in
which there was only one viable party -- Democratic, of course.
Within that party, factions abounded, successful statewide
campaigns were often launched on the basis of little more than
the support of Establishment friends and neighbors, and, to a
much greater degree than in the North, substantive issues were
generally smothered by the shouts of ornate orators who could
win by wowing the boys at the forks of the creek.

     Jimmy Carter has been criticized for not taking a firm
stance on some issues. But in this failing, he is entirely
representative of today's Southern politicians. Even as in the
bad old days, personality still counts more than issues. The
difference is that the candidate who can holler "nigger" the
loudest no longer wins; instead, candidates try to project what
has been called a "best man" image. This has been termed the
"politics of trust" -- trust in basic good intentions.
Arkansas' Governor Pryor, for one, insists that issues "aren't
nearly as important as honesty and decency."

     Modern Southern politicians are fond of describing
themselves a being "people-oriented," and they undertake
elaborate projects to dramatize their concern for the common
man. As a Congressman, Pryor worked anonymously in nursing
homes for several weeks and later made public his findings about
how old people were being mistreated. Campaigning successfully
for the U.S. Senate in 1970, Florida Democrat Lawton Chiles
walked a circuitous 1,003 well- publicized miles from Pensacola
to Miami, chatting every step of the way with prospective
voters about their problems. Last year, while running for
Governor, Mississippi's Cliff Finch caught attention by spending
a day a week working at such jobs as grocery-store clerk and
bulldozer operator.

     Television's invasion into Southern homes has turned the
flamboyant old stump speakers into an obsolete breed. Like many
another oldtime Southern demagogue, Louisiana's Huey Long, who
could have talked the alligators out of the bayous, used his
stump-speaking abilities to become the hero of his state's poor
people. So did Eugene Talmadge, an on-and-off Governor of
Georgia for many years in the 1930s. His son, U.S. Senator
Herman Talmadge, makes a then-and-now comparison: "In my
father's day, you had big rallies at the county courthouse and,
if you could afford it, you had barbecues. You shook every hand
you could find, and it was all face to face. It's all changed
now. You are talking to people sitting quietly in their living
rooms. The atmosphere of the old public meeting is gone. You
have to be attractive physically and look good. Abraham Lincoln
wouldn't have been very successful on TV."

     Still, their handling of racial matters is the key to the
new Southern politicians. They are not color-blind. Far from
it- -they especially court the black vote. Mississippi's
Democratic Representative David Bowen, 43, is typical. Says he:
"I make a special effort to reach out. I speak in black churches
and to black civic groups. I've been to dozens of black clubs
and gatherings. That's not a unique situation now. Anyone in
Mississippi who wants to get elected does that. These are my
constituents."

     Many of the political oldtimers have also got the word.
Examples:

      --  Alabama's George Wallace was elected Governor in 1962
standing four-square on a platform against a state sales-tax
increase. After he was elected, the legislature voted in favor
of a tax hike, and House Speak Albert Brewer visited the
Governor to commiserate "because you'll have to veto it." Brewer
later recalled: "He looked at me in silence for a moment and
said, `I'll just holler nigger and everybody will forget it.'
And he did. And they did." In his 1963 inaugural speech,
Wallace proclaimed: "Segregation now -- segregation tomorrow --
segregation forever." But on a November weekend ten years later,
Wallace crowned a black home-coming queen at the University of
Alabama, then told a black mayors' meeting in Tuskegee: "We're
all God's children. All God's children are equal."

      --  Louisiana's State Representative Risley Claiborne
("Pappy") Triche was a legislative floor leader in the fight
against school desegregation in the 1960s. But in 1972,
speaking in favor of two bills aimed at protecting racial
minorities from job discrimination, he acknowledged that some
people might think, "`Listen to that segregationist. Isn't that
the guy who offered all the segregation bills in 1960 and fought
the battle to preserve segregation in our public school system?'
The only reply I can make to that, gentlemen, is that yes, that
occurred. At that time in the state of development of the
history of our state, we thought we were correct. We now find
that we were wrong."

      --  South Carolina's Republican Senator Strom Thurmond is
the man who, as a Democratic Governor in 1948, led a Southern
walkout in protest against a civil rights plank in the national
Democratic platform. Running for President as a Dixiecrat,
Thurmond carried four Deep South states. He switched to the
Republican Party in 1968, and later became an architect of
Richard Nixon's 1972 "Southern strategy." Today he eagerly
displays to visitors in his office a two-page list of
"accomplishments in behalf of blacks.' Items: "Assisted Mrs.
Victoria DeLee in expediting day-care funds for Dorchester
County"; "Co-sponsored bill to find a cure for sickle-cell
anemia."


ON THE HILL

     Since politicians from the Deep South long had no chance
of rising to the presidency, they concentrated on holding power
through the Congress. Elect 'em young and keep 'em there was
the credo -- and for most of this century, Southern House and
Senate committee chairmen, who attained their positions through
seniority, were effective against civil rights legislation. now
the Southern death grip on committee chairmanships is
weakening. In the Senate, three key chairmen are expected to
retire in 1979: Mississippi's James Eastland, 71 (Judiciary),
Alabama's John Sparkman, 76 (Foreign Relations), and Arkansas'
John McClellan, 80 (Appropriations), Mississippi's John Stennis
(Armed Services) is a cinch for re-election this year, but he
will be 81 when his next term ends. In each case, a Northern
Senator stands next in line in succession.

     The situation is much the same in the House. Arkansas'
Wilbur Mills, who lost Ways and Means after his Tidal Basin
antics, is retiring. In a virulent outbreak of democracy,
freshmen in the House Democratic Caucus last year forced the
ouster from chairmanships of Louisiana's F. Edward Hebert
(Armed Services), and Texas' Wright Patman (Banking) and W. R.
Poage (Agriculture). All were replaced by Northerners.

     Yet instead of chagrin, a sense of relief seems to prevail
among many Southerners on Capitol Hill, Says South Carolina's
Democratic Senator Ernest ("Fritz") Hollings: "When I first
came up here. they had all of us Southerners meeting around
[Georgia's Senator] Dick Russell. Later on we met for a while
around [Louisiana's] Allen Ellender and decided what to do about
a busing amendment. Those days are gone. We don't see our
interest now as being any different from any other section of
the country." Adds Florida's Senator Chiles: "A lot of new
Southern political talent is being liberated now. I don't think
the South still needs the kind of power the old committee
chairmen had. When they had it, they used it defensively to try
to block civil rights legislation, for instance, and to get a
little pork. The system is changing. We don't have to block
anything now. We've been integrated."

     That feeling runs strongly among the South's White House
members. Some note happily that black Representatives Barbara
Jordan and Andrew Young often choose to sit in the House
chamber with white Southern friends rather than with Northern
liberals or blacks. Others laugh about how some white Southern
votes are now cast to block antibusing amendments backed by
Michigan and Massachusetts Congressmen. Most of the South's
congressional Democrats point with particular pride to the fact
that on the 1975 roll call for a seven-year extension of the
Voting Rights Act, their vote in favor was 52 to 26 in the House
and 9 to 6 in the Senate. Southern Republicans, on the other
hand, opposed extension by 17 to 10 in the House and 4 to 2 in
the Senate.


THE G.O.P DILEMMA

     That vote cast harsh light on a particular problem for the
South's Republican Party, which as recently as 1972 showed
promise of providing the region, at long last, with a genuine
two-party system. Dwight Eisenhower, national hero, had brought
respectability to Southern Republicanism in 1952, carrying
Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. His success signaled at
least the beginning of the end for "yellow-dog democracy," in
which, or so it was said, Southerners would vote for a yellow
dog if it were nominated by the Democratic Party. By the late
1950s, efforts by Democratic Southern Governors attracting
Northern industries caused something of a political backlash.
Recalls South Carolina's Fritz Hollings of his term (1959-63)
as Governor: "After four years I had filled up the state with
industry. Then I looked around and they were all Republicans.
When you bring in GE and Westinghouse, you get the jobs, but
then you see that politics follows the jobs."

     In 1964 Barry Goldwater became the first Republican ever
to sweep the Deep South -- but in so doing, he helped paint the
Southern G.O.P. into a far corner of conservative,
segregationist reaction. Figuring that Republicans could not win
much of the black vote as a bloc, Goldwater said: "We ought to
go hunting where the ducks are" -- in effect among white
segregationists. This appeal, then and since, attracted many
strongly conservative Democrats who were distressed by the
increasingly moderate trend of their own party. In 1972 the
G.O.P. reached its high-water mark. Nixon won all Southern
states, and after the election Republicans held seven U.S.
Senate and 34 House seats from the South, as well as 288 places
in Southern state legislatures.

     Then, in 1974, Republicans suffered a serious setback. The
Southern G.O.P. lost one seat in the U.S. Senate, seven in the
House and 82 in the state legislatures -- including 40 in North
Carolina alone. The main reasons were voter protests against
Watergate and the recession, but Virginia Congressman M.
Caldwell Butler, a moderate Republican who was one of several
Southern stars on the House Judiciary Committee that voted for
impeachment of President Nixon, ascribes to the G.O.P. of his
own state a flaw that applied elsewhere as well. Says he:
"Republicans in Virginia have fallen heir to the extremist
conservative elements of the Democratic Party."

     With Jimmy Carter heading the Democratic ticket, Southern
Republican fortunes hardly seem likely to improve in 1976.
Party politics aside, what would Carter's election mean to the
South? Says Arkansas' Governor Pryor, "We wouldn't be singing
Dixie, but we'd be saying to the rest of the country, `Thank
God, you finally recognized us.'" Says North Carolina's
Democratic Representative Richardson Preyer: "For the South, it
will put on the imprimatur -- we're all part of the country;
we're not just a poor cousin."

     But what if Carter loses? Will Southerners assume that
defeat came in part because of Northern prejudice against the
South? Will the South retreat once more into embittered
isolation? Says Mississippi's Democratic Congressman David
Bowen: "It would reinforce some of the South's apprehensions
and increase the South's feeling of persecution. We Southerners
feel we've been discriminated against, just as the blacks were
discriminated against." That view seems overly gloomy. The
political change that the South has undergone seems
irrevocable. Win or lose, the mere fact that Georgia's Jimmy
Carter has received his party's presidential nomination is ample
evidence that the American South is entering more fully into the
nation's political mainstream.


THE CANDIDATE How Southern Is He?

     "I am a Southerner and an American."

      --  Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best?


     The priorities seem implicit in the autobiography that
Carter wrote as he set out on his presidential quest. Yet
despite his credentials -- boyhood in and manhood return to
South Georgia, a couple of terms in the state legislature, the
governorship -- how much of a Southern stamp does Carter really
have? After  all, he left Georgia at 18 for the U.S. Naval
Academy, was exposed there to everything from ballroom dancing
to naval strategy, followed that with windows on the
non-Southern world in such places as Oahu, Hong Kong and
Schenectady, N.Y.

     Carter does not fit many Southern stereotypes. He is not
a hard drinker, poker player, or profane and garrulous see-gar-
chomping raconteur. His humor is low key, his New South
approach to voters is cooler than the delivery of the hot stump
speechifiers of another era. Carter tells crowds: "When I'm in
the White House, you'll have a friend there." In contrast, a
prewar Georgia Governor and populist, gallus-snappin' Eugene
Talmadge, was wont to tell his crowds: "Come see me at the
mansion after I'm elected, and we'll set on the front porch and
piss over the rail at them city bastards." Carter quotes
Reinhold Neibuhr and Bob Dylan rather than traditional Southern
heroes. He is more self-disciplined than many a Southerner,
aloof to the point of loneliness.

     Carter is a product of Georgia, and he moves easily in the
two cities without which the state would be Alabama East.
Atlanta and Savannah represent a wedding of the old and the new,
and give Georgia the tone that distinguished it from the rest
of the South. Savannah drips with history, tradition and
gentility. Atlanta is and was the transportation crossroads of
the South. It is a city of stunning architecture, the regional
headquarters of most of FORTUNE's 500, cosmopolitan rather than
provincial (only a quarter of the population is nativeborn).

     While all this is part of Carter's world, he is a Southern
farm boy at heart who still knows how to turn sweet-potato
vines, chop cotton and pull peanuts, and who looks homeward to
a hamlet so archetypically Southern that it is almost parody.
Beyond that, he is a bucolic devotee of hunting and bird dogs,
stock-car racing and rock music -- notably backwoods Georgia's
own Allman Brothers. Says he of Georgia rockers in general:
"They're good boys. I understand them."

     He is also a totally immersed Christian who knows his
Bible, along with all verses of Amazing Grace, and considers
neither religion nor kinship particularly joke-worthy. While
Carter does not stem-wind like a "How Long O Lord?" Frank
Clement or Huey Long, he is a truly Southern orator. He is given
to nostalgia, imagery and hyperbole. He declared in his
acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden, for instance, that
the U.S. income tax structure was "a disgrace to the human
race."

     TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud, who has covered the
Democratic candidate since last October, reports:

     Carter is a melder. He has spent much of his life seeking
the golden mean. His parents differed dramatically on
everything from race to reading habits, and Carter apparently
learned early that if he wanted to earn the approval of both of
them, he would have to partition his personality to strike the
best balance between them. The balance that he struck was nearly
perfect.

     On his father's side, he is Old South. His late father,
"Mr. Earl," was a seigneurial landowner and entrepreneur who did
not allow Negroes beyond his back door (Mr. Earl's father, in
epic Southern style, was gunned down in an argument over
ownership of a desk). Carter's mother, Miss Lillian, who was
always more bookish, represented the New South, urging fair and
open treatment for blacks, less stress on tradition and more
attention to the times that are a-changing.

     Carter's success as a Southern politician has been based
on his ability to sense that his personality, created in part
by the push and pull of his parents' influence, reflected the
mood of much of the contemporary South -- a continued reverence
for the past with a growing desire to "get shut" of it. On this
basis, he campaigned for Governor, and, sensing a similar
attitude in the nation as a whole, he is campaigning for
President on this basis. If there is a problem now, it is that,
while Carter's understanding of Southern attitudes is intuitive,
his understanding of the national mood beyond the South is
merely intellectual.

     Like many other Southern moderates who were "moderate on
race" long before that was socially acceptable, Carter was not a
passionate crusader for civil rights in the years before he
entered politics. On the school board, in his church and in the
PLains business community, he did make small gestures -- which
required a measure of courage -- in behalf of simply justice
for blacks. But even in Plains, where the Carters were the
leading family, he knew the limits of his power and authority,
and did not seek to strain the tolerance of his white neighbors
beyond the breaking point. Still, Southern white moderates who
took small steps at great risk are held in higher esteem by
many blacks than Northern liberals who took bold steps at little
or no risk.

     Carter has said that if there is a single political
philosophy that he can be identified with, it is populism.
Thus, he is an heir to the political movement that argued that
poor, rural Southerners were being exploited by the banks and
big businesses of Atlanta as well as New York. As he has moved
up the political ladder, he has toned down this pitch, adding
such distinctly unpopulist notions as good management,
long-range planning, competence and other hallmarks of the age
of technocrats. But lately he has put into his speeches a line
that invariably gets the most applause: "I don't owe the
special interests a thing. I owe the people everything."

     It is this philosophy that links him, however uneasily and
tenuously, with Black Congressman Andrew Young and Mississippi
Publisher Hodding Carter III on one end of the South's
political spectrum, and with George Wallace and Lester Maddox
on the other end. That was the point Carter was attempting to
make when he sid in 1970 that Maddox "has compassion for the
little man," and when he said that a Humphrey-Wallace ticket in
1972 "would do well in the South," and when he called himself
"basically a redneck."

     Culturally, Carter has very little in common with
rednecks, but he understand what their fears are, what makes
them tick. He understands that they want to think well of
themselves and appeals to them to do so. He still has enough
redneck in him so that they do not see him as a total alien. For
all his sophistication, he has never quite shaken his discomfort
in posh surroundings. In the Governor's mansion in Atlanta,
visitors were often surprised to find him padding around the
elegant halls in bare feet.

     Carter in a real sense has used the South. He has adopted
what he liked and what was useful to him and tried to reject
what he did not like or was not useful. His view of himself and
the world has been shaped in large part by a distrust of big
money, power and government, the dedication to the heroic
mythology of the Confederacy and its gentle traditions that were
so often belied by violent reality, the fundamentalist religion,
the romantic belief in the redeeming qualities of rural life,
and the sense of the region's old isolation, poverty,
backwardness and- -above all -- its preoccupation with race. he
also believes the South has been misunderstood. In a speech at
Emory University while he was Governor, Carter said: "One of the
great afflictions on the South in the past...is
that...politicians have underestimated the Southern people. This
has caused the lack of...accurate analysis of the quality of the
South...by the rest of the nation and the world." However much
Jimmy Carter may have been transformed by Yankee influences as
an adult, the core of the man is Southern, and one of the most
important causes that he identifies his candidacy with is the
final, unqualified re- entry of the South into the Union.

_______________________________________________________________
October 4, 1976 TRYING TO BE ONE OF THE BOYS

     In the Democratic cloakroom just off the Senate floor,
Hubert Humphrey cracked, "Segretti did it. It had to be one of
the dirty-trick guys.' Los angeles Tiems Cartooinst Paul Conrad
lost not a second in sketching a lascicious Jimmy Carter
fantasizing over the Statue of Liberty -- undraped. A
Californian just back from a trip winked at his wife and
announced: I've got that Jimmy Carter feeling."

     The implausible linkage of Jimmy Carter to lechery stemmed
from some afterthought views on sexual mores that the candidate
expressed in a wide-ranging interview that will appear in the
November Playboy. The result of five hours of interviews given
over a three-month period to Writer Robert Scheer, the Playboy
article quotes Carter on such substantive topics as U.S.
intervention in foreign countries, multinational corporations
and the Mayaguez incident. But none of these created a stir.
[Equally ignored was the stratling revelation by Carter's
campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, in a companion Playboy
articel by Scheer, that two top foreign policy advisers to
Carter are not being considered for major appointments if the
Demcorat wins in November. Jordan is quoted as saying: "If after
the Inauguration you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and
Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would
say we failed. And I'd quit. But that's not going to happen.
You're going to see new faces, new ideas. The Government is
going to be run by people you have never heard of." The
statement suggests considerable political naivete: why embarrass
such men as Vance and Brzezinski, advisers to Kennedy and
Johnson and experts on whom Carter is leaning for advice?]

     What riveted the public, in the wink of an eye, was
Carter's use of the words "screw" and "shack up" while making
a candid, purposeless admission that like other humans, he
harbors lustful thoughts. With that, the Demcoratic nominee
opened himself to titllating ridicule, blue-nose outrage and
serious questions about his judgment: should a presidential
candidate choose a public forum where he will share attention
with busty "Miss November" and a blurb heralding "Much More Sex
in Cinema?" The cover promtion for the Carter story: "Now, the
Real Jimmy Carter on Politics, Religion, the Press and Sex in
an Incredible Playboy Interview."

     Incredible indeed. In discussing sex at all, Carter was
attempting to assure Playboy's presumably hedonistic readers
that his own preference for marital fidelity has not given him
a holier-than-they attitude. "We are taught not to judge other
people," Carter said of his Southern Baptist upbringing. Then,
in a rambling response to a suggestion that he might be a
rigid, unbending President," Carter declared: "What Christ
taught about most was pride, that one person should never think
he was better than anybody else." That should have been
sufficient, but Carter continued: "I try not to commit a
deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow,
because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set almost
impossible standards for us. Christ said, `I tell you that
anyone who looks on a woman with lust in his heart has already
committed adultery.'

     "I've looked on a lot of women wityh lust. I've committed
adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God
recognizes I will do -- and I have done it -- and God forgives
me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not
only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and
shacks up with somebody out of wedlock."

     Carter followed this curious intermingling of pulpit and
locker-room language with, "Christ says don't consider yourself
better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch
of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife." The
comments came after the interview apparently had ended and
Carter was standing at the doorway of his home, seemingly unable
to shut either the door or his mouth.

     Carter's resort to undeaconlike idiom was perhaps best
explained in a subsequent Sunday New York Times Magazine
article by Norman Mailer -- in which Carter used a still
raunchier expression. Quoting Carter as saying, "I don't care
if people say _____," Mailer wrote, "And he actually said the
famous four- letter word that the Times has not printed in the
125 years of its publishing life." Analyzed Mailer: "It was said
from duty, from the quiet decent demands of duty, as if he, too,
had to presnt his credentials to that part of the 20th century
personified by his interviewer."

     A more serious question -- why Carter felt obliged to bare
more than anyone needs to know about what goes on in his mind
and heart -- puzzled even his supporters. So did the fact that
he spent more time with Scheer, a former editor of the
left-leaning Ramparts magazine (who had previously done a
Playboy interview with California Governor Jerry Borwn that had
impressed the Carter camp) than with any other journalist. As
Columnist Mary McGrory suggested, the conversation "should have
been off the record with God, not one taped with Playboy."

     Reaction was swift and varied -- from both Carter backers,
who were dismayed despite efforts to rationalize what he had
done, and foes. Observed Georgia Democratic Chairwoman Marjorie
Thurman, a Carter opponent in state politics: "Bad, bad, bad."
South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings expressed hope that
"when he becomes President, he'll quit talking about adultery."

     Dr. William Wolf of the Episcopal Divinity School in
Cambridge, Mass., said, "It sounds to me like good theology and
good honest human experience brought together." The candidate's
own pastor, the Rev. Bruce Edwards of Plains (Ga.) Baptist
Church, noted, "I have no particular objections to it...but I
would have used other words to describe the same thing."

     Editor Gerard Sherry of San Francisco's Catholic Monitor
said, "I think he was trying to explain Christian ideas on
promiscuity. If anything, he showed himself much less arrogant
than Ford. Ford said [in a Ladies' Home Journal interview] his
daughter would never have an affair. That was pretty dumb.
Carter was being truthful with all due humility." The reaction
that most intrigued California Pollster Mervin Field was
expressed by his 16-year-old daughter Melanie as she watched
television news accounts with her father. When the
Carter-Playboy story was concluded, Melanie asked: "Dad, is
Jimmy Carter a weirdo?"

     "There was nothing to be gained," said Senate Acting
Democratic Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia, pondering why
Carter granted the interview in the first place. Commented
Robert Bailey, 47, a bakery operator from Freemont, Calif.: "I'm
a Baptist myself, and for a Bible-totin' Baptist to say those
things -- well, they were crude. I don't see why he had to
reveal all his deep, inner thoughts -- to make a national
confession. It certainly doesn't make you a great man to do it."

     Privately, a Bay Area radio commentator joked: "The fact
Carter thinks about it but doesn't do anything just goes to
show he isn't a man of action." But ridicule is as menacing to
a candidate as outright condemnation, and Carter appears to be
reaping his share of it without having persuaded the Playboy
readership that he is anything but square. As one observer put
it, "If you are not one of the boys -- and Carter is not -- then
do not try to be.' Rosalynn Carter's own reaction to what her
husband had said somehow emphasized this point. Her husband,
she proclaimed, had her "complete trust."

     Carter advisers were concerned over the political fallout,
but they should also worry about their own efficiency. Playboy
insists that it agreed to allow the candidate or his aides to
review the unedited transcripts of the taped interview -- to
correct factual errors, they maintain, but other interviewees
have been allowed to make substantial changes. The Carter camp
never asked for the transcripts, says Playboy Assistant
Managing Editor Barry Golson. He also insists that he made
several calls to Press Secretary Jody Powell to arrange for him
to review the transcripts, but that Powell never returned the
calls. Journalists familiar with Powell's operation question
this; Powell is not that difficult to reach. But there is no
question that he was derelict in pursuing the matter; in the
crush of his campaign duties, he apparently just forgot to check
back.

     When the leers and sneers subside, it may prove to be
quite a different element of the Playboy article that has the
most serious political consequences. In the interview's final
passage, Carter links Lyndon Johnson with Richard Nixon in
"lying, cheating and distorting the truth."

     TIME has learned that Nixon himself phoned Lady Bird
Johnson to express his dismay at the candidate's gratuitous slap
at her late husband, an action reminiscent of less serious barbs
Carter has hurled in the past at Humphrey, George Wallace and
Edward Kennedy. Carter quickly called Mrs. Johnson to emphasize
that he admired her husband and had spoken favorably of him
elsewhere in the interview, but did not apologize, according to
intimates of L.B.J.'s widow. Lady Bird described herself through
an aide as "hurt and perplexed." The timing could hardly have
been worse. Rosalynn Carter was scheduled to make campaign
appearances with Lady Bird in Texas while her husband's L.B.J.
remakrd was still on the air and in the headlines. Though Lady
Bird was cool, she met Rosalynn in San Antonio and conducted her
through the Johnson Library in Austin without so much as a
mention of Playboy. At week's end, during an airport press
conference in Houston, Carter tried to mollify L.B.J. admieres
by explaining away his remarks as "an unfortunate juxtaposition
of those two names [Johnson and Nixon] in the Playboy article
that "grossly misrepresents" his feelings about Johnson. Pressed
by reporters, he conceded that the "juxtaposition" was his, not
Playboy's. Said he: "It was a mistake and I have apologized for
it."