The death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter feels like the end of an era– and all the more so, since it will be followed very speedily by the launch of the Trump/Musk presidency.
There has been much discussion about the echoes between Carter’s failure to win re-election after his first term back in 1980 and the crash-and-burn that doomed Pres. Joe Biden’s more recent, far too-long-pursued attempt to win re-election. The reasons for the two failures were very different. Age, which was the major factor (of many) for Biden certainly wasn’t a factor for Carter. The explanations most U.S. commentators have given for Carter’s resounding failure back in the elections of November 1980 have nearly all centered on his failure to resolve the lengthy and very debilitating crisis over Iranian students’ holding of U.S. hostages and the (linked) issue of the massive disruptions that the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran inflicted on the U.S. economy.
But by contrast, very little attention has been paid to the significant effect that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s decision to run against Carter in the Democratic primary much earlier in 1980 had in weakening Carter’s ability to organize a successful re-election campaign. And crucially, the role that dedicated pro-Israel organizing played in encouraging Kennedy to mount that primary challenge to Carter.
Back in 2009, I secured and was able to report on a short series of interviews with the Kennedy staff member who had been the linchpin of that pro-Israel organizing effort. That was Tom Dine, a man who in 1979 joined Kennedy’s staff in the senate after some years working for the Senate Budget Committee and as a defense-affairs staffer for Sen. Edmund Muskie. “With Ted Kennedy, I was ostensibly doing defense policy, but really I was orchestrating his Jewish-vote efforts,” he told me during those interviews.
Continue reading “Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and AIPAC”