For the Record

Just one week before Kansas City, the Washington Post contacted nearly 500 of the GOP delegates by phone and came up with the following fascinating insights on their vice presidential preferences then. Richard Schweiker was the first choice of only 2.6 per cent of the delegates at large; of only 5.6 per cent of the Reagan delegates. In a match against other prominent Republicans he finished ninth out of nine (just behind James Buckley). First choice was John Connally, but even he got only 15.2 per cent of the vote…. When asked who was their least favorite choice for Vice President, it was—and by several lengths—Nelson Rockefeller, wanted least by 21 per cent of those voting…. Feverish activity in Ford camp in week before the Convention included private meetings between White House Counsel Philip Buchen and Leon Jaworski, the final Watergate Special Prosecutor. The White House wanted to be absolutely sure that no as yet unpublicized Watergate dirt could wash off on John Connally…. Daily World, the Communist paper, had its own analysis of choice of Schweiker and of Schweiker’s assertion that he would support whatever labor plank was put into the platform in Kansas City, “So long as labor does not have its own independent political movement, capitalist politicians will continue to use it as a political football.”

Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, was piling up a mixed bag of endorsements and Bronx cheers. Ralph Nader found his positions on consumer interests “more admirable than those of any other presidential nominee in decades.”… Madalyn Murray O’Hair (of the no prayer in public schools decision) found his position on abortion—he would do nothing legally to stop it—just right…. Lester Maddox, who has never liked Carter, was offering a new sandwich in his restaurant, the Jimmy Carter, “with a little peanut butter and a lot of baloney.”… Pollster Lou Harris was himself less bullish on Carter than his own polls showed. Harris told columnist John Lofton: “Jimmy Carter hasn’t proven himself; he’s very vulnerable. Carter we find not an inspirational figure.”… And Carter had made one major booboo. In a New York Times interview that was widely circulated, he commented that “the only person in the country who has a lower rating in the polls than Connally is Gov. George Wallace”—hardly a way to keep himself ingratiated with the man whose endorsement had done much to break the anti-Carter logjam during the primaries. And a man who still walks tall in the South. Carter subsequently apologized to Wallace, who was quoted in People as saying he had left New York City after the Democratic Convention with mixed feelings, “sort of like a father seeing his daughter come home at 4 o’clock in the morning with a Gideon Bible tucked under her arm.”… And Walter Glanze, managing editor of the Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary, with an inflexible Sept. 15 deadline, has bitten the bullet. The Dictionary will show Jimmy Carter as the 39th President of the United States. Gerald Ford will be listed as U.S. President, 1974-1977.

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Just one week before Kansas City, the Washington Post contacted nearly 500 of the GOP delegates by phone and came up with the following fascinating insights on their vice presidential preferences then. Richard Schweiker was the first choice of only 2.6 per cent of the delegates at large; of only 5.6 per cent of the Reagan delegates. In a match against other prominent Republicans he finished ninth out of nine (just behind James Buckley). First choice was John Connally, but even he got only 15.2 per cent of the vote…. When asked who was their least favorite choice for Vice President, it was—and by several lengths—Nelson Rockefeller, wanted least by 21 per cent of those voting…. Feverish activity in Ford camp in week before the Convention included private meetings between White House Counsel Philip Buchen and Leon Jaworski, the final Watergate Special Prosecutor. The White House wanted to be absolutely sure that no as yet unpublicized Watergate dirt could wash off on John Connally…. Daily World, the Communist paper, had its own analysis of choice of Schweiker and of Schweiker’s assertion that he would support whatever labor plank was put into the platform in Kansas City, “So long as labor does not have its own independent political movement, capitalist politicians will continue to use it as a political football.”

Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, was piling up a mixed bag of endorsements and Bronx cheers. Ralph Nader found his positions on consumer interests “more admirable than those of any other presidential nominee in decades.”… Madalyn Murray O’Hair (of the no prayer in public schools decision) found his position on abortion—he would do nothing legally to stop it—just right…. Lester Maddox, who has never liked Carter, was offering a new sandwich in his restaurant, the Jimmy Carter, “with a little peanut butter and a lot of baloney.”… Pollster Lou Harris was himself less bullish on Carter than his own polls showed. Harris told columnist John Lofton: “Jimmy Carter hasn’t proven himself; he’s very vulnerable. Carter we find not an inspirational figure.”… And Carter had made one major booboo. In a New York Times interview that was widely circulated, he commented that “the only person in the country who has a lower rating in the polls than Connally is Gov. George Wallace”—hardly a way to keep himself ingratiated with the man whose endorsement had done much to break the anti-Carter logjam during the primaries. And a man who still walks tall in the South. Carter subsequently apologized to Wallace, who was quoted in People as saying he had left New York City after the Democratic Convention with mixed feelings, “sort of like a father seeing his daughter come home at 4 o’clock in the morning with a Gideon Bible tucked under her arm.”… And Walter Glanze, managing editor of the Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary, with an inflexible Sept. 15 deadline, has bitten the bullet. The Dictionary will show Jimmy Carter as the 39th President of the United States. Gerald Ford will be listed as U.S. President, 1974-1977.