Taxi Stories
Ed and I would meet at the Belmore Cafeteria on lower Park Avenue at 28th street and swap stories. The neon sign in the window proclaimed the Belmore "New York's most fabulous restaurant." Owner Philip Siegel kept the cafeteria open twenty-four hours a day. It was a cavernous place that sat 500 customers. You entered through a turn style, took a ticket, served yourself, paid and found a table or a booth along the walls. Before Siegel installed track lighting and potted plants in the late Seventies, nothing much decorated the place. You can see the Belmore, pretty accurately recreated, in Martin Scorceses’s movie Taxidriver, which came out in 1976, the year I started driving. In fact, that movie gives you a good picture of New York in those dark years
Non cab drivers in the Belmore were either students or the elderly, people on fixed incomes. Most drivers in the Seventies were Italian and Irish, not many blacks, not many Hispanics, not many foreigners, only a few women. Many drivers carried a lead pipe next to their cab seats and told stories about having to use them. They didn’t pick up “niggers.” They resented the first wave of gypsy cabs that were becoming more and more popular in the city’s slums. The gypsies word-of-mouth advertisements said it all, “We ain’t yellow,” the color of New York’s licensed cabs. The students read, the elderly stared into space and the cab drivers kept up a constant stream of discontent and anger.
Ed and I sat amidst this human wreckage and talked. As he grew older Ed began to resemble the statues of his Inca ancestors. He was Indian and Spanish, and as he aged his face grew more square, darker, his eyes heavier, stone like. Ed always carried a book, and never a novel or a mystery or anything contemporary for that matter. He read originals, favoring first accounts of historic explorations: Bernal Diaz’s book on the Cortez conquest, Lady Blunt’s adventures in Arabia, tales of the Silk route, Thesinger crossing the Empty Quarter.
Ed was one of the best conversationalists I have ever known. Many of my readers may not have any idea what I mean by a “conversationalist.” Today we might say that Ed was a great bullshitter. He could talk about anything and always came up with an intelligent, witty alternative to the conventional way of looking at things. “Only hit a child in anger,” he advised. And, of course, that advice makes perfect sense when you think about it. “Wash your hands before you pee, not afterwards. Urine is sterile and what’s cleaner after a day on the streets, your hands or your pecker?”
Ed had mastered cab driving, just as he had mastered other trades. “Never wait in cab lines,” he advised. “Know when to talk and when to shut up.” “Get a radio and work it to avoid dead heads,” one way runs to the end of Brooklyn or Queens where you have to drive back to the city empty. “Keep moving.” He told me I could catch the lights on 7th Avenue uptown without a stop, if I could keep my speed at about 51 miles an hour. He knew where best to cross Central Park at different times of the day or how on Saturday morning you could make good money hauling working class women around the Bronx on their shopping trips.
Ed was contentedly working class and had no patience for white collar compromise. “They’re all playing games. Everybody’s pretending to be someone else, someone they think will be approved of by their buddies and bosses, but none of them are real.” Ed took a sip of the hot, black Belmore coffee, a weak tea color and heavy in caffeine. He put the cup down on the formica booth table and looked at the juke box on the wall, then turned back to me. “Working class people are so low on the totem pole, they can be whoever they want, at least when they’re off work.” Unlike Clint Jenks, Ed had no love of the working class as an instrument of social change. He hated war and took part in marches against the war in Vietnam, in part for the sheer theater of those massive events, but he had no real hope that demonstrations would do any lasting good. He said that he had read too much history to have much hope for the wishes of the common man.
After a final slurp of coffee, we headed back to the streets. Ed owned his own medallion and the value escalated tremendously during his tenure. I drove for a share of the take, after expenses, which included gas and oil, maintenance and insurance. It was enough to save up for a deposit and first month’s rent and move into my own apartment, another railroad flat on 105th just off Broadway, with a window at the far end opening onto another air shaft.
I learned the city. I enjoyed the glimpse I was getting of New York, closer to that of a cop than a private citizen. The Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world, dominated the New York City skyline and seemed to declare the unspoken mantra of my Wall Street clients, “We are masters of the Universe.” They were the “keep the change” crowd, giving you 40 cents on a $5.60 ride. To most of them you were simply an object, the driver. One businessman with his fashionable girlfriend, caught me stuffing a twenty-dollar bill into my sock to hide it in case of robbery. “Look,” he guffawed as we sped up Broadway from Wall Street toward the Village,“He stuffs his money in his sock just like a whore!” He was laughing and pointing at my legs. He had no idea what it was like to have a knife pressed against your throat on a dark street in Harlem as I had only two weeks earlier. The girl laughed politely.
At dusk, the hookers who gathered on lower Lexington just above Gramercy Park in mid afternoon, moved up to Times Square. I would swing by if was in the area and pick up a cab full. They never tipped, which surprised me, because we were both in a tipping business. I asked why and one of the women sneered, “Because you’re a man.” Another time a poor, skinny little girl, ran out from a doorway in a drenching downpour, hair matted to her head, thin dress soaked and clinging to her body and offered me a blow job for a ride to Penn Station. I dropped her off for free and hoped she got back home.
The best tippers were the bus boys, at the bottom of the economic pile. I looked for them at 2:00 am when the restaurants finally closed, and I loved to pass up the half-drunk rich kids looking for a short ride to a late night bar to pick up a busboy half way down the block. The bus boys knew I had to deadhead back to the city, and they appreciated the ride. They lived way out, beyond even the far-flung subway and elevated system. I always needed directions, and they gave good ones, never stuck me for a bill and tipped heavily.
A good run at around 2:30 to 2:45 in the morning, if I were down below the Village, was up 11th Avenue past the gay bars at the end of Christopher Street. Most gays partied in the village, but many lived on the upper west side, so I could pick up a fare that would pay my way up town, almost to my garage at 127th Street. And gays tipped well.
One night I was waved down by a six foot six man in jeans and a jeans jacket, spiked blond hair and a big, square, scowling Germanic face. He climbed in back and in a thick German accent, asked to go to 11th Avenue and 39th Street. This was a deserted warehouse district at night. I jumped to the conclusion that I had a crazed Nazi in the back seat and started looking for a police cruiser, when in a deep voice, garbled by emotion, my passenger asked, “Is it getting big yet?”
I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw his intense eyes boring into mine as he asked more insistently, “Is it getting big yet?” His shoulders seemed to be pumping, and I adjusted the rear view mirror to get a full look at him. He was kneeling on the back seat, pants down around his ankles, jerking off. “Is it getting big yet?” he asked more and more urgently. We reached 39th Street before I found a cop, so I pulled over to the side and told him the fare. He was completely out of it, focused only on the urgent demands of whatever masturbatory fantasy he was going on. He wouldn’t budge. I finally got out of the cab, opened the back door and pulled him out. I climbed back into the driver’s seat, locked all the doors, and pulled away without my fare. I could see him in the rear-view mirror, standing there, on the abandoned street, pants still around his ankles, looking betrayed. Sometimes everyone I picked up seems to need help.
Three months into driving, I knew the city well and booked high. The 125th Street Cab Company gave me a brand-new Checker, the last model ever made. It was a magnificent vehicle, built on the frame of a Chevy half ton pickup truck with a back seat that comfortably held five people, leaving an empty seat in front next to the driver and plenty of room in the luggage compartment for suitcases and gear. I was making a living wage, had my own apartment and a new girlfriend, introduced to me by Mimi and Ed. She was a beautiful professional singer of Medieval Madrigals and other church music, teamed up with two gay men in a musical group that couldn’t quite pay the bills. She had long, black hair, dark eyes that seemed romantically gypsy to me, with all the warmth and good sense of her working-class Italian family. I had managed to land on my feet, but I was far from satisfied.
My new Checker was air conditioned and cruising through the familiar streets of New York with or without a passenger in the late summer heat was not unpleasant, but I could have stayed in New Mexico as a member of the working class, living in a landscape I loved.
Ed was happily working class. I wanted work that I thought of as more satisfying, I wanted to have an impact, maybe even to test myself against the giants, for whom I had so little respect. I have no idea where my ambition came from. My parent never pushed. But there it was. After Labor Day, when employers were back from summer vacation, I started a new round of appointments.
Back In the Middle Class
It was shortly before Thanksgiving when Richard called, near panic in his voice asking me if I could drive him to Bennington, Vermont for a speech he was scheduled to give the next day. I had my son, Zeke living with me in my apartment on 105th and Broadway. Richard called in the middle of my afternoon shift. I couldn’t figure out a way to make the sixteen hour round trip. He pled with me, but I saw no way of getting my cab back by my 3:00 am deadline let alone how to take care of my son, so I refused and suggested he take the bus.
Confused or anxious, Dick got off the bus halfway to Vermont at the entrance to a boys reformatory. He later said he was not sure where he was but wandered onto the property where he was discovered sitting under a tree, unsure of what to do next. A local doctor looked at him, contacted his sister who lived in New York, and put him on a bus for home. I still feel bad about not driving him.
Somehow abandoning Richard propelled my next move. Walking up Madison Avenue on a day off, I saw my shoulder length hair reflected in a store window displaying expensive men’s clothing, another failed interview behind me (this one at Dell Publishers where an old WBAI buddy worked). The length of my hair had been noted, and as I left Dell I wondered for the hundredth time why the length of my hair was so important to everyone, but for the first time another thought instantly followed: “Why is the length of my hair so important to me?” I walked into a Madison Avenue barbershop and got a “business haircut” to the delight of the barber, who carefully saved my long strands.
The timing was fortuitous. A week or so later, Carey McWilliams, editor of the Nation Magazine, the man who had sent Dick and me Special Agent Jack Levine ten years earlier, arranged an interview with his wife, Marlene Sanders, who headed up the documentary unit CloseUp at ABC television news. Clean shaven, short haired, with a new sports jacket, shirt and tie, creased pants and polished shoes, I convinced Marlene to hire me as a production assistant, another low man on the totem pole position. I took a big cut in salary to leave cab driving and join the middle class.
Ed was disgusted. We were in the bathroom of his big apartment on the upper west side. All the windows in the apartment were open in a desperate attempt to relieve the overwhelming smell of petroleum-based resins. Ed had a new business in addition to cab driving. He said he needed help. He was importing large quantities of Mexican tile and making them into tables and wall hangings. He had a wood shop set up in one of the bedrooms and an assembly line in the living room. The neighbors didn’t complain about the high volume of activity in the elevators, or the hammering and sawing to make the tile frames, but they couldn’t deal with the stench of the resin that Ed was mixing in his bathtub and then pouring, bucket by bucket, over the tiles inside the frames creating a surface he named “Marcata.”.
Ed lived on the edge, utterly independent but also frequently illegal, leading to moves in the middle of the night. Shortly after I turned Ed down on his Marcarta venture, his pet parrot, Pajarito, availed herself of an open window and escaped first to the roof, and then out toward the Hudson River never to be seen again. I was there having dinner and followed Ed to the roof where he vainly cried, “Parjarito” into the urban landscape. His square face looked like a Mayan god. Ed and Mimi had smuggled Parajrito into the country at the bottom of a pail filled with dirty diapers. No border guard asked to look inside that bucket. The parrot had seemed an old friend. “was she confused or did she want to get away?” Ed wanted to know. I had no idea.
The failure of Marcata to sweep New York’s interior decorating business, the rising threats of neighbors and the loss of Parajito conspired to drive Ed and Mimi and their flock out of New York City and back to San Francisco. Family ties were now exhausted, and I remained in New York alone.
I went to work at Closeup in 1977 shortly after the first of the year. I was assigned to Richard Girdeau, one of Marlene’s younger producer’s. More established producers would have nothing to do with a new employee forced on them by the boss. Richard was a university man, well trained, from New Jersey with a stay-at-home wife and child living across the river. He was working on a Close Up show called Justice on Trial, about disparities in the criminal justice system. It was nothing we hadn’t known since the late fifties, but it was a good cause. Richard wanted to shoot the film in black and white, like a film noir, a good idea that ABC and Marlene rejected.
After working together for a few weeks, Richard went to Marlene and told her I was at least an Associate Producer. She raised my pay and promised to let me co-produce my next show. I was on my way.
Richard sent me into the field on several research trips, including one to Boston, Massachusetts. I was staying in the Ritz Carlton on the Boston Commons, and after a long day of interviewing, before dinner, I decided to take a walk in the park. It was dusk. The winter sun was dropping behind the buildings quickly as I approached the center of the park. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement in the trees first to the left and then to the right. I caught a glimpse of two young men. I turned around and headed back toward the hotel. The movements in the trees turned with me. I began to move more rapidly. The two young men, now clearly visible, kept pace and moved in toward my walkway. I pulled up the tails of my Polish raincoat and broke into a run.
I had gone from outlaw to a mark, from predator to prey. I’d made it back into the middle class.
ABC News
I was once again a journalist, using my craft to pursue the truth. Or was I. A decade earlier I had excoriated commercial media for its pro-business agenda and support of the Vietnam War. “Running dogs of the imperialists” we called them. Now here I was, running with them.
I liked television as the vehicle for my journalism. I had started in radio, but pictures increased the power of persuasion. It was a lesson never forgotten by those of us who watched or heard the 1960 Richard Nixon/John F. Kennedy debate. On radio Nixon’s attention to detail overcame the glib New Englander’s platitudes. On television, the handsome, self-possessed young man overwhelmed the puffy Nion, his face mottled by five o’clock shadow, looking uncomfortable as he watched Kennedy.
The power of pictures was reinforced during the civil rights movement. When people could actually see dogs and fire hoses attacking high school kids the balance of public opinion tipped. The chant at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was, “the whole world is watching.”
ABC’s documentary series CloseUp was run by Marlene Sanders, who had broken boundaries as the first women correspondent in Vietnam and the first Vice President of a television network. Richard Girdau told Marlene that I was really a producer. She gave me a badly needed pay raise and assigned me to co-produce a program with Tony Batten, an African American. Tony and I hit it off and worked well together, both of us outsiders on the close knit CloseUp staff.
Our first show was on the nuclear fuel cycle. We decided to begin at the Navajo reservation where uranium mines had caused increased incidents of caner among miners. Drifting uranium-tailing piles worried local ranchers. We interviewed a Navaho elder in a tiny meadow surrounded by aspen and pine along in a stream in the Lukachukai Mountains. He spoke of “his people” and their relationship to “the earth” the rates of cancer and official indifference. What seemed to us moving and profound in the mountains of Arizona seemed like a series of tired clichés in the cynical editing rooms at ABC news. Indians were losers, Marlene assured us, and nobody wanted to listen to losers. Our Indian elder never made it into the final show.
We visited deteriorating nuclear power plants and went to Hanford Washington where engineers assured us that they had solved the plutonium disposal problem with a process called “glassification.” Engineers and scientists were still working on ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste in 2017, almost 40 years later. They are equally confident of success.
Marlene assigned our next project, eventually entitled The All Volunteer Army: A Shocking State of Readiness. Although neither of us had ever been in the military, we were a good team. The army tried to cooperate. We met with a series of colonels and majors deciding where to go and what to see. But we quickly discovered that when it came to assessing what was really going on, officers were useless. They all faithfully mouthed the company line. Everything was just fine and the soldiers were ready for any contingency in the “can-do” army.
The enlisted men knew better and career non-commissioned officers knew the most. In 1978, the majority of sergeants we met were African American. Tony became the conduit through which they hoped to tell their story. The army was almost dysfunctional. Drug use among enlisted men was rampant, equipment was poorly maintained, morale was low, officers were arrogant and out of touch. We visited the Fulda gap. If a war with the Soviet Union broke out, this is where Soviet troops would pour across a low point in the mountains separating East and West German.
The communications major told us the Black Horse Battalion was ready to go. The sergeants told us that out every nine tanks only five or six worked, the rest being cannibalized to keep the others going. But don’t worry, they said, even fewer Soviet tanks work and their soldiers are even more demoralized.
Our European line of defense was a joke that was costing the American taxpayer a fortune. Worse, the Army officer Corp, with some notable exceptions, seemed racist. The largely white, West Point trained officers blamed the increasingly brown and black troops they commanded for the Army's problems. A white officer at Fort Jackson gestured, on camera, to the colored troops behind him and said, "They're losers. They were born losers and they’ll die losers, and you can't win a war with losers." In the rough-cut Tony and I edited, this was the moment when the audience gasped and realized what was wrong with the Army.
Marlene screened the show before Christmas and said she liked it. It might have aired in much that form if an intense drama had not unfolded behind the scenes at ABC News. Roone Arledge had made a huge success of ABC’s previously flagging sport’s division. He convinced ABC honchos that he could make money on news, still a radical idea in 1978. News had always been a loss leader, the free lunch that bar tenders put out to entice customers to drink beer. News was expected to run at a loss, worth the cost because of the prestige news coverage brought to a network. News fulfilled a civic responsibility. Watch the great movie Network to get a sense of the shock that the idea of making money on news had two years before in 1976.
Roone was particularly disappointed in the ratings of the CloseUp unit, and it was clear from the start that he did not have much faith in Marlene to fix them. One of her producers, Pam Hill, on the other hand had achieved some of the highest ratings on CloseUp. Roone made Pam the show’s “artistic director.” He called Pam into his officer constantly and completely ignored Marlene, who resigned shortly after the first of the year.
Arledge put Pam in charge of CloseUp. She had major problems with our rough cut. In the first place, unless there was an actual threat of an attack from the Soviet Union, who cared how powerful our army was? We told Pam that no one we spoke to thought the Soviets were about to invade. Tony was more adamant than I was, and Pam took him off the show and put me in charge. Solidarity and journalistic integrity might have persuaded me to join him ten years earlier, but I was acutely aware of my tenuous hold on a professional job.
I returned to Germany to find generals who would testify on camera to the threat of an imminent Soviet invasion. They were all extremely right wing. One of them had Nazi paraphernalia displayed on his study walls. We had to be careful to keep them out of the interview shot. These Nazi generals gave us statements about the possibility of an invasion through the Fulda Gap.
I wrote five versions of the script. Pam rejected all of them. Roger Petersen, our correspondent, wrote several additional versions. Finally, Pam wrote the final script herself.
Before a CloseUp documentary aired, after the show had gone through its final edit, color correcting and audio mix, we held a final screening with lawyers, Roone, Pam and other honchos. The key moment in Pam’s version was the same statement of the white lieutenant at Fort Jackson. These men are losers. But in Pam’s version his bitter comment became was the core message of the film. The army’s problem was the men it was recruiting, the black and brown soldiers they had no respect for. The officers were blameless.
I turned to Dick Richter, Pam’s assistant and a good friend, and whispered, “This is exactly the opposite of what we found as journalists in the field.” Pam overheard me and turned around in her chair to answer with a big smile on her face, “Isn’t it funny how things turn out like that sometimes?”
Public Broadcasting
My CloseUp partner Tony Batten had been a reporter on the innovative PBS series The 51st State, about life in New York City, produced in the early Seventies by New York station WNET. He won several awards for a 1972 piece about a gang murder in the South Bronx. Public television was making an effort to include more African Americans in its staffing and to produce programming about African Americans. Some great programming had been done, but it was difficult to get enough stations to carry it to attract underwriting.
The problem, many public broadcasters thought, was the narrowness of vision. Programs by Blacks about Blacks couldn’t attract a large enough audience. Tony was part of a second generation of "minority" programming, based on the idea of multiculturalism. KCET developed Interface, which focused on the interaction between various cultures in everyday life. Tony was the host.
ABC was Tony’s first (and last) foray into commercial television. When Pam took him off the army show, Tony approached PBS with an idea for a multicultural television news magazine. WETA, the public television station in Washington DC, picked up the idea and Tony asked me if I wanted to take an on-air job in Washington as a co-host. There would be three of us: an African-American, a white and an Asian woman. The new show would be called F.Y.I.
ABC’s journalistic integrity seemed in doubt. Profits were going to be increasingly important and journalism would suffer. I thought Public television would be a more comfortable base and I was intrigued by the idea of being on air.
In my last interview to secure the job with WETA’s station manager, we chatted about this and that, and then out of the blue he asked me,“Are you still political?” It was almost fifteen years since my trip to North Vietnam, but some search of my name conducted by WETA must have turned up my radical background. I denied having any political interests.
I loved New York and I was sure I’d go back, but as it turned out that period of my life over. As in so many situations, I never went back to live. I console myself with the memories of some of the best times I ever had.
We were the mod squad of television, a cliché of the time. I loved the fieldwork but the show was under-funded and there was not enough money for much real journalism. The studio pontificating made us all uncomfortable and much to my surprise I hated being recognized in restaurants. The occasional piece of journalism made it worthwhile. We did what I believe is the first television story on the health affects of Agent Orange on U.S. servicemen, at a time when the Pentagon was in full denial. The letters of gratitude from veterans suffering from its effects made me feel there was still some point in being a journalist.
FYI wasn’t funded for a second season, and I considered moving back to New York when I got a call from Barbara Cohen. At the time she was news director of National Public Radio (NPR). They were looking for a producer of their flagship program All Things Considered, approaching its tenth anniversary. One of Barbara’s headhunters, Larry Josephson, gave her my name. I had never listened to the program, and I took a crash course over the next week, keeping copious notes. It was an intelligent program with a sense of humor, but ATC’s editorial voice seemed narrow and timid.
A famous New Yorker cartoon shows a New Yorkers’ view of America. The city takes up most of the frame and the western deserts start just beyond the New Jersey border. ATC could have printed its own New Yorker’s view of the world, where the deserts began just beyond some Washington/New York axis. The rest of the country might as well not have existed.
The political spectrum was equally narrow. ATC’s upper middle class, editorial voice spoke for centrist liberals working within the power structure where most real problems are theoretical and political. ATC pretty much excluded the majority of working Americans in the rest of the country and the activists on the left and right who were taking practical steps in a real world to deal with problems. I told Barbara I’d like to open the show up and broaden its editorial dialogue. I wanted reporters from all over the country and I wanted the views of conservatives and progressive liberals.
ATC was produced by a tight knit group of people, self protective and suspicious of outsiders. At my first editorial meeting, after introducing myself, I asked, “What’s going to be on the show today.” The show’s host at the time, Susan Stamberg, looked scandalized and intoned, “All Things Considered is not a show, Christopher, it’s a program.” I was cocky in those days and outraged at what I thought was pure snobbery. I snapped back, “Well, that’s the first thing that’s going to change.”
There were problems carrying out my vision for the show. To include more reports from the rest of the country we had to find reporters across the country that met our broadcasting standards. We also had to make room for more stories in our show clock and that meant cancelling or shortening the stories of our regular correspondents. Bitter, angry battles were fought with staff reporters.
It would have been much worse if it hadn’t been for the launching of Morning Edition on November 5th, 1979. When the commercial, CBS producers that Barbara hired to produce Morning Edition failed to come up with a decent public broadcasting show, she fired them and raided All Things Considered for her Morning Edition staff. At the time it seemed like a disaster, but in fact it forced me to hire most of my own people. I reached out to producers from Pacifica and other, similar independent stations around the country. I got the people I wanted and the loyalty I needed.
To help solve the problem of regional reporters, we took ATC on the road and held news workshops in Austin, Anchorage and San Francisco. We would arrive a week early, work with local reporters to upgrade their skills and produce local stories, then broadcast from these remote locations. It was great publicity and helped train a new generation of excellent journalists.
It was on a remote in Austin, Texas, that I began to appreciate Frank Makowitiz’s extraordinary leadership abilities. His idea of a morning news show was brilliant, and it brought NPR national attention. But the cost of creating Morning Edition almost bankrupt NPR. As one wag put it, “Frank Mankowitz put NPR on the map and almost took it off again.”
Cocaine use was rampant in the early eighties and NPR was no exception. At the final dinner in Austin, one of my producers returned from the men’s room with white powder on his mustache. Someone at the table commented, “Is that powdered sugar on your mustache?” Mankowitz didn't say a thing, but when we returned to Washington a rumor spread through NPR that the feds were about to conduct a raid. NPR cleaned up immediately. Frank never said a word.
News in the Late Seventies
It’s great fun to produce a daily news show. The ATC slate (in our case a white board) was clear in the morning and erased when we went home at night. Except for the occasional personnel problem and a few pieces that required development over time, my plate was clean at the end of the day. It was not like the agonizing six months we routinely spent on a documentary at ABC.
It was a fascinating time to run a daily news show. Jimmy Carter, who began his presidency on a high note, was struggling. He persuaded the Senate to ratify a controversial Panama Canal treaty that gave control of the canal back to the Panamanians. He devised an ambitious energy plan to reduce American dependency on foreign oil. He negotiated a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians. He put human rights at the top of his foreign agenda even if his efforts on the issue were not always commendable.
When I took over ATC the country was still buzzing about Carter’s July 15th speech, which the media called his malaise speech, although Carter himself never used the word. He had been scheduled to speak on July 4th, but abruptly cancelled his talk when the draft prepared by his staff seemed unresponsive to the dire situation in which the country found itself. Gas lines stretched for blocks around those stations that still had fuel to sell.
Carter retreated to Camp David and invited a wide range of citizens to come and talk with him. Ten days later he delivered a speech like no other in American history. I watched it again in 2017. It’s a Sunday school sermon, a deeply felt, personally researched look into the American soul. Carter spoke of “a crisis in the American spirit,” of a people who had lost “confidence in the future” and had a “growing disrespect for our basic institutions, the government, the news media, the business community.” We had become “self-indulgent and consumptive,” defined by “what we own instead of who we are.”
He listed a litany of failures: Vietnam, the 1968 assassinations of political leaders, our dependence on foreign oil. Carter predicted it would get worse over the next five years. He called for a decrease in foreign oil consumption, funds for alternative sources like coal and natural gas and he asked us to get 20% of our energy from solar power by the year 2000. He called for energy conservation, warned of possible rationing, called for $20 billion for public transportation and more money to help the poor pay their rising energy bills.
Initial reaction to the speech was positive, but that quickly changed in the days ahead as the media pounded home the narrative that “the malaise speech” blamed the American people for their own troubles.
Farsighted as Carter was on energy, he was hardly a New Deal progressive. As Gary Hart had made clear in 1972, the Democratic Party leadership had abandoned the New Deal. Carter implemented a pro-business agenda based on the conclusions of the Trilateral Commission, which were not that much different from the notorious Powell memo. He increased the defense budget. He enacted the first big tax cuts for the rich and also the first big deregulations with the airlines and trucking industries, throwing labor under the bus in the process.
I quote at length from 2014 Jacobin piece by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones explaining the social consequences of deregulation.
“By drastically reducing ticket costs, the major airlines would take on an unsustainable amount of debt that, combined with the loss of business to the new entrants, would lead to layoffs or bankruptcy. Pension funds were then raided and labor contracts voided to pay for the price wars. With each airline company collapse, thousands of employees were laid off, decimating union membership.
“To compete, the legacy airlines also drove down the salaries of their pilots, and cut benefits and vacation time. Besides a reduction in compensation, a two-tiered pay system has been set up with decent pay for incumbent pilots and markedly low wages for new entrants. Starting salaries for pilots are now as low as $15,000 a year, even as CEO pay rises inexorably. Remarking on a career in which he had seen his pay cut in half and his pension eliminated, captain Sully Sullenberger told the BBC in 2009 that he did not know ‘a single professional pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps.’”
Deregulation swept through America like a disease under the next administration of Ronald Reagan, but Democrats need to acknowledge that it began under Carter. In 2016 the abandoned working classes had their revenge with the election of Donald Trump who only promised to care about them.