The Straightest Arrow

For five weeks before the Democratic Convention, the race for the vice-presidential nomination had been run and rerun within the confines of Jimmy Carter's methodical mind.

Carter kept his own counsel about the result to the last. Just before 8:30 a.m. on the day after his nomination, Carter quietly slipped word of his choice to the Secret Service, so that it could arrange protection. Then Carter told his wife Rosalynn, who had specifically asked not to be informed any sooner because she feared that she might not be able to keep the secret. At 8:30, Carter put through a call to the fancy Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "Would you like to run with me?" Carter asked. Minnesota's Senator Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale, 48, needed no time at all to think about his answer. It was a quick, much relieved yes. Except for the formalities, the Democrats had their 1976 ticket.

The vice-presidential choice is often a frantic afterthought, a decision argued out in the exhausted nominee's hotel suite in the small hours after the presidential balloting has ended. But Jimmy Carter, assured of his convention victory weeks beforehand, painstakingly canvassed some 40 national leaders for their suggestions.* He prepared preliminary lists, then dispatched his Atlanta confidant, Lawyer Charles Kirbo, to interview the possible choices (TIME, July 12). Kirbo took along questionnaires: "What is the condition of your health? Have you ever had psychiatric or other treatment? If divorced, in what court?" And so on. Kirbo asked about financial records, about any potential scandals in the background. (One of Glenn's aides said it was like "filing a loan application with Household Finance.") Then Carter settled on seven finalists. All were from Congress. Having run in the primaries on an anti-Washington theme, Carter needed a Mr. Inside to go along with his Mr. Outside image. Among other things, there will be both a new Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader next January, and Carter understands the need for a good working relationship with the Hill.

Some suspected that Carter's search was merely a publicity stunt--like David O. Selznick's nationwide search for the perfect Scarlett O'Hara--to enliven a convention that was otherwise a foregone conclusion. The evidence suggests, however, that Carter was honestly looking for the candidate who best fulfilled his three criteria: 1) qualification to serve as President; 2) compatibility of views; and 3) regional or ideological balance.

New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino, apparently never a serious contender, eventually took himself out of consideration, citing age (67) and eye trouble (possible glaucoma). Senators Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois and Henry Jackson of Washington seemed to trail from the outset. After the June 8 primaries, Idaho Senator Frank Church appeared the likely favorite. Entering the primaries late, Church proved an effective campaigner, winning in Nebraska, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. He had expertise where Carter was weakest, in foreign affairs. But Church faded fast. It is said that some fellow Senators advised against him and probably more important, Kirbo was not overly impressed with him.

Senator John Glenn's fortunes apparently were the next to rise, especially after a survey by Carter Pollster Pat Caddell showed him and Maine's Muskie to be the most popular choices on one list of 14 possible candidates. Glenn flew to Plains, Ga., where he got along famously with Carter's family (he was eight-year-old Amy's favorite). But his relative inexperience (18 months in the Senate) and seeming malleability weighed against him.

Muskie had the obvious advantages of his distinguished Government experience (17 years in the Senate, two terms as Maine Governor) and his Catholicism. Carter sensed trouble with Catholics; Muskie might help there.

When Fritz Mondale made the pilgrimage to Plains--to what the Chicago Daily News' Peter Lisagor referred to as "the Court of St. James"--Carter found himself immensely and unexpectedly impressed. Mondale, known as one of the most reflective and studious men in the Senate, had thoroughly backgrounded himself on Carter. He made a point of reading Carter's autobiography Why Not the Best?, which he kiddingly referred to last week as "the best book ever written." Although Mondale is one of the most liberal men in the Senate, Carter found him undogmatic, practical and ideologically as well as personally compatible. Carter was impressed that Mondale served on the Senate Finance and Budget committees; that proved a distinct plus in the eyes of the Georgian, a trained engineer who relies heavily on concepts of planning and management. Unlike Muskie, Mondale is a new face, a new generation. What is more, as a friend points out: "He is an ideal choice in the post-Watergate period. He is the world's straightest arrow."

As the selection process neared an end, Carter's campaign manager Hamilton Jordan smilingly told TIME: "Jimmy ordered a pair of dice sent up to his room last night." That was a joke, of course, but the fact is that though Carter proceeded methodically, in the end, as he said, "it was a subjective analysis" --a matter of chemistry. He liked Mondale's intelligence, self-sufficiency and dry humor. The earnestly handsome Mondale, like Carter, is a Protestant (Presbyterian), but as the Georgian said: "I can't balance a ticket all that many ways."

Carter admitted he had been troubled that Mondale had aborted his early presidential bid in 1974 on the grounds that he lacked the stomach for a long, grueling race. He was the first man out on the track and the first one off it. In just six months in 1974, Mondale gave more than 100 speeches, traveled nearly 200,000 miles, visited 31 states and made image-building trips to Moscow, Paris and Israel--only to discover that no one seemed to care. In the presidential preference polls, he was getting the support of only 2% of the voters, a figure that put him, he wryly notes, "three percent behind 'don't know.' "

Worse yet, Mondale disliked the whole frantic hoopla of running for the presidency and the business of asking people to give him money. Confessed Carter: "I had a slight feeling of resentment that I had worked hard, and he had not." (There was some irony in Carter's choosing the dropout over men like Jackson and Church, who had fought hard in the primaries.) But the Georgian was persuaded by Mondale's explanation that he had simply assessed his campaign realistically and concluded it was going nowhere.

The also-rans took the decision with good grace. Within minutes of his phone call to Mondale, Carter called each of the others. Said Muskie: "Aside from the frustration he created, I thought he handled it with dignity and without demeaning any of us." Church joked that he had had an omen: "Lightning struck my house two days ago in Bethesda, and you know they say that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place." John Glenn confessed regret, but smiled: "We finally found out who's going to mow my lawn this weekend. Me."

In the Democrats' harmonious mood, few objected to Mondale. Some Southerners were unhappy with the choice of a Northern liberal, but Carter said he was reassured when the Alabama and Georgia delegations expressed their enthusiasm for Mondale.

Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley had been pushing Stevenson, but accepted Carter's choice warmly. "I'm very happy with the ticket," said Daley. "In Illinois, it'll help." Basil Paterson, chairman of the Caucus of Black Democrats, described the caucus as "overwhelmingly enthusiastic."

When Mondale was re-elected to his second full term in the Senate in 1972, Hubert Humphrey said: "We are seeing the beginning of a truly great national career that can take Fritz Mondale to the office that I long sought." After Mondale dropped out of the race in November 1974, he returned to Capitol Hill. But he had not really abandoned his interest in gaining higher office. He was impressed by Carter --whom he hardly knew.

Urged by some liberal Senate staffers to get back into the race after the Pennsylvania primary seemed to leave Carter with a clear field, Mondale said, "No, I've signed up with Berlitz for a course in Southern."

During more than three hours of talks in Plains, Carter and Mondale found they agreed on the basic issues, although the Georgian has generally walked the middle of the road, while the Minnesotan is a staunch liberal (his voting record last year received a 94% rating from the Americans for Democratic Action--the same as Humphrey's). Mondale has a reputation of being one of the leading supporters of busing, but he and Carter even had a meeting of minds on that touchy issue. Choosing his words carefully--and seeming to hedge his previous positions a bit--Mondale says: "I have never been an advocate of busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance. But I have supported the courts in enforcing the law, which occasionally required busing." That is just about what Carter has been saying all along.

Eager to please, Mondale not only supplied Carter with copies of his income tax returns for the past five years but also a report from his doctor describing his only ailment--a minor case of hypertension. (Carter referred the report to Kirbo's personal physician, who agreed that it did not indicate a serious problem.)

As they talked, Carter was attracted by Mondale's deep concern for social issues, a set of beliefs that reflect the hardy strain of populism and reformism that grew up in America's Northern plains. Frederick Mundal, his great-grandfather, emigrated from Norway's Sogne Fjord in 1856 to become a homesteading farmer in Minnesota. The candidate's father, Theodore Sigvaard Mondale, was a farmer and a land speculator who became a Methodist minister before being wiped out in the '20s by a series of misfortunes--including the long and financially draining illness of his first wife. Before she died in 1923, she mentioned that a good new wife for her husband would be Claribel Cowan--a strong woman with blue eyes and broad shoulders who had studied music at Northwestern University.

After a courtship conducted mainly by mail, the two were married in 1925 and in time had three sons. Clarence Mondale, 50, Fritz's older brother, is now a professor of American history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Morton Mondale, 41, is an education official in Aberdeen, S.D. While Fritz was growing up in a succession of hard-hit towns, the family had enough money--but only barely. "We lived in houses most people wouldn't consider habitable," recalls Morton, "but I never considered myself poor."

All during those years, farmers and storekeepers in the small towns of Minnesota were going bankrupt. The Rev. Theodore Mondale fumed at what he felt were the injustices of the system, and his outrage had a lasting effect on his sons. Mondale--who is well known as a defender of the urban poor--also champions the farmer whenever he can. The Senator was further influenced by his parents' dedication to the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, frugality and compassion.

The senior Mondale had other lasting influences on his son. "He would tell us, 'You only get spanked for lying or dishonesty,' " the Senator recalls. His father discouraged his sons from using tobacco by forcing them to smoke two cigars--enough to make them wretchedly sick. Alcohol was also banned in the Mondale household. Fritz Mondale still only smokes an occasional cigar, and two Scotches amount to a bender.

In high school, Mondale was known as "Crazy Legs" for his exploits on the football field and celebrated for his rich rendition of Ol' Man River at the Elmore theater. He was an intense young man, if an indifferent student, who had formed something called the Republicrat Party while still in junior high.

To earn money to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, Mondale worked as a pea-aphid inspector for the Green Giant company in the town of Blue Earth. It was at Macalester that Mondale first got involved with Hubert Humphrey and set his career on the course that was to carry him to the vice-presidential nomination.

Those were the days when Humphrey, Orville Freeman (later Governor and John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Agriculture), Karl Rolvaag (later Governor) and others were struggling to banish far-left-wingers and Communists from the newly merged Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Mondale helped out as one of the student volunteers known as "the diaper brigade." The liberal D.F.L. has been a powerful force in Minnesota politics since the late '40s.

In 1948, aged 20 and still at Macalester, Mondale helped Humphrey in his first Senate race, running Hubert's campaign in the normally Republican 2nd District. Humphrey won there by 8,500 votes.

After Fritz's father died, there was no money to keep him in college. His plight was recalled by Mondale's father-in-law, Maxwell Adams, then chaplain at Macalester. "Fritz was called in by the financial officer of the college," says Adams, "and told, 'You owe $40 for the second semester.' Well, he didn't have $40. He went to professors he knew and they didn't have $40 either." So Mondale dropped out and went to Washington as head of the student arm of the Americans for Democratic Action --whose director was none other than Humphrey.

Mondale spent a year there, then transferred to the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1951. After two years in the Army, he returned to get a law degree at the university. Mondale spent a year with Orville Freeman's prestigious Minneapolis law firm, then opened his own office with Harry MacLaughlin, a law school friend now a member of the state's supreme court. In 1958 Mondale helped manage Freeman's successful campaign for a third term as Governor, and in May 1960, when the state's attorney general abruptly retired, Freeman appointed his old aide to the job.

That November, Mondale won election to a full term as attorney general. He attracted some attention outside Minnesota in 1962 when he helped persuade 22 other state attorneys general to join in a legal crusade. They endorsed a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the claim by an indigent Florida convict named Clarence Earl Gideon. Gideon insisted that state courts should provide free counsel to those who could not afford their own lawyers. Gideon won his landmark case.

When Lyndon Johnson picked Humphrey for his running mate in 1964, Mondale's career got another big boost. At Humphrey's urging, Governor Rolvaag appointed Mondale to the vacant Senate seat. Mondale easily won election in his own right in 1966 (capturing 54% of the vote) and re-election in 1972 (with 57%). His maiden speech was about the problems of world hunger.

In the Senate Mondale gets things done not by gladhanding or arm twisting ("I am uncomfortable asking people for things") but by diligently doing his homework. He was a main strategist for the partially successful drive in 1975 to limit filibustering in the Senate. A firm advocate of open government, Mondale was a key member of the committee, chaired by Church, that last April proposed reforms to curb the excesses of the CIA and the FBI.

Mondale is primarily known for his devotion to easing the plight of the neglected and the disadvantaged. "I've spent a lot of time suffering over human rights, and I've had some notions based on my personal life," he says. "There's just millions of kids in this country that are utterly destroyed before they have a chance. I think it's the most costly, unfair, outrageous thing that happens in America." To get a better feeling for the problems of the deprived, Mondale has marched with Cesar Chavez' United Farm Workers, visited Indians in the West and Eskimos in Alaska, and--with his wife --gone on a welfare diet for a week.

Trying to convert his concerns into legislation, Mondale has established an impressive record in the Senate. Now chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Youth, Mondale sponsored a comprehensive child development program in 1971, which would have provided $2.1 billion for health care, nutritional aid and educational assistance for preschool children. The bill containing his plan was vetoed by Richard Nixon.

Remembering his own problems, Mondale has worked to help deserving students afford a college education. In particular, he has tried to ease the plight of middle-income families by making more of them eligible for federally backed student loans for college. Now chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Social Security Financing, Mondale sponsored the plan that provides automatic cost-of-living increases for recipients of the benefits.

Carter would certainly go along with Mondale's general approach to these programs, and there is general agreement between the two on a number of other basic issues that are bound to arise during the campaign. Like Carter, Mondale is in favor of tax reform to help the poor and the middle class. (Mondale sponsored the $35-per-taxpayer and dependent income tax cut that benefited millions of Americans last April 15.) Both men would oppose building the B-l strategic bomber (total cost when fully deployed: $22 billion) until more test results are in, but both would keep up research and development funding for the program. Both men have paid far more attention to domestic concerns than foreign policy. They basically feel that detente should be continued, although they advocate a tougher stand by the U.S. Each believes the nation should strive to create stronger ties with the Third World.

In other areas, Carter and Mondale will have to iron out some differences. The Senator, for example, favors breaking up vertically integrated oil companies (those that not only pump oil but ship it, refine it and retail it as well); the Governor does not. There is a mild difference on the right-to-work law: Mondale opposes it, while Carter does not, although he says that if Congress passed a bill changing the law he would sign it. Abortion is a more difficult subject for the two men. Carter supports the present system of legalized abortions, while saying that he would do everything within his power to sponsor programs that would eliminate unwanted pregnancies. Mondale admits that he has not made up his mind on abortion. Says he: "I realize that doesn't satisfy anybody. I'm not satisfied with my own position--but it does trouble me."

Mondale, once the reluctant campaigner, let it be known that he intends to give the campaign everything he has. He acknowledges, "I'm not the world's best speaker," and the fact is that his high-pitched voice can be irritating. Yet twelve hours after Carter put him on the ticket, he did a better than creditable job in his acceptance speech, with an impassioned Humphreyesque plea for a return to the old-fashioned virtue of compassion. It was a sermon that he began to learn nearly half a century ago from a populist Methodist minister and a proud woman in the small, stricken towns of Minnesota.

* Last week, Carter said he would propose that future conventions recess to allow the presidential nominee about 30 days to decide on a running mate and then reconvene to ratify the choice or allow the Democratic National Committee to do so.

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