Given nothing new to look at, the press, predictably, is following its inclination to recultivate the seediest questions about the past. Chappaquiddick is alive and well, as it were, but in a new guise. It is coming back to haunt Kennedy in a post-Nixonian world, in which lies and coverups and deemed more heinous for public officials than the improvident acts that gave rise to them. "It's not what he did in the night," said a prominent pollster. "It's what he did in the morning." Other polls show that his image as a big spender is paring away his support. All of which is exacerbated by his thick-tongued blunders of late, boo-boos that are moving more-educated voters into the undecided column, since they are the voters whose expectations Kennedy has raised highest by sculpting an image of himself as the man on the white horse. Indeed, a tiny chip in a statue presumed to be the handiwork of a Michelangelo disturbs the eye much more than a gaping chink in a curbstone.
In this environment, Kennedy committed this blunder on Iran, and compounded it the next day by persisting in making subtle distinctions that are largely lost on a public more unified around a simple case of right and wrong than it has been, as one pundit sadly put it, "since John F. Kennedy was assassinated." As if this weren't enough, Teddy pressed the issue into Wednesday by calling for "a public debate" on the fate of the shah, then quickly reversed his position after meeting with Cyrus Vance. In the meantime, he suffered demystification through the cynical criticism of lesser lights like Robert Strauss and State Department spokesman Hodding Carter III, who told a Princeton, New Jersey, audience: "I'm not one to tell a master politician how to suck eggs, but I think that (Kennedy's statement on the shah) was a remarkably stupid thing to do."
For evidence of how Kennedy might better have handled matters, there is perhaps more to be revealed from recalling the remarkably stupid than the politically masterful; therefore, let us examine Jerry Ford's major faux pas on Poland.
During the '76 campaign, opinion polls were being conducted daily. They revealed that as long as Ford persisted in reordering his inanities about his Easter European statement – which he did for three days, to the delight of the Carter campaign – his public favorability continued to decline. The moment he gave his mea culpa, however, the negative momentum ceased. While public perceptions of Kennedy and Ford are not analogous, the public's reaction to blatant errors tends to be consistent, causing one adviser experienced in such matters to conclude, "the best thing to do when you say something stupid is to go out and apologize." Carter quickly apologized after his ethnic-purity gaffe, swiftly lancing the boil of festering press reaction to the comment. Kennedy apparently could not bring himself to do the same.
The damage to Kennedy will inevitably take its toll among political operatives within the Democratic party, people who were sold on the idea that Teddy was a master of political machinations.
