Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1976

Viking, $14.95

Marathon is the proper title for this book about a handful of men running a race that takes a long and exhausting time to run and also a long time to tell. Witcover relates in solid, workmanlike fashion the story of the campaign that led to Jimmy Carter’s election as President last November.

The ‘76 campaign began even before the campaign of ‘72 was over and, as Witcover acknowledges, was extensively a media event. So a very great deal of the story he has to tell consists of stepby-step accounts of how principal contenders for the White House (Ford and Reagan on the Republican side, eight— or was it nine or ten?—on the Democratic side), their aides, and their pollsters (oh, yes, their pollsters!) plotted and staged the happenings that made their way relentlessly onto the front pages and TV screens. From the standpoint of the candidates, Witcover amply demonstrates, the campaign with its thirty state primaries was an exercise in “masochism on a national scale.” For American voters, it was a less than mesmerizing undertaking: only 54.4 percent of Americans aged eighteen and older bothered to vote for President. For every one who voted for Jimmy Carter, three did not. If Carter had not been a southerner, he almost certainly would have lost to Gerald Ford.

Memoranda written by Hamilton Jordan telling his boss, the governor of Georgia, why and how he should run for President make fascinating reading. The winner of Marathon began the race one night in September 1972, before Richard Nixon’s re-election, when Jordan and three other aides trooped into the governor’s office and Jordan said, “Governor, we’ve come to tell you what you’re going to do with your future. We don’t, know how to say it other than to say, we think you can be President.” Jimmy Carter simply smiled. He’s still smiling.

—Robert Manning