A Happy Garden Party

Two scantily clad young women strolled the sidewalks a few blocks from New York's Madison Square Garden, eying the men passing by and uttering an inviting "Hi!" They were posing as prostitutes, trying to get arrested in order to stir a protest against the city's new antiloitering law. But two streetwise cops caught the ploy. "They didn't have the moves," scoffed one.

Only a dozen homosexuals showed up for a scheduled mass love-in at a park in downtown Manhattan. There was not a policeman in sight to give a care. The once notorious Paul Krassner, a founder of the Youth International Party, sadly watched a crowd of 250 of his Yippies getting stoned in Central Park as a demonstration for the legalization of marijuana. Cops looked on with detached amusement. "People don't care if you smoke," groused Krassner. "It's become irrelevant."

Amid the peaceful aura emanating from the 1976 Democratic National Convention in a sometimes bloody boxing and hockey arena transformed into a political Garden of Eden, there was no way to incite a fight over anything. The fiery war issues of 1968 and 1972 seemed ancient history; the countercultural revolution had turned passe. The Democratic Party was both luxuriating in and seeming a bit bored and stifled by its newfound h-a-a-a-r-m-o-n-y. Complained California Political Consultant Don Bradley, "All this sweetness and light turns my stomach."

With debate deliberately limited by the convention rules, the only minority report adopted by the convention was an innocuous platform amendment promising to loosen Hatch Act restrictions against political activities by Government employees; a similar proposal was passed by the Democratic Congress but vetoed by President Ford. The lack of controversy was less a result of rigid control by the Carter forces than of patient conciliatory efforts by Democratic Chairman Robert Strauss over the past three years and of Carter's own persuasiveness last week. In earnest appearances before restive groups of women, blacks and Latinos, Carter promised each that they would be visibly represented at high levels in his campaign and in the Government he hopes to organize. He pledged all-out support of the Equal Rights Amendment and assured women that each key party committee would have at least a 50% female membership.

In its most stirring moment, the convention also sought to bury more than a century of division over race. The party gave its most resoundingly heartfelt ovation to the hulking figure of a black woman, Barbara Jordan. The Texas Congresswoman's resonant plea that the barriers that divide Americans be finally bridged ("Notwithstanding the past, my presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not forever be deferred") will take its place among Democratic Convention oratorical classics: the eloquent addresses of Adlai Stevenson in 1952, Alben Barkley in 1948, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, William Jennings Bryan in 1896.

The party that had long tended more toward convulsions than conventions this time squelched each lingering itch for fratricide. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, booed and hooted in 1968 for unleashing his clubbing cops against antiwar protesters and banned altogether in 1972 by the overzealous George McGovern reformists, was back at his pink-faced best, basking in interviews, murdering the language in a forgettable speech explaining the urban affairs plank of the party's bland rock-no-boats platform.

Alabama's once feisty Governor George Wallace, who only four months ago was widely expected to enter the convention with some 500 combative delegates demanding a measure of blood for past slights, faded forlornly away in a listless six-minute speech that was barely audible. Yet one more time he railed against the "bureaucratic briefcase toters who ought to have their briefcases thrown into the Potomac River." Then Wallace was wheeled away to little applause as Peter Duchin's band fittingly played Alabamy Bound. (Never once during the convention did the band play Dixie. Georgia's Carter and his aides felt that the song stirs divisive rather than unifying emotions.)

The Democrats did not, of course, extend that feeling of good cheer toward their Republican opponents. Although Candidate Carter and his teams of advisers went out of their way to praise President Ford as a decent, well-intentioned man, convention oratory repeatedly linked him and Richard Nixon. Watergate, expected to be almost a subliminal issue, was cited in varied pointed ways. "Who broke and entered in the night?" asked New York Governor Hugh Carey on opening day. "Who opened the mails? Who tapped the phones?" Hubert Humphrey, in the second night's most resounding old-style oratory, drew sustained applause by assailing "these self-appointed experts on law-and-order" who took crime "off the street and put it in the White House."

Humphrey, a beloved party figure whose final chance to reach the top had been brushed aside in the Carter sweep, enjoyed the convention's most intense display of affection. Resplendent in a youthful powder-blue suit, the man who would have been elected President in 1968 if he had been afforded even half the degree of party unity that Carter now enjoys, received a cheering, whistling ovation. Maine's Ed Muskie, passed over finally for the vice presidency, was warmly applauded as well.

Two of the men who had valiantly but vainly challenged Carter in the primaries rose gracefully to the occasion with two of the better speeches. Idaho's Frank Church, despite a late hour, awoke dozing delegates with a rousing attack on the foreign policy of "the Nixon-Ford Administration." Cried he to cheers: "Candor in making foreign policy, with all its liabilities, is preferable to deceit." Arizona's Morris Udall, freeing his more than 300 delegates to vote for whomever they wished, noted that "this is a night for peaches and peanuts, and not a very good night for cactus." Normally, Udall joked, "when Democrats assemble a firing squad, they always gather in a circle. But when we get together, watch out, and tonight we are together." Carter, said Udall, had "beat us fair and square," and, he noted, "This is a good man, Jimmy Carter, and he will make a strong President, and I am behind him."

If Humphrey's and Muskie's times had passed, while Church and Udall had gained stature in defeat, California Governor Jerry Brown had entered the primary race late, scored surprising successes and clearly caught the presidential bug. ("I like running for President," he told a TIME luncheon during the convention.) He allowed his name to be placed in nomination, then strode a bit dramatically into the hall to take his delegation's microphone and switch the earlier, predominantly Brown California vote to 278 for Carter and "two floating somewhere in the hall."

Never any kind of convention threat to Carter, Brown privately had high praise for the Georgian's "intelligence" and "energy"--but is most certainly expected to take another, better-aimed shot of his own at the national scene whenever the chance beckons. He might well have to wait eight years, when he will be only 46. Carter visited the California delegates in their hotel, where he thanked them for "not unleashing" Brown until the final weeks of the primary campaign.

The convention potentially marked another shift--the fading of the Kennedy family from its foremost place in Democratic politics. True, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could still disrupt the activities by her mere entrance into a prominent box. Seated near her stylish sister Lee Radziwill and well-groomed friends, Jackie was flanked by the plain, spontaneous Carter sons, Jack, Chip and Jeff, as well as the smilingly smart wife Rosalynn--in their own way perhaps symbolic of a future, very different social scene in Washington.

Teddy Kennedy still was often besieged by reporters and admirers, but his convention seat far across the hall from Jackie's was out of the spotlight. Moreover, not once did he take the podium--the first time since 1952 that a Kennedy had not done so at a Democratic Convention. As Teddy visited the Massachusetts delegation on the floor of the Garden, a misty-eyed woman delegate said: "This is a very emotional moment."

Were there tensions between the emerging Carter and departing Kennedy clans? If so, both parties worked to smooth them over. As the Senator said kind words about the candidate in a Walter Cronkite interview, Carter placed a call to the CBS booth in the Garden. "Hello," said Carter to Kennedy. "I just watched you. I appreciate the things you said. I look forward to working closely with you in the election. I value your judgment and advice very, very much." Pleased by Kennedy's promise of support. Carter replaced the receiver. The call may have symbolized a significant moment of transition in the party.

The formal affirmation of the change was undramatic. Placed in nomination by New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino, whose high-pitched voice was ill-equipped to combat the hall's poor acoustics and chronically inattentive audience--but whose Italian background and Watergate impeachment role were subtly suited to the politics of the moment--Carter swept to his expected first-ballot nomination. Because Massachusetts, apparently confused on its vote count, at first abstained, the honor of putting Carter over the top fell fittingly to Ohio, where Carter's late primary victory wiped out all lingering vestiges of a stop-Carter movement.

Before delegations switched their votes and Carter was declared the convention's nominee by acclamation, he had rolled up 2,238 1/2 votes to 329 1/2 for Udall, 300 1/2 for Brown, 57 for Wallace and 22 for Anti-Abortionist Ellen Mc-Cormack.* There were few surprises in the preordained voting result--and, thus, no great display of emotion.

On the convention's last day, there were some tears in the Garden during the poignant, if a bit bizarre vice-presidential nomination of Fritz Efaw, 29, who had avoided the Viet Nam draft by living in exile in London. Seconded by Ron Kovic, a paraplegic casualty of the war ("I am the living dead"), Efaw made a plea for a broad amnesty for all Viet Nam service evaders before withdrawing his name.

Later, the delegates gave more joyous emotions full rein, happily bouncing two beach balls high in the colorful hall while awaiting the nominees. Fritz Mondale, normally a reserved, if witty, man, shook off the nervousness apparent at a morning press conference in which Carter had revealed his choice, and delivered a punchy, shouting speech.

"Tonight we stand together as a party," he declared. "We stand together as a nation, united at long last, North and South, Georgia and Minnesota--one."

Mondale accused the Republican Administration of having "tried to paralyze the momentum for human justice in America ... that special American notion of fairness and compassion." He drew a thunderous reaction with his blunt charge: "We have just lived through the worst political scandal in American history and are now led by a President who pardoned the person who did it." Assailing Ford vetoes and a "deadlock of American democracy," Mondale pledged that "the first thing we are going to do when President Carter is elected is to get this Government moving again."

Before Carter strode down a floor aisle amid standing cheers, delegates and TV viewers watched a skillful, effective film, produced by Carter's media director Gerald Raffshoon, that traced the candidate's lonely fight for the nomination through 19 months to its triumphant finish. The film even took humorous delight in cartoonists' fascination with Carter's glistening toothy grin.

But it was Carter's dramatic speech, delivered with his uniquely understated softness, barely pausing to let a point sink in, yet building in a gentle cadence to convey undertones of strong emotion, that befittingly climaxed the convention. Carter had spent some 30 hours honing the speech, which was about 65% wholly his own effort. The rest was mostly the work of his top speech writer, Patrick Anderson. Carter had used a tape recorder to practice his delivery. Surprisingly populist in thrust, yet with bows to free enterprise and an appeal to patriotic pride, the speech elaborated on Carter's now familiar campaign themes.

"My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for President," he began in a jovial reminder of those days not long ago when everyone was asking, "Jimmy Who? Running for what?" Then, in a wholly attentive hall, he spoke of "a new mood in America. We have been shaken by a tragic war abroad and by scandals and broken promises at home. Our people are searching for new voices and new ideas and new leaders." Americans have emerged from these ordeals, he added, as "idealists without illusions, realists who still know the old dreams of justice and liberty--of country and community."

Carter ran through the Democratic pantheon--F.D.R., Harry Truman, John Kennedy--and, in the new spirit of unity, restored Lyndon Johnson to the roll, calling him "a great-hearted Texan, who took office in a tragic hour and who went on to do more than any other President in this century to advance the cause of human rights." Responding, delegates applauded the memory of L.B.J., whose role in a tragic war was never mentioned.

Carter lauded the immigrants who had helped build the party, drawing a few smirks with his pronunciation of "Eye-talians," but he scored in attacking the Ford Administration. "We have been governed by veto too long," he said. "We have suffered enough at the hands of a tired and worn-out Administration without new ideas, without youth or vitality, without vision, and without the confidence of the American people." After "a time of torment," he argued, "it is now a time for healing. It is time for the people to run the Government and not the other way around." Next year, Carter predicted, "we are going to have that new leadership," adding in a frequent ad lib to his text: "You can depend on it."

In an extravagant passage that will be hotly debated during the campaign, Carter assailed an undefined "elite." This unnamed "they," he charged, "never stand in line looking for a job" when unemployment prevails, never lack a place to sleep when "a confused and bewildering welfare system" fails, never suffer from inferior education, but send their children "to exclusive private schools." They benefit from "an unfair tax structure--and tight secrecy always seems to prevent reform." Carter called the income tax system "a disgrace to the human race," promised reform, and vowed: "You can depend on it."

"The poor, the weak, the aged, the afflicted must be treated with respect and compassion and with love," said Carter, who then explained: "I have spoken a lot of times this year about love, but love must be aggressively translated into simple justice."

Typically, Carter went on to pledge that if he is elected in November, he will be "a President who is not isolated from the people, but who feels your pain and shares your dreams, and takes his strength and wisdom and courage from you. I see an America on the move again, united, a diverse and vital and tolerant nation, entering our third century with pride and confidence --an America that lives up to the majesty of our Constitution and the simple decency of our people. This is the America we want. This is the America we will have."

The Carter rhetoric was general, moralistic, populist, a bit preachy. But it carried a revivalist's ring of sincerity, and it had propelled him far in 19 months on a tortuous campaign trail. At any rate, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. ended the convention with a spirited Baptist benediction, and all the hall joined in a reminiscent rendition of We Shall Overcome, the Democratic soil in Madison Square Garden was nourished by many a delegate's mixed emotions of nostalgia over some proud battles of the past, general happiness over the current harmony and high hope for the fall campaign.

* There were 60 1/2 votes for others, including 19 for Church, ten each for Humphrey and Henry Jackson, and nine for Fred Harris. Among those getting one vote were Kennedy, Cesar Chavez and Leon Jaworski.

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