The Education of Jim Fallows

James M. Fallows '70 still finds it painful to return to Cambridge now, more than six years since his senior year ended abruptly in early May, canceled because of student protest against the war. He gets a terrible feeling in his gut every time he visits, the victim of disabling memories of Harvard as a "place of hatred." His undergraduate career was baptized by a forceful mobbing of then Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara outside Quincy House in the fall of 1966. It was abbreviated finally by the cancellation of exams in the wake of unrest following the invasion of Cambodia.

"I have never been able to get a real look at Harvard since then (1970)," he says, "It still looks like the place where there was tear gas in the air, there was rampant hatred in the air, and emotions were all on edge."

Fallows has traveled far--geographically and professionally--since he left Harvard with a two-year Rhodes Scholarship and an impressive start in journalism highlighted by frequent publication in national, large-circulation magazines. But far more striking than these travels are Fallow's political sojurns. While seven years ago he served as president of The Crimson during its most radical era, Fallows is now taking a sabbatical from writing about politics to serve as one of the chief speechwriters for Democratic presidential contender Jimmy Carter.

Although Fallows expects to return to journalism after Novermber 2 no matter who triumphs, he does not use the brevity of his tenure to sidestep inquiries about his passage from The Crimson to the Carter campaign. In a series of interviews last week, as he accompanied Carter in a swing through Florida, North Carolina and New York, Fallows detailed the changes in his temperament and in the political atmosphere of the country that led him to join Carter's entourage.

The tall, boyish, slim-featured and soft-spoken Fallows opens his explanation evoking the moral challenge that the Vietnam War presented students in the late '60s. Today, he says, "there is no single overriding concern which makes you dismiss all marginal concerns and trimming." But in the late '60s the war was such an overriding force. It was an "epochal test, and you didn't know how it was all going to finally turn out and whether for the next 39 or 40 years people would point back and say, 'Those people did not speak up when the test of time came'...It was hard to know then that this was different from being a protesting citizen of Germany when atrocities were going on," he says. Only by grasping the "enormity of the offense" and of the pressure on the young, Fallows adds, can you understand why what everyone did then--on both sides--was "so extreme and so unreasonable...sounded harsh, inhuman, bitter and wrong and cruel...irrational."

Fallows had his own added brand of pressure to cope with. While solidly to the left of the mainstream, he is remembered as a relatively moderate voice inside the paper's debates. Fallows remembers being accused of neo-nazism by students on the far left who, he says, suspected anyone "who was not part of the Weatherman faction." And moderate and conservative students labeled him a "beserk lefty," Fallows adds.

Fallows also points to concerns that grew out of his writing for The Washington Monthly, a small public affairs oriented journal, as a source of his sympathy for Carter. Fallows says Carter shares his interest in "the way government structurally gets screwed up and the way that conventional ideologies don't take care of a lot of the ways that government goes wrong." He offers the civil service unions--once a "grand hero of the left" but now an "impediment to much of what you want to do"--as one reason why he supports the ex-Georgia governor's at-times sacrilegious proposals for improving government services. Characteristically choosing the Vietnam War as an example, Fallows maintains that a theme that "rings out from history" is the inability of those performing a job to communicate what's going right and what's going wrong to those making policy decisions. He believes Jimmy Carter the businessman and government reorganizer would attack this "detachment" of experience and decision-making.

Fallows has other reasons for supporting Carter. He believes the Georgian has "tapped, not in a cynical way but in a sincere way," the thirst of the electorate for a return to the "basic verities," for "tremendous change and...(at the same time) tremendous stability." Fallows argues further that the Democrat is "one of the most profoundly anti-elitist candidates to appear" on the American political scene this year. But Fallows readily admits he doesn't believe Carter is the "messiah." He says he recognizes "the shortcomings in him. There's a lot of stuff in what he says that I wouldn't particularly endorse. But when it comes to a choice between two people, you choose the one who seems better."

*****

Fallows' jump into the Carter camp is hardly his most dramatic political change-of-heart. He came to Harvard the product of a conservative, pro-Goldwater California town 70 miles east of Los Angeles, with the requisite chunk of Ayn Rand reading under his belt. "As (politically) juvenile as everybody else" in his class, he adds. He is not, he says now, embarrassed about his enthusiastic support of the Republican. Like many of his classmates Fallows soon was swept up by the anti-war movement. He recalls that he began to doubt the right-wing, pro-war legacy of his upbringing during his freshman year, when Sen Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) journeyed to Boston to defend the American Vietnam policy. "I went and listened to it perfectly confident that he would have reasons to rebut all the criticism of the war, and he didn't. He never really answered any of the questions. That was a real shock to me."

Fallow's political awakening parallelled immersion in The Crimson, which he headed during 1969, the year of the occupation and bust at University Hall and the year the newspaper called editorially for the victory of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Looking back at his actions during the late sixties, Fallows believes the most profound change in his character since his graduation has been acquiring an ability to accept the human decency of individuals who he believes are guilty of indecent acts. "It always came as somewhat of a surprise back in those days to see that people you thought were doing bad things were in fact decent people. It seemed contradictory."

Fallows began to stop "dividing people into demons and heroes" the summer after he graduated from college, when he was working on a project on water pollution for Ralph Nader, "The Water Lords." In Savannah, Ga., he and his co-workers met with the owners of the mill that was fouling the Savannah River, and found them to be "very pleasant, very nice people."

Now Fallows translates this change of temperament into his writing, trying to blend but not resolve the personal and political, "on the one hand being sensitive about what's good in people...being willing to understand their human richness, while, on the other hand, you are still willing to say what you think they are doing wrong...the purest kind of criticism is when you put yourself in their place, and then you can more persuasively say. This is how you're getting screwed up, and these are the sorts of traps to avoid--as opposed to just lecturing them about being bad people."

Fallows does not believe he has experienced any "violent" change in his world outlook since leaving Harvard. He contrasts himself to classmates who swung sharply to cynicism and professional school after their search to "save the world and root out evil" was frustrated. Nor has he gone the route of some of his classmates who, because "there was such a moral sickness in those days...ended up doing a lot less respectable things than they would have if they had gone to other places."

*****

Fallows did not jump at the chance to work for Carter, mulling over the late June offer for five or six days. He had to drop his writing projects--a piece for The New Yorker about the military and a book for Random House about class divisions in the United States--and survey friends to see whether he would have difficulty crossing back into journalism afterwards. And he studied the charges of Robert Shrum, an ex-McGovern speechwriter who left his position with Carter with a blast about the Georgian's alleged two-facedness. After three months working for Carter, Fallows has concluded that Shrum's reaction was understandable but wrong. "Carter can be a curt, cold man," Fallows says. "But if you accept this character trait and balance off the times the candidate has not said certain things to certain audiences with "the times he does say things to audiences which are not politic," then you don't emerge with the image of a Nixonesque, calculating Carter that Shrum offered.

So since the Democratic convention in mid-July Fallows has served under chief speechwriter and novelist Patrick Anderson, who says he cannot think of anyone who has joined the staff since the New York nomination "who has gotten to have more access to the governor than Jim has." Fallows and Anderson travel with Carter in his plane, Peanut One. They work on speeches in their shared hotel room and on the typewriters at the back of the plane during flights and campaign stops. Fallows also attends Carter's major issues speeches and appearances at rallies. At these "Roman gladiator type events," as Fallows calls them, Carter delivers his well-wornstump speech with some additional material Fallows or Anderson has developed. Fallows tags along for these in case Carter says something new that might "get us in trouble," to get inspiration for new speech material and to tune up Carter's talk and delivery in case it lags, Fallows says.

Fallows hardly speaks of speechwriting with great enthusiasm. "If you've written speeches," he says, "then you understand both what a different form they are from real writing and how you get used to venting all your own prejudices under your name. It feels a little frustrating to tone them down." Along with this suppression of "the luxury of being able to deliver your own opinions," the speechwriter can't devote any space to evidence or explanations, Fallows says. "You have to string together conclusions and assertions one after another and try to make little rhetorical patterns with them."

While he longs for journalistic freedom, Anderson has encouraged him to leave his options open. "It might be that a year or two there (in the White House) would help his writing rather than hurt it," Anderson said last week Anderson believes that Fallows has the proper mixture of abilities to serve as a speechwriter--a mixture that has steadily increased Carter's trust in the Harvard graduate. "We need people," Anderson says, "with talent, people who can stand the physical game and basic insanity of campaigning, and who can deal with the candidate." Fallows, he adds, can do all this.

Fallows also senses that he has broken down some of Carter's reserve. "He's very slow to extend trust, and I feel he's extended some tentacles of it towards me. As far as an inner circle would imply somebody who is called in and asked 'Well, Jim, what do you think about the way the campaign's going,' that's not the case at all."

But Fallows quickly adds that while he does not have the entree of Carter faithful like Jody Powell, the candidate's press secretary and arguably his closest aide, he does have written access to Carter. "I've sent him some things giving churlish advice...write it out, he'll read it and respond one way or the other. There's not a bar to ideas as ideas."

Along with the frustration of adjusting to a new form Fallows has faced the frustration of overcoming what he sees as the issue-less campaign bias of the press. "You hear complaints about an issue-less campaign, and then you try to get an issue past these reporters. It's like driving through the Notre Dame front line. You just can't do it." Fallows recalls the press reception of a speech Anderson wrote a few months earlier, "the most reasoned and eloquent discourse you'd want to find" about how liberalism and conservatism have changed in recent years. "The reporters were bored to tears by it. The only thing they were interested in was the attack on President Ford's vetoes. It's the same with every speech. They rush through to find a paragraph about Ford. It's as if they're sports reporters."

*****

Fallows is coasting through the final days of the campaign now. Only a couple of major issues speeches remain, and the speechwriter is only a shadowy presence on the road, more quiet and less stern than most of the Carter staffers. His calm demeanor is a striking contrast to his unsettling memories of the past, of a turbulent war against a war that so forcefully shaped his world outlook. And his politics have mellowed similarly. He has shelved an impressive career in journalism to labor for a candidate whose prospective administration is--like any challenger's--full of question marks and hypotheticals. He may be a candidate who might, like John F. Kennedy '40, "sounds like he is doing a lot more than he is"; a candidate who might not be able to move his reform legislation through a suspicious Congress. But he also may be a candidate who, Fallows says, "has a potential of being a president that has an impact similar to FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)'s, in making a momentous difference in the way government is run."