Being the spouse of a young editor at a morning newspaper doesn’t carry a lot of perks, unless you like being alone in the evening. I thought I had delivered a perk to Mimi in 1980 when I was an editor on the city desk of The Des Moines Register.
The Register was going to be hosting the only debate before the Iowa caucuses between President Jimmy Carter and his Democratic challenger, Sen. Edward Kennedy. (California Gov. Jerry Brown wanted in, but Register Editor Jim Gannon said he needed to be campaigning seriously in Iowa, and he wasn’t. Brown eventually campaigned and Ganon relented, but Brown remained largely a sideshow to the Carter-Kennedy race.)
The obituaries and eulogies for Kennedy today focus on his long career in the Senate and on the tragedies of his family and personal life more than on that one run for the White House. But at the time, it was a huge deal that the last of the Kennedy brothers was challenging the sitting president for the Democratic nomination.
The Register had a lottery for the few tickets allotted to employees and I got one (probably two, but I couldn’t go because I needed to work that night, editing debate coverage; Mimi was probably going to take a friend or sister). She was eagerly awaiting the opportunity to watch the historic event.
Wherever you stood on the candidates, a seat at a debate between the sitting president and the last presidential candidate from the Kennedy brothers was a glimpse of history that nearly anyone of our generation would savor. The first president either of us have much awareness of was John F. Kennedy and everyone in our generation remembers where we were when we learned he was shot.
That’s a much more vivid memory for Mimi than the Kennedy-Carter debate. President Carter canceled, saying he needed to stay in Washington and handle the Iranian hostage crisis. So my perk for Mimi was a ticket to nothing. I was not able to get a ticket to the Republican debate, which did come off, though the eventual president, Ronald Reagan, did not attend.
Twenty years later, I was back at the Register and got Mimi and my oldest son, Mike, tickets to the 2000 debate between Al Gore and Bill Bradley. No one canceled. But somehow it wasn’t the same.
The Buttry Diary 
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