The Anchorwoman, The Assassin, And The Day I Shot President Carter

I’ve learned a thing or two about ambition in my life. It lives in each of us to varying degrees, and each of us do different things because of it. And then it does different things right back to us. Take me, for instance. Or better yet, take Jimmy Carter, Jessica Savitch, or a guy I used to know named Charley. Ambition led all of us to be at the intersection of 8th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia on the evening of September 23, 1976. Carter’s ambition carried him there to engage President Gerald R. Ford in the first debate of the ‘76 election campaign. Jessica Savitch, the golden girl of the local TV news scene, was there to cover the event live for KYW-TV, the city’s NBC affiliate, and to continue building the persona that appeared to be leading her to a network gig in New York. Me, well, I was there to cover the event for what I was certain would be my future career as a globetrotting photojournalist. And because I wanted to see a real, live president. And because I had the hots for Jessica Savitch, a fascination that had caused some minor jealously just the previous weekend as my girlfriend and I spent one of many lazy Sunday afternoons poking around the beautiful little artist’s colony of New Hope, PA. Charley was there to participate in the debate, too, but in a decidedly different role. I would have to wait another 4 years to meet him, but he'll enter my story here in just a few paragraphs.

As the sun set that evening, bright yellowish quartz lights clicked on here and there as television correspondents did their pre-debate standups. I had wedged myself into a spot next to where Jessica Savitch was now holding a microphone and brushing her hair away from her face, brilliantly lit. Serious looking men with their suit jackets unbuttoned had appeared from nowhere and stationed themselves along the police line every eight feet or so, speaking quietly into their closed palms and staring across the barricades into the crowds. Then, from across the intersection, the sound of cheering grew louder as a tight quartz-lit group of men worked its way through the crowd. As his Secret Service cordon made the turn onto Walnut, camera strobes popped and Jimmy Carter’s hand shot up over the crowd. He had walked the three blocks from his hotel! I saw his trademark toothy grin directed at Jessica and her camera, directed at ME, as he waved again and then disappeared through the front door of the theater. It was almost anticlimactic a few minutes later when President Ford’s motorcade sped through the intersection and I caught a glimpse of him silhouetted in the back seat of his bulletproof limousine, waving casually from the wrist. In between snapping photos of the boisterous scene all around me, I glanced over to see Jessica shouting rapidly into her microphone while trying to look over her shoulder at Carter and Ford and back into the camera at the same time.

Ambition. Savitch had once told a friend "I'm going to be a network anchor, and I'm going to do it fast”. Sure enough, within a year or so of the debate she was a correspondant and anchor on NBC’s Sunday evening national newscast, an accomplishment that invited skepticism among some journalistic colleagues. David Brinkley publicly referred to her as “the dumbest woman I have ever met”. Another coworker described her as having had "a nut streak in her, but she also had some kind of energy force behind her eyes. It was like she put on her little custom suit, shot a beam across the room, and zapped you." Meanwhile, 6 weeks after the debate Carter won the election and then proceeded to lose the electorate over an energy crisis, runaway inflation and a Mideast hostage standoff. And within a few hours of standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with one of them and across the street from the other, I was back at my dead-end job working the midnight shift as a subway train driver. I made my eight round trips that night in the darkened operator’s cab rocking gently on welded rail, lulled into waking dreams of infinite possibility.

And time moved on; things progressed as things always do. By 1980 I had gone from being bored and artistically unappreciated as a subway train driver to being bored and artistically unappreciated as a camera store manager. My own ambition had led me from a dead-end to a false start. Life, for the most part, was flying past me, and all I could do was watch it go by and occasionally take a picture of it as it went.

Until, that is, Charley walked into my store one afternoon and asked if I would like to see President Carter. He was a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service and one of my favorite customers. He had been on duty the night of the debate four years earlier, stationed inside the Walnut Street Theater as I watched from across the street. An avid amateur photographer, he seemed to really appreciate the few hours I had spent with him one night in the store’s demonstration darkroom showing him how to make black and white prints. Afterward, he bought me dinner, and he told me he had served three tours of duty in Vietnam in a Special Ops unit tasked with assassinating Viet Cong officers and politicians. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but he seemed to genuinely like me and was quite grateful for the help I had given him. So when he took my social security number back to his office and returned a half-hour later with a small blue lapel pin with the letter “A” on it, it felt like a thank you. “Be at the Navy Yard on Wednesday at 12:30”, he said. “Make sure you’re wearing this. I’ll meet you there.”

The little blue pin worked like magic, and two days later I found myself parked in the VIP lot adjacent to the base’s administration building, staring at a pair of immaculate green and white Sikorsky Sea King helicopters. Smartly uniformed Marines stood at parade rest at each of the helicopters’ boarding stairways, and men in suits patrolled the perimeter of the lawn. At one end of the field I saw a low platform and a number of press photographers standing around it, about 50 yards away from the helicopters. I grabbed my camera bag and walked over there, hoping that that was where I was supposed to meet Charley.

I was standing there feeling very conspicuous when several unmarked black sedans pulled up nearby, red and blue lights flashing behind their grilles. Charley hopped out of the lead car looking every bit the Secret Service agent in a three piece suit and dark sunglasses and wearing a little ear bud.

“What are you doing over here?” he said.

Oh shit, I thought to myself. I’m too close. “Am I too close?” I answered as apologetically as I could.

“No, no. C’mon.” He led me across the lawn toward the closest helicopter, and as we walked, he told me that he was working the advance team for Carter’s motorcade, driving the same route about 10 minutes ahead of the President. “Checking for open windows in high buildings, loose manhole covers, lone nuts, that sort of thing.”

And just like that we were standing at the short stairway leading up into the helicopter. The Presidential seal was subtly displayed on the fuselage under the cockpit window, and through the glass I could see the pilot flipping switches. The words “Welcome Aboard Marine One” were embroidered into carpeting on the stair risers. An unblinking Marine guard stared straight ahead; ignoring him, Charley walked me around behind the strut-mounted landing gear to a narrow spot between the fuselage and the tire. The stainless steel railing of the stairway was now right in front of me, close enough for me to touch. One of the enormous rotor blades hung directly over my head.

“You should be able to get some good shots from here. Stay put and don’t move until I come and get you.”

He walked away, leaving me standing there leaning against the polished aircraft that would soon be carrying the most powerful man on the planet. The evidence of that power was all around me, and I especially made note of the sharpshooter teams stationed on the roof of the administration building. The perimeter of the leadership of the Free World was secure and locked down, and I was about to be standing at its epicenter. The sound of sirens approaching brought a heightened state of activity to everyone around the helicopters.

And, perhaps like you right about now, I had to pee.

Only kidding. A column of police and Secret Service vehicles quickly rolled past the first helicopter followed by the familiar long black limousine with flags on the fenders. The limo stopped smoothly at the curb, the doors flew open, and President Carter emerged and stepped up on the door sill so that he could wave over the top of the car. As he walked toward the helicopter and shook hands with a line of dignitaries that had formed to send him off, I started shooting pictures. At one point the strut of the landing gear got in my way, and I took a step back and to my left to shoot around it. I was immediately shoved back into place by a heavy hand on my shoulder belonging to someone who I hadn’t even realized was there, and I muttered “sorry” as I waited for my heart to start beating again. I had a momentary glimpse of a dark suit in my peripheral vision. When Charley said “stay put and don’t move”, I guess he meant “stay put and don’t move”.

Carter bounded up the steps less than three feet in front of me. He paused at the top for a second or two, turned around, and waved. The motor drive on my Nikon was going “clack-clack-clack”. I knew I had a great shot. As he turned back to duck through the door, he sort of looked down in my direction. He was still smiling, not at me but from the wave. There was a really heavy look in his eyes, which made me wonder what was on his mind at that particular moment.

As soon as he disappeared into the cabin, the Marine guard followed him up the stairs and inside. All around me now, Secret Service agents were walking around with their arms in the air like NFL referees yelling “That’s it! Everybody back!” I walked over to where Charley was standing near the limosine and watched as the rotors on both helicopters started to turn. The roar was deafening as their engines reached liftoff power; Marine One swayed a bit on its landing gear and then rose straight up in the air. I could see Carter’s white shirt in one of the windows as his helicopter banked and moved off to the south, the second one following in close formation.

I thanked Charley and said goodbye, and, turning onto South Broad Street, I wondered about the kind of ambition that my friend must have had. He had killed for his country and he would die for his President, both oddly in the same cold-blooded, apolitical manner and neither in the abstract. What kind of person would knowingly sign up for that? I could find no answers that day, nor have I come up with any in the years since.

Three months later John Lennon was shot dead on the street in front of his wife. His murder appeared to be an ominous bridge between the failed, lame duck presidency of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”. On TV, Jessica Savitch reported that the killer, Mark David Chapman, had dropped down into a “combat stance” when he fired. Charley came into my store the next day, and all he kept talking about was how “the guy shot him from a ‘combat stance’”. He was smiling when he said it.

My story should probably end there, but it doesn’t. It comes with a couple of postscripts.

First off, Charley was right. I did get some very good shots that day, which indirectly led me to be hired a number of years later to photograph former President Carter when he came to Concord, MA to speak to a Unitarian organization. Evidentally, he liked my pictures enough to request a set for the Carter Presidential Library. I couldn’t print them fast enough.

And then there’s this.

I don’t remember who the network anchor was who announced the death of Jessica Savitch in 1983, but the sad news touched me in a way that none of the people I knew at the time would ever be able to understand. Rumors of a troubled personal life had been leaking out for years and were no longer confined to whispers among colleagues; divorces, miscarriages, depression, cocaine-fueled newsroom tirades, and beatings by an abusive boyfriend had caused NBC to pull her from everything except one-minute news updates delivered on the hour in prime-time. Her career had imploded publicly on live TV three weeks earlier when she slouched and slurred her way through 43 seconds worth of news copy read off a Teleprompter through half closed eyes. That near-catatonic performance on October 3 would be her final appearance before a television camera.

She died on a stormy night behind a restaurant in New Hope, PA the same town where I had spent the Sunday afternoon prior to the debate making my girlfriend jealous by talking about her. Her dinner companion, trying to leave the parking lot, mistakenly turned onto the old towpath that led to the Delaware Canal instead. The car went over the side and tumbled fifteen feet, landing on its roof in a few feet of water. The muddy canal bank sealed the doors shut, and Jessica, her friend, and her dog quickly drowned. Neither drugs nor alcohol were a factor in the accident, just a torrential downpour, an unmarked dirt road, and absolutely miserable, rotten luck.

The first sentence of her obituary in Time Magazine the following week put a now-familiar word front and center in laying out the short story of her rapid rise and tragic fall: “Near its end, her life seemed to carry a storybook warning: ambition may lead to power and fame, but the path beckons to a precipice.”

Ambition. Jessica Savitch had it in spades and it left her humiliated and dead in a muddy ditch. I have absolutely no idea where or how Charley ever wound up, but somehow the thought of a simple retirement on a government pension doesn’t fit the picture I have of him. Me, well, I never made it as a globetrotting photojournalist. Never even tried, really. But my days as a subway train driver are far, far behind me. These days I teach digital photography to people whose ambition reminds me of my own so many years ago. And at 82 years old, Jimmy Carter, bless his soul, was on CNN the other night talking about his hope for a hopeless world.