Twenty years on, it’s hard enough to recall Ted Kennedy as a serious presidential threat; harder still, with this year’s primaries effectively over by mid-March, to imagine a sitting President and his main challenger for the nomination fighting all the way from January in Iowa to August’s convention in New York. But the noxious mix of double-digit inflation, a gas shortage, and his own earnest leadership had left Jimmy Carter so vulnerable that a summer 1979 California poll showed Ted Kennedy getting nearly 60 percent support in a three-way nomination race with Carter and Jerry Brown. The President’s answer to this news was uncharacteristically forthright and fiery: “I’ll whip his ass.” Kennedy proved to be one political problem Carter understood how to attack.

Ted Kennedy’s candidacy for the White House had seemed inevitable since the death of his brother Robert in 1968, and he remained on pollsters’ presidential shortlists even after Chappaquiddick; by the time he unofficially announced, on Labor Day 1979, Ted’s long-dreamed presidential bid had, for liberals in the fractured Democratic party, become the political equivalent of a Beatles’ reunion—and with a similar risk of anticlimax. Despite a damaging interview with Roger Mudd (who asked the surprisingly difficult question “Why do you want to be President?”), some unfocused early campaigning, and a national rallying to the President after American hostages were taken in Iran on November 4, Kennedy survived almost being knocked out of the race early and eventually won enough significant states (New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut) to keep alive. By the time the two men came to Madison Square Garden in August, Carter was numerically in command for renomination by more than three hundred votes, but the Kennedy delegates promised a hard floor fight; Kennedy called for an “open” convention, allowing all the delegates to fall where they wanted. If he lost this procedural vote on the first day, the question would be not simply how Carter might unify his party but what Teddy would say to his romantic army of loyalists. Would he accept a draft? Many on the floor wore “I’ll Walk With Wimpy!” buttons, threatening to follow the head of the Machinists’ Union, Mr. William “Wimpy” Winpisinger, out of the convention if Kennedy wasn’t the nominee.

To the political press assembling in the Statler-Hilton Hotel across Seventh Avenue from the convention, the looming slugfest had even more ugly promise than the pitched Reagan-Ford battle four years earlier. As a seventeen-year-old whose only previous work had been bagging groceries, I found my new job as the Chicago Tribune ’s convention newsroom assistant (gofer) pretty thrilling. But it seemed that even the Tribune ’s stable of worldly political reporters—Jon Margolis, Bob Greene, Ray Coffey—were expecting high drama as much as the party leadership was dreading it.

Arriving early on my first nervous morning, I neglected to press a vital second switch on the coffeemaker, and after