In the early months of 1976, New Jersey’s Democratic Party establishment did not roll out a welcome mat for Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn.
But a 27-year-old Ruth Puglisi — now Ruth Dugan — did.
She opened the doors to her split-level home in Woodcliff Lake to the Carters as chairwoman of the fledging New Jersey Carter campaign, a high-profile role for a woman party activist at the time.
Puglisi — who later married James Dugan, the state Democratic Party chairman who organized a slate that opposed to Carter in 1976 — also opened the doors to her bulky Ford Grenada for the Carters and ferried them around the Jersey political circuit to meet political reporters and hold press conferences.
She remembered Jimmy Carter as someone “authentic” who flashed a sense of humor and with not as much of a pronounced Southern drawl as it seemed by the public image. But it was Rosalynn Carter’s devotion despite the grind of the campaign that remains seared in Dugan’s memory.
Rosalynn Carter “was this wonderful woman who’s telling me how she hated going to all those car races with Jimmy,” Dugan said Monday, recalling the time when Rosalynn Carter stayed over for two days. “I remember her putting on makeup in a dark hallway — very little makeup, anyway. She was charming and grateful for anything you could do.”
And Dugan did plenty during that uphill 1976 primary: She opened the Carter for President campaign in West Orange; bedecked her three young children in Carter for President shirts as she roamed the state and fired off attack-mode press releases.
But one thing she could not do was persuade the state Democratic establishment to unify behind the upstart Carter. The party leaders, under James Dugan, mobilized a slate of uncommitted delegates who became informally known as the “Anybody But Carter” slate. They brought in marquee Democratic candidates to oppose Carter, including former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and California Gov. Jerry Brown, Ruth Dugan said.
At one point early in the primary contest, she arranged to have the her future husband, James Dugan meet with Jimmy Carter at Newark Airport. They had a “nice conversation, and I thought that we had made some movement,” she recalled.
“And as I walk out, I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And he says, I think ‘he wears too much hairspray.’ I mean give me a break,” said Dugan, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for the state Senate in the Bergen-based 39th District in 2021.
The truth was that Carter was relatively unknown in a crowded field of 11 candidates, all eager to reclaim the White House after the Watergate debacle and the muddled interregnum of Gerald Ford’s succession of Richard Nixon. But Carter constantly stressed his outsider status, as a nuclear engineer and a folksy peanut farmer who did not have ties to the Washington, D.C., establishment, which the public held in low regard after the Watergate scandal. He argued that he could bring about change because he was beholden to no one. It was the buck-the-establishment message that began to gain traction around the country in the spring of 1976.
Voters “wanted to take a shower after Watergate,” Dugan said.
It was a point that she drove home back in New Jersey with scathing press releases that attacked the insular, corrupt, male-dominated bossism that refused to give Carter the time of day. The attacks prompted former U.S. Rep. Peter Rodino, D-Essex, to break from the Anybody But Carter cabal, she said. Rodino had just come off his star turn as chairman of the House impeachment inquiry into former President Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair, and he didn’t want to tarnish his reputation as a good-government crusader, she said.
But most of the party establishment remained opposed to Carter, who garnered only 21% of the vote in the New Jersey primary, a distant second to California’s Brown who grabbed 59%. And 42% of voters selected the slate of at-large uncommitted delegates, while only 28% picked the Carter slate.
“They didn’t give him a fair shake,” Dugan said.
Dugan, the Swedish-born daughter of Holocaust survivors, had become a U.S. citizen at 18. She still marvels that 10 years later she would be running the New Jersey campaign of a presidential candidate. She viewed Carter with the idealism of a new immigrant: here was a candidate that embodied the best of what an American values.
“I’ve always loved the country. I’ve always cared about it,” she said. “He literally spoke to me, meaning what I felt the country should have — somebody decent, somebody who cares, somebody who’s smart.”
Her first impression of him two years earlier was underwhelming. At the time, Carter was national chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “My first impression was that he was sincere, forthright, terribly bright and terribly Southern,” she told the Record in a 1976 interview. “I doubted that we could have a Southerner as president.”
After Carter pulled off the upset that November, she was offered a White House staff job but turned it down because of her young family.
Now 77, Dugan, remains active in Democratic state politics, holding fundraising receptions last year for now-Sen. Andy Kim and congressional candidate Sue Altman. She also retains some of the memorabilia from that period: the stacks of Carter campaign stationery that appeared at her doorstep in two dozen boxes after she accepted the job as state chairperson, the thank-you letters from the Carters and the signed photographs. She also is clear about the sad irony that Carter’s death came just weeks before Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term.
Carter offered to reform Washington with a spirit of ethical reform; Trump and his MAGA loyalists want to tear down the “administrative state” and retaliate against enemies both real and perceived. Carter preached national unity and racial reconciliation. Trump was reelected with divisive, racist rhetoric and has vowed to deport millions of immigrants.
“Jimmy Carter believed in decency and commitment to your country and not to yourself,” Dugan said. “And now we have one of the most selfish presidents ever possible coming back to the White House and throwing away everything we thought we were. And it’s mind-boggling.”
Charlie Stile is a veteran New Jersey political columnist. For unlimited access to his unique insights into New Jersey’s political power structure and his powerful watchdog work, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: stile@northjersey.com
