Then on a cold day that January, opportunity knocked. Opportunity was named Jimmy Carter, visiting Pittsfield to lay the groundwork for the Massachusetts primary, but unfortunately the Dobelles were Republicans. Party differences notwithstanding, Carter liked the mayor and his wife.
Likewise. Says Kit, "Something unique about Carter struck us right away." Adds Evan: "I'm not cynical, but he was the first politician I'd met whom I could visualize ever signing the Declaration of Independence." A few weeks later they registered as Democrats and signed on to work for the Carter campaign.
After the inauguration the President named Evan to the $50,000-a-year post of Chief of Protocol but specified that the Dobelles would serve as a team. "It was natural for the Carters to ask us to do it jointly," says Kit. "He and his wife have always worked together. They sensed that Evan and I had a similar relationship." Of course, her status was wife, her salary zip. Evan could use the help since he spoke no foreign language and had never been abroad. She at least had traveled as far as Bermuda. In Pittsfield, they had lived in a lakeside cottage on $20,000 a year and thought a big night out was beer and sausages at the Eagle Cafe.
Nevertheless, 14 months and hundreds of banquet galas, national days and state visits later Evan was promoted to the prickly post of treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Carter's choice for his replacement as Chief of Protocol: Kit. Evan is still at the $50,000 level, and now so is his wife. As protocol boss, Kit is the intermediary between the government and Washington's 22,000-member diplomatic community. In addition, she escorts foreign leaders in the U.S. and accompanies the Carters on their trips overseas.
In the studied informality of the Carter administration, frills have been dropped, including the 14 herald trumpeters and the honor guard of 56 servicemen for ceremonial occasions. "But some traditions work, they make people comfortable," Kit points out. "You need the order of precedence. Otherwise at an airport I'd have to decide who should stand where, and it would get personal."
Kit has one problem Evan didn't—a varied wardrobe for the 400-plus functions she logs in a year. "I look for things that pack, and I try not to buy things that people remember." Some floor-length dresses she used to wear in Pittsfield pass just fine in the capital.
Meanwhile, at the DNC, Evan is whittling away at the party's debt of around $3 million. Initially some Washington watchers felt Evan's GOP past was a liability. Still, he is Jewish and a former president of a B'nai B'rith lodge, which may soothe hesitant party donors who don't like the U.S. sale of weapons to Arab nations. Evan insists that isn't a problem—"Foreign policy should not affect fund raising. The arms sales didn't help us in the Jewish community, but it didn't hinder us either."
Despite the President's flagging popularity, Evan remains optimistic: "People may take a while to understand him." And by Dobelle's lights anyway, "We have an activist President in an apathetic country and no overriding crisis to solve."
The Dobelles' sojourn in the Carter camp may be a sidestep in what Evan candidly calls his "carefully orchestrated political career," but it has also brought the couple entree into hard-to-crack circles. Kit, for instance, joins the First Lady, Jeff Carter's wife, Annette, and Mrs. Cyrus Vance for Spanish lessons thrice weekly at the White House. And Evan is in position to accrue a few political IOUs.
The son of a successful but itinerant physician, Evan went to 11 different elementary schools but did most of his growing up in Florida. He considers himself "a Southerner on most things, which is what attracted me to Carter." Political fever caught him in high school, when he did a civics project on his congressman, Democrat Paul Rogers, but his real heroes then were ballplayers Duke Snider and Roy Campanella. Kit was raised in Hamden, Conn., one of three daughters of a bank executive.
She met Evan in 1966 in Boston, while stuffing envelopes in a state representative race. "I saw her as quiet and determined," Evan says. "I'd be up and down talking to people and spilling coffee over the envelopes. Kit would stuff a thousand, zip-code them and say goodnight." They courted sporadically, job-hopping around academe (she's a U Mass grad and he got his M.Ed. there), politics and foundation work. They married in 1970. "I honestly don't know when we decided," says Kit. "It sort of evolved and became understood. Evan decided the timing, and that was a month before we did it." They were wed in her parents' garden, the protocol-chief-to-be wearing a dress made by her mother. Evan then spent two years working for Massachusetts Republican Senator Ed Brooke and lost a state senate campaign before running for mayor of Pittsfield.
In their two-bedroom condominium in Northwest Washington, which Evan jokes is "more a tax deduction than a home," there is a division of labor. Evan grocery-shops and Kit cooks, but sparely—"Calories mount if you're eating luncheons and dinners every day," says Kit. Sighs Evan: "I fantasize about mowing a lawn." They are postponing having children and have, in fact, suspended their whole game plan. "As long as Carter wishes, my future is his," pledges Evan. "Around '83, I'll start thinking again." Kit says, "I gave up predicting our future. Reality is more interesting than anything I would have dreamed." And, she adds, "In some ways life is easier than it was in Pittsfield. You can't relax when you're the mayor and his wife. Here, people still don't know us."
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