The six double-wide trailers were set up off of the main hall in Madison Square Garden, like a series of covered wagons on the western frontier. The arrangement said everything: The people inside this makeshift camp were hunkered down and under duress.

It was the 1980 Democratic Convention, and inside the trailers, top staff to President Jimmy Carter were nervously tracking their support among convention delegates, minute by minute. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts was trying to take the nomination from Carter in an open convention.

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It was the peak of a brutal fight inside the Democratic Party, one so bruising that the party has been careful to avoid a similar experience ever since. And it is a cautionary tale for Democrats as they head into the 2020 election cycle. Their bench of candidates is deep. Their grassroots energy is strong. But if they tear themselves to pieces like they did in 1980, they could squander their shot at defeating President Donald Trump.

The argument facing Democrats now has echoes of 1980. Kennedy wanted to move the party left. Carter occupied more moderate territory. Much of the 2020 debate boils down to a similar split in the party, between bold progressives like Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and swing-state centrists like former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Democrats must figure out whether the country is more open to a liberal president than it was in 1980.

The story of the 1980 convention—told here with new details about a near-fistfight on the floor and relying on long forgotten TV footage—is a reminder of what happens when intraparty rivalry becomes so personal that the combatants lose sight of the greater cause of winning the general election.

The Carter forces were able to hold their coalition of delegates together on the convention’s first night to beat back a movement to vote in favor of an open convention. That win ensured Carter the nomination, and Kennedy conceded.

Yet Kennedy’s team was intent on embarrassing Carter on the convention’s second night, when the delegates would vote for a party platform. Kennedy’s camp was pushing to include planks that were a rebuke to the president: a call for a $12 billion stimulus spending program, a measure to fight unemployment and an endorsement of wage and price controls—proposals far to the left of Carter’s.

The vote on the platform would come right after Kennedy was slotted to speak at the convention. The Carter forces knew that the senator’s speech would create an atmosphere highly favorable for Kennedy’s platform proposals to pass and that many of their delegates were already leaning toward voting for them. The delegates had had to say no over and over to Kennedy whips asking them to vote to open the convention the day before, and they were exhausted. They wanted to say yes to something.

Robert Strauss, Carter’s campaign chairman, could not understand why Kennedy insisted on continuing to fight. “If you have any wisdom and judgment at all, you know you don’t get carried away by personalities and pettiness in a political fight,” he told The New Yorker.. “Politics is tough enough . . . that you don’t cut each other’s throats.” But Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, thought he knew. “We neglected to take into account one of the most obvious facets of Kennedy’s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness,” he wrote with great bitterness after the election in his score-settling book, The Other Side of the Story.

Before the platform speech, tensions were so high that high-ranking members of the dueling factions almost got into a fistfight. Harold Ickes, who was running the floor operation for Kennedy, used an obscure procedural rule to call a halt to the afternoon floor proceedings. It was nonprime-time programming, but Ickes’ delay would muck up that evening’s televised schedule. It was a gesture done purely out of spite. “We just said, ‘F— ’em.’ This had turned into a real grudge match,” Ickes said in an interview. “I mean, we weren’t thinking about the country. We weren’t even thinking about the general election. It was, ‘F— ’em.’ You know? To be blunt about it.”

Tom Donilon was livid. The Carter aide was responsible for seeing that the 1980 Democratic Convention went off without any major hitches, and he had just been blindsided. The convention had been stopped, for no apparent reason, on the second day, by Kennedy forces. Donilon threw down his headset and stormed toward the stage, where he found a Carter lawyer named Tim Smith grappling with Ickes as they came down the stairs from the stage. “What the f— are you doing? You can’t do this!” Donilon yelled at Ickes. His outrage caused his already ruddy complexion to glow red.

Ickes, then 40, sneered at the younger political operative. “Go f— yourself. I’m shutting this convention down, Tom,” he said. For a few moments, the two men were on the verge of blows. Several minutes went by. The phone on the podium rang. It was Kennedy, calling for Ickes from his room at the Waldorf Astoria. Several Kennedy advisers were also on the phone.

“Harold, I’m watching the convention. What’s going on down there?’“ Kennedy asked Ickes.

“Well, senator, you know they didn’t comply with this rule,” Ickes responded, explaining the technicality he had used to stop the proceedings.

“How long do you expect this convention to be shut down?” Kennedy asked.

“For two hours,” Ickes said.

There was a long pause. Then Kennedy spoke.

“Harold, I think it’s time we got on with the convention.”.

When Kennedy reached the platform later that evening, the mood inside Madison Square Garden was electric. He began with a joke: “Well, things worked out a little different from the way I thought, but let me tell you, I still love New York.” Those in the hall laughed, with a tinge of sadness. In his next breath, he said, “I have come here tonight not to argue as a candidate but to affirm a cause.” It was a subtle but unmistakable distancing of himself from Carter. The cause, he said, was to fight for what Andrew Jackson referred to as “the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics and laborers.” He went on to attack Republican nominee Ronald Reagan as “no friend of labor . . . no friend of this city and our great urban centers across this nation . . . no friend of the senior citizens of this nation . . . no friend of the environment.”

Kennedy acknowledged and rebuffed the critique that the left’s ideas were stale. “The great adventures which our opponents offer is a voyage into the past. Progress is our heritage, not theirs,” Kennedy said. “The commitment I seek is not to outworn views but to old values that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures.”

Outside of Madison Square Garden, Kennedy’s words were an awkward fit for the political moment. The New York Times editorial page wrote in response to Kennedy’s speech that “a big reason Senator Kennedy did not win is that many people feared his answers to social problems are too liberal, by which they mean, obsolete or too expensive or both.” The editorial argued, “One can regret the turn to conservatism in America; one can rail against it; one can work to reverse it. But through much of his campaign, the Senator pressed on as though it didn’t exist.”

However, the final minutes of Kennedy’s remarks made it one of the most memorable political speeches in modern political history. “There were hard hours on our journey, and often we sailed against the wind,” he said. When he had first used that phrase, almost two years earlier in Memphis, it was a defiant signal that he intended to fight Carter for the nomination. He had been a sailor in a racing vessel, gaining speed, looking at the headwinds and feeling himself ready to take them on.

Even the Carter trailer compound was quiet, in uneasy awe. Carter chief of staff Hamilton Jordan could feel the power of the Kennedy magic working its will on him. “For a long year, Ted Kennedy had been the enemy . . . but it was difficult for me to see him in the convention setting without thinking of his family and its tragedies, of Bobby Kennedy’s emotional appearance at the 1964 convention, when he stood looking sad while Democrats cheered and cried for half an hour,” Jordan wrote in his account of the election.

Now, 16 years later in 1980, another Kennedy stood before a Democratic convention, not the same as his brothers, not their equal, but having shown himself to be unique in a way that many found admirable. “Ted Kennedy’s words triggered open the floodgates of memories: Camelot, magic rhetoric, and the shock of the assassinations,” Jordan wrote.

Kennedy briefly acknowledged Carter’s victory and congratulated him. But there was a caveat in his promise of party unity. It was not an unqualified support of Carter. He said the unification would happen “on the basis of Democratic principles.”

Kennedy’s last words were a eulogy for his campaign. He sought to capture its essence as having upheld something bigger and greater even than politics. He cast himself in defeat as a prophetic figure whose intransigence and bullheadedness were effort to call his brothers and sisters in the party back to their faith, an attempt to redeem and redirect his wayward party and a wayward president.

“And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our party in 1980 that we found our faith again,” he said.

Kennedy’s final words transcended politics and connected with his family’s past. “May it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of [Alfred, Lord] Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now,” he said, his voice breaking. “‘I am a part of all that I have met. Too much is taken, much abides. That which we are, we are: one equal temper of heroic hearts, strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’”

As he quoted from pieces of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” Kennedy evoked the memory and grief of all the losses and tragedies in the Kennedy family and his own life. “Too much is taken” spoke to the death of Joe Jr. in World War II, JFK’s assassination, Bobby’s assassination, his sister Kathleen’s fatal plane crash, his sister Rosemary’s lobotomy, the cancer that cost his son Teddy Jr. his right leg and the plane crash that nearly killed Ted Kennedy himself. “Much abides” spoke to his sense of gratefulness for what he still had left. “That which we are, we are” was a poetic way of stating what was true: He was a blemished human being, and could not change that. And the closing words of the poem spoke to what had been the driving theme of his candidacy—a determination “not to yield.”

Kennedy’s voice peaked as he paid tribute to his family name and the dream of Camelot: something that was too good to be true, a fairy-tale period that lasted only a short time and had its truest essence more in the minds of JFK’s admirers than in reality.

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die,” Kennedy said.

With one more nod to the audience—a wooden, almost formal nod—and a barely audible “Thank you very much,” he turned from the podium. The hall exploded and the delegates’ applause and cheering lasted almost thirty minutes. It was “one of the great emotional outpourings of convention history,” the New York Times editorial page noted.

The vote on the party platform was to come immediately after Kennedy’s speech, and now the Carter forces were disheartened. All the emotion in the hall was now with Kennedy, and he had made clear in his speech that he believed the party needed to come his way on policy. Jordan and Strauss entreated the whips to fight for their version of the platform, but they knew it was a lost cause. And so they accepted two out of Kennedy’s three proposals: the $12 billion stimulus program and a call for a jobs bill.

The deal that the Carter camp had reached with Kennedy’s people ensured that there would be no official protest or complaint. Still, a sitting president had accepted a platform at his own convention that included measures he opposed.

Carter now had to unite the party in his speech on the convention’s final night. He got off to a rough start. As he began, a loud series of firecrackers went off in the crowd less than a hundred feet to his left, set off by a woman named Signe Waller from the Communist Workers Party. The explosions caused the president to flinch and pause his delivery and rattled everyone in the hall. Secret Service agents removed her and another CWP demonstrator.

Carter reinforced his image as a bumbler by making a verbal gaffe when thanking people at the beginning of his speech. “We’re the party . . . of a great man who should have been president, who would have been one of the greatest presidents in history, Hubert Horatio Hornblower!” he shouted. The crowd reacted with confused applause, and Carter reached for the words to pull them back in with a shouted correction: “Humphrey!” He had mistakenly referred to the former vice president, senator and Democratic nominee for president, who had died of cancer in 1978, as the fictional protagonist of C.S. Forester’s popular series of novels.

The rest of the evening foreshadowed the trouble on the horizon for Carter and the Democrats.

Carter finished his speech at 10:19 p.m., and the band struck up “Happy Days Are Here Again” as his wife Rosalynn, and then Vice President Walter Mondale and his wife, Joan, joined the president onstage. But comedic disaster struck almost immediately. The balloons heldon the ceiling became stuck when the mechanism to release them wouldn’t work. Only a trickle of balloons fell to the floor.

“Whoever’s in charge of balloons at this convention had better find themselves a new job,” cracked ABC’s Ted Koppel. Even Carter came in for abuse from some in the crowd. “Forget the hostages, he can’t get the balloons down,” said one person on the floor, according to Dan Rather.

And all of this was nothing to compare to the disastrous handshake that would come to symbolize the split within the Democratic Party, and the question of whether the wrong nominee had been chosen.

As Kennedy made his way to the convention in a motorcade from the Waldorf Astoria, the cheering inside the hall died down. It was quite a contrast to the response for Kennedy’s speech two nights earlier. The delegates had cheered and danced and sung for 30 minutes then. But for Carter, it took less than 10 minutes for things to quiet down.

Carter’s aides scrambled to keep the party going, to avoid the embarrassment of several minutes of quiet prior to Kennedy’s arrival. Strauss began calling political figures up onto the stage to keep the crowd cheering and the TV audience watching. It was ridiculous. He was calling people no one had heard of or cared about. “This convention right now needs” Kennedy Koppel said on ABC News. “This demonstration here has kind of fizzled out.”

Finally, at 10:36 p.m.—nearly twenty minutes after Carter’s speech had ended—Kennedy reached the doorway to the hall and waited for Strauss to call him up. The buzz of his arrival emanated out into the hall. Loud chants of “We want Ted” rose up.

Strauss announced Kennedy’s name, and the hall drowned out all else with its roar. Kennedy walked into the hall “like an engine coming up the ramp,” ABC anchor Sam Donaldson said. He made his way through the crush of bodies around the stage, and up the three or four stairs onto the podium. Carter awaited him at the top. It was almost like he was a state official standing at the bottom of the stairs outside Air Force One, waiting for the president to come down and shake his hand. Kennedy’s mouth was taut, his eyes were dead, and his brow was slightly furrowed.

After Kennedy shook hands with others on the stage—Rosalynn, Amy and Vice President Walter Mondale—Carter made his move. He took a few steps toward center stage in front of the microphone. It was a clear attempt to bring Kennedy with him and to pose for the cameras, the two of them, hands together and aloft: a long-awaited, badly needed moment of victory for Carter.

Kennedy could not, would not do it. He realized what Carter was doing, and stayed where he was, a few paces away from the podium. He waved to the crowd, nodding his head in a rhythmic way in acknowledgment of them. Carter reached the microphone, apparently thinking or hoping that Kennedy was right behind him. He realized that Kennedy had not come with him, and looked over his left shoulder. He turned back, took a step back and to his left, and extended a hand to Kennedy for a handshake, but he did so with his hand almost at shoulder level. It was a clear invitation to take his hand and raise it high.

The announcers expected Kennedy to give the president what he wanted. “There it is, there’s the moment,” Reynolds said. “Let’s see if we—there it is.” Kennedy stepped forward and shook Carter’s hand, but he did not raise it, and his expression remained an almost somber one. His mouth remained closed, he let go of Carter’s hand, and then he raised his hand again to the crowd. “What we are still lacking,” Koppel said, “is that classical political photograph of the two men arm in arm, holding their hands up together.”

Kennedy shook Carter’s hand again, then he moved past him like he was at a rally and the president was just another nobody on the rope line waiting to shake his hand. He shook hands with Joan Mondale and a few other people behind Carter. The president continued applauding, and then turned back to the microphone, standing at the podium alone. He mouthed the words to the song being sung in the hall. He was by himself.

A few minutes later, Carter spotted his wife and Kennedy shaking hands on the stage and sidled over to shake Kennedy’s hand for a fourth time. And then Kennedy walked down the steps, flashing a raised fist to the crowd before descending. The cameras caught him shaking hands with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton as he made his way away from the stage.

Moments later, Kennedy emerged back on the stage for a curtain call. He shook hands with Carter again, a fifth time, then slipped behind him on the stage while the president clapped with his hands held high. Carter faced forward but kept looking over his shoulder in both directions to see what Kennedy was doing. Kennedy smirked as he nodded toward the crowd. Finally, he made his way off the stage for good. He walked behind the first lady and first daughter, raised his left hand to the crowd, and then saw Carter walking over to stand next to him, still hoping for a moment of unity. The president of the United States was groveling on live TV, in front of the nation, for a photo with the man he had defeated for his own party’s nomination. Roughly 20 million people were watching on live TV. “Well, this is slightly awkward,” NBC’s David Brinkley said.

But Kennedy just chuckled in amusement, patted the still-applauding president on the back, and turned to walk down the stairs. Carter was left pumping his right fist in the air to the crowd as Kennedy exited. It was, reporter Teddy White wrote, “as if he had appeared at the wedding of his chauffeur.”

It was all awkward enough to make the country wonder if Democrats had made the right choice—if the candidate with more centrist cred, but less rock-star appeal, really could take on Reagan. A few months later, they had their answer. It’s possible that Kennedy would have lost to Reagan in the general election, as Carter did. But the Democratic National Convention debacle raised fresh questions for Democrats about whether they had the right alternative to a charismatic former entertainer and Republican candidate like Reagan in 1980.

It’s a question that looks a lot like the one Democrats will try to answer in 2020.