Published December 30, 2024
In the summer of 1975, a little white man stood on a straight-backed chair in an upstairs conference room of the hotel, a Radisson or a Hyatt. He was surrounded by black labor leaders, big men with cigars and diamond pinky rings and a knowing, unfoolable air. They were in Atlanta for the Urban League’s annual conference, and they eyed the white man with mild curiosity. All they had been told was that he was the former governor of Georgia and that he wanted to have a few words with them.
He began to speak: “When I am president . . . ” It sounded as if he said: Win ah im prissident.
He started to tell them about what he would do when he got to the White House. They chuckled at the effrontery. They raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances ribald with amusement. Who IS this cracker?
He had a blotched complexion and sandy hair and a Chiclet smile. He looked like Tom Sawyer; you thought he should have a fishing pole over his shoulder. But, looking again, you noticed that his big, cold blue eyes, the color of glacier ice, were enameled with a hard intelligence and had a force of will and stubbornness in them. You had an inkling that he was serious and that your first impression might have been wrong.
Almost nobody outside Georgia knew Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Plains, in the red clay country in the southern part of the state. He wasn’t a rube. He’d left Plains and seen something of the world, graduating from Annapolis at the end of the war. He stayed in the Navy for ten years and worked on nuclear submarines with the legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover. He went back home when his daddy died and left him the peanut business. He got into politics.
His sudden ascent into history was a matter of reflexes and timing. By the time he stood on the chair in Atlanta in 1975, the country had been through the wringer six or seven times. Richard Nixon had resigned the previous summer, ruined by Watergate. President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes and misdemeanors. The pardon seemed to add to the squalor. In the spring of ’75, the last Americans made their slovenly exit from Saigon: in their haste they dumped their helicopters like empty beer cans into the South China Sea. It was the vivid end of a wanton war, the country’s first outright military defeat. Stagflation and recession ate away at the economy. The country was demoralized, clinically depressed. Everyone agreed: America was in decline. The 1970s were the price to be paid for the 1960s—the lousy morning after.
It was in this unhappy atmosphere that Jimmy Carter saw his opportunity. The meek shall inherit the earth. He picked his way through the 1976 primaries against a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates (Jerry Brown, George Wallace, Mo Udall, Scoop Jackson, Sargent Shriver, Birch Bayh, and others) and came up with the Democratic nomination. He was a stranger to Washington. That was a plus. He represented a possibility of restored innocence, a good man emerging from the country’s remnant heartland decency. A peanut farmer shall lead them. An outsider might (to use a phrase from the future) drain the swamp. He promised, “I will never lie to you.” Voters knew that, on certain matters, two of their recent presidents (Nixon and Lyndon Johnson) had been spectacular liars. Carter would be the not-Nixon, the not-Johnson—a Georgia sunbeam.
But presidents are either lucky or unlucky. Carter was unlucky. The 1970s were on the whole a bummer; Carter was no match for the jinx. In his afflicted presidency, bad luck colluded with his flickering attraction to martyrdom, or, to state it more carefully, his tendency to set himself up for failure, as if in order to struggle against it and overcome it in some spiritually triumphant way. He was full of scruples—willful and stubborn and accident-prone.
In the White House and after, it was Jimmy Carter’s most ruthless ambition to be a good man, which might have brought to mind Aristotle’s warning that “a good man may not be identical to a good citizen”—or make a good president. Even if you admired Carter’s performance, you might approve something that Machiavelli wrote: “Any man who under all conditions insists on making it his business to be good, will surely be destroyed among so many who are not good.” Machiavelli stipulated that there are the Christian virtues (forgiveness, compassion, the beatitudes) and the pagan virtues (the antiqua virtus of courage, glory, ruthlessness), and that these two great codes are simply incompatible with one another: the wise prince will opt for the nastier, pagan way. Isaiah Berlin published a brilliant essay on all this, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” five years before Carter took office.
On Inauguration Day in January 1977, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter left the presidential limousine and walked hand in hand down Pennsylvania Avenue. The sweet touch of his simplicity: he wore cardigan sweaters, like the dad in a fifties family sitcom. He carried his own bag off the plane. He gave America a theater of, shall we say, ostentatious modesty. Some dismissed it as affectation. They detected the odor of sanctimony.
Under Carter, another energy crisis came on, tripling the price of oil. Inflation grew by 200 percent. Mount St. Helens blew up. Three Mile Island melted down. Carter gave away the Panama Canal. Over-attentive to detail, he kept an eye on which staffers got to use the White House tennis courts.
He had the mind of an engineer and a Sunday school teacher, but whether things were in his control or out of it, they had a way of going wrong. His brief stretch of history seemed snake-bitten. The “misery index” (inflation plus unemployment) went through the roof. Revisionist historians have begun to write more favorably of Carter, but now that he is gone—at 100, the longest-lived U.S. president—it will be hard for him to escape the historical verdict that his one, somewhat-hapless term served mostly as an interlude between much bigger acts.
Carter took the stage after a Shakespearean decade. It was not entirely his fault that he came off as a letdown, an anticlimax after the assassinated young god of the boomers’ youth and the two complex villains, Johnson and Nixon. And he set the stage for Ronald Reagan. In such company, Carter seems one of the minor poets.
In the first year of his presidency, Elvis died; in the last year, John Lennon was murdered. The humorist Dave Barry wrote that the most memorable event of the Carter presidency occurred the day that he was attacked in his canoe by the notorious “killer rabbit”—a big, panicked, feral creature, known locally as a “swamp rabbit,” that swam hissing and gnashing its teeth toward the president as he was fishing. There was merriment in the press.
On the other hand, Carter brokered peace between Israel and Egypt in the Camp David accords. Blessed are the peacemakers. It was the high point of his presidency, and it established the themes of his long, internationally active post-presidency—monitoring foreign elections, cajoling and flattering dictators, flirting with violations of the Logan Act, and withal receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Alas for Carter, the most memorable event of his tenure was not the killer rabbit but, rather, the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis, which commenced in November 1979. Walter Cronkite signed off each night’s broadcast by informing his viewers how many days had passed since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s mobs had taken over the United States embassy—a sadistic reminder of Carter’s, and America’s, weakness and humiliation. When Carter authorized a daring rescue mission, U.S. rescue helicopters ignited in the desert. Carter never quite lived it down. The hostages were released, and the crisis ended, only on January 20, 1981—the day that he handed the presidency over to Reagan.
Then came the four-plus decades that would lead many Americans to conclude that while Carter had been, on the whole, unsuccessful in the White House, he was surely the finest ex-president. The international work of the Carter Center in Africa and elsewhere; Jimmy and Rosalynn’s modest ranch house in Plains; their regular labors (wearing hard hats, wielding hammers) for Habitat for Humanity—such gestures invested him, over the years, with a saintly aura in the eyes of many, especially in contrast to the styles of other ex-presidents who have reveled in life among the 1 percent. Americans beheld the Clintons’ dodgy opulence and, more recently, Barack and Michelle Obama’s accession to enormous fortune, including a $15 million beach house on Martha’s Vineyard. They saw in Carter—as they first did in 1976, before he went to the White House—more enduring virtues.
That might have been the agreed-upon storyline, anyway, except for certain moral complications. Carter from time to time had odd, almost unaccountable affinities—notably his habit, even compulsion, to associate with very bad people: dictators, thugs, people like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Haiti’s Raul Cédras, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, or the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat. Carter courted and flattered such figures in his travels and abetted them in their oppressions of the poor, who were supposedly blessed. The Christian side of Carter was always negotiating with the pagans and trying to appease them. This produced erratic behavior. He maddened President Clinton by over-meddling in negotiations with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. He told the New York Times, a little weirdly, that “Mrs. Cédras was impressive, powerful and forceful. And attractive. She was slim and very attractive.” (Students of Carter remembered his long-ago admission to Playboy that he had sinned by entertaining “lust in my heart.”)
Carter’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, which amounted, officially, to his trademark—his Christian identification with the underdog—somehow (by a Machiavellian turn in his psychology) was transmuted into an amoral chumminess with over-dogs. This seemed perverse. Worse, it seemed a self-righteous brand of anti-Americanism.
In the early 1980s, Carter visited the real estate developer and future president Donald Trump in New York and asked him to contribute $5 million to the Carter Center. Trump was startled by the ex-president’s chutzpah and hardly bothered to answer. But he admitted later that he admired the ambition and even the gall of the request. Carter, a religious Baptist from rural Georgia, had no trouble in asking for the money, or in seeking the presidency, because he believed in miracles. But some miracles turn out better than others.
Lance Morrow was the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focused on the moral and ethical dimensions of public events, including developments regarding freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and political correctness on American campuses, with a view to the future consequences of such suppressions.
