Remembering Jimmy
James Earl Carter was a one-term president who preferred his deeds, rather than his words, to speak for himself.
We are going to hear a lot about Jimmy Carter in the next couple of weeks, as the United States transitions from the 46th presidency to the 47th. There will be deeply partisan assessments of the 39th president. It is indisputable, however, that Carter made history as the president who lived the longest after leaving the White House and was the first to live past the century mark. George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018, made it to 94.
Carter’s legacy will likely be as much about those post-presidential years as the four years he spent as chief executive, which ended in ignominy with Iran holding 52 hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran until minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. Carter had enjoyed support after the the embassy was overtaken, but his popularity faded in April of 1980 when a daring high-risk U.S. commando raid to free the hostages ended in failure in the Iranian desert with eight American soldiers killed in an aircraft accident. Presidents must make risky decisions. If they succeed they share in the heroism. If they fail they must take responsibility.
Carter was frequently depicted as a peanut farmer from Plains. He was no hick, however, having graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and subsequently served as an engineering officer for the power plant on a nuclear submarine.
I first met Carter when he was trying to leap from the Georgia governor’s mansion to the White House. After a campaign speech in Las Vegas I shook his hand, exchanging a few kind words. My impression was that this Democratic Party candidate was a really nice guy, but he did not have the charisma, experience nor eloquence to overcome the pack of more formidable politicians who stood in his way to the nomination. How wrong was my early political prognostication. I subsequently doubted he and Walter Mondale could best the Gerald Ford-Bob Dole ticket in the general election. The Republicans carried more states than the Democrats in the 1976 general election, however Carter captured both the popular and electoral vote counts.
Carter had his accomplishments in the Oval Office. He was the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize (only one of four presidents to be so honored) for the Camp David Accords, an ambitious framework for peace in the Middle East — a goal more elusive today than it was then.
Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan had them dismantled. Carter created the Education Department and the Energy Department. But he would leave office as one of the most unpopular U.S. presidents of modern times. Voters blamed him for the long gas lines, economic malaise and remembered him giving a fireside chat from the White House library in a cardigan sweater urging Americans to conserve energy during one of the coldest winters of the 20th century by keeping “thermostats at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night.”
That speech, noted the Washington Post’s Frederic Frommer this past August, “marked the beginning of a wave of backlash from Republicans that would span years, even decades. They labeled Carter’s address and his cardigan as indicative of weakness and a diminishment of the presidential office. Republican critics accused him of victim-blaming Americans for the energy crisis instead of providing solutions towards energy independence.”
Has any president dared since to deliver a speech while wearing a cardigan?
My fellow Substacker, Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, assesses that Carter’s presidency failed because he was an outsider in his own party and had few true allies among powerful Democrats.
For young Americans in that era, their impressions of presidents were shaped as much by the NBC sketch comedy show ‘Saturday Night Live’ as by the network evening newscasts, which were then still dominant purveyors of information.
Perhaps Carter had been able to defeat Ford because the incumbent was portrayed by Chevy Chase as a brain-damaged klutz (added to widespread disgust over his pardon of Richard Nixon). But Carter (with Dan Aykroyd in the role) was parodied for his responses to inflation, although hip enough to talk a caller down from an acid trip.
Unlike his 20th century predecessors who survived their presidencies, Carter did not retire quietly to a Pennsylvania farm or a California coastal estate. He promoted human rights, helped eradicate Guinea worm disease, built homes for the poor, wrote dozens of books (winning three Grammys for audiobooks) and religiously taught Sunday school. Unlike many politicians, Carter did not engage in these activities for photo ops.
Carter also was an international election observer as part of the global activities of his namesake center based in Atlanta. It was on one of those Carter Center trips, to Nepal, where I last met the former president, interviewing him a couple of times during the course of a critical election in that country in 2009 for my on-scene VOA reporting. As I wrote in my book Behind the White House Curtain, I did not have the heart to confess to Carter how I had sold him short 33 years earlier.
Both the 45th and 46th presidents paid tribute to Carter on Sunday evening.
Donald Trump posted a couple of times on his Truth Social platform. Trump noted although he strongly disagreed with Carter “philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for. He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect. He was a truly good man and, of course, will be greatly missed. He was also very consequential, far more than most Presidents, after he left the Oval Office.”
Joe Biden, took a break from his vacation in the U.S. Virgin Islands to appear before pool reporters who hastily gathered to hear the president speak and answer questions for nine minutes, telling them “Jimmy Carter lived a life measured not by words, but by deeds. Biden noted that Carter "changed lives and saved lives all over the globe."
Biden, in what will be taken as a late season swipe at Trump, also said: “Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or where they talk? I can't. I can't."
Biden, who said he will order a state funeral in Washington for Carter, will share a spot in presidential history with him as among the few Democrats who only won a single term.
Flags are to fly at half-staff for 30 days after a U.S. president dies. That means the Stars & Stripes will not be fully raised the day Trump returns to office as the 47th president.
