Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on ‘The Smallest Acts of Daily Life’)

“The fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.”— Conservative commentator David Brooks, “Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be,” The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2022

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Hollywood Squares,’ on Airline Security)

Peter Marshall: “True or false: Some airlines now give you a thorough frisking before permitting you to board the plane.”

Paul Lynde: “That’s the only reason I fly.”—Game-show host Peter Marshall (1926-2024) and comic actor Paul Lynde (1926-1982) quoted by Daniel E. Slotnik, “Peter Marshall, Longtime Host of ‘The Hollywood Squares,’ Dies at 98,” The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2024

Quote of the Day (Tom Wolfe, on ‘Jersey Teenagers’ When First on the Loose in NYC)

“The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teenagers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other.”—American “New Journalist” and novelist Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited,” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

The term “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” is believed to have first appeared in print in a December 1977 New York Times article, quoting Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell. But a dozen years before, Tom Wolfe had analyzed, with a sociologist’s exactitude and a zest all his own, the youthful contingent of this mobile brigade.

As I read the above passage, I did some quick math. The teens that Wolfe was describing, if they are alive today, would be grandparents.

Years earlier, when they had kids of their own, they had to endure with their adolescent girls the same ritual they’d tried out with their parents: i.e., “put those patient curls in your lips and tell Mother—you have to spell it out for her like a kid—that yes, you're going out with some of your girlfriends, and no, you don’t know where you’re going, and yes, you won’t be out late, and for God’s sake, like don’t panic all the time, and then, with an I-give-up groan, tell her that ‘for God’s sake’ is not cursing.”

Quote of the Day (Frederick Douglass, on When Political Parties Are Strong)

“[P]olitical parties, like individual men, are only strong while they are consistent and honest, and… treachery and deception are only the sand on which political fools vainly endeavor to build.”— American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of Jimmy Carter, ‘Dasher’ From Plains)

Oct. 1, 1924— Jimmy Carter, who rose improbably from a humble speck on a map to the highest office in the land, was born in a hospital in Plains, Ga.—the first Oval Office occupant who came into the world in this formal medical institution.

Plains left its imprint on Carter in all kinds of ways. Indeed, it lies at the heart of one of the paradoxes of his life: a leader of fierce ambition who nevertheless kept coming back to a community and way of life where he could be of service.

Not that he never had the opportunity to leave for good, or that others didn’t want him to move. For instance, wife Rosalynn (a fellow Plains native) regarded it as a “monumental step backward” when he announced he was resigning from the U.S. Navy in 1953 to return to the town where his father Earl had made a difference in the life of other residents as a successful businessman who continually aided others.

When Carter’s Presidency ended after a single term in 1981, he didn’t go on the lecture circuit where he could charge exorbitant fees to business and industry groups, or hobnob on Martha’s Vineyard with fashionable culturati, but went back to Plains, where, finding the family peanut business $1 million in the red when placed in a blind trust during his President, they began to pare down their debt as they started a new life.

Trust me: It can be difficult blogging about a person or event in such a way that readers come away having learned anything new. No matter how often one may return to someone as consequential as a President, no single post, no matter how intrinsically interesting (as I believe was the case with Carter’s energy policy, recounted here), can do justice to a career.

For that reason, when I can, I try to write about something I’ve experienced directly relating to that. Fortunately, there were two such events relating to Carter.

The first involved not President Carter, but candidate Carter. Back in 1976, when he first ran for President, he had devoted much of his early resources to the Iowa Presidential caucus, effectively putting that state on the political map by placing first among the Democratic contenders. 

The code name that the Secret Service initially used for him, “Dasher,” testified to the tireless marathon campaign he subsequently conducted until his victory that fall.

The New Jersey Democratic primary, though held in June, was nothing like the afterthought it’s become in recent quadrennial cycles.

As a high school sophomore then in the first week of June, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see a potential President once I learned Carter was coming to my hometown of Englewood, NJ.

(I felt the same way in 1984, when Gary Hart came to Bergen County. I’m afraid that the candidate subsequently got into hot water when he took literally the musician warming up the crowd for him, Stephen Stills, when he performed “Love the One You’re With.”)

The 1976 Carter appearance in Englewood occurred at Galilee United Methodist Church, whose primarily African-American congregation was emblematic of one of a major component of the base he was cobbling together in a campaign that took the Democratic establishment by surprise.

Carter was introduced to the crowd by civil rights icon Andrew Young, eloquently vouching for him as an exemplar of a “New South” shedding its segregationist past at long last—a characterization all the more helpful for any in the audience who recalled the candidate’s remarks only two months before in which he used the phrase “ethnic purity” to defend the purity of white neighborhoods in cities.

(After his election, Carter appointed Young U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—then forced his resignation two years later in the fallout over an unauthorized meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization.)

I don’t recall any policy positions that Carter enunciated that afternoon—he had carefully blurred many of them throughout the primary season—but I vividly remember, as he vigorously shook one hand after another, that grin so toothy that it became the fallback feature for cartoonists during his Presidency.

And I recollect the circumstances he faced then: Major rivals on the right (George Wallace, Henry Jackson) and the left (Morris Udall) had lost losing key primaries, leaving only Sen. Frank Church, Gov. Jerry Brown, and aging party lion Sen. Hubert Humphrey in a last-ditch “Anybody But Carter” movement.

The key takeaway of Carter’s address, then, in between his usual stump speech that he would be offering “a government as good as its people” to a country sick of Washington, was that the Democratic powers that be were united against him.

If this moment in time has any significance at all now, it’s as a foreshadowing of what happened with the Republicans 40 years later, when alarmed party leaders mounted their own effort against a candidate they feared would not make it that fall: Donald Trump.

In both campaigns, the leading candidate had built up too high a delegate candidate—and there were still too many candidates dividing the opposition to him—for the “Stop” movement to work.

The second event related to Carter that I was involved with, indirectly, came after he left office. Not only, like most 20^th century Presidents, did he want to write a memoir giving his side of the story, but, with so much debt hanging over his head from the decline of the peanut business, he wanted to do so quickly.

Still, he wanted to do a good job of it—so, as he had done before he delivered his disastrous “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979, he called together the best minds he could think of for their advice. One such expert was the college professor I had for a year-long seminar on the American Presidency.

So my professor polled his experts—his students—on the single subject they wanted the President to cover.

I don’t think my topic was unusual. As much as anything else, the protracted Iranian hostage crisis had conveyed an image of American impotence, and had probably crystallized for the public a growing sense of Carter as incompetent. The Iranian militants had already given signs of growing radicalism. Why, then, had Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran for cancer treatment?

Carter insisted that he’d been told that the Shah was so close to death that the treatment he required was only available in the U.S. (It turned out, as Robin Young and Samantha Raphelson reported for Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR in January 2020, that David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and former shah attorney John J. McCloy exaggerated the lack of medical options available to the Shah.)

The group gathered to meet Carter in 1981 included among its luminaries Edmund Morris. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt urged the ex-President to concentrate on creating a narrative, stressing that Carter’s was a great story that demonstrated the possibilities of America.

Published a year later, Carter’s Keeping Faith turned out to be in much the same vein as nearly all Presidential memoirs: stodgy and self-justifying, not one that most readers would enjoy reading. Maybe he just needed time to find his voice and best subject matter, though: An Hour Before Midnight, his memoir of growing up in Plains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.

What struck me about Carter’s meeting with these historians was less what he (or they) said or did but how he appeared—or, rather, how he and Rosalynn appeared. The sofa where the two sat was quite large, my professor recalled, but the former First Couple sat so close together that it represented a casual, maybe even unconscious, indication of their comfort in each other’s company, the product of a marriage that lasted 77 years—the longest in Presidential history.

With so much of Carter’s career turning on improbabilities, maybe the greatest of all might be the final chapter going on now. The former President has been in hospice care for 19 months, a far cry from the six months that 90% of such patients undergo.

He has defied the medical odds, just as he defied the low expectations of those who met him for the first time years ago. He has outlived some of his detractors and earned the surprised respect of others (including me) who regard him as a model for a modern ex-President.

Surely, Carter regards his longevity as a blessing—but even many Americans who thought of him as ultimately a failed President are likely to see what he has served as an active private citizen as a blessing to his country

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on a Mistake Made by Young Writers)

“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”—American fiction writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Preface to How to Write Short Stories (1924)