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 20th
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
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