10 Short Stories about Jimmy Carter, Part I

We announced that we were going dark for a (work)week. This upended the normal course of things, since we haven't been dark for that many days in a row in nearly a decade. It would seem the universe did not approve, because roughly 6 hours after we posted that announcement, Jimmy Carter died. Are we murderers? Maybe.

As we have noted in the past, we cannot match the obituaries being produced by the major news outlets. First, they have been writing and revising their Carter obits for half a century. There is a well above average chance that some of the people being credited for obits today have, themselves, passed away (to take one example, the fellow who wrote the bulk of The New York Times' obituary, back in the 1970s, is Roy Reed, who died in 2017). Second, if one of the major news outlets wants to get a response from Carter's kids, or one of his still-living Cabinet members (there are five; Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal; Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall; Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr.; and U.N. Ambassadors Andrew Young and Donald McHenry), then those outlets can get those people on the phone. We can't.

So, if you want a good, solid, old-fashioned obit, then you can read the one from the Times, or you can read the ones from The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Associated Press, Rolling Stone, NPR, the BBC, The Guardian or Al Jazeera. They're all somewhere between "good" and "excellent," and they all cover pretty much the same ground, so you probably don't need to read more than one of two of them. We tried to get a Canadian outlet among the foreign examples, since two of the best known incidents of Carter's career involved that nation (the "Canadian Caper" and the incident we describe below), but every Canadian newspaper we looked at is running with the AP story. Wonder what they might be working on that leaves them too busy to write a custom obit. Hmmm....

Similarly, if you would like to know how various key figures have responded, well:

• The Carter Center
• Vice President Kamala Harris
• President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden
• Barack Obama
• George W. Bush
• Bill and Hillary Clinton
• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
• Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA)
• Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA)
• Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)
• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
• Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
• Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA)
• Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA)
• Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower
• Martin Luther King III
• The U.S. Navy
• The United States Naval Academy
• Habitat for Humanity

This is not an exhaustive list, obviously, but it gives a pretty good sense of things, particularly from the people and organizations whose thoughts are (probably) of most interest. As with the obituaries, they do tend to cover a lot of the same ground. In fact, we took the content of all of the above linked statements, removed the words "jimmy" and "carter" and then produced a word cloud of the 100 most frequently used words:

That gives a pretty good sense of the tone and tenor of things.

In any event, what we are going to do is something we've done on the passing of a few other notables, such as Dianne Feinstein, something that (hopefully) plays to our strengths: We're going to present some anecdotes from Carter's life. In Feinstein's case, we did 10, but given Carter's significance, we prepped to do... forty. Actually, truth be told, we were aiming for 32, because of the movie Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, but things spilled over by a bit.

Needless to say, to run them all at once would be... a lot. So, we're going to run 10 per day, each day this week except for January 1 (when we need to go dark to work on the site software). That means that the next weekday that will be completely normal is Monday, January 6. Since we did the prep for this several months ago, it's not THAT far removed from taking a break.

As a rule, we have mostly avoided the really famous stuff, since you can get that from the obits. If we do delve into one of the more famous parts of his story, it will be to give some thoughts beyond the normal narrative. The stories are laudatory, more often than not, but they most certainly are not ALL laudatory. We've organized them in roughly chronological order; all of the ones today come from before Carter was president. We hope this approach will help give a sense of the man and his times, in a different manner from an obituary. And with all that said, away we go:

1. Not Born in a Manger: This is one of (Z)'s favorite pieces of "bar trivia": Carter was the first U.S. president to have been born in a hospital.
   
   Since World War II, give or take a few years, there has been a pretty clear correlation between hospitals and wealth. That is to say, the wealthier a person is, the more likely they are to go to a hospital for various treatments and procedures, including the delivery of a child. Before World War II, there was also a correlation, but it was basically the reverse. That is to say, wealthier people could afford to summon a doctor to their homes, and hospitals were mostly for poor people who did not have that privilege (frontier dwellers of the 19th century also delivered babies and had healthcare at home because there was no other option).
   
   That, then, is the reason that Carter was born in a hospital. While the other presidents born in the early 20th century—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan—came from families that were either wealthy, or at least had the means to afford home healthcare, Carter, as he explained later in life, "lived in relative isolation in a rural community [and] didn't have electricity or running water in our house until I was 14 years old." And the role of poverty in this story actually goes beyond that. His mother, Lillian, was employed as a nurse at the nearest hospital, Wise Sanitarium. On the advice of the physician she worked with, Dr. Sam Wise, she delivered at the hospital because it would mean a shorter recovery time, and thus fewer lost days of pay.
   
   
2. Racial Niceties: Although Carter's family was not well off when he was born, their fortunes improved some as he moved into adolescence, such that they were not only able to acquire running water and electricity, but also a radio. He noted, frequently, that his single most vivid childhood memory involved the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight of 1936, which was one of the biggest sporting events of the first half of the 20th century. Several of the former president's Black neighbors, not having a radio of their own, asked if they might join the Carters in listening to the fight. That was agreeable, and so around a dozen people listened in the family's living room as Louis (who was Black) defeated Schmeling (who was white).
   
   The fight over, the Black visitors politely thanked Carter's father for inviting them into his home, and walked back to their house, about a hundred yards away. "At this point," Carter noted, "pandemonium broke loose inside that house, as our Black neighbors shouted and yelled in celebration of the Louis victory." He never forgot that "all the curious, accepted proprieties of a racially-segregated society had been carefully observed," and he regarded this as a key moment in crystallizing his dislike for racial boundaries.
   
   
3. Entry into Public Life: Anyone who follows politics knows that Carter was both U.S. president and governor of Georgia. Most probably know that, prior to his 4 years as governor, he spent 4 years in the Georgia state Senate. But his first foray into public service, and his first paying job, was serving as a member of the Sumter County Library Board, which he did while a teenager. He recounted: "We set up a traveling library, the bookmobile... it would come to Plains and stop in the grove... I think twice a week. And anybody in town could come and check out books from the bookmobile." This helped foster a lifelong love of reading, and of writing. Carter would go on to write over 30 books, running the gamut from world affairs and faith to children's literature and poetry.
   
   In case you are wondering, Carter's favorite book was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. If you are not familiar with it, the title, which is derived from a line in an ancient Jewish wisdom book, probably gives the wrong impression. The work is not actually about famous men, as that concept is generally understood; it is photographs and text that tell the story of three Southern tenant-farming families during the Great Depression. "What impressed me with that book," Carter wrote," was the tremendous chasm between people who have everything, who have a house and a job and education and adequate diets, and a sense of success or security, who want to do good things, and the vast array of people still in our country who don't have any of these things, and whom we seldom, if ever, know. That book, among other things, woke me up to the fact that we still have people like this next door, and we are not doing much about it."
   
   
4. Ditch Day: Although he put together an impressive record of academic achievement, Carter was not the valedictorian of his high school class. That is because he and a group of friends participated in the school's customary, but definitely non-sanctioned, senior ditch day. Carter got all zeroes for that day, his main competitor did not ditch, and so did not, with the result that the future president ended up as salutatorian. He was nonetheless the only member of his graduating class to earn a college diploma—and, indeed, finished in the Top 10% of his class at the United States Naval Academy.
   
   Incidentally, Carter's senior year of high school was the 11th grade. There was no 12th grade in Georgia until 1945.
   
   
5. O, Canada: Most people familiar with Carter's biography know that his course of study at Annapolis resulted in a (military) career as a nuclear engineer. The future president never faced combat, as he did not finish school until after World War II was over, and there wasn't much naval warfare during the Korean War.
   
   That said, Carter did get a chance to display his bravery before leaving the service. In 1952, a nuclear reactor in Deep River, ON, Canada, exploded, and then-Lieutenant Carter was ordered to join the 26-man team tasked with helping neutralize the damaged equipment. To practice, Carter & Co. built a full-scale replica of the reactor on a tennis court. They had to get their movements down pat, as the scientists' best guess was that 90 seconds in the damaged reactor was the maximum exposure that a human could tolerate.
   
   When the rescue operation was actually conducted, the Americans entered the reactors in teams of three. Carter and the two fellows who entered with him spent 89 seconds in the reactor, and the mission was a success. That said, he absorbed as much radiation in those 89 seconds as a person generally absorbs in about a year, and his urine tested positive for radioactivity for more than 6 months. Doctors warned him that between that experience, and a family history of cancer, he was at high risk of dying of that disease. It's possible they were right, though not on the timeline they presumably envisioned.
   
   
6. Still a Politician: When politicians, and in particular presidents, get a reputation for being very honest, people often forget that they were/are still politicians. This is particularly noticeable when looking at the popular perceptions of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Carter.
   
   A pretty good illustration of how Carter was more than willing to play the game, when necessary, is his evolving position on civil rights. As we note in the Joe Louis story above, Carter claimed to be anti-racist and anti-segregationist from a young age, and he was almost certainly telling the truth about that. When fellow residents of his hometown of Plains, GA, formed a White Citizens Council (essentially, a more respectable version of the KKK), Carter refused to join, and his home was repeatedly defaced with racist signage. In his first campaign for office, in 1962, he made this incident a key part of his story, and was elected handily, substantially on the strength of Black votes.
   
   Four years later, Carter decided to run for governor of Georgia. He once again leaned into his pro-civil rights record, up against Lester Maddox in the Democratic primary. Maddox had absolutely no experience in office before this; he became a public figure for exactly one reason: He defied the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and refused to serve Black patrons in his restaurant. During the campaign, Maddox' favorite line was describing Martin Luther King Jr. as an "enemy of the people." Carter not only lost the primary, he finished in third place, as Maddox went on to victory.
   
   When Carter took another crack at the governorship in 1970 (at that time, governors were limited to one term), he concluded that "pro-civil rights" was not viable statewide, and staked out a position on race that was somewhere between "moderate" and "conservative." Most obviously, he criticized his main Democratic opponent, Carl Sanders (who had been governor before Maddox) for... supporting Martin Luther King Jr. That helped the future president secure the white, conservative vote, and thus the nomination. And in those days, in the South, "I won the Democratic nomination" meant "I won the general election." Carter took more than 60% of the vote on Election Day. Interestingly that included many votes from Black Georgians. Leroy Johnson (D), one of the few Black state Senators to be serving in that era, explained: "I understand why he ran that kind of ultra-conservative campaign. I don't believe you can win this state without being a racist."
   
   In other words, Black voters were gambling that the 1960s Carter was the real article, and not the 1970 Carter. They guessed right. In his inaugural address, Carter decreed: "At the end of a long campaign, I believe I know the people of our state as well as anyone. Based on this knowledge of Georgians North and South, Rural and Urban, liberal and conservative, I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over." And one of the first things he did upon moving into the governor's mansion was install a large portrait of... Martin Luther King Jr. He was, of course, finished pandering to racists from that point forward.
   
   
7. Hooray for Hollywood: Since the advent of motion pictures, most presidents have enjoyed the occasional movie. There are three presidents, however, who can be described as real film buffs: Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
   
   While Carter was governor of Georgia, the 1972 film Deliverance was a huge hit and brought much money and interest to northern Georgia. If you know the film, you might consider that to be a little odd, but it is what it is. This inspired Carter to create the Georgia Film Office in 1973, to facilitate the production of many more film projects in the state. The list of films and TV shows made possible by this office is quite long (over 2,500 entries) and includes, among other notables, Roots, Smokey and the Bandit, The Big Chill, Revenge of the Nerds, Matlock, Driving Miss Daisy, My Cousin Vinny, The Fugitive, Forrest Gump, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Black Panther and pretty much the entire Tyler Perry empire.
   
   During his presidency, Carter viewed over 400 films in the White House's screening room; he said his favorite film of all time was All the President's Men. In a 1977 address to the American Film Institute, Carter observed: "The movies have touched all our lives—mine as a farm boy. It gave me a vision of the outside world. I'm sure the first time I saw the White House was in the back seat of a movie theater."
   
   
8. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You): Most folks know that, for its first year or so, the Carter campaign was going nowhere. Those same folks, if they were to pause and consider the matter for a moment, would realize that the 1976 election was the first close election in which voters 18 to 21 could vote (1972 was a blowout). Both parties wanted to lay claim to that demographic. Carter knew he was (primarily) up against Mo Udall in the Democratic primaries, and then would be up against Gerald Ford in the general. Both of these men were so square they could be divided by four. Taking stock of all of this, the Carter campaign decided to embrace rock and roll as part of its branding.
   
   Now, please note, Carter certainly loved him some music and some pop culture, but he wasn't going to embrace any musician who was TOO dangerous. No Led Zeppelin, and certainly no Ramones or Stooges. However, he did get the endorsements of a bunch of Southern rockers (and semi-rockers), including the Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, Jimmy Buffett, Charlie Daniels and Willie Nelson. All of these artists also staged one or more benefit concerts, with the money going to the campaign. This helped enormously with the youth vote, and also with keeping the lights on at campaign headquarters. It's enough a part of Carter's story that there's a documentary about it, Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President.
   
   
9. Lust in His Heart: The notorious Playboy interview, conducted during the 1976 presidential campaign, in which Carter admitted that "I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it" is one of the very best known parts of the Carter lore.
   
   This being the case, we would not include it in this item, except for the fact that the real significance of the event has largely been forgotten. Consistent with the "straight shooter" image that Carter developed, the Playboy interview is usually mentioned as an example of his willingness to speak his mind truthfully. That is all good and well, but the considerably more significant story here is that until that interview, Carter had evangelical voters locked up, while opponent Gerald Ford basically never talked about religion.
   
   However, the Ford campaign had advance notice of the interview, and decided to "counterprogram." So, the day that issue of Playboy hit the shelves, the White House hosted a group of 34 prominent evangelical leaders to discuss "values." Ford also began to talk about his religious convictions on the campaign trail (he was an Episcopalian), even though he never became entirely comfortable with that.
   
   Obviously, Jesus did not save the election for Ford. However, Jesus did make it very close. Most obviously, polls of Texas had Carter up by 20 or more before the Playboy interview. After the interview, the most prominent evangelical in Texas, W.S. "Wally" Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, switched loyalties to Ford. Ultimately, Carter won Texas by just 3 points. Republican strategists took note that the overt racism of Nixon's Southern strategy wasn't working too well anymore. However, they also noticed that most of the main evangelicals had once been outspoken segregationists. That seemed to suggest that a heaping helping of "Christian values," with a dog-whistle undercurrent of racism, could be a winner. Thus was born what scholars describe as "Southern Strategy v2.0." When did "Southern Strategy v2.0" stop working? We'll let you know when that happens.
   
   
10. Data Driven: News organizations began to use computers to crunch polling numbers and vote tallies in the 1950s. But the first political campaign to make aggressive use of the technology was almost certainly the 1976 Carter campaign. In order to get work done while flying between campaign stops Carter's staff set up a computer system that could send and receive data from 30,000 feet in the air. No big thing today, but pretty revolutionary in that time. In an article entitled "The Computer-Driven Candidate," The Washington Post's David S. Broder wrote:

    "Peanut One," Jimmy Carter's campaign jet, is the first such candidate aircraft to be equipped with two computers.
    
    The one in the back, a wicked, purring creature, is hooked in by elaborate circuitry to the schedule, media, and organization staff in the Atlanta headquarters; to running mate Fritz Mondale's plane; to the wealth of polling data produced by Pat Caddell in Cambridge; and to the information retrieval services of The New York Times library. It produces endless sheets of high-speed data, all properly coded.
    
    But impressive as it is, the computer in the back takes second place to that housed up front, inside the head of Jimmy Carter. The peanut-farmer/atomic-engineer is the closest thing to a computer-driven candidate this technical age has yet produced.

    Other reporters were equally impressed, and there were several pieces of this sort.

Tomorrow, 10 stories from Carter's presidential years. (Z)

Reader Reflections on Jimmy Carter, Part I

When Jimmy Carter's health took a turn for the worse, and it was clear the end was near, we asked readers to send in their thoughts on the 39th president. We've also gotten some new ones, since the news broke, and we will undoubtedly get more over the course of this week. So, we're going to share some of those, half a dozen at a time:

• J.T. in Islip, NY: A year after I aged into being a voter in 1975, I felt fortunate to be able to vote for Jimmy Carter. He was intelligent, accomplished, caring and, in some way, a man of the people. Versus Ronald Reagan—a paragon of falsity, bravado and shallowness. That vote was especially sweet because it counterbalanced my Goldwater-besotted father's knee-jerk vote for whatever Republican appeared on the ballot. Thank you, Jimmy—for who you were then, who you became after your presidency and who you remained to 100. Well-lived, peanut farmer.
  
  
• S.W. in Erie, CO: Every time I met President Carter at an Executive Briefing at the Carter Center, I would tell him the same thing, "You were the first president I ever voted for." Unlike our previous (and future) president, after Carter's lost 1980 campaign, he and his wife went back to their modest ranch home in Plains, founded the Carter Center, and did nothing but good works for as long as they capably could. He and Rosalynn were approachable, down-to-earth, and beloved in their community, even though many of their neighbors had differing political views. He will undoubtedly be our last farmer-president.
  
  During the Q&A sessions with his Carter Center donors, the former president was honest, direct, and answered questions with no equivocation. After one donor asked if Tony Blair was an effective leader for his country during the Iraq War, Carter's response was a simple "no," which elicited a few chuckles from the audience used to vague answers from politicians. He would often remind his audience that his term was a rare time of peace for our country. As he famously said, "We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet."
  
  When speaking about gay rights, Carter maintained that Jesus never spoke against homosexuals, even though homosexuality was well-known during the time of his earthly ministry. I remember when he left the Southern Baptist Church because they voted that women should no longer serve in leadership roles in their churches. Before he was well known, he was the only white man in Plains to refuse to join the segregationist White Citizens' Council. His faith was always the driving force behind his works of mercy and his unwavering support for civil rights. Despite the derision of his detractors, President Carter strove to make a difference, and he did.
  
  
• L.S. in Queens, NY: When George W. Bush left office, he started painting. It was controversial. I remarked, "When George W. Bush left office, he picked up a paint brush. When Jimmy Carter left office, he picked up a hammer and built homes. I like Carter's choice better."
  
  May we all make the world better because we were here.
  
  
• T.K. in Fayetteville, NY: In the spring of 1979, an accident at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania led to the evacuation of all students attending Dickinson College. For me and five of my friends, the time off from school meant a road trip and a chance to spend a day or two in our nation's capital. Young and invincible, we drove by the Unit 2 reactor that was leaking radiation and headed toward Washington, D.C.
  
  When we arrived at the White House, we discovered the President of the United States jogging around the grounds in dark socks and light-colored shorts. As he came within earshot, the six of us began to shout that we were refugees from Three Mile Island. President Carter wanted nothing to do with us and ran in the other direction. We thought we were hilarious. The Secret Service agents arrayed on the South Lawn were less amused. We decided it was time to move on.
  
  I never faulted the president for avoiding us. We probably looked like a bunch of lunatics and he had enough on his plate already. Unlike many of his critics, I believe the humble peanut farmer from Plains has been consistently underrated. Brilliant, honest and forthright, his concern for protecting our environment and his ironclad commitment to democracy and human rights will form a lasting legacy. With our nation now imperiled by vain and self-serving windbags, we could certainly use more people like Georgia's Jimmy Carter. May he rest in peace.
  
  
• R.T. in Arlington, TX: As I reflect on Jimmy Carter, I see many parallels between him and Joe Biden. Both served in the wake of high-drama, scandal-laden presidencies. Their appeal came in part because they were moderates. Carter ran as an outsider, and while Biden was an ultimate insider, he came back from a stint on the outside. Each had a competitive primary season when they were elected. Both convey(ed) true decency and compassion—not an act. Each inherited a foreign policy mess, with Carter dealing with the results of decades-long propping up of the Shah of Iran and Biden dealing with the results of the decades-long military interventions in Afghanistan. The Camp David Accords were nothing short of heroic in the annals of peacemaking. The two men's biggest weakness was/is that they struggle(d) to inspire Americans. Jimmy Carter will always have an honored place in my heart for everything he did and was after he left office. There has never been a better former President. Joe Biden's story is still being written.
  
  
• M.J.M. in Lexington, KY: I am old enough (65) to remember President Carter as the national scold. But in his post-presidency he led by example, instead, which is a slow way to earn a following and respect. But for me, it is the best way. President Carter has character. He has earned my admiration.

Six more tomorrow! (Z)

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