Remembering Lyndon Carter (TeVarsey) During his First Year in the White House: A Memoir of an Anglo-American
Carter has a story, but not the only one we choose to remember. Carter did several autobiographical works that show how his instincts and ambitions affected him early in his life, as well as his reflections and memories from his presidency and postpresidency. Carter’s writings reveal a man striving to earn trust from others, displaying unerring trust in himself and forever trusting in a country that did not always return the favor.
Those impulses recur in distant moments. As a boy, for instance, he spent a lot of time with the African American families who worked as tenant farmers or day laborers on his father’s land. He played and joined their children for meals in their homes, absorbed their values and even sought to duplicate their way of speech. It is hard to think of what they were like, but Carter wrote that it was only natural for him to be the outsider and to try to emulate their habits and language. He took earnest pride in serving as interpreter between his mother and their Black neighbors — “I made my share of mistakes when trying to shift between the two dialects,” he admitted — and he noticed that the Black adults confided their personal and financial concerns to him, hoping, he assumed, that he would pass them on to his parents. “I usually found a way to bring up these issues at home when I thought it might help,” he wrote.
Carter did have signal successes in brokering a historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt and in securing Senate ratification of his treaties ceding the Panama Canal to Panama. He also managed to achieve significant reforms in regulations — especially those affecting energy production and transportation — that would eventually lower consumer prices.
Mr. Carter came to the presidency owing little to anyone, including his own party. Assembling a formidable coalition of small-town and rural voters, white blue-collar voters and African Americans, he surprised everyone in America — except perhaps himself and his wife, Rosalynn — when he beat Gerald Ford in the 1976 election.
In retrospect, he could not have run at a more auspicious moment. The previous decade had been brutal for the United States. Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek a second term because of the public displeasure with the Vietnam war. Another, Richard Nixon, resigned to avoid impeachment. The assassinations of another Kennedy, Bobby, as well as the nation’s premier civilrights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., claimed the lives of many people. The war ended in humiliating failure.
He opposed the Gulf War in 1991 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he angered many when he likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. He also riled many Americans by suggesting that opposition to President Barack Obama was rooted in racism. More recently, he earned new admirers and detractors alike with his public disapproval of then-President Donald Trump.
As former president, Carter did not shy from controversy, particularly when it came to the Middle East, the region that gave him his greatest foreign policy achievement and also his most damaging setback as president.
But the greatest factor in Carter’s rising reputation was his own performance in his post-presidential career. He worked with Habitat for Humanity to rehabilitate homes for low-income families. He established his own nonprofit, the Carter Center, after teaching at the university. And over the ensuing decades, he published more than two dozen books and became an international advocate for peace, democratic reforms and humanitarian causes.
Historians have generally not rated Carter’s presidency highly, and he left office with his Gallup poll approval rating in the low 30s. His Gallup approval rating has climbed back above 50% and he remains the only president in the last 100 years to have an approval rating above 50%.
Reagan captured nearly all of the southern states that Carter had carried four years earlier, and he won the election with 499 Electoral College votes. Carter conceded before the polls had even closed on the West Coast.
The election looked close at Labor Day and even into October. The debate held on October 28, 1980, was a clear victory for the challenger. Carter failed in his attempts to paint Reagan as an extremist. The Republican managed to be reassuring and upbeat even as he kept up his attacks on Carter’s handling of the economy and on the rest of Carter’s record.
Reagan won the New Hampshire and Southern primaries and never looked back. His triumph at the Republican National Convention in Detroit set the tone for his campaign.
Ronald Reagan didn’t become the consensus choice of his party until 1980, after he had sought the nomination twice before. But he wove a complex set of issues into a fabric with broad appeal. He proposed sweeping tax cuts as a tonic for the economy, more spending on defense, a more aggressive foreign policy and, just as important, a return to the traditional values of “faith, freedom, family, work and neighborhood.” He favored school prayer, opposed abortion and was against busing for integration.
Carter was able to suppress the challenge to the nomination of Edward Kennedy because of the hostage crisis. Carter refused to debate Kennedy and made the primaries a kind of referendum on the Iranian situation. Kennedy’s bid, which was a favorite cause of liberal activists and organized labor, was not enough to get him elected. Still, it contributed to the weakness of Carter’s standing in the general election. And what had worked against a challenger from the Democratic left did not work when Carter faced one from the Republican right.
Yet another blow was dealt to Carter’s standing when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up its client regime there. Carter’s decision to have the U.S. boycott the Olympics in Moscow was less popular because of his opposition to aggression.
There were worse consequences to the Iranian crisis. The revolution saw the overthrow of the Shah, a longtime ally of the U.S., and the installation of a stern theocratic regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fierce critic of the United States. When Carter agreed to grant the Shah a visa to receive cancer treatments in the U.S., young followers of the ayatollah overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days. Carter was able to free them. An airborne raid intended to free them ended in catastrophe in the Iranian desert, leaving eight U.S. service members dead after a collision of aircraft on the ground.
The president’s party lost more in the 1978 mid-term elections that Carter and the Democrats suffered than usual and the Democrats lost ground in both the House and the Senate.
Although his name recognition nationally was only 2% at the time of his announcement, Carter believed he could meet enough people personally to make a strong showing in the early presidential caucuses and primaries. He embarked on a 37-state tour, making more than 200 speeches before any of the other major candidates had announced.
His career as a former president lasted four decades and ended on Sunday in Plains, Georgia. He was 100 and had lived longer than any other U.S. president, battling cancer in both his brain and liver in his 90s.
Ronald Reagan defeated his bid for reelection in 1980. Thereafter, he worked with Habitat for Humanity and traveled the globe as an indefatigable advocate for peace and human rights. He was awarded two prizes: the U.N. prize for the field of human rights in 1998 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
The first president elected since the Civil War was from the Deep South. He entered politics at a time when Democrats still dominated in his home state and region. He had begun his career as a naval officer in the submarine corps, but in 1953 he left the service to take over the family peanut business when his father died. He served in the Georgia legislature for four years before making his first bid for governor.
He finished second in that contest behind a populist who had a tool of his trade, a pickax.
Carter was a member of the traditional white Southern cultural identity. He supported integration and the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Carter was elected his successor four years later and declared in his maiden speech that “the time for racial discrimination is over.”
He would be featured on Time magazine’s cover four months later, making him a “New South” symbol. He was getting ready to run for president when he ended his term as governor. But he did not burst onto the national stage so much as he crept up onto it, appearing before small groups in farming communities and elsewhere far from the big media centers.
Wherever he went, he was able to get to know rural voters and evangelicals, doing well in big cities but also in the more rural areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Almost immediately upon taking office, Carter encountered difficulties with various power centers in Congress. A number of their priorities ran afoul of the own party’s preferences and he and his tight circle of aides weren’t aware of congressional customs or prerogatives.
A case in point was a “hit list” of Western water projects that the Carterites regarded as needless pork barrel spending. The list was a declaration of war for a number of Democrats facing reelection in thirsty states. Although Congress fought Carter to a draw on the projects, many of these Western seats would be lost to Republican challengers in 1978 and 1980.
Carter took office at a time when inflation and energy prices persisted since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Paul Volcker was appointed the new chair of the Federal Reserve by Carter, who wanted tighter monetary policies to tame inflation and prevent a recession. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran caused a price spike and lengthy pump lines which were worse than in 1973, causing more grief on the oil front.
Jimmy Carter is going to be judged by history well ahead of his times. He’s, I would argue, the most intelligent and hardworking and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.
A Bird: Jimmy Carter Was a Southern Baptist and the Time for Racism and Discrimination in America, During the Black Hole Era
A bird. Yes. He said in that famous speech that a lot of us now worship self-indulgence and consumption. He just read The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch and he’s already taking a page from it. This also spoke to his sense of morality and righteousness as a Southern Baptist. And it was a sermon. And I think it’s very prescient today, because we’re still living in a culture, a political culture that is quite narcissistic.
Inskeep: In 1979, he gave a famous speech about a crisis of confidence in America, doubt about the meaning of our own lives. I’m quoting his words now, ‘A loss of unity, of purpose for our nation, the erosion of our confidence in the future.’
There is a bird. Yes. You know, he grew up in deep segregation, a time when the South and much of the country was still dealing with racial segregation. He empathised with the Black people that he grew up with. And when he became governor, he announced in his inauguration statement that the time for racial discrimination is over. Shocking his audience.
Inskeep: I learned from your book that he grew up in this very rural way, but also was kind of an elite family locally, because his father had a number of Black workers and this was part of the unequal or patriarchal society that he then tried to change or improve.
Despite societal norms and political pressure, Carter often followed his instincts and did what he believed was right, according to Kai Bird, biographer and author of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Carter did not stop doing things in the last year of his life. He celebrated his 100th birthday this year and became the oldest living former president, which led him to vote for Harris in the presidential election of 2024.
Carter Carter was a boy who didn’t know he could play with the black kids in a rural Georgian farmstead: “When he was the smartest boy in the room,” Bird said
“He was always the smartest boy in the room in school,” Bird said. He always thought he was the smartest person in the room. So, he was faced with a dilemma, and that’s because he had ambition.”
Born and raised on the humble farmlands of southern Georgia, Carter grew up without running water and used an outhouse. During segregation time, he played with the Black children in his community.