A Memories of a Small Town, Presidential Success: James Earl Carter Jr. After his First Two-Term Term in 1972, he Arrived in the United States
A familiar story surrounds the one-term, small-town president who was James Earl Carter Jr.: a good and honest man, well intentioned but overmatched in his White House tenure, selfless and admired in his postpresidential vocations. You can smile when you read the conclusion of Carter’s ” Keeping Faith” and discover that he predicted he would have many useful years ahead of him. Yes, he did.
The impulses return in distant moments. He spent lots of time with african american families that were tenant farmers or day laborers on his father’s land. He played with their children, joined them for meals in their homes, absorbed what he could of their values and even sought to replicate their manner of speech. It is hard (or maybe not so hard) to imagine what they made of such zeal, but for Carter, “it was only natural for me to consider myself the outsider and to strive to emulate their habits and language,” as he wrote in “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” a 2001 memoir about growing up in Depression-era Georgia. 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.
In 2002, Mr. Carter received the prize for his important contribution to the Camp David agreement, as well as his commitment to human rights and his work fighting tropical diseases.
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.
He could not have picked a better time to run. The previous decade had been brutal for the United States. One president, Lyndon Johnson, chose not to seek another term because of rising public anger at an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon resigned so that he would not be impeached. Another Kennedy and the nation’s premier civilrights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. were killed in assassinations. The war didn’t end well.