What can be said about President Jimmy Carter? His post presidency has been the most active and public of his predecessors and successors. It also has been the most altruistic. It seems a year has not gone by when we haven’t heard of him involved in a number of humanitarian causes such as monitoring peaceful elections around the world. And all along his wife Rosalynn by his side. As long as I can remember, I’ve known about Jimmy Carter. He was elected in 1976 when I was in junior high, just starting to become aware of world affairs and national leaders. It was Jimmy Carter’s presidency and failed attempt at a second term in 1980 against Ronald Reagan when I learned the ways of politics: the differences between Democrats and Republicans—and that our nation was changing after a so-called liberal era. Carter’s defeat, having been my first time to vote, was like a punch in the gut, being young and naïve and optimistic. I couldn’t believe no one I knew supported Carter anymore.
Recently at a bookstore, I picked up a new book on him: His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life by Jonathan Alter. I didn’t pick it up immediately. I liked the offbeat cover, a colorful photo/animation portrait of Carter crafted by Andy Warhol. After sleeping on it, I returned the next day to grab it. Published in 2020, it was a heavy 700-page tome, and I read every word, learning something new and impressive about Jimmy Carter on every page.
The author, a former reporter during the Carter years, was surprised to find not a single book on his presidency and life had ever been compiled other than biographies penned by Carter himself. As a news reporter in the 1970s, the author also witnessed mounds of legislation passed by Carter. Carter is the third most accomplished president—meaning he got a lot done for this country, right behind the formidable Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson. But Mr. Alter goes on to note that during the Carter administration, after Watergate, journalists were hyper cynical as was the nation. Reporters wanted dirt, dirty tricks and maybe outlandish nonfiction stories with characters like Deep Throat that Hollywood would package as a movie deal. Carter was … an honest to goodness sincere, optimistic, Christian, Baptist, environmentalist, highly intelligent Renaissance man and basic good guy. No story there to jaded reporters and a tired nation merely surviving in the pessimistic late 1970s.
Touching history and the future
The Carter biography begins by summing up Jimmy Carter as someone who was raised essentially in the 19th century, lived in the 20th century yet possessed a clear vision of the 21st century. His family—led by a father who taught his son everything he knew about farming, mechanics and carpentry and a mother, Miss Lillian, who was a nurse and midwife birthing many children in Plains, Georgia, including a beautiful girl named Rosalynn, and who would serve in the Peace Corps in her late 60s!—was a dutiful quiet bunch save little brother Billy. At dinner they all sat at the table together, politely eating while reading, every one of them a different book with no conversation. The habit or ritual stuck with Jimmy and his wife and the children they raised.
Jimmy’s father was as prejudiced as any typical white Southerner of his era but not so Miss Lillian. That woman, alone, attended numerous protests for civil rights. She wasn’t a marcher, just an onlooker and quiet supporter. She not only tended to the wounded African Americans harmed by police or white supremacists countering the civil rights movement, but she provided bail for arrested protesters as well as drove them to hospitals or back to their homes. The Carters were devout Southern Baptists, but often Miss Lillian would take young Jimmy with her to African-American churches where mother and son enjoyed the live music and the emotion of the gospel—countering the reserved and regimented Baptist service.
As a kid Jimmy worked crop fields as expected by his father. Being fair-skinned, however, he was pulled indoors when the sun was hot and replaced by Black children. The boys would become friends, and Jimmy frequented one of the boy’s homes, eating dinner cooked by the boy’s mother whose kindness and dignity Carter credited with shaping his demeanor. As he became a teen-ager, he was highly intelligent yet could never get along with or understand his father, a man who never praised his son. At 17 Jimmy determined to study hard to get into the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1943 with world war in full swing, Jimmy wanted to serve and was accepted into Annapolis. On the day he left home for good, dropped off by his stoic parents, he never knew his departure into adulthood left them literally grief stricken and crying all the way home. On occasion when his parents came to visit, they’d bring with them the beautiful young lady Rosalynn whom Jimmy began to notice and started dating.
Jimmy excelled at Annapolis and fully expected to serve in the war, but the war ended before he got his chance. He and Rosalynn married and were off for years raising three sons in Hawaii, California, New York and Connecticut as Carter built an impressive naval career which led him into the innerworkings of nuclear submarines. It was the sudden illness of his father that brought him back to Plains. His father wanted Jimmy’s brother Billy to run the family peanut business, but the old man knew the younger sibling was reckless and lacked business sense. After the patriarch’s passing, Jimmy, feeling weighted with heavy family obligation, moved his own back to Plains, Georgia—Rosalynn, after tasting real freedom and excitement living so far away, not happy returning to their small hometown.
Carter’s biggest regret
They returned to the South just as America was dealing with protests by African Americans for civil rights. The Carters had become part of the country club set, but when the issue came up time and again among their white social friends, the couple simply would not comment on which side they supported. Quietly Jimmy and Rosalynn and Miss Lillian supported civil rights and equality and nondiscrimination of Black people and all races and ethnicities. But they never said a word. Instead, they walked a fine line, had to as a large business owner with many employees. Simply put, the Carter family had a lot to lose if they were outspoken like Pete Seeger or Joan Baez or Marlon Brando in those days. The KKK would have burned down their business if not their homes and properties of all their employees. Eventually as the issue of civil rights was not going away, the Carters lost all of their friends who soon understood the couple believed cultural change was progressive and suppression was regressive.
As an important businessman in his community, Carter made it his business to get into local politics. He was head of the school board when segregation was ongoing, whites at one school, Blacks at another. As the issues of inequities became known to him, he took it upon himself to tour every school white and Black. He found all the Black schools lacking in every way. He understood this could not continue, and he did whatever he could to improve the schools with proper books and supplies and a decent budget. In his small community, word spread of the Carters. Then one day his business building was painted with a racial epitaph.
Carter’s older sister Ruth became a Born Again Christian. She talked with her brother one day about his deep depression which she assumed was due to leaving behind an exciting naval career to run his daddy’s smalltown business. While Carter cried privately with her, they prayed together. At that moment, Carter was Born Again, too. Soon after he worked diligently for several months in other states as a witness for Christ in hopes others would be saved, too. But his sister remembered a comment her brother said upon entering a higher phase of serving God: He believed he should be President.
Carter was elected governor of Georgia in the early 1970s. One of his first tasks and honors was to declare a Martin Luther King Jr. state holiday, something he would propose nationally as president. During his governorship, his popularity soared especially among country & Western musicians, usually from the South, and rock blues bands like the Allman Brothers with Georgia roots. Day or night at the governor’s mansion, Carter greeted anyone who showed up. He often had a drink in hand and with his huge smile graciously welcomed guests, young or old, Black or white, musicians or non musicians, even Bob Dylan. Carter and his sons listened to Dylan’s albums throughout the ’60s; they bonded over the music and wordcraft. Dylan and others in the entertainment world who met Carter back then spoke of an aura surrounding him. He seemed … genuine. Real. Unjaded. Holy. Holy? Yeah, holy. Maybe just someone who was important though unpretentious. Whenever Carter met anyone, including Bob Dylan, he would witness to them and ask if they wanted to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Whatever the reason, a few years after meeting Jimmy Carter, Dylan converted to Christianity.
The Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller in 1973 to monitor world affairs and study solutions for big problems abroad, tagged Gov. Carter to represent one of two slots open for Southern governors. Carter applied his innate superior studious abilities to learn every world problem and devise realistic solutions. In other words, he took the chance appointment to heart. Soon he believed he had what it takes to run for U.S. President. In those days he had a lot of competition but took it upon himself to go city to city, town to town, and ask for people’s vote. Rosalynn and his grown sons had their own separate speaking engagements to introduce the country to Jimmy Carter. At heart Carter set out to prove one very important thing: that a Southern man could be 1) not racist and 2) elected President of the United States. One incident that came up was the competition with fellow Southerner George Wallace. As Carter talked state to state, Wallace, who vehemently opposed Carter (the feeling mutual), finally bowed out and offered Carter his delegates—all pro-segregation and essentially racists. Carter quietly refused to add the Wallace bunch to his numbers.
He won the national election against incumbent President Gerald Ford. It was … unbelievable. But Carter always believed in himself. After the inauguration, President Carter and his wife and their little girl Amy walked hand in hand down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The family brought along an African American woman, whose prison sentence Carter had pardoned as governor, to be Amy’s nanny. Amy attended Washington, D.C.’s, integrated public schools. The nation had never seen anything like the Carter family. As President, privately he prayed several times a day. He asked anyone who was with him, including international heads of state, to join him in prayer. He especially prayed before any major decision he had to make as president. And yet he was a strict believer in separation of church and state and would not allow prayer to begin any governmental meeting or gathering.
With little fanfare by the press for four years, Carter commenced to reducing the military budget while significantly expanding Social Security and Medicare. An environmentalist, he placed solar panels on the White House, which were summarily removed by the Reagan administration and decades later re-installed by President Obama. Carter lived by his own recommendations to the American people like keeping the thermostat on 68 during the winter to conserve fuel. He wore a sweater in the White House to keep warm. He diligently tried to work with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear arms. He believed in diplomacy not bullying. A lot of Americans hated him for it, perceiving it as weakness.
Peace on earth, good will toward men
And it was Carter’s idea to bring peace to the Middle East. Already good friends with Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat, Carter invited Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to join a Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David in September 1978. According to the Carter biography, the leaders met for weeks trying to hash out an agreement whereby the two ancient enemy nations would agree to live together in peace and harmony. More than a dozen times, Begin would come close to signing then back out. Carter tore up each attempt and patiently, though growing frustrated, would begin again. Finally, an agreement was announced, and the three world leaders signed the document, celebrating at the White House with hands clasped together. The peace accord has remained intact to this day. Carter was left out of the Nobel Peace Prize that year which the other two leaders received marking this remarkable accomplishment. But years later Carter would receive the long overdue honor, with Willie Nelson, longtime friend and political ally, performing for the honor in Oslo, Norway.
The Iranian hostage crisis was perhaps Carter’s downfall, along with double-digit inflation and gas lines. The Middle East was a hornet’s nest President Carter could not eradicate no matter how hard he tried. Every day on the news and in the papers, the faces of the hostages left Americans feeling duped and stupid. We did not feel proud of ourselves. If only we could go in like a big budget Hollywood action movie and shoot up the enemy and free our people. It was not to be. Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to former California Governor Ronald Reagan, darling of the GOP and the Moral Majority who would become the loud and powerful evangelical Christian political movement.
The most ironic story about the Carter presidency, one whereby the leader was an outspoken conservative Christian (one who while in office taught Sunday School at a DC Baptist Church, hated abortion but believed government had no right interfering with a woman’s decision, who started a new Baptist church in his community when his childhood church refused to allow Blacks in the congregation) is that the Rev. Billy Graham—who boasted friendships with every U.S. President of his time, except Carter—never accepted an invitation to visit the White House or have a public or private conversation with President Carter. Why? Why not? Those two should have had a lot in common yet politically did not.
President Carter started the Carter Center to help solve world problems. Even as the Carters have grown into old age, they have taken a week every year to help build houses for the homeless through Habitat for Humanity. They have raised tens of millions of dollars to solve little-known yet devastating Third World problems, such as the gruesome Guinea worm disease. They have served this nation unselfishly much of their lives. The author early in the story of Jimmy Carter shares an anecdote from people who’ve known him all their lives: When you first meet him, you like him; after you get to know him, you don’t like him; but when you’ve known him for ten years, you understand him. Through great to little-known triumphs and bitter public humiliations, time has been President Carter’s saving grace. He knows he’s on this earth for a reason.