Thinking of Jimmy Carter — and What Came After
In a world full of Ronald Reagans (and worse), strive to be a Carter
Former President Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29th at age 100, was president of the United States during my college years, a seminal time in the life of the country — and in my life, when I switched my major from biology to journalism and then, after graduation, got on a Greyhound bus to New York City to study acting.
There was a fair amount of drama for me (literary and otherwise) before I took that step, and there would be an overabundance of drama, on slightly larger stages, for President Carter.
According to a grandson, he was motivated to make it to his centennial birthday so he could vote for Kamala Harris. The Carter Center celebrated his centennial early, on Sept. 17, with a concert by many musicians who admired the Carters. Of all U.S. presidents, he was the longest-lived.
His time in office, 1977–1981, saw rising gas prices and high levels of inflation (something called stagflation); a primary challenge to the president from his left, in the person of Sen. Ted Kennedy; the 444-day Iranian Hostage Crisis, negotiated until Carter’s last day in office (and, as many, including the Carters, suspected, counter-negotiated by the Reagan campaign); and rejection by the American people in his bid for reelection, a popular vote drubbing cruelly amplified by the Electoral College.
His time in office also saw oddball and generationally telling cultural things attached to Carter, like his brother’s own Billy Beer; Carter admitting to having wrestled with devilish lust in his heart; his hanging out with the Allman Brothers and Willie Nelson; his caricature appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone (wearing a white tunic and draped with a Confederate flag, the cartoonist’s shorthand for Baptist and Georgia), being endorsed, with characteristic “fear and loathing,” by Hunter S. Thompson; and his introducing a new kind of records collection to the White House — one not made up of classified documents but of something groovier: albums.
The 39th president’s down-home hipness and Christian empathy ran so deep that Dan Ackroyd crafted a classic Saturday Night Live skit called “Ask President Carter,” during which the president was determined to “talk down” a caller experiencing a bad acid trip.
After, came the ascent of former B-movie actor, former California Republican governor, and gleeful dog-whistler Ronald Reagan (he of the phony “welfare queen” story, who pointedly opened his campaign with a states-rights speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been brutally murdered), whose victory in 1980 so altered the arc of our history.
One perhaps not-surprising fact: In the 1976 election, Carter was the last Democrat to sweep the Deep South.
Is one of the tragedies of life that we find some wisdom — if we manage any at all — late when we are aged and already being led from the stage? Shakespeare thought so. If that is generally true, it did not seem to be the case with Carter, who appeared to know his purposes early. His upbringing and Christian faith — combined with his love of the poetry and optimism of the folk music and rock and roll of the Sixties and early Seventies — inspired and informed his thinking on human rights and the necessity of being steadfast in duty.
Carter, who began hospice care at his home, in Plains, Ga., in February 2023, and then held on to be with Rosalynn until she passed from this life, at 96, the week before the following Thanksgiving, showed us how one could conduct a life of deep meaning even after what would seem a lengthy string of highlights: earning a college degree, studying engineering and nuclear physics; serving one’s country as a submariner in the navy; and moving in public service from school board to governor to the presidency. After the humiliating defeat to Reagan (which we were reminded may have more affected Rosalynn, who loved politics), he volunteered to work for Habitat for Humanity. Side by side, Jimmy and Rosalynn, married for 77 years, famously swung their hammers to build decent housing for families for nearly four decades.
Let us take just a moment to compare and contrast.
Folk hero Ronald Reagan punched down on service workers, like waiters and waitresses, saying they caused much of the budget deficit. (As that young man studying acting while waiting tables in New York City, I heard him complain that they didn’t declare their tips.) Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, talked a good game about the right to unionize but in practice was notoriously against workers’ rights. As governor of California, he fought against allowing collective bargaining to migrant farm workers; as president, he summarily fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers striking for better working conditions, which set off a spate of strike busting in other industries.
Carter may have been the last person running as a Democrat to win the Deep South, but many of his fellow Democrats did not recognize him as such. While he was in office some saw him as a Rockefeller-style Republican or a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt. After his time in the White House (perhaps to make amends for his tepid support then of worker’s rights and raising the minimum wage), Carter lived his faith by volunteering to construct houses alongside working poor people. He and Rosalynn were helping to build homes where the owners would pay a mortgage but no interest, which made living in a home more affordable than paying rent to a landlord.
A lack of affordable housing continues to be a crisis in the United States. The Carters did something about that, and their involvement resulted in the nonprofit Habitat becoming one of the country’s largest builders of private housing and rehabs.
In a 2018 interview with Parade, Carter commented:
“The Bible says you don’t charge interest to a poor person, so in the United States we don’t charge any interest. And so people have 30 years to pay the principal, and even out of a welfare check or with a small job, or if you’ve been paying rent, you pay a lot more rent than you’d pay for monthly payments. And there’s a great deal of pride in taking care of your own house that you help to build. We go back and visit some of the houses we built 30 years ago, and we never see graffiti on the walls, or a broken window or an unkempt lawn. And often when the people around it see how well the Habitat homeowners take care of their own places, it makes the whole surrounding community want to be better citizens.”
When I think of Jimmy Carter and what came after, in my mind’s eye I see Habitat houses (which I have also worked on, with family, co-workers, and members of our former church), then preposterous McMansions, and finally the hyper-garishness of the likes of Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago. Those mental images make it clear that hyper-rich Americans, beyond typically displaying little taste, have lost any sense of decency and that the Nouveau riche has no idea of the tradition of noblesse oblige.
With Reagan, the Republican credo of shameless unbridled greed was set: to make those with less pay the pampered way for those with more. From that era, it has only gotten worse, with attacks on our paltry social safety net while income disparities grow greater.
The Carter years seemed the last era in which colleges and universities were run as educational institutions, where professors were venerated and students could afford to attend or at least work their way through. The question about college back then was more Have I done well enough academically to get admitted? rather than What kind of loans can I get to attend?
As governor of California, Reagan had fulminated about the protests against the Vietnam War on the University of California campuses, and ever after he had it out for college students and wanted to make them pay — literally. From the age of Reagan, one can trace the beginnings of the right’s intensified distrust of public education, the corporatization of higher education, the dismantling of the role of tenured professors with money shifted to administration, GOP-led state legislatures defunding higher education, and costs for students spiraling out of control.
Reagan turned his back not only on higher education but also on the environment. He famously derided (and removed) the solar panels that Carter had presciently installed at the White House and got rid of the tax incentives that would have allowed more Americans to take Carter’s lead.
Carter was the first world leader to comprehend the long-term problem of global warming. He also spoke of “sustainable development,” an unusual phrase in that era.
As journalist Jonathan Alter wrote in a 2020 opinion piece, not only did Carter push for, and sign, major environmental legislation, he was the first world leader to comprehend the long-term problem of global warming. Carter also spoke of “sustainable development,” an unusual phrase in that era.
With Reagan, many American Christians shucked their responsibility of being good stewards of the planet and began their hard right turn from the loving and inclusive message of Jesus to the televangelists’ Prosperity Gospel, intended to comfort the rich, who were uneasy hearing about camels and some “eye of the needle” thing. The new rich wouldn’t suffer to be admonished while sitting in a church pew they helped fund.
Reagan told us government was not the answer and neither, apparently, was the Word of Jesus — all of which acted as a bugle call for the battle to be further engaged in the culture wars. Reagan’s men, for example, were said to frequently joke about the AIDS crisis, and Reagan privately made fun of gays. It would take years for the “Bedtime for Bonzo” star to mention the disease by name.
If the government no longer had a positive purpose, education was suspect, and you weren’t supposed to turn the other cheek and care for your fellow citizens, then the path was cleared for the likes of high school graduate Rush Limbaugh to become a founding father of a new Troll Nation, conceived in the liberty of owning the libs and dedicated to the proposition that white men were being pushed aside.
Reagan, a bad actor in more ways than one, whose insistence on trickle-down economics began to tear the very fabric of what made us, well, us, hollowing out the middle class and undermining the working poor, became a venerated American hero. Carter, who had served his country faithfully as a Naval officer, as governor of Georgia, and as president was derided as a wimp.
And so the Republicans had begun to work their dark magic in creating alternative facts, turning patriots into objects of derision and know-nothing narcissists into patriots and, now, even cult figures.
Americans have always been trained to look down on intellectual accomplishments, and they didn’t feel much of a kinship with an egghead president who had studied engineering and nuclear physics. After Watergate exposed the corruption in the Nixon administration and the well-intentioned pardon of Nixon by Gerald Ford set a dangerous precedent, Carter promised to tell the public the truth. He tried, delivering a speech in July 1979 about “a crisis in confidence” and saying that “too many of us tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” But Americans didn’t like to hear about that. (Carter’s views seemed to mirror those of Robert F. Kennedy, who had questioned the value of the gross domestic product in measuring the success of a country.)
The Carter Center would go on to protect democracies around the globe by pioneering the monitoring of elections. Carter would do his utmost to battle against the disabling parasite Guinea worm, in Africa and Asia, which the Carter Center hopes to eradicate by 2030. And, in his final message to the public, he would show us what a death with dignity, at home, looks like. A moving cartoon, by Steve Sack, shows Carter building a last Habitat home as an example to us all.
We can both laugh and cry at this cartoon, by the great Mike Luckovich, which shows how much has changed in the type of person many Americans think capable of being president — which I and many others would place at the feet of Reagan. (Remember the line from “Back to the Future” uttered by a flummoxed Doc, when he learns from Marty who is president in 1985: “Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who’s vice president, Jerry Lewis?” It was funny, and for good reason.)
Like Nixon, Reagan seemed largely indifferent to criminality among members of his administration. Carter, like the Democratic presidents who would follow, led a remarkably corruption-free executive branch. Now, the GOP embraces its identity as a pro-corruption party.
When I was living in New York City, working as a waiter at a restaurant near the New York University campus, during a lunch shift one day someone came in and excitedly said the Carters were nearby, working on rehabbing some apartments on Great Jones Street. A few of us went outside and walked to the corner, thinking we might spot them across Broadway, where construction was happening. And there they were, Jimmy and Rosalynn, standing on the sidewalk, wearing construction hats, being interviewed by someone.
For nearly forty years, I’ve told that story, but in researching this piece, I could find no mention of their ever being on Great Jones Street. The project, only the second Habitat work they did, was indeed happening, but on East Sixth Street, blocks away from the restaurant. (I later remembered that I did walk there to see them at work.)
Standing on a corner of Third Street and Broadway, we believed that we had seen them. We were all young, serious, and reasonably cynical people then. (As Bob Dylan, a Carter favorite, framed it, Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.) But we were agog thinking we had seen the former President and First Lady in “dungarees” and wearing work gloves while rehabbing an apartment building in our very slice of scuzzy early-80s Manhattan.
And really, we had seen them, for who they were.
With the Carter Center’s critically important work on human rights, the environment, public health and fair elections, and her work as First Lady on advancing the issue of mental health in an era when no one wanted to discuss it, all these decades later when it comes to Jimmy and Rosalynn I remain agog.
And in their openness about facing death and making use of hospice care, they used their celebrity for a good purpose right to the end.
In their obituary of Rosalynn, the New York Times called her “the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.” As he was disinterested in politics, it was she who made so much happen.
Carter memorialized his wife:
“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished. She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”
As I write this, Carter himself is being memorialized at Washington’s National Cathedral, with beautiful tributes written as time capsules from the late former president Gerald Ford (delivered by his son Steve) and his vice president, the late Walter Mondale (delivered by his son Ted) and the eulogy by his grandson Jason.
Stu Eizenstat, one of Carter’s White House advisors, summed up his praise of what Carter accomplished with this:
“He may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore. But he belongs in the foothills, for making the U.S. stronger and the world safer.”
Here’s a sweet short video, taken from the film “Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President,” of Bob Dylan quoting Lynyrd Skynyrd while speaking about Carter.
An earlier version of this commentary appeared in “Politically Speaking” on Medium.
