“It felt like we’re going to be all right again”: The truth of Jimmy Carter

It’s not that I think that everyone isn’t entitled to their own opinion, it’s just that I think that those who haven’t a clue about things on which they speak should not be paid to spew their ignorance just because they have an ability to “go viral.” Case in point in this seemingly endless parade of stupidity are those who weren’t alive or were barely out of diapers telling me about former President Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s legacy has undergone a tremendous re-evaluation since he left the presidency after one term – with many now saying he wasn’t nearly as bad as he was first thought to be, some saying he’s the best “former president” that’s ever been and some, like the inerudite, moronic Scott Jennings on CNN, who said that Carter “was never suited for the office in the first place,” “cuddled up” to dictators and undermined U.S. interests.

Jennings was barely out of diapers when Carter left office and has only learned what he wants to learn about the man secondhand or through tales told to him by those who were so evolutionary backward as to have not shed their vestigial tails before being forcefully expelled into the political environment that today is populated by nothing but bottom feeders spouting venom and oozing primordial pus while claiming they're making America great again. Jennings’ criticisms are as valid as having him conduct brain surgery after watching a YouTube video. 

It never ceases to amaze me how little we learn from our own history – even recent history. I was just a callow teen when Jimmy Carter became president. Following in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford’s attempt to right the ship of state, Carter blew into town an outsider intent on shaking up the Washington establishment.

For those of us who became adults during that time, the Carter years embraced an end to racism, a belief in empowerment and, as a friend of mine constantly reminded me, “It felt like we’re going to be all right again.”

He came to us following a decade of tumult and despair, or as he told us, “We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.”

For some of us, Carter doesn’t need to be re-evaluated. He was a man who did some good things and some incredibly stupid things. But, at that time in history, Jimmy Carter was the salve we all needed. He was a Southern boy, like me – the first deeply Southern president elected since the Civil War. As a teenager, we knew him as a “Rock n Roll” president who embraced the music of The Allman Brothers and Willie Nelson. He was a bib overall-wearing peanut farmer who appealed to us on a variety of levels. 

Jimmy Carter arranged the Panama Canal Treaty, established diplomatic relations with China, and negotiated the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. He was the first to deal with the energy crisis and raised a powerful voice on behalf of human rights around the world. He stopped exporting grain to the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. He also worked on arms reductions with the Soviets. It was he, not Reagan, who brought the Cold War to an end. But despite all of this, he was not seen as a good president. 

Gas prices climbed during his time in office. He got the blame for that. Iranian students took American hostages in Tehran and held them for more than a year. While he didn’t get blamed directly for that, he was blamed when the American military failed their mission to free those hostages.

That problem was exacerbated by Carter’s Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, apparently reaching out to the Iranians and promising them a better deal if they’d wait until he was elected to release those hostages. For the record, Carter got the hostages home alive without breaking any laws or selling arms to the ayatollah, but by then Reagan was being inaugurated.

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, in his autobiography “Man of the House,” said Carter was the smartest public official he’d ever known. He “could speak with authority about energy, the nuclear issue, space travel, the Middle East, Latin America, human rights, American history and just about any other topic that came up.” He could tick off pro and con arguments with ease. “His mind was exceptionally well developed, and it was open, too. He was always willing to listen and to learn,” O’Neill recalled. 

The one exception was when it came to the politics of Washington. And that was where, according to O’Neill, and White House reporter at the time Sam Donaldson said Carter failed. He was a true Washington outsider, having spent only one term as the Governor of Georgia. He didn’t know how to manipulate the machine. “Carter did not organize his presidency well,” Donaldson said. His cabinet choices sometimes undercut him and it “made him look even weaker,” he added.

The greatest criticism of President Jimmy Carter, offered by his contemporaries, is that he was a victim of his own arrogant hubris. He, like every other Democrat, thought his will alone would suffice. Convinced of his path, he failed spectacularly to get Americans to follow him. The Democrats did then what they do now as a result: they ate their own.

This occurred despite a truly groundbreaking speech on July 15, 1979.  Many called it the “malaise” speech, but Carter called it the “Crisis of confidence,” speech. As I prepared to enter college that Fall, I watched President Carter as he  framed the problems in this country so well that it seems prescient today. He told us that the last decade had instilled us with deep wounds that had not healed. He then pointed to a growing problem few had identified and fewer spoke of; “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

“As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning,” Carter told us. He railed against extreme politics that “pulled us in every direction” by powerful special interests. “You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends,” he reminded us.

But in the end, Carter still saw hope. “We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans. . . We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now.”

The speech impressed some of his contemporaries, sailed over the heads of most Americans and Carter became a one-term president, often dismissed and ridiculed.

“While Carter was not very popular by the end of his term in office, his image is already improving,” O’Neill said in 1987. “Undoubtedly, future generations will look upon him more kindly than his contemporaries do.” Donaldson agreed and also said in 1987, “History, I’m sure will treat Carter than did the voters in 1980. His record, particularly in foreign affairs is quite good.”

The praise we hear today is usually for what Carter did after his presidency; working with Habitat for Humanity and acting as an elder statesman who did not hesitate to call Israel on the carpet, or Donald Trump, or even members of his own party.

I confess I appreciated him from the time I could first vote. In the 1980 presidential election, I cast my first vote for president. I never tell anyone how I vote because I find it a private affair, and while you may think you know how I vote by what I say – you’re as likely to be wrong as you are right. But, in this one case I will simply say that in 1980 I could not, nor would I ever, vote for Ronald Reagan – a vile man who vowed to “Make America Great Again”, took credit for bringing the Iranian hostages home when he did not and who embraced devout Christians for their votes, while never embracing the ideology they claimed they embraced.

It wasn’t Carter’s fault that oil prices tripled and wrecked our economy, or that a band of Iranians seized hostages and held on to them for 444 days in Tehran. While progressive on foreign affairs and human rights, he was on economic issues “a lot more conservative than I was,” O’Neill told us. And while it was Reagan who promised to get government off our backs, it was Carter who rightly or wrongly initiated banking deregulation as well as deregulating railroads, trucking, airlines and oil. He also alerted us to the problems of the federal deficit and cut $50 billion from the national debt. 

That meant little to us as teens wearing big ties and platform shoes, listening to rock and roll while even white guys sported Afros and we all began dancing to disco. (Okay I never did that, but a lot of people did.)

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Carter was the calm before the storm. He was the template for Bill Clinton, right down to having a party-happy brother. During my years of teen excess, I like all other teens before and since, “knew a guy” who’d buy you liquor with the right monetary incentive. My guy always tried to sell us “Billy Beer” brewed locally by the Falls City Brewing company, sold nationally and named after President Carter’s erstwhile brother.

For those of us who were in the White House Press Corps at the time, Carter was an enigma. “He was a little strange but also quite appealing,” Donaldson told us in his memoirs. He said Carter was stubborn and blunt. “I was then and I am now ambivalent about Jimmy Carter. He is a man of truly admirable qualities, but also of some glaring shortcomings,” he said.

Joe Biden, a young senator at the time of Carter’s presidency, reminds many of Jimmy Carter. On the surface, I can see it. Both were horrible communicators. Both had incompetent staff. But Carter was an outsider and Biden an insider. Biden should have learned and should have known better. Carter failed to convince us to follow him because he naively believed people cared to govern themselves. Reagan took to the airways and convinced us we could make America Great Again by trusting him to solve all of our ills. We may be the government of, for and by the people, but Reagan knew then and Trump knows now the truth: We want to be as uninvolved in government as possible. 

Or as Donaldson noted, politicians get defeated if they concentrate on the substance at the expense of style. Carter did that. Biden did that. Reagan never did that. Trump has no idea what the substance is; he’s only about style.

Some will say we didn’t deserve Jimmy Carter. Some, like Jennings, still disparage him. But for many teens in the 70s, he gave us some hope for the future when my generation had little cause for any. We grew up at the tail end of the baby boomer generation watching our friends and neighbors die in Vietnam. We saw assassinations and distress. Riots and violence. Carter was hope that resided between the violence of the past and the macabre, decadent future, the rise of the “Me Generation” and intolerant, radical religious lunatics, the awful class war that created an oligarchy of billionaires, destroyed the middle class and eventually swept away all the progress made during the civil rights era and more.

President Biden said of Carter, “He forged peace, advanced civil rights, human rights,  and promoted free and fair elections around the world.”

He was a complex, complicated man. But most who lived during that time understood that while you may endlessly debate the results of his one-term administration, President Jimmy Carter had the interests of all of his country in his heart. Only those flippant idiots who spread their vile verbal excrement on a variety of media platforms to feather their own nest think otherwise.

Happy New Year. “Quod erat demonstrandum.”