Jimmy Carter Deserved Better
The 39th president of the United States was a genuinely good human who wanted nothing more than peace in the world.
Two days before the end of 2024, a full century after he was birthed into this world, former President of the United States James Earl Carter passed away yesterday. Known to everyone as Jimmy, he was a remarkably open, honest, and transformative president—Bill Clinton simply does not win in 1992 without Carter paving the road for him—who was handed a broken country and punished for correctly identifying our deeper issues and telling us the truth about what was needed to make us whole.
Like many from the Gen X/very elder millennial cohort who went through high school in the 1990s, we were taught that Jimmy Carter was a failed president who did not solve the nation’s problems, and made some of them worse, through his “naïveté” and “liberalism.” The funny thing about getting older, and the distance provided by the passing of time, is that it allows for history to analyze matters more thoroughly. The political battles of the past two decades taking place over the Internet, with all the advantages and disadvantages that conveys, also provides some excellent context for Carter’s presidency and how it was assessed—namely, that school textbooks are often politicized because of the influence of large conservative states like Texas and Florida on the content. Gen Z have also been far kinder to Carter, quite possibly because of Kai Bird’s excellent biography of him, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, which came out during the COVID pandemic.
Carter swept into office in an election that was hardly a popular mandate, winning 50.4% of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes to Gerald Ford’s 48% and 240 electoral votes (Ford won California, but one of the electors was “faithless” and cast their electoral vote for Ronald Reagan, who’d lost in a convention vote to Ford). However, he had started the year not even considered a remote possibility to win and demolished all of his primary rivals to cruise to victory as the Democratic nominee. He was a very open candidate, discussing his evangelical faith without hesitation, and openly touting his friendship with the southern rock band the Allman Brothers. The documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President is an excellent watch if you want to learn more about his musical loves and see some pretty cool footage of Carter hosting a music festival on the White House lawn.
Honest to a fault during the fall campaign, Carter lost some evangelical support because he chose to sit down with the excellent political reporter Robert Scheer in a long-ranging interview for Playboy magazine, in which he was truly open in a way that no political candidate will ever dare to be again. Why? When asked about his faithfulness to his wife Rosalynn (who died earlier this year) admitted that he had “lusted in his heart after other women and prayed for forgiveness.” He was mocked by many hard-bitten reporters who were not used to this sort of piety and openness, yet those same reporters would complain about politicians lying to them. Carter told voters on the trail that he’d never lie to them as president, yet no politician can be honest all of the time. He likely meant it, but did not consider the consequences of his promise, as the vignette below demonstrates.
Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward at The Washington Post were eager to test Carter’s honesty, and as Woodward recounted in his 1999 book Shadow, did so on a story where they had evidence that King Hussein of Jordan was on the CIA payroll. Carter had been president for less than thirty days when Bradlee and Woodward were called to the White House after contacting press secretary Jody Powell for comment. Carter sat down with the two, confirmed the story and the amounts given to Hussein, and said that he had ordered the payments ended. As someone who was bent on bringing peace to war-torn parts of the world, the Mideast was an obvious first area to start. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was flying to the region and would be in Jordan in a couple of days, so Carter wondered aloud if Bradlee could run the story without naming Hussein. Bradlee said no, it wasn’t possible. [Note: it was, but Bradlee no longer gave benefit of the doubt after Nixon and Watergate to politicians.] Carter then asked if they would hold off until after the Jordan visit. Bradlee was noncommittal. Bradlee then asked if running it would damage national security, and Carter said it would not.
The story ended up running as Vance arrived in Jordan. King Hussein was embarrassed, called the story dangerous and told Vance it could end his ability to help shape events in the Mideast. Vance thought it was so bad that they might have to write off Hussein as an ally altogether. Days later, Carter sent Bradlee a note on his stationery that said it was irresponsible to run as Vance was arriving, which Bradlee was offended by because Powell had said they wouldn’t do any pissing about the story. Woodward implied in Shadow that Carter took telling the truth as optional, using this story as an example.
In Carter’s mind, though, he took the story as a deliberate attempt to embarrass him. He’d been president for 28 days, with his administration trying to get their feet underneath them, hadn’t even known about the payments until they’d been raised by the Post. When I first read Shadow as a college sophomore, I thought that Bradlee and Woodward were right. Now I recognize that they weren’t,—they used this story to put Carter in his place when he had nothing to do with a policy dating back to the Eisenhower administration. There wasn’t any real need to publish the story in a rush, either. No greater purpose was served by not waiting. Carter absolutely leveled with Bradlee and Woodward, told them the truth, and asked them to wait. They abused his trust, and as a result, he began to draw more inward. He became less trusting, and he didn’t level with the media as much going forward.
At the same time as this, Carter decided to tackle the energy crisis, giving a primetime address wearing a cardigan sweater, and asking Americans to sacrifice—drive at lower speeds, turn down thermostats at night to sixty-five degrees, and use public transit more often. This was an inconvenient truth that Congress and Americans didn’t want to hear, and it took so long to pass that it ended up being too late to stop the second OPEC oil shock of 1979—a time where Carter gave a speech about the need to tackle the crisis of confidence. It initially polled very well, but soon became infamous as the “Malaise Speech,” a name derived from the media’s repetitive use of the word in describing it. Few ever noticed after that name took hold that Jimmy Carter never uttered that word while giving the speech. It was another example of media distorting Carter and his earnestness as scolding. By the end of the year, the Soviets were in Afghanistan and Iran had taken our embassy staff as hostages.
Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy soundly in 1980 through a combination of appeals to Southern revanchists, undercutting our hostage release negotiations with Iran, and smooth bromides about government being our real enemy. Americans didn't want to face any more hardships after six years of economic and political instability and the lingering aftermath of a miserable war in Vietnam that never should've been fought. Quite frankly, the pride of most Americans was wounded, and we didn't want to learn the lessons of our failures, so we gladly accepted the snake oil known as Reaganomics instead of the tough, difficult truths that Carter put forward.
Carter went home to Plains, Georgia, and after dealing with an initial period of bitterness of losing to Reagan (a bitterness accentuated by the evangelical community turning on a true Christian such as himself for the televangelist style of Reagan), he chose to move forward and show the world that he meant every word, every deed, every action he’d taken as President for peace. He founded the Carter Center for Peace, which has done superlative work for free and fair elections around the world. He joined fellow Georgians Millard and Linda Fuller and Clarence Jordan (who used to live down the road from Carter) in their nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, spending decades helping to build homes with Rosalynn.
He went to Haiti in 1993 and North Korea in 1994, helping to avert war even though Bill Clinton was enraged by Carter’s “freelancing,” as Clinton regularly used the epithet “loser” to describe Carter. It was a complete misunderstanding of why he was doing it and very poor form, considering that Carter succeeded in both instances. The North Korean nuclear program halted for a decade after Carter’s negotiations (having gotten the White House to begrudgingly use him as special envoy). Carter’s peace efforts as President with Israel and Egypt were so successful that even now, with Israel rapidly becoming a pariah for its unhinged onslaught against the Palestinians and Lebanese, those two nations have never gone back to war against each other. Carter’s peace plan worked.
Time would prove Carter right in other areas, too. As a result of the Reagan economic policies and their acceptance as truth, we are now in the worst wealth imbalance since the Gilded Age. Billionaires control our news media, our politicians, and our economy. They utter demands and the government caves. They file lawsuits and the media settles. They’ve elected one of their own in Donald Trump, twice now. Worst of all, the denial of the energy crisis that Carter wanted us to tackle, that he knew in 1977 needed to be met with green energy like solar panels (which Reagan petulantly removed from the White House), has led us to a climate change that has become irreversible. The incoming second Trump administration is going to burn every last fossil fuel and strangle every EPA regulation to make a few more bucks over our dead bodies.
It didn’t have to be this way. Jimmy Carter did his damnedest to ensure it wouldn’t be this way. He deserved better than getting whipped by Reagan in 1980. He definitely deserves an apology from all of us. We should’ve listened to him. The price of not listening will be paid for decades to come.