The importance of Jimmy Carter

Editor's Note: This story was first published in The Savannahian on March 6, 2023, soon after it was announced that former President Carter would enter hospice care. In October 2024 – as Carter turns 100 years old – he is still alive and still in hospice care. We wanted to re-run this piece in honor of Carter's centennial celebration. It has been unchanged other than the addition of this note.

ONE OF THE most persistent tropes about James Earl Carter Jr. – most often delivered in a sneering tone by men of a certain generation – is that he was “the worst president we’ve ever had.”

Of course, this is one of the most demonstrably false statements you could make.

Jimmy Carter didn’t start a bunch of nearly endless foreign wars while eliminating constitutional freedoms at home. He didn’t openly support the spread of slavery while in office. He wasn’t psychopathically committed to the genocide of Native Americans. And he didn’t campaign against banks and then bail out the same banks that caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression – just to name a few examples from the 46-member rogue’s gallery of White House occupants.

However, I’m forced to admit that there's a grain of truth in the criticism, if only in the sense that Jimmy Carter didn’t have the required total absence of moral compass needed to be a “good” U.S. president.

To be an effective U.S. president, you have to be an asshole, a liar, a hypocrite, a warmonger, a backstabber, a sociopath, and a crook, in varying combinations to include all-of-the-above.

Above all, you must be a successful salesperson for the U.S. military-industrial complex, and be an expert in exerting imperialism abroad while decrying the practice in any other country less efficient at it and less sanctimonious about it.

None of those descriptions applies to Carter, which is probably why so few people would describe him as having been an effective president.

By the existing, fucked-up rules of the rigged game, he wasn’t.

For the younger folks reading this, here’s the thing to remember about Jimmy Carter: When he got elected, he put his peanut farm into a blind trust to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety or corruption involving the family business.

That seems either laughably naïve today, or perhaps transparently cynical. But it wasn’t a gimmick, I promise you.

Partially due to his lack of direct management, the peanut farm was $1 million in debt by the time Carter left the White House, and he had to sell it. From then on, his main source of income was writing books – 32 in all.

For all the jokes about being “just a peanut farmer” – jokes that Carter leaned into humorously during his political campaigns, and that his opponents sought to exploit as proof of his lack of experience or ability – it’s important to note that the Carter family peanut business was built by Jimmy Carter’s father.

It was one of the most notable and successful ventures of its kind in South Georgia, one employing a diverse workforce at a fair wage before that was something one frequently attempted to do in South Georgia.

Jimmy Carter was the one president – really the one politician that I’m aware of – who truly walked the walk, even when it hurt.

Think of all the presidents who claimed to be devout Christians who were complete bastards and hypocrites… and then think of Jimmy Carter teaching Sunday School at his tiny hometown church almost every single Sunday for four decades after leaving public office.

Think of all the presidential scandals over the years... and recall that Carter has been happily married to his first sweetheart for 76 years, and his administration’s biggest scandal was when he gave an interview to Playboy and admitted with great regret that he had “lust in his heart.”

Think of all the presidents of both parties who inexplicably became very wealthy, or wealthier, during and after their time in the White House… and then think of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter continuing to live in the same small, nondescript ranch house in Plains, Georgia for the remainder of their time on Earth.

But there it is today, just off the main road – one of the only roads – in Plains, clearly visible from the street. The only thing that tips you off that a VIP lives there might be the chain link fence and the occasional glimpse of laidback Secret Service presence.

But otherwise there’s nothing to distinguish Jimmy Carter’s house in Plains from a similar abode in Windsor Forest, or Blueberry Hill, or Mayfair Terrace, or any other generic postwar middle-class suburb here in Savannah.

To be clear: That little ranch house at 209 Woodland Drive isn’t the Carters’ “main” house, or one of their houses, or a summer house, or a vacation house.

It’s the only house Jimmy and Rosalynn have ever owned, since building it in 1960.

One of the most important experiences of my life was in Plains, attending one of Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School services at Maranatha Baptist Church, a service he provided with almost no break from the 1980s, right after he left the White House, until 2020.

My visit was in 2012, when Carter was a relatively hale and hearty 87. The only nod to his status – other than the excitement and anticipation of the few dozen of us in the sanctuary to listen to him – was a pair of very chill Secret Service agents flanking Carter, no closer than 20-30 feet away.

Carter entered to little fanfare, immediately relaxing us with not only his trademark smile, but the rich sense of humor behind it.

And young folks, here’s another thing to remember about Jimmy Carter: He is fucking hilarious. A whip-smart, brilliant sense of humor, with great comedic delivery. I think out of all his underrated qualities that might be the most underrated.

It reminded me that one of the most important things about Carter, but one that's barely discussed today, is how much the man loved campaigning for office, and how good he was at it.

Jimmy Carter in full campaign mode back in the '70s was an amazing thing to see. He was young – in his early 50s – engaging, funny, and almost superhumanly energetic.

When I saw him in 2012, he had lost none of that humor or engagement, and honestly hadn't lost much of his physical dynamism either.

Here’s an interesting backstory from my day in Plains that tells you more about our screwed-up country than about Carter himself:

In Maranatha Baptist, there is an overflow area with closed-circuit monitors so that those who couldn’t find a pew to sit in could still see and hear Carter’s Sunday School. But when I was there, the overflow area wasn’t needed at all. The main sanctuary wasn’t even full.

I heard later the reason why crowds were down.

You see, just six years before this service, Jimmy Carter had the temerity to publish another book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which among other things posited that the Palestinian people should be able to enjoy the same basic human rights as everyone else on this planet.

Of course, saying that Palestinians are people, too, is the ultimate sin that any U.S. politician or pundit of either party can commit, the most egregious single transgression that the American political system recognizes, for which there can be no redemption.

The one and only move that can disqualify you from the game for good.

But Jimmy Carter wrote that book anyway, knowing the likely reception, because he believed it to be true.

As always, Carter was ahead of his time. The then-controversial use of the word “apartheid” with regard to the state of Israel would be vindicated about 15 years later, when the United Nations Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli organization B’Tselemall all began specifically using the word to describe Israel’s policies against Palestinian citizens.

Anyway, the reason fewer Christian church groups were bussed into services at Maranatha Baptist, apparently, is because that simple, inarguable, and very basic proposal – that Palestinians are human beings -- offended them when they found out Carter had written a book about it.

It wouldn’t be the first time Carter took an unpopular moral stance. The only reason he and Rosalynn attended Maranatha Baptist at all is because when he was elected president in 1976, his childhood church, the much-larger Plains Baptist, voted to stop letting Black people attend. So Jimmy and Rosalynn refused to go to church there anymore.

Plains Baptist is still there, and still large, while Maranatha Baptist is considering shutting down entirely, not only because of the impending passing of their most famous member, but because they can’t find a permanent pastor.

What a country!

The other main trope from Jimmy Carter’s era as president was that “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.”

This tired old myth goes that after defeating Carter and holding him to a single term in office, The Gipper spent so much money on the U.S. military and waved the American flag so frickin’ hard that the Rooskies just couldn’t keep up, and decided to fold up the tent.

Like most stories of this kind, it’s total bullshit. First of all, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was so sudden that it was more of a surprise to the CIA than to the Russian people themselves.

More importantly for our purposes here, it completely glosses over Carter’s role.

As I recall, a bunch of old Soviet guys were finally able to give interviews to Western media after the Soviet Union’s collapse. They were asked something along the usual lines of, “Didn’t Reagan cause your downfall by forcing you to spend so much on weapons,” etc.

The old Soviet guys laughed. We’re Russians, we’re not afraid of war, they said. We beat Hitler and Napoleon. Reagan didn’t scare us.

What did scare the Soviet regime, however, was internal dissent. A threat from within was the only thing that was truly a threat to them, as is usually the case with totalitarian regimes.

And the Carter foreign policy with regards to Russia involved full-throated criticism of their human rights record along with direct support of dissidents within the Soviet Union.

One of the reasons Mikhail Gorbachev adopted the glasnost policy of liberalizing the flow of information and free speech in the USSR was Carter’s effort to promote and support various dissident authors and speakers behind the Iron Curtain.

In the final analysis, Carter’s main problem as president was simply being too honest with the American people.

There's no more easily propagandized group of people on the planet than Americans, precisely because we're so arrogant that we believe we can’t be propagandized.

In his now-notorious “malaise” speech in 1977 -- which didn’t actually use the word malaise, but instead "crisis of confidence" -- Carter warned that America was too dependent on fossil fuels, needed more public transportation, turned our backs on the poor, had lost trust that our government had our best interests at heart, and were in a moral crisis because of our consumerism (“we’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose”).

Read it all here and tell me where’s the lie? The man was at least 50 years ahead of his time.

But the American people hated it, hated being told the truth.

In the ensuing campaign for the 1980 presidential election, Reagan would weaponize that speech against Carter very effectively.

Reagan knew that Americans want to be lied to, we want to be told that wastefulness makes us stronger, that poor people deserve to be poor, that any problem can be fixed with enough budget cuts on literally everything except the military.

Do you get the sense that I think Jimmy Carter was just too good for us? You might.

At the time, I didn't think that. My generation was thoroughly propagandized that Carter was a bad president – "the worst we've ever had" – and Reagan was not only a good one, but a great one, possibly the greatest we ever had.

The propaganda was ridiculous, and also very intense, and to a great extent continues to this day. But looking back, the extent of the Reagan administration's cynicism and mendacity cannot be overstated.

The main reason Reagan defeated Carter was because of Carter's failed military effort to free American hostages held in Tehran by the new Islamist revolutionary government in Iran.

Reagan would, of course, turn right around and begin supplying weapons illegally to the exact same Islamic revolutionaries in order to fund arms sales to right-wing death squads in Nicaragua.

Speaking of failed military efforts: Over 200 U.S. Marines were killed in 1983 – blown up – by a terrorist bomb in their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon during the Reagan administration.

"Tough-guy" Reagan's response? He pulled us completely out of Lebanon and didn't do jackshit about the bombing other than a strongly-worded statement.

Why did Reagan get a total pass for such cowardice and traitorous duplicity while Carter could never seem to catch a break? That's one of the ultimate and most enduring mysteries of American political life.

Reagan never served in the U.S. military other than a brief stint in the Reserves and as a touring "celebrity" for PR purposes. While Jimmy Carter was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who served with distinction as a submarine officer.

Unlike nearly every other former president, after his defeat Carter didn’t cash in by charging huge speaker fees or joining corporate boards. He began funding and building the Carter Center in Atlanta, and of course began his long and fruitful companionship with Habitat for Humanity.

To be fair, many old-time Atlantans today still hold a grudge, perhaps rightfully, against Carter for the way the Carter Center came about. The original, much more ambitious plan for it involved razing several historic residential neighborhoods to make way for the complex.

It was an intense struggle between the then still-unpopular ex-president and longtime residents of the city where he once resided in the Governor’s Mansion.

The people won the fight, thankfully, but the Carter Center was built and thrives to this day – also thankfully.

One of the most important political and personal evolutions of my own life has been to fully appreciate the legacy of Jimmy Carter, as a president, as a former president, and as a person.

The propaganda of my younger days was pernicious and persistent, but I'm a better person for having pushed through to the other side of it to understand the full story of this remarkable Georgian.

I've often referred to Jimmy Carter as "the greatest living American." With his recent entry into hospice care, it appears that very soon he will no longer be living, but simply one of the greatest Americans ever to have lived.

Maybe one day the rest of us will finally catch up to his legacy.

The lead image for this story is courtesy of The LBJ Library and The Carter Center. It was taken in Austin, Texas in 2014.