Thinking of Jimmy Carter — and What Came Next
In a world full of Ronald Reagans (and worse), be a Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter was president of the United States in my college years, a seminal time in his life, the life of the country, and in my own life when I switched my major from biology to journalism, and then, upon graduation, went to study acting in New York City.
There was a fair amount of drama (as in theater) before I took that step, and there would be a whole lot more drama, on the national and world stages, for President Carter.
His time in office, 1977–1981, saw rising gas prices; high levels of inflation (something called stagflation, which sounded scary and maybe a little dirty); a primary challenge to the president from his left flank in the person of Ted Kennedy; the 444-day Iranian Hostage Crisis, negotiated until Carter’s very last day in office (and, as we all suspected, counter-negotiated by the Reagan campaign); and rejection by the American people in his bid for reelection, a loss amplified by the Electoral College.
Oh, and fun and weird cultural things attached to the president, like Billy Beer; his having wrestled with lust in his heart; his hanging out with the Allman Brothers and Willie Nelson; his appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone (wearing a white tunic and draped with a Confederate flag, cartoonist shorthand for Baptist and Georgia), endorsed with fear and loathing by Hunter S. Thompson); and his introducing a records collection to the White House — not classified documents, but something much groovier: albums.
And, after, the ascent of former B-movie actor, former 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 not-so-fun fact: in the 1976 election Carter was the last Democrat to sweep the Deep South.
Is the tragedy of humanity that we find wisdom — if we manage it at all — when we are aged and being led off stage? If so, that didn’t seem the case with Carter, who appeared to know his purposes early. His upbringing and Christian faith — and perhaps his love of the poetry and optimism of 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 at 98 recently began hospice care at his home, in Plains, Ga., showed us how one could conduct a life of deep meaning even after what would seem to be a 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 landslide defeat to Reagan, he volunteered to work on Habitat for Humanity houses and kept it up for nearly 40 years.
Compare Reagan’s blaming service workers like waiters and waitresses for the budget deficit (they didn’t declare their tips) and Carter’s living his Christian faith by building houses side by side with working poor people. He and Rosalynn were helping to construct decent homes where the owners would pay a mortgage but no interest, which made living in a home more affordable than paying rent to some landlord.
In a 2018 interview with Parade, he 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 Carter and what came after, in my mind’s eye I see Habitat for Humanity houses, then grotesque McMansions, and finally the hyper-garishness of Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.
With Reagan, a new Republican credo of unbridled greed was set; those with less would pay the way for those with more.
The Carter years seemed the last time colleges and universities were run as educational institutions, 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? Reagan, who as governor of California had fulminated at the protests against the Vietnam War on the University of California campuses, 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, and costs for students spiraling out of control.
Reagan turned his back on higher education as he turned his back on the solar panels that Carter had presciently installed at the White House, along with the tax incentives that would allow Americans to take Carter’s lead. 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 and spoke of “sustainable development,” an unusual phrase at the time.
With Reagan, American Christianity laughed off being good stewards of the planet and began its hard right turn from the 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 and didn’t deign to be admonished while sitting in a church pew they had 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 engaged in the culture wars. Reagan’s men frequently chortled about the AIDS crisis, and Reagan in private regularly made fun of gays. It would take years for the president to mention the disease by name.
If the government no longer had a positive purpose, 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 Rush Limbaugh to become a founding father of a new Troll Nation.
Reagan, whose insistence on “trickle-down” economics began to tear the very fabric of what made us, well, us, hollowing out the middle class and militating against the working poor, became a venerated American hero. In contrast, Carter, who had served his country faithfully as a Naval officer, as governor of Georgia, and as president was derided as a wimp.
The Republicans had started then to work their dark magic in creating alternative facts, turning true patriots into objects of derision and mediocre narcissists into patriots and, then, even cult figures. Of course, Americans have always been well-trained to look down on intellectual accomplishments, and they didn’t really trust 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 did and many didn’t much like to hear it.
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 death with dignity, at home, looks like. A moving cartoon, by Steve Sack, shows Carter building his final 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?” It was funny for good reason.)
Like Nixon, Reagan seemed indifferent to criminality among members of his administration. Carter, like the Democratic presidents who would follow, led a remarkably corruption-free executive branch.
When I was living in New York City, working as a waiter at a restaurant close to 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 going on. And there they were, Jimmy and Rosalynn, standing there on the sidewalk, wearing construction hats.
For nearly forty years I’ve told the story that I saw them that day, 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 on East Sixth Street, blocks from the restaurant.
We believed we had seen them. We were all young, serious, and reasonably cynical people then. That was required of us at that time in New York City. (As Bob Dylan, a Carter favorite, framed it, “Ah, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”) But each of us was agog thinking we had seen the former president and first lady in dungarees, wearing work gloves, 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, all these decades later when it comes to Jimmy and Rosalynn, I remain agog.
N.B., The note about the Reagan campaign’s efforts to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election, as reported by the New York Times, was added after publication.
