Jimmy wasn’t a saint, but sometimes he tried to be
Except for Harry Truman, no former president turned the tide of humiliation like Jimmy Carter. Truman had a 22% approval rating in 1952, his last full year in office. Now he’s remembered as salty, plainspoken and competent.
Carter, 98 and in hospice care, had a turnabout almost as dramatic.
Running for reelection in 1980, he carried only six states and Washington, D.C., in a humiliating loss to Ronald Reagan. Gas shortages, 14% inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis ended Carter’s political career.
The peanut farmer from Georgia went back to teaching Sunday school. He also built homes for downtrodden people through Habitat for Humanity.
Carter seemed to stand for decency. His reputation grew even stronger in the last two years as the country watched former President Donald Trump try to steal an election and overthrow the government.
Often lost in these remembrances is that Carter’s own campaign tactics were those of an alley fighter.
Elected governor of Georgia in 1970, Carter immediately began charting a path to the White House. His first step toward national prominence was leading a movement to stop Sen. George McGovern from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972.
After McGovern prevailed, Carter showed a duplicitous side. He pressed to become McGovern’s running mate.
Carter had the good fortune of being passed over. Republican Richard Nixon clobbered McGovern, winning 49 states. Had Carter been on the ticket, his ambition to become president would have imploded with McGovern’s.
The Watergate scandal drove Nixon from office. It also created a good possibility of an outsider winning the presidency in 1976. Carter saw his chance and sprang, claws exposed.
Author Hunter S. Thompson, the most distinctive voice covering presidential elections in the ’70s, regarded Carter as brutal.
“He’s one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met,” Thompson once said. “The other two were Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger, the president of the Hell’s Angels. … Carter would cut my head off to carry North Dakota. He’d cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx. He never apologized for it. He understands the system. That’s why he won.”
Carter had another, better side. He first commanded the attention of Thompson and other national correspondents in May 1974 in a speech on Law Day at the University of Georgia.
An Annapolis-educated engineer, Carter told the attorneys and judges they were part of a broken system denying justice to many.
“I was in the governor’s mansion for two years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a prisoner — a woman,” Carter said. “One day she came to me, after she got over her two years of timidity, and said, ‘Governor, I would like to borrow $250 from you.’
“I said, ‘I’m not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to hire a lawyer. I want to pay the judge.’ “
Carter found her account was true. He asked an aide to look into the woman’s case. She was freed not through bribery but by a court ruling.
His interest in righting wrongs was almost as strong as his will to win elections. As president, Carter appointed more women and ethnic minorities to judgeships than the previous 38 presidents combined, said Stuart Eizenstat, who was an adviser to Carter and in 2018 wrote a 900-page book about his old boss.
Carter arrived in Washington as a former Georgia state senator and one-term governor. His understanding of foreign affairs did not compare with Nixon’s.
One international crisis crippled Carter’s presidency. Iranian students overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 Americans hostage.
In April 1980, during his reelection campaign, Carter authorized an aggressive move to bring home the hostages.
It ended in disaster. A helicopter and a transport plane collided, killing eight U.S. servicemen in the Iranian desert. Captors would hold 52 of the hostages for 444 days.
Carter withstood a primary challenge from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Defeating Reagan was another story. A former actor and two-term governor of California, Reagan broke to a huge lead in the polls.
As always, Carter’s instinct was to attack. It seemed to work. A week before the election, a nationwide Gallup Poll showed Carter with a 3 percentage point lead.
The poll was wrong. Reagan swept to victory, and Carter packed for a return to Georgia.
Nixon and other Republicans perpetrated the crimes of Watergate. Yet Republicans won three of the next four presidential elections. Carter was the only Democrat to win in that stretch, but he also was the first to lose.
Carter conceded to Reagan without hesitation. “The people of the United States have made their choice, and of course I accept that decision, although not with the same enthusiasm I accepted it four years ago,” he said.
Freed from the heat and competition of politics, Carter could revert to times he used his talents without concern for personal gain.
That female prisoner being shaken down by a judge was still fresh in Carter’s memory. There had to be other people who needed a hand. He’d find them.