Remembering Carter

It is of absolutely no significance to the reader that, in the late summer of 1975, Jimmy Carter and I crossed paths for the first time. Carter, I assume, forgot that exchange minutes after it ended, as surely he did the several that followed. It is of some significance to me, for that initial meeting — an interview — was a learning experience: Sell a candidate short at your own professional peril.

It was a Saturday, and an old Naval Academy classmate of Carter’s, banker Al Rusher of Brinkley, was shepherding his friend through an afternoon of question-and-answer sessions with central Arkansas reporters.

Carter had a good handshake, the beaming, ear-to-ear smile that would become the stuff of a million editorial cartoons, and a serious, matter-of-fact approach to discussing whatever issue a reporter raised. Parity, nuclear (“nu-kaler”) power, Palestinian statehood.

Carter’s bona fides as a progressive southern governor were well established. But the likelihood of any politician from south of the Mason-Dixon Line crossing the finish line to the presidency seemed remote. Not that I dismissed the former Georgia governor out of hand; my ego was not so inflated that I permitted myself the luxury of declaring to anyone (save myself) that his campaign was but an exercise in vanity.

A year later the peanut farmer had secured the Democratic presidential nomination, and a couple months after that he unseated Gerald R. Ford. Arkansas pitched in: Carter came within a whisker of taking 65 percent of the vote (only Georgia gave him a larger share of its ballots) and he carried 72 of our 75 counties, almost half of them by 70 percent or more, leaving only Baxter, Benton and Sebastian on the table.

The nation at first was charmed by a president who insisted on carrying his own luggage, who preferred blue jeans to black tie and boots to brogans, and whose down-home tastes (grits, red eye gravy, corn and cornbread) amused the White House chefs. By 1980, however, a series of crises that Carter seemed unable to resolve — inflation, energy prices, a Russian invasion of Afghanistan, American hostages in Iran — gave the White House to Ronald Reagan, who captured Arkansas’ six electoral votes by less than a percentage point.

Of course it hurt — it had to have hurt. But Carter shook it off, and a post-presidential career of human rights activism and advocacy for democracy brought for him, justly, the Nobel Peace Prize. The 39th president was usually reluctant to judge his successors, but expressed outrage at the Oval Office dalliance of the 42nd, a lifelong Democrat, and utter revulsion at the performance of the 45th, a self-identified Republican. He was appalled that so many of his fellow evangelicals could be as politically transactional as they demonstrated in 2016 and again in 2020.

In between his countless missions at home and abroad he found time to return to Arkansas periodically, once to honor financier Jack Stephens, another Annapolis classmate, but more often to blast ducks from the winter skies. His host was the late Sen. Kaneaster Hodges, whose vote in support of the Panama Canal treaties was crucial to its adoption, a major victory for Carter, and which cemented the two men’s friendship.

“He was very modest, but he could tell a good story,” chuckles Henry Hodges, Kaneaster’s brother, recalling the dinners that preceded the hunt. Remembering, too, the morning that Carter and one of his Secret Service agents went jogging in Newport, getting lost and having to ask a startled townsman for directions back to the Hodges home.

So often had Carter defied advancing age and the actuarial tables that the inevitable came to seem improbable, even impossible: He would simply defeat whatever ailed him and resume building houses for the poor, monitoring overseas elections and launching initiatives to eliminate diseases. And teaching Sunday school at the Baptist church in Plains. Then came the announcement that he was leaving the hospital for the last time, the very last time, to begin hospice care at his home.

The longest-lived president, at 98, was mortal after all. Looking death in the face, and laughing. Four years ago, before vanquishing (at least for a time) the malignancy that had attacked his liver and brain, he spoke of his faith and the prayers that had put him “absolutely and completely at ease with death.”

“Born again” in this life, he was certain of an afterlife, he said, if uncertain about what “form.” One needn’t share Carter’s theology to appreciate how it worked for him.

Serious appraisals of his presidency, of his entire adult life, make plain how hard he worked for others, for us. And how often he was right, even as we were selling him short.