The redemption of Jimmy Carter

BY SEPTEMBER 1980, the presidential race was in a dead heat, with America’s sitting president, Democrat Jimmy Carter, facing Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. On Tuesday, Sept. 16, with two months to go until Election Day, President Carter walked into an Atlanta church during a Southern campaign swing. But this wasn’t just any church. It was Ebenezer Baptist Church, the former pastorate of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Andrew Young, a former congressman, Georgia favorite son, and civil rights icon who had worked closely with King, sat with Carter in a pew at Ebenezer, along with King’s widow and father. When Carter was introduced, the president climbed the dais and delivered a message that instantly made headlines.

Carter warned the assembled crowd that if Reagan were elected president, there would likely never be a national holiday in memory of King, the great civil rights leader. What’s more, Carter said, his Republican challenger had actually opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the watershed law that enfranchised black Americans. In fact, Carter suggested Reagan was in league with the Ku Klux Klan.

So distorted and vitriolic was Carter’s speech that the press seemed taken aback.  “President Carter steered his way along a road of invective that has already become well-rutted in this young fall campaign,” The Washington Post reported, “suggesting today to an all-black audience that Ronald Reagan had injected hatred and racism into the contest.”

Carter’s race-based broadside also surprised conservative columnist George Will, who penned a Sept. 21 column titled “The Smear.” Prior to his Atlanta church appearance, Will wrote, Carter had “contented himself with implying that Ronald Reagan is an equal opportunity warmonger who will incinerate everyone on earth, regardless of race, color or creed.” But Carter had clearly realized that was not helping him enough in the polls, Will wrote. So now, the mild-mannered Georgian had ratcheted up the stakes: “Carter has decided that such moderation in pursuit of power is no virtue. Now he has said that Reagan is a racist.”

In fact, Carter’s attacks on Reagan had grown so shrill that even sympathetic liberal journalists were calling him out. This new brand of invective did not appear in keeping with the temperament of the born-again Baptist who was never shy about invoking his Christian faith. What on earth had happened to the affable Jimmy Carter, the smiling soul from Plains?

Carter stands with Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Sr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sept. 16, 1980. (In the back is Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson.) Associated Press/Photo by Charles Tasnadi

JAMES EARL CARTER JR. grew up on his father’s sprawling farm in Plains, Ga. Both his parents, but especially his mother Lillian, were significant influences on his faith. The Carters attended a segregated Southern Baptist church. It was there at age 11 that Carter openly professed Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and was baptized.

That childhood faith grew in intensity as Carter reached adulthood and entered public life.

At age 33, he was ordained a deacon at his home church, where he led prayers, taught a Sunday school class, and even occasionally preached sermons. He was influenced by his sister, evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, in a particularly significant way. Her spirit of evangelization struck him, and he ­realized after speaking with her that although he had met countless thousands of Georgians since entering politics, he had shared the gospel with very few. He sought to correct that when he ran for president, prompting some cynics to think he was exploiting his faith for political gain.

But in truth, Carter was “born again,” as he put it, calmly trying to explain to secular reporters what that meant. He told them it meant loving God “with all your heart and soul and mind, and [loving] your neighbor as yourself.” He put it this way during the 1976 campaign: “The most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ.” Throughout his presidency and the remainder of his career, Jimmy Carter was bold about expressing that.

In 1976, Carter had just wrapped up a term as Peach State governor. As a presidential candidate, he represented a refreshing alternative from the Nixon-Ford years, and indeed from the tumult that had roiled the nation for a decade: The back-to-back assassinations of King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. The burgeoning drug culture. Vietnam. The Manson murders. The Kent State shootings. Patty Hearst. Watergate.

Following the televised torture of the Watergate hearings, Richard Nixon resigned. His vice president, Gerald Ford, both succeeded the disgraced president and pardoned him. Ford, though a likable man, was thoroughly uninspiring. Carter was different, and his willingness to talk about his faith and proudly describe himself as born again appealed to many Christians.

His folksy manner also attracted people from all over Main Street America, whether Christian or not. Here was a candidate from outside the Beltway, who had nothing to do with Vietnam or Watergate. In November 1976, Carter edged out Ford 50 to 48 percent and won the Electoral College 297 to 240.

The new president promised better days ahead for America. But four years later, as Carter campaigned for a second term, things had not improved for the nation—quite the contrary.

The economy was terrible, underscored by a pessimistic measurement called the “misery index,” which captured the soaring rates of unemployment and inflation, each of which had spiked into double digits. Meanwhile, interest rates approaching 20 percent had nearly halted home-buying. An energy crisis during a brutally cold winter sent gas prices soaring and lines at service stations snaking for blocks. In response, Carter told us all to put on sweaters and put more air in our tires to save gasoline, which was being rationed. The president told Americans to understand that their nation was simply mired in a “malaise.” This though the country faced its worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.

Military morale was also bad, and U.S. foreign policy was stained by the loss of dependable allies worldwide, many of which had fallen into the Soviet orbit. Between 1974 and 1979, the Soviets had picked up close to a dozen satellite states. America was clearly losing the Cold War, a situation Carter’s naïveté and policies only made worse.

Yet amid this dismal track record, there were bright spots. Carter’s most far-reaching, statesman like accomplishment began taking shape in 1978, when he hosted and negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. This summit would lead directly to the 1979 peace treaty between the two nations. Carter’s achievement was genuinely remarkable, a splendid triumph that made Israel and Egypt America’s two best Middle East allies and forged a friendship between historically bitter foes. Carter at Camp David achieved what UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 had urged, namely, a lasting and durable peace. And so it was a major snub when the Nobel Committee in 1978 awarded its peace prize to Begin and Sadat but not to Carter.

Carter looks over some papers in his den still wearing jeans and boots from an early morning visit to his peanut warehouse in Plains, Ga., in August 1976. Associated Press/Photo by Peter Bregg

BUT ON THE HEELS of Camp David, a pair of foreign policy catastrophes occurred in November and December 1979.

In November, Iranian militants seized 66 Americans, then held 52 of them hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Along with Israel, Iran had been America’s most reliable Middle East ally. But in February 1979, the Shah, Mohammad Reza, was overthrown, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to take control, and our one-time friend soon became the world’s No. 1 terror state. The Shah’s replacement dubbed America the “Great Satan.”

The Americans were held hostage in Iran throughout the remainder of the Carter presidency—444 days, to be exact. Carter seemed helpless to free them and in fact feckless and cowed before the ayatollah. An April 1980 Delta Force rescue attempt failed disastrously due to military hardware and planning problems.

Just weeks after the hostage crisis began, Carter faced another foreign-policy nightmare when the Soviet Red Army stormed into Afghanistan. In a television interview six days later, he said: “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week. … This action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”

Many viewed his remark as dangerously naïve, evidence of an evolving education that was unacceptably late for a president. Reagan said privately of Carter’s assessment: “It is frightening to hear a man in the office of the presidency who has just discovered that the Soviets can’t be trusted.”

According to Gallup, Carter’s approval rating in July 1980 had fallen to 21 percent, the lowest of any president since Harry Truman. Everyone agreed that America was in decline. Historian Edmund Morris captured the national mood: “When President Carter wasn’t telling us about his hemorrhoids, he was telling us about our national malaise.”

Carter teaches Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga. Associated Press/Photo by John Bazemore

ON OCT. 28, 1980, during a nationally televised debate against Carter, Reagan asked Americans if they were better off now than four years ago. For most people, the answer was obvious: absolutely not. The look on Jimmy Carter’s face when Reagan asked that question suggested he knew the answer, too. Carter’s presidency was in big trouble—which may help explain his ruthlessness toward Reagan that fall.

On Sept. 1, 1980, Carter kicked off his campaign in Tuscumbia, Ala., where he addressed a huge crowd. Once again, the media called him out—this time for his choice of location.

“It was not nostalgia but cold, hard political calculation that brought the president South today to open his general election campaign,” The Washington Post opined. “The area around Tuscumbia is largely white, fundamentalist Christian, traditionally Democratic and conservative. Recently the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan made Tuscumbia its national headquarters and this morning, before Carter’s arrival, a handful of Klan members marched through the town streets.” (It would have been more accurate to say that the Klan had recently opened a major regional headquarters in Tuscumbia.)

Ironically, given remarks he would make at Ebenezer Baptist just two weeks later, Carter was joined at the appearance by several Democratic senators and governors, including prominent segregationists who had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act: James Eastland of Mississippi, who was notorious for blocking civil rights legislation in the U.S. Senate, and Democratic Sens. Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee and John Jackson Sparkman of Alabama. Former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who famously—and physically—tried to block the integration of his state’s universities, also appeared in Tuscumbia with Carter.

By the time Carter ascended the dais at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the overwhelming political repudiation that would define the 1980 election loomed large. Carter himself seemed to sense it coming. Maybe that’s why the Georgia Baptist stood in the Rev. King’s former church and accused Reagan of racial “hate.” Carter insisted to the black congregation: “You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like ‘states’ rights’ in a speech in Mississippi; in a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the South … Hatred has no place in this country.”

When Reagan spoke of states’ rights, he, as a conservative, was speaking of federalism, as enshrined by the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Throughout his career, Reagan, like so many governors, Republican and Democrat, complained about how the federal government had usurped too many powers that were the province of states and local municipalities.

Carter certainly knew this. Still, he stood at Ebenezer Baptist and proclaimed, “Obviously the Ku Klux Klan is an obnoxious blight on the American scene, and anyone who injected it into the campaign made a serious mistake.” Carter’s personally linking Reagan to the Klan was a fresh stab, all the deeper because Carter thrust the knife from the church of America’s leading civil rights icon.

So what had happened to Jimmy Carter? Behind the beaming grin and talk of faith, he had become the very thing he’d run against in 1976: a desperate politician.

When Reagan caught wind of what had happened Ebenezer, he was disgusted. Campaigning in Texas when he heard the news, he called Carter’s conduct “shameful.” And when Americans voted on Nov. 4, the verdict was in: Reagan crushed Carter at the polls. The sitting president lost the popular vote by 51 to 41 percent, lost 44 out of 50 states, and was routed in the Electoral College 489 to 49.

Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, work at a Habitat for Humanity building site in Memphis, Tenn. Associated Press/Photo by Mark Humphrey

THOUGH JIMMY CARTER’S PRESIDENCY was unarguably flawed, his failures in office may help explain why Carter became a much better ex-president—probably the most active ex-president in U.S. history. What we most fondly remember about Carter was his post-presidential work, from building houses for Habitat for Humanity to serving as a diplomat abroad, doing everything from negotiating with foreign leaders to certifying election results in nations struggling to become democracies.

In 2002, nearly a quarter century after brokering the Camp David Accords, Carter finally received the Nobel Peace Prize he should’ve collected in 1978.The prize left a bittersweet taste, tainted as it was by partisan politics.

“The announcement of the award came only hours after the U.S. House and Senate gave President George W. Bush authorization to use military force against Iraq in order to enforce UN Security Council resolutions requiring that Baghdad give up weapons of mass destruction,” CNN reported at the time. “Asked if the selection of the former president was a criticism of Bush, Gunnar Berge, head of the Nobel Committee, said: ‘With the position Carter has taken on this, it can and must also be seen as criticism of the line the current U.S. administration has taken on Iraq.’”

The committee’s shameless politicization of the award put a cloud over Carter’s belated recognition. Nonetheless, the award was long overdue. Perhaps it was fitting that like other Carter achievements, it came after his presidency.

Carter lived 43 years with Americans’ overwhelming November 1980 rejection. Perhaps he applied the rest of his life to burnishing a legacy not defined by those four years. As always, it was his faith that brought out the best in him, though late in life he deviated publicly from Biblical teaching on 21st-century issues such as gay marriage. He lived to age 98, longer than any American president, and aspired to the Scriptural exhortation, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” In cases like Camp David and in much of his post-presidential work, Carter achieved that.

“Americans … disagree about the effectiveness of his presidency and the impact of many of his policies,” writes professor Gary Scott Smith, author of Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush. “One fact, however, is indisputable: Jimmy Carter’s deep, robust Christian faith guided his life and helped direct his approach to politics. He was one of the nation’s most religiously devout chief executives.”

He was indeed. Few would argue with that.

—Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College.

The Carter Presidency

AP Photo

Nov. 2, 1976

Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter is elected president.

Sept. 7, 1977

Carter signs the Panama Canal treaties, providing for eventual transfer of canal rights to Panama and continued U.S. use.

Jan. 19, 1978

Carter gives the State of the Union address to an increasingly hostile Congress, blaming uncooperative government officials and representatives for many issues. Carter and Congress continue to wrangle throughout his presidency.

AP Photo

Sept. 17, 1978

Carter brokers peace between Egypt and Israel when Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin sign the Camp David Accords after 13 days of secret meetings.

Dec. 15, 1978

Carter announces normalization of relations with the Chinese Communist Party and the end of official relations with Taiwan.

AP Photo

June 18, 1979

Carter and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT II treaty in Vienna, agreeing to nuclear armament reduction for both countries. The treaty is never ratified due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of that year.

July 15, 1979

Carter gives his “Crisis of Confidence” speech addressing American “malaise” amid an energy crisis. He touts individual responsibility for energy solutions.

AP Photo

Nov. 4, 1979

The Iran Hostage Crisis begins as 52 Americans are held hostage by Iranian student militants in Tehran. Carter’s diplomacy and rescue attempts failed; the hostages were released 444 days later on the day he left office.

Nov. 4, 1980

Carter loses the presidential election to Ronald Reagan in a landslide defeat.