Jimmy Carter was the first President I ever actually helped campaign against...lol. This was some time after my brother and I had been publicly identified as "little Republicans," when we were just old enough to wonder what that meant. The person who called us that was Dad's second cousin once removed, a Republican Party operative. Dad also had a third cousin who was a Democratic Party boss. Mother and Dad weren't registered party members but they usually voted for Republicans.
The civics teacher said, "Youall are old enough to take an interest in the election! Watch the debate on television, or listen on the radio."
So I sat up to listen to the debate on the radio. So naturally my brother did too. The debate aired around the time we normally went to bed. We were familiar with the candidates' names and some things the newspaper had reported that they'd said, but not with their accents, or with some of the issues they discussed. Fifteen minutes into the debate, we were asleep. This, however, meant that we'd listened to more of it than most of our school friends had.
One issue was of direct interest to us. Senator Mondale had sponsored a bill that, if passed, would have subsidized full school terms for everyone above age two. We had read a bit of the history and knew that subsidized school always meant compulsory school.
We went back to school, where everyone was wailing about having to go to school between ages six and sixteen, and informed our friends that the candidate Carter, if elected, would make it mandatory for everyone to go to school between ages two and twenty.
Adults actually worried that our campaign rhetoric was getting too strong. "He has a daughter about your age. What would you say to her if you met her?" This was a real possibility, though not a high probability. The Carters didn't drag Amy out to every small town they visited. In fact the students who were taken to wave at them did not meet Amy, and in fact we were not in that group.
"I would say, 'We think your father is a nice man, but he's all wrong about school'."
"Then that's the way to say it to other people. Everybody is wrong about something, sooner or later. There's no need to be hateful about it."
The school had mock elections. Other grades showed a modest R majority, representative of our town before the Ds got lost in Left field. In our classes Ford got more than 95% of the mock votes.
Unfortunately the nation as a whole did not have the benefit of clear guidance from middle school students, and for the next four years we observed something like a definition of a nice man being all wrong about a number of things. President Carter did not extend the age of mandatory school attendance but he did create a federal Department of Education that reduced the control parents, teachers, and elected school boards had over schools, thus opening the school choice debate.
He talked a lot about the energy crisis, or energy crunch. He preferred that people associate the energy crisis with President Nixon, a sneaky rhetorical trick that didn't slip past us children unobserved. He advised businesses, though unfortunately not schools, to close early on Wednesday so they could save on heating expenses.
I don't think President Carter himself did much to bring sweaters back to the height of fashion--he was not exactly the fashion model type--but his administration did. Sweaters, and longish skirts, knee-high boots, velour, corduroy, "the layered look" generally, and lots of autumn-leaf colors that looked good with Mrs. Carter's auburn hair. I was interested in fashion design at that stage of life. I couldn't afford to make human-sized clothes, but made boxes full of doll-sized designs, some only drawings, some actual doll outfits, demonstrating how much better all those blonde blue-eyed dolls looked in candy-mint pastels and white rather than autumn-leaf colors. I did appreciate the return to fashion of the long missing concept of dressing for the weather.
Like the outbound President, Carter presided over a period of inflation. There wasn't even a virus panic to blame it on. In 1974 one of the sentences I'd learned to say in Spanish was "There is always an inflation after a war," but the inflation took a long time to stop after that undeclared war. I learned, though, that this inflation was to be blamed on the Federal Reserve more than on a series of Presidents who belonged to different parties and had little in common. I didn't blame President Carter for the inflation but I thanked President Reagan for stopping it.
The Carters really tried to make frugal and Green choices fashionable. Bicycles for adults, recycling, gardening, cooking and canning your garden's produce, weaving your own fabric and sewing your own clothes, were trendy in the Carter years. People started knitting again. People who weren't Amish were mail-ordering hand tools from Amish stores. I liked that. Jimmy Carter had actually insisted on his right to walk rather than be paraded in a car when he officially moved into the White House. Washington frothed. The guards threatened mutiny. Presidents of the United States forfeit the right to walk down the street like human beings, everyone agreed. The Carter administration failed to make walking to work a dominant trend but did establish that walking and car-pooling were cool things for ordinary people to do, at least among True Greens. Using public transportation also became cool, in some cities. The core of Washington's Metrorail system had been designed before, but it came into actual use during, the Carter years.
Those who talked about foreign policy thought Carter could have taken a tougher line. Considering how much the US had invested in the Panama Canal, some thought he sold the management of it back to Panama too cheap. Some thought he showed too much sympathy to the Arabs, some to the Israelis. If the peace negotiations with which he helped didn't last long, still, anyone who endures public criticism for being too nice to both sides of a dispute has to be doing something right. The Ayatollah (a title I will probably always want to translate as "well-known religious maniac") Ruhollah Khomeini held Americans who had been working in Iran as hostages, ordering that the ones who tried to escape or resist be murdered, the others treated courteously with every effort to convert them to Islam. Some thought Carter should have tried to appease the Ayatollah; some thought he should have declared war. President Truman had famously observed that when Americans were "passing the buck" of blame, "the buck" stopped with the President, and this was certainly seen for President Carter. He was scolded Left and Right.
Well...what would you have done with the Ayatollah? There is an ancient and honorable tradition of national leaders offering pardons to convicted murderers if they can get people like the Ayatollah off the scene, but not doing that made most of the hostages' experience pleasant and educational; having the Ayatollah murdered might have got the hostages murdered too. I think this was when I learned to say that it was possible that the President had information I didn't have. I've said that about all of them since.
Some of the information the President had that not all of his constituents had was made available even to me as I entered my teens. I knew that our relations with the Arab countries were strained not only by our alliance with Israel but also by market competition among oilmen, some of whom wanted to aggravate hostilities in order to boost their own profits at others' expense. The Gulf War was being set up in the 1970s, perhaps even the 1960s. Some of the things you might have thought of saying to Khomeini would have been unacceptable to some oilmen whose support the President wanted.
Some of the things you might have thought to saying to some other people seem not to have occurred to Jimmy Carter because he was too nice to think about them. The Carters accepted the misleading and superficial information the cult chose to let them see, and spoke favorably about Jim Jones's cult. They spoke diplomatically to Idi Amin, too. Idi Amin represented a lot of people but passing up an opportunity to have Jim Jones locked up might have qualified as too nice.
President Carter was serious about diversity, too, although some saw him as the quintessence of nice-but-wrong even about that. He appointed people as different from the usual White Anglo-Saxon Protestant "President's Men" as Andrew Young, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, most unusual of all, Billy Carter. They were all roasted thoroughly while living. Then there was the time, a BBC reporter recalled to me, still indignant ten years later, when President Carter looked around the group of White men who were discussing some issue or other, noticed that the reporter was the only one in the room who didn't look like part of a clone, and asked the reporter to pose with the actual discussants just to "add a little color to the picture." We know that the BBC was a better organization in those days than it is now, because a worldwide inquiry into why real Black American voters had not been invited to be in the group was not launched.
Another passing eddy of tackiness that caught President Carter was told to and retold by another writer, but it's too good to forget...Carter thought it best if his staff were all safely married. One young man was in an open-ended relationship, and it was not his boss's place to nudge him along: "And when do you plan to have the wedding?" The young man muttered something about "when the magnolias are in bloom," possibly with the mental reservation that he was thinking of magnolia trees that hadn't been planted yet. "In Georgia," Carter reportedly said, "the magnolias are in bloom right now!"
And everyone always agreed that, even by US standards, Jimmy Carter smiled too much.
Well...the Cold War was on. How quickly we forget. The Cold War was a trade war conducted on terms of "coldly" minimizing contact with countries "Behind the Iron Curtain," but in practice it meant that, for forty years (1947-1988; Wikipedia says 1947-1991), everyone had to live with the prospect of an all-out "hot" nuclear war with the Bad Old Soviet Union, any minute. We didn't think "We'll show those Russians that our ideas work better," although that was what we did. We thought "If the Russians drop bombs on..." and "If the President does anything stupid and starts World War III..." Presidents Johnson and Nixon had seemed just about foolish enough to do that. President Carter did not. Considering what we were told about what was going on in several countries where people had reasons to feel annoyed by us as a nation, both Carter and Ford were appreciated just for staying out of any more wars. Real reconciliation between men who had risked their lives for their pro- or anti-war beliefs, in the 1960s, often took place only in the 1980s but President Carter at least tried to start that, too.
President Carter had written a campaign book called Why Not the Best. The book was less inspirational, more about party politics, than the title sounded. Baby-boomers were, undeniably, attracted to the idea of asking "why not the best" when making any decision. Did we want to keep having new fashion looks every season, all interpreted in nylon and polyester, or to buy some decent cotton and wool clothes and wear them for years? We said "Why not the best?" and bought the decent cotton and wool clothes with classic cuts. Did we want college educations? I didn't, particularly, but "Why not the best?"--the Pell Grant program made it possible for every literate citizen of my age to go to college. Were we going to let a federal Department of Education lower the standards of public schools even below where they'd been? "Why not the best?"--we'd homeschool! And so on! So then in 1980, in the next presidential election, we said "Why not the best?" and elected President Reagan.
I think the Reagan administration is guaranteed a higher rating than the Carter administration. President Reagan not only stayed out of any real wars but ended the Cold War. If the President's primary duty is to avoid getting into any avoidable wars and win any wars that become unavoidable, Reagan did that, and with flair, and while adjusting to increasing physical disability. However, only some of us get to be Irish. I don't think the Carter administration was a huge success, but it was less bad than several; consider the Bushes' wars, Obama's race treason on the welfare issue, Biden's vaccine mandates, Johnson's war, Nixon's failure either to end or to win the war, Truman's bombs, or FDR's or Wilson's power grabs.
What Carter will be best remembered for is that, having been a relatively young President (though his face didn't show it), he had more time than anyone else has ever had, or is likely to have again, to be an Ex-President. He used that time to show the world how retirement and aging are done in a healthy society. He travelled, socialized, wrote, and continued to teach Sunday School as he'd done before being elected, but mostly he donated real work to a charitable cause.
Both Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter continued to be describable as nice-but-wrong in several ways throughout their lives. They promoted measles vaccines and other ideas this web site considers to have been mistakes. The houses Jimmy Carter helped to build are small and tend to be packed too closely together. Some lines in the Carters' jointly produced book, Everything to Gain, sound inane--though others are excellent. At least the Carters did work for good causes. They donated their celebrity status to charity, rather than using it to sell patent medicines or bad ideas.
They seemed to stay middle-aged, but more youthful and active than most middle-aged people, for forty years. They literally wrote the book on how to age gracefully. They never avoided talking about either politics or religion; they never seemed divisive or exclusive about anyone else's politics or religion. While Jimmy Carter seemed neurologically to be an introvert, he also lived more modestly, and made himself much easier to meet or talk to, than any other ex-President ever has done.
I never met any of his family. Washington is a city that attracts celebrity hounds; in some social circles any evidence of the most cursory acquaintance with a Famous Person is worth money. If you want to speed up things, from waiting for a table in a restaurant to getting an appointment with a medical specialist, first visit your Congressman and latch on to a souvenir pen, then be sure the desk clerk sees you use the souvenir pen to fill out a form. After that, some Congressmen may be seen as more valuable than others, but in any case the suggestion that you might be either related to or working for a Congressman will speed up matters that run very slowly for an ordinary unconnected person. Do you think that's very nice, either to the individual the clerk is waiting on, or to Congressmen? I do not. I think the Carters' way of expressing contempt for that approach to social life was to make themselves so easy to meet. After the elementary school principal who was also a D party boss, I worked for half a dozen people who knew the Carters socially. It's one thing to meet someone famous by working on the same project or walking a dog in the same park; it's quite another thing to choose a project, a dog park, even a church, on the chance of meeting someone famous there. Quite a lot of people in Washington who were very accessible to fans, constituents, etc., I managed to avoid meeting--not because I didn't think they were interesting, or wouldn't have wanted to work on any project of interest to them, but because I didn't want to be or seem like a celebrity hound. Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were in that group.
This is my little testimony in the court of history, as we lay to rest a President who, if not the best President we had, was far from the worst. I believe that, if Heaven has anything remotely like the "pearly gates" scene as we picture it in jokes, a junior angel at the gate will say, "Carter, is it? Why Not the Best, indeed! Why were you not the best President?"
And St Peter will say, "Because he was the best retiree, and role model and teacher for other retirees. Come in, Brother!"
And some time or other in the course of Eternity, I'll fly from the part of Heaven that looks like Virginia to the part that looks like Florida, to visit my Aunt Dotty. In Heaven no poison sprays ruin the pleasure of birdwatching. We will watch the pelicans. And then Aunt Dotty will say, "There's a young woman I want you to meet," and we'll fly up to the part that looks like Georgia. Landing beside the finest, healthiest peanut patch that ever grew, because in Heaven there is no black rot, we'll walk up to the house and find the Carters there. Aunt Dotty will say, "I always wanted to see you shake hands with Amy Carter."
I won't think I have much to say. Adults don't usually greet new acquaintances with "So, are you going to vote for my father?"
In the special case of Jimmy Carter, however, his daughter might well say, "So, what do you remember about my father?"
I'll say, "I always thought he was a nice man but all wrong about school. Who cares about that any more? Like everyone else up here, he was close enough to being right about Jesus."
Our cartoon image of Heaven is a feeble attempt to imagine what the unimaginable might be like. I pray that it may be something like this.
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