Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter was a character out of Cubist painting, his temperament a mix of beiges, grays and ochres, his personality a flat canvas that had the air of being three-dimensional, his policies a spiky collision of discrete elements. Mr. Carter appears in the documentary, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, on Feb. 15, 2018.James Fideler/Courtesy of Not Just Peanuts LLC
Jimmy Carter was at once perhaps the biggest and smallest figure ever to occupy the White House, both casting a dark shadow and shining a bright light on the presidency.
As president, he shrunk the office, doing away with pomp and most ceremonies, refusing to enter a room to the strains of Hail to the Chief, surrendering power to the Capitol Hill barons who disdained him and diminishing the aura of the position he fought so fiercely to win.
As ex-president, he expanded the role, becoming an emblem of selflessness and service. With a hammer and screwdriver, he personally helped Habitat for Humanity build more than 4,300 homes for the poor around the United States. With a clipboard and a checklist, he monitored elections in more than three dozen countries.
With a fine-tuned sense of morality, he spoke out on human rights in world forums, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize. And with a command of Scripture, he taught Sunday School at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Ga. While Theodore Roosevelt considered the presidency a “bully pulpit,” the postpresidency was Mr. Carter’s.
The 39th president, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, was a character out of a Cubist painting, his temperament a mix of beiges, greys and ochres, his personality a flat canvas that had the air of being three-dimensional, his policies a spiky collision of discrete elements. And when he appeared in public in November, 2023, aged 99, at the funeral of Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years, his visage was, in what would otherwise be a contradiction in terms, a shocking, almost translucent, pallid white.
At the end of his first year in the White House, Time magazine argued that “the man from Plains is not the kind of bourbon-sipping, backslapping politician who gets along easily with the good ole boys in Congress” – that understated the matter.
The historian Stephen Graubard described him as “self-righteous, concealing his arrogance by pretending to be concerned only with others” – that overstated it.
Brazil’s former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, got it about right, seeing Mr. Carter as “possessed of an extraordinary physical energy and, above all, a commitment to fundamental values: liberty, democracy, human rights, and the need to hear those who don’t have a strong voice.”
He was determination personified. “All you ever had to do for Jimmy Carter,” long-time aide Hamilton Jordan said, “was to tell him something was impossible, and he would usually do it.”
Remembering Jimmy Carter, a presidential study in contradiction and high conduct
What he didn’t do was court his fellow Democrats in Congress, the “cave dwellers” who regulated the ebb and flow of social life in Washington, or the journalists who remain at their keyboards as presidents come and go.
For that, he paid a price. When he ran into heavy weather – with the economy, high-gasoline prices, hostages in Iran, a failed rescue attempt of the captive diplomats – Mr. Carter had no shelter of support to protect him from the cruel winds of Washington.
A high-profile senator of his own party, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, tried to unseat him for the 1980 Democratic nomination. Mr. Carter was then denied the second term he so yearned for as validation of his rectitude by an even bigger Washington outsider than himself, former governor Ronald Reagan of California.
Woodrow Wilson was the only president with a Ph.D., Theodore Roosevelt read Euripides, Aristotle, Aristophanes and Gibbon while president, and John F. Kennedy was marked deeply by the books of John Buchan, later the governor-general of Canada and a close associate of William Lyon Mackenzie King. But Mr. Carter – a Naval Academy engineer with the soul of a poet – might have been the American president with the most cultivated mind.
He did, in fact, write poetry; tellingly, his volume was titled Always a Reckoning. But it was his Annapolis training that left a mark on Canada. In 1952, as a potential nuclear-reactor catastrophe was unfolding 183 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, Mr. Carter was part of an American team dispatched to deal with hydrogen explosions amid a partial meltdown of the NRX reactor core at Chalk River, Ont.
Brandishing a wrench, the 28-year-old Naval lieutenant was lowered into the reactor and, facing lethal radiation exposure if he lingered beyond 90 seconds, hurriedly but carefully made the repairs that averted a disaster. The episode affected his health for the remainder of his life.
As a presidential contender, Mr. Carter campaigned with a smile, one so broad and persistent that it seemed forced – but he served as president with a scowl. He spoke often of grace, but his governing style was anything but graceful; at one point, he infamously fired half his cabinet in one vengeful swoop.
He accused his fellow Americans of suffering from despondency and anguish in a nationwide address that went into history as the “malaise speech,” even though the term never appeared in his remarks. Mr. Carter, however, often seemed to be a portrait of malaise.
Jimmy Carter’s great acts: Fighting inflation by deregulation and appointing Paul Volcker
He could be treacly. I remember one moment in the East Room when, besieged by the Iran crisis and by his internecine fight against Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Carter addressed a small gathering and then, lowering his voice to display sincerity but instead demonstrating cynicism, asked members of his audience to have their pictures taken with him.
And he could be spontaneously generous. Once, when speaking with me for a magazine article on how and when presidents pray, he asked if I had spoken with “Jerry,” a reference to Gerald Ford, whom Mr. Carter had defeated in a bitter 1976 election campaign. When I told him I hadn’t been able to connect with Mr. Ford, he said he’d call him. A day later, Mr. Ford was on the line.
“He had been defeated, but he was a gentleman,” Mr. Carter said of his one-time foe in another conversation, a few days before Christmas in 2004. When the two travelled together for the funeral of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, he said, “We developed one of the closest friendships that ever developed between two presidents.”
Mr. Carter set the predicate for that friendship the day he was inaugurated to succeed Mr. Ford, who had been selected as vice-president as scandal unfolded in the White House and who was elevated to the highest office in the land after Richard Nixon resigned.
“For myself and for our nation,” Mr. Carter said in his first sentence as president, “I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”
Virtually no one in the capital ever thanked Mr. Carter, however. Nor did many appreciate how much his administration led the country away from its Vietnam and Watergate past.
“Few of Jimmy Carter’s predecessors or successors in the White House could boast that they had not lied, broken the law or taken the country to war,” Kai Bird wrote in The Outlier, his 2021 biography of Mr. Carter. “By this standard, the Carter presidency was exceptional.”
That may be epitaph enough, and though 21st-century presidents strive mightily not to be compared to Mr. Carter, they very likely will not equal that record.
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.