Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most virtuous of all America’s presidents
Summary
The humble peanut farmer who went to the White House died on December 29th, aged 100
To their confusion, and often to their regret, Americans seemed faced with two Jimmy Carters. One was the man whose presidency, won by a squeak and relinquished amid the humiliation of the Tehran hostage crisis, seemed an essay in weakness and naivety. This was the chief executive who once addressed the nation in a grey cardigan, sitting by a guttering fire; who, at the peak of the energy crisis in 1979, as Americans queued miserably for petrol, wanly criticised their malaise; who, at peak of the cold war, seemed to hope he could effect a thaw by writing a personal letter to the exiled nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; and whose bid to rescue the hostages ended with a helicopter crash in the desert. This was also the man who, out fishing, was said to have been assailed by a “killer rabbit" that swam towards him; who, when jogging, suffered heatstroke; and who admitted to Playboy magazine that he had often committed “adultery in my heart", inciting a wave of mockery from sophisticates on both coasts.
Like Bill Clinton after him, he was Southern through and through, brought up in the woods and swamps around Plains, Georgia. Unlike Mr Clinton, he was unintellectual, a peanut-farmer and one-term governor of Georgia whose formation had been in the navy, not university. In a crowded Democratic primary field in 1976 his country freshness, like his drawl and his toothy grin, marked him out, as did his surprising ambition; but Cartermania barely survived the novelty of his inauguration walk to the White House.
To his supporters he represented the confident, booming New South, at last emerging from segregation; to the doubters he was a hick with straw in his hair, soon floundering in the quagmires of Washington and the world. The “Georgia mafia" who came with him were also an amateurish bunch, typified by his tubby, venal budget director, Bert Lance; his good ol’ boy chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan; and his younger brother Billy, who traded on his high connection to promote a brand of beer and, from his service station in Plains, dispensed the sort of mischievous platitudes that presidents can do without.
Yet scarcely had Mr Carter left the job than he seemed completely different: both effective and impressive. He threw himself into Habitat for Humanity, a charity that builds houses for the poor, raising the roof-beams himself with hammer and nails. Through his Carter Centre, set up in 1982, he became a tireless advocate for peace and democracy, travelling the world to monitor elections, end wars and promote human rights. In short order, he became America’s conscience and its moral ambassador. When he disagreed with his successors—as with George W. Bush over Iraq—he said so loudly. In 2002 he won the Nobel peace prize, gaining a stature he had never had in his brief troubled spell at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Yet these were the same man. There was no side to Mr Carter, and no dissembling. The landmarks of his foreign policy—the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, the Salt II disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union and the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, all criticised by many as giveaways at the time—were typical of a man intent on peace for its own sake. Almost his first act as president, after all, had been to pardon all those who had evaded the Vietnam draft, an attempt to heal one of the deepest fissures in America. He believed, with equal conviction, in the union of all men as brothers. In the Jim Crow years he had not hesitated to play with the black farm boys who lived on the same dirt road; as governor of Georgia he had made a point of choosing black candidates as judges and putting black portraits in the state Capitol. Now, prickly foreign leaders were invited to sit with him on the Truman Balcony in rocking chairs and talk about their grandchildren.
Working with Congress seemed harder. He did not understand the arts of schmoozing and doing favours, and offended Capitol Hill with attacks on pork-barrel spending. As a result, although he managed to set up the Department of Energy in 1977 to deal with the energy crisis, he struggled to get either an energy-reform bill or petrol rationing passed. On the economy, in years dogged by stagflation and unemployment as well as soaring oil prices, he seemed torn between charity and frugality, and neither worked. As inflation shot up into double digits, he imposed price controls; later he brought in credit controls and austerity, which drove America into recession. As someone who had experienced poverty and failed harvests, his uncomplicated aim was to help those in need; but he never found a consistent strategy for doing so while in office.
Surrounded by the high life of Washington, he still kept his lifelong predilection for woodworking and quiet fishing, for introspection and making things from scratch. In the same way, amid a maelstrom of clashing policy advice, simple Christianity was his guiding principle: to walk humbly, love his neighbour and do right by him.
America was not used to this. Religious as the country was (and is), presidents usually came in the safe, muted colours of Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism. God could be turned on or off, to suit the times. A Southern Baptist who had preached and taught Sunday school, whose Bible was kept to hand and whose God was permanently present, was a curiosity and an embarrassment to more secular types. Mr Carter did not proselytise as president, but behaved as he believed: his autobiography was called “Keeping Faith". Nor was he doctrinaire, severing his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention because it would not grant equality to women. His last act in the Oval Office was to pray for the freedom of his people; his last visitor there reminded him that no citizen had been killed in war during his administration. That was, for him, sufficient consolation.
In Russia, he might have been called a holy fool. In America, his career raised the disquieting thought that it might be impossible for a really effective president to also be a really good man.
