By Jeff Guy
President Jimmy Carter
I was sitting back in my car before leaving Wichita early Sunday afternoon. I sent texts to my kids, Sam and Kenzie, checking on how they were doing. Sam responded right away, told me was doing alright.
“We’re going to see Nosferatu in the theaters tonight,” he texted. I told him I saw A Complete Unknown with friends at the Boulevard Theater the night before.”
“Niiiiice, Bob Dylan,” he texted back.
Driving back home, I listened to a Wallflowers CD I’d checked out from the library. It was around 3:30 p.m. and I’d been back home a few minutes when I sat at the kitchen table and a message from AP News came over my phone.
Former President Jimmy Carter passes away at 100
I was sad, but I knew he was in a better place. He had great timing, hanging on long enough to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris and checking out before Trump takes office. The Biden/Harris team can be trusted to honor the 39th President in a fitting way.
A few minutes later, my friend, Melissa texted me. "Our hero, Jimmy Carter, has passed away. Wish we could have given him Kamala before he left this world."
The house was cold. I drove to Walmart to buy new batteries for the thermostat. I was heading for the self-checkout line when Sam texted again.
“I’ll let you know if Nosferatu is any good. Robert Eggers is one of my favorite directors.”
“Have you heard the news?” I texted back.
“About what?” he asked.
“Check the national news.”
He came back a couple of minutes later.
“Oh, I see,” he texted.
“Yeah.”
“RIP to the best peanut farmer around.”
President Carter & my childhood
The 1976 Presidential election between President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter is the first one I can remember. I was still too young to know the significance Carter had to Baby Boomers – hair over his ears, quoting Bob Dylan lyrics from the campaign podium, talking about his sons blasting Led Zeppelin on the campaign bus. And if I had heard about lusting in one’s heart, I wouldn’t have known what that meant. I just knew my parents and grandparents supported Jimmy Carter so I did too.
My friend, Randy, introduced me to a rhyme. “Carter’s a farter, but Ford’s never bored.” That, I understood. Unfortunately, my mom told me “fart” was a bad word. Ahh, the good old days.
January, 1977. We were in second grade, seated on the carpet – Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Clark’s classes together, watching the inauguration of the newly elected President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, on a small black and white TV. We’d had a mock election as a school and even some kids who “voted” for Ford were clapping after Carter took the oath of office.
The thing that resonated most with me, however, was the sight of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter shaking hands. That was a good thing for me to see as a child. That handshake told me that even though an election campaign is a dog fight, at the end of the day we were all friends, all Americans.
I was too young to understand the issues that led the voting public to choose Carter – the loss of faith in government after Vietnam and Watergate. All I knew was we had a new President and I felt some spirit of hopefulness in the air. It wouldn’t last, but for that one moment there was optimism and idealism.
“He’s a peacemaker,” my grandma Mac would say of Jimmy Carter. I was at her house the night he appeared on TV with Israeli Prime Minister Manachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after Carter brokered a peace deal between the warring countries.
One day I heard Grandma Mac & my great aunt Velma talking about how Jimmy Carter was a devout Christian. Back then, a Christian was considered a good thing to be. Christianity had a good name in those days and it didn’t surprise me that a nice man like Jimmy Carter would be a Christian. It was like, “Well, yeah, of course.”
But even at 8-years-old, I had enough sense to know that Carter’s faith was separate from his role as President. I’d learned in school about how the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower in search of religious freedom. I may not have known the term, but I understood the concept of “separation of church and state.”
A year later, when I was in third grade, Pres. Carter wasn’t so popular anymore. I understand now that inflation, long gas lines and, more than anything else, the Iranian hostage crisis sealed his presidential fate, but this was my first experience, noticing and contemplating how people could turn on a dime.
Years later in Mrs. Ralston’s sophomore English class, we were studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I read about how Brutus, appealing to the audience’s sense of logic, had them convinced that he was right in slaying Caesar. Minutes later, Mark Antony took the stage, appealed to the audience’s emotions, and stirred within them a mob mentality.They turned hell-bent on killing Brutus and his men.
“People are fickle,” Mrs. Ralston said.
So that’s why…I thought to myself. I’ve seen it a million times since. People change with the wind and more often than not, the majority is wrong in their mainstream opinions. Hell, Trump won the popular vote this go-around.
Most of my classmates in sixth grade voted for Regan in the school’s mock election in 1980. Some students asked the teacher, Mrs. Byrdslong, who she was voting for. “Rah! Rah! Rah! Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!” Of course.
Anyhow, I stuck with Carter. There was a lot of sadness in my house the night he conceded the election to Ronald Reagan. “I’m going to support this President all I can,” he said before the TV cameras and crowd of supporters. My mom, almost crying, said, “He was a good President.” It was a humbling and humiliating defeat. For years, Pres. Reagan would criticize the legacy of Carter’s presidency.
A few years later – I was about 14 or 15 – I saw Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter on the nightly news, wearing hard hats and work jeans, wielding a hammer and nails to build Habitat For Humanity Homes.
He was back.
Faith
It was around the early ‘90s, and I saw Jimmy Carter on The Tonight Show, telling Jay Leno stories related to his latest book, Turning Point, a memoir of his first election campaign – to be Georgia state senator for the 13th district. Carter was unique in the Deep South for his support of racial integration, and his opposition used it against him. He exposed a fraudulent election, took on the Georgia good ol’ boy system and won his Senate seat.
I read several books over the years that Carter had written. He covered topics such as politics, faith, women’s rights, bringing peace to the Middle East, and aging. He wrote poetry and and even wrote a novel of the American Revolution called The Hornet’s Nest.
My favorite of Carter’s books was An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. Jimmy Carter was born to James Earl Carter, Sr., a World War I veteran, and Lillian Gordy Carter, a nurse who traveled along the backwood country of rural Georgia, healing patients. The Carters settled along a dirt road in the unincorporated railroad town of Archery, founded by African Americans. Archery was about three miles from Plains. Plains, Ga., with a population of fewer than 1,000 people then and now was the Big Town, the center of a thriving community life.
Carter’s prose was evocative of the Depression, farming practices, community activities and church life in the years before integration and advanced communication would open up the wider world to the community. Carter wrote about the five people, other than his parents, who most influenced his life.
“Two of them were white,” he wrote.
The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Around a year ago, I gave my one copy to Sam. It was always my dream that one day I would make it to that Sunday School class Carter taught for decades at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, to meet the Carters and ask the man to sign his book for me.
But I never made it. In the past few years with Covid and Carter’s declining health, it became clear that I never would.
Only a few weeks ago, I watched on Kanopy, the documentary, Rock and Roll President, which talked of Carter’s love for music and his friendship with musicians like The Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. At the start of the film, Carter put a vinyl record on his turntable and Dylan started singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Willie Nelson wrote in his memoir about smoking marijuana on the roof of the White House. To spare the President any embarrassment, he wrote that he smoked a joint with a member of the White House staff “but it turned out to be one of my sons,” Carter said.
When Reagan assumed office it was back to the Perry Como days. There has not been a rock and roll President since Carter – Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing notwithstanding – and with rock no longer being the cultural force it once was, there will never be one again.
There will never again be a President like Jimmy Carter. Period. A progressive on the environment, Civil Rights, prison reform, women’s rights and healthcare reform, a President who appointed more women and Blacks to the federal bench than any before – it’s not all happening today. Parts of it are. Presidents since Carter have incorporated these issues into their agenda, but Carter was the whole package. He believed in these ideals, fervently. He continued fighting for them long after he’d left the presidency.
Historians will, rightly, analyze and theorize on the positive and negative aspects of Carter’s career. But at the end of the day, history will be kind to Jimmy Carter.
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