“You Should Run for President”: Jimmy Carter’s Ad Man Speaks

On an unusually warm Washington winter afternoon, Gerald Rafshoon, spry and trim at 90, stood and watched as I carefully leafed through the pages of a three-ring black binder at the dining-room table in the home of his granddaughter, Jaclyn Rothenberg. The paper was tissue-thin and its color a light mustard.

A day earlier, on December 29, Rafshoon’s friend of 58 years, President Jimmy Carter, had died at his home in Plains, Georgia. Rafshoon was still processing the news and keeping busy, fielding a call from Peter Baker of The New York Times and putting on a tie for a CNN appearance in an hour.

Jaclyn had suggested he pull out some of the documents he had stored away in his files from his years inside the Carter White House, where Rafshoon served as Carter’s communications director and his trusted media guru.

As I peered down, I saw “EYES ONLY” typed out across the top of a memo Rafshoon had written to Carter on June 30, 1978. The moment was a crossroads in Carter’s presidency, coming ahead of the midterm elections and just after Carter’s polling numbers had plummeted to their lowest mark since he took office due to widespread unhappiness with the economy.

Rafshoon had joined the White House weeks earlier after spending much of 1977 and early 1978 tending to his advertising agency in Atlanta. He had grown frustrated as he watched Carter struggle to adjust to the presidency and to Washington, where many in the power structure—the lawmakers, the lawyers, the journalists—viewed him as a sort of pious alien.

On page 12, Rafshoon urged the embattled president to revive the outsider spirit of Carter’s thrilling 1976 campaign, where Rafshoon had been image-molder in chief, and of his January 20, 1977, inauguration, where Carter famously strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue holding hands with his daughter, Amy, and his wife, Rosalynn, as thousands cheered.

“Since that time,” Rafshoon wrote, “the image has steadily blurred. There have been too many signals, and they have too often been in conflict. There has been a sense of uncertainty. It is that perception that we have to overcome.”

I glanced at the right margin. There, in neat black cursive, was Carter’s handwritten reply.

“True,” he wrote.

Rafshoon smiled as I turned the pages and pointed out Carter’s unmistakable scribbles, including the loopy, swan-like J well known from his signature.

Rafshoon’s 43-page memo went on to detail recommendations for how Carter could jump-start his fortunes ahead of what would be a brutal 1980 reelection race.

“So far the American people have mostly seen you attacking oil companies, Congress, Doctors, and Lawyers. They have seen very little of your non-controversial human side,” Rafshoon wrote on page 20. “I am not suggesting that we contrive activity to convey a false impression—merely that we let the American people see both sides of your character.”

Rafshoon added, “I cannot stress too strongly the need for more public activity that conveys the image of a competent and compassionate leader and less public ceremonial activity and public stroking of Congress.”

“I agree,” Carter wrote in pen.

Carter’s responses were not always head-nodders. His scrawl could be terse and headstrong, such as when he vented on page 16 of the June 30, 1978, memo that “too much of our planned ‘success’ is in the hands of Congress.”

Decades later, as Jaclyn’s dogs circled his legs, Rafshoon told me Carter’s brilliance and complexity were most revealed when he was in private, digesting memos like those on the table and brooding over the reality of his hard-won power.

Even though Carter was what biographer Jonathan Alter calls a “world-class autodidact,” Rafshoon said Carter understood that he needed more than his obvious intelligence, skill, and the halo of his sterling character to achieve his ambitions. He recognized, Rafshoon said, that he also needed to sell the idea of Jimmy Carter to a nation that didn’t quite get him.

Rafshoon, now one of the few surviving members of Carter’s inner circle, wistfully said he was there for the entire sales campaign, watching up close as this pensive peanut seller willed himself first to the governor’s mansion in Georgia, then to the presidency, and then, ultimately, to the world.

Others were close if not closer to Carter at various junctures in his political ascent—including his late aides Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, in particular, as well as the late onetime wunderkind, the consultant Pat Caddell. There was the banker Bert Lance, his fellow Georgian. But Rafshoon occupied a singular space in the Carter orbit: He was a New York–born Jewish strategist and confidant who instinctively understood the potency of Jimmy Carter as a political project long before most people took Carter seriously. Carter trusted him because he was there near the start and never left.

And for Rafshoon, the sale never really ended. Up until Carter’s final years, he was the former president’s informal sherpa with the national press, bringing columnists and reporters and authors down to Plains to see Carter teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church, where the shaggy green carpet seemed to be straight out of the time when Carter was president.

“You’ve gotta get to Plains,” he’d say. “You’ve got to see what it’s all about, the whole thing.”

First, the State House

They first met in 1966. Rafshoon was a young, talkative businessman, vibrating ambition and seeking big-fish clients in the South. He was fresh off a stint with Twentieth Century Fox, which gave his small shop a sheen of Hollywood glamor. He loved to tell tales about his time working on advertising for Cleopatra, the 1963 film starring Elizabeth Taylor.

Carter was a young state senator and retired naval officer from south Georgia, also vibrating ambition but politically stalled as he sought the Democratic nomination for governor, running in a field that included Lester Maddox. Maddox, a segregationist, had risen to infamy in 1964 when he violated the recently passed Civil Rights Act and refused to serve Black students at his restaurant. He routinely threatened violence with an ax handle.

Rafshoon had been following the six-man primary race from afar and thought Carter’s campaign was kitschy, especially his country-western jingle that played on the radio. An associate told him that he should nonetheless meet the candidate.

At the time, political advertising felt like a dead end for someone trying to build his client base. “You don’t get paid,” Rafshoon recalled thinking at the time, as we sat and talked about Carter for 90 minutes over cappuccinos. “You might make a few friends, but you could make a few enemies as well.”

After Carter fired his ad man, Rafshoon decided to take the meeting. He called around his contacts, asking about Carter beforehand and hearing that he was the kind of guy who preferred to read a book while others ordered drinks.

“I love old Jimmy, but he’s a bookworm,” one Georgia legislator ruefully told him. “Everyone else has a broad, but Jimmy is busy reading Dylan Thomas.”

Carter came into the meeting, held at the stately Dinkler Plaza Hotel in downtown Atlanta, with a small group of his allies. Rafshoon noticed that Carter’s eyes were glacier blue and his manner was measured but coiled and intense, almost simmering a bit over his campaign’s inability to catch fire in the primary contest. There was no attempt to win over Rafshoon.

“Well, whaddya got?” Carter asked him.

“First thing, get rid of that damn jingle,” Rafshoon replied. “Second thing,” he said, we’re going to take the advertising budget and “put it all into television.” Instead of doing traditional spots, Rafshoon said, it’d be “cinema vérité.”

“I’ll get a cameraman from WSB,” the local TV station, he said, “and we’ll follow you around.”

Rafshoon’s pitch on the message: They say you can’t win.

Carter kept listening. Carter’s colleagues raised their eyebrows. Who runs for governor by saying others don’t believe you can win? It didn’t make sense to them.

Rafshoon insisted that Carter could get traction on his biography and being perceived as antiestablishment. Being a graduate of the Naval Academy and a rural businessman were nice, but they didn’t have enough edge at a time when rivals like Maddox were drawing headlines with their incendiary personas.

“They don’t decide who can win, you decide who can win,” Rafshoon said, summing up how he believed Carter could start to gain ground in the race. It was populism 101 and Horatio Alger with a whiff of peanuts from Plains. Carter was silent as the others there grumbled about Rafshoon’s proposal.

“Carter turns to them and says, ‘Let me speak to this fella alone. You all go back, I’ll see you at the car.’ And they go out, and he looks at me and says, ‘Don’t argue with these folks. They’re good folks. I need them with me.’” Carter then paused. “Now,” he told Rafshoon, “let’s go do your campaign.”

Within days, Rafshoon and a rumpled television crew were in Plains, shooting footage of Carter at work. Those initial Plains shoots worked for Carter, who felt relieved to be finally getting closer to something he had long been seeking: a way to communicate his character to voters in a manner that felt genuine. Rather than going to a studio or radio booth, he was at home, shedding the suit he wore in Atlanta for a plaid shirt with an open collar, walking among tractors, shucking peanuts, and letting his thick sandy hair swoop over his forehead.

Carter lost that race. Maddox, whom he despised, ended up winning the primary, with Carter finishing third and narrowly missing the runoff. The defeat was devastating, but it was not without its upsides. Carter had made a mark. “He went back to Plains, and I went back to pitching Sears Roebuck and others,” Rafshoon said, but they had an understanding that a comeback in 1970 was not merely possible but a calling. “Keep in touch,” Carter told him.

As they ramped up for that campaign, Rafshoon told Carter that he should do a political dance and avoid being tied down to any position or ideology; he argued that it would be better to straddle different constituencies and be seen as vaguely palatable to traditional Southern Democrats, young voters, and Black voters who were looking for a sunny change agent.

“The one thing I didn’t want was to get into issues,” Rafshoon told me. The campaign was going to be about “character and hard work and him saying a few words talking about his past and that he grew up in Georgia and everything.”

The strategy worked. Carter surprised his skeptics and beat former Governor Carl Sanders, who was popular with Georgia’s business leaders, in the Democratic race.

“Sanders was in the hands of the bankers,” Rafshoon said, recalling the thrust of Carter’s message in the summer of 1970. “We had called him ‘Cufflinks Carl.’” In one ad, where they wanted to show that Sanders was a creature of exclusive clubs, Rafshoon had his crew zoom in on a fancy door for emphasis, giving the impression that Sanders mingled with the elite.

“The sign on the door said ‘Private club, members only,’” Rafshoon said. “But it happened to be the Jewish club that I belonged to; it was the only place I could get that.”

Rafshoon chuckled as he remembered Sanders’s fury with him personally. At one campaign event, Sanders got up and said, “Jimmy Carter has hired a slick advertising agency to impugn my record.” Sanders then plucked out his cufflinks. “Well, now we’re going to roll up our sleeves,” Sanders told the crowd, “and we’ll show ’em what my record is all about.”

Sanders remained bitter about the campaign for years, calling Carter “evasive,” “very deceitful,” and a cynic on race for saying he would allow segregationist George Wallace to speak at the Georgia statehouse—an overt appeal to white voters—all while Carter was making overtures to the Black community. Carter brushed off the criticism, Rafshoon said, because he felt he had been careful enough in the 1970 campaign to avoid making any promises to anyone.

Carter also could say he had some distance from his own campaign—and from his ad man. Carter, Rafshoon said, was someone who was fiercely determined to win yet notably cautious when it came to anything that might affect his reputation, including Rafshoon’s scathing ads about Sanders. “Carter came up to me,” Rafshoon said, “and said, ‘I need to see these commercials.’ All the way through—governor, president—he never saw a commercial until they were on the air. I said, ‘I do the commercials, you do the campaigning.’”

Once elected, and limited to one term by Georgia’s Constitution, Carter quickly took care to veer away from any suggestion that he had winked to the segregationists by taking them on in his January 12, 1971, inaugural address where he declared, “The time for racial discrimination is over.”

Rafshoon was on the dais that day and said the conservative Democrats who had backed Carter’s bid against Sanders were shocked and betrayed. The selling of Jimmy Carter 1970 hadn’t yielded what they thought they bought.

Sitting among a few “real racists,” Rafshoon said he heard former Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin turn to Senator Herman Talmadge and say, “That son of a bitch, he lied to us!” A few others, Rafshoon said, looked at him with scowls that seemed to say, “There’s the little Jew that wrote that.”

If only they knew, Rafshoon thought.

Aiming for the White House

By the summer of 1972, when Democrats convened in Miami Beach to nominate George McGovern, Carter and his tight-knit group of aides were starting to acquire a taste for national politics. A short and ill-fated effort to get McGovern to tap Carter as his running mate left Rafshoon and Jordan hungry for more.

“Hamilton and I—I remember it so well—we were watching McGovern’s speech with our wives, and it went into 4 o’clock in the morning and we’re walking away and Hamilton says, ‘I never want to come back here. We had to go hat in hand trying to be number two to McGovern, who’s not going to win.’ And I said, ‘Jimmy ought to be president. If these schmucks running the campaign could do that, you and I could do that.’ So we came back and told Carter we want to come talk to you about your future.”

Carter agreed and said he wanted to have the meeting at the governor’s mansion, not in his official office at the state Capitol. Rafshoon remembers it vividly.

“You can’t run for reelection,” Rafshoon told him.

“I know that,” Carter said sharply.

“You can’t beat Herman Talmadge,” who was up for reelection to the Senate in 1974, Rafshoon said.

“Probably not,” Carter said.

“We think you should run for … president,” Rafshoon told him.

“Oh? Why do you think that?”

Jordan and Rafshoon ran through a list of attributes they believed could give Carter a chance.

“What do we do now?” Carter asked.

“We’ll come back to you with a written brief,” Jordan told him.

After Nixon resigned in August 1974, Carter and his advisers saw the opening they had been seeking: Carter could run as a total contrast to the Nixon style of politics. Rafshoon told Carter the commercials could be an amped version of what he did in 1966 and 1970, portraying Carter as a man of the people who was vigorous and the opposite of the parade of polished Democrats from the Senate, among others, who were not-so-quietly lining up to take on Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford. Carter announced his long-shot bid in December 1974, mostly generating a shrug from the press and from top Democrats in Washington.

Carter and his team doggedly put their plan into action. Rafshoon once again brought a camera crew to Plains to film Carter walking around the small town and making his rounds at his business as the sun lit his face. Every ad, he said, had a desired undercurrent: “Character. Character.”

Getting the Carter family’s story and its colorful figures into the public imagination—from Rosalynn to Carter’s whip-smart, service-oriented mother, Lillian—was also key.

Soon Carter’s target was the Iowa caucuses, where the campaign saw a chance to link the state’s agricultural roots with Carter’s own, and Carter stunned the naysayers in January 1976 by finishing well ahead of better-known candidates such as longtime Senator Birch Bay of Indiana.

For Rafshoon, it felt like 1970 on steroids with Carter doing well with religious voters, farmers, and blue-collar voters but also, as the Times noted in its coverage of Iowa’s caucuses, he “scored heavily … even among Iowa’s few Blacks.”

Rafshoon, as ever, was focused on the sale—selling Carter to the masses and the insiders. He credits Hamilton Jordan for nudging Carter to be in New York on the night of the caucuses and maximize the media bump from a strong showing by getting on as much television as possible.

“Barbara Walters thought he was cute,” Rafshoon told me. Other media types began to swarm around the candidate as he headed to New Hampshire. Yet as Carter climbed in the polls and won more contests, the scrutiny of the sale could be painful. Not everyone shared Carter’s estimation of himself that he could confidently balance his rectitude with the compromises of a presidential campaign that punched above its weight.

“Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies,” was the headline for a cutting Steven Brill May 1976 article in Harper’s that went off like a bomb inside Carter’s campaign, Rafshoon recalled. Brill punctured holes in Carter’s description of himself on the trail as a “nuclear physicist and a peanut farmer” when he was a former naval officer with a bachelor’s degree who owned a warehouse.

“That didn’t hurt that much, but it hurt,” Rafshoon said, saying that it made many of the reporters who had jumped on the Carter story after Iowa start to cover him with cooler heads.

Once Carter won that November, Rafshoon paid close attention to how the press covered President Carter. It was evident to him that many journalists respected his out-of-nowhere achievement and his political grit but they did not know Carter well or, worse, found him to be a little too corny for their liking, not unlike Rafshoon’s first impression of Carter after he heard that radio jingle a decade earlier. The seasoned Washington types could also sense that Carter was a grinner on television and at rallies but rarely flashed it when he saw them approach him. One senator privately said Carter “makes Richard Nixon look like an extrovert.”

That was going to be a problem.

“I Don’t Need Sally Quinn”

In 1978, Rafshoon took Nixon’s old hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building and made it his own. When he wasn’t with Carter and Jordan and Powell in the Oval Office, he enjoyed trading jokes with colleagues about his own time in the Navy or his days at the University of Texas as they worked on rehabilitating Carter’s public image, and there were always more stories to share about his time advertising movies.

Rafshoon was troubled, however, as the summer ended. Carter was doing better in the polls and had more energy. There was a new spark in his public performance too, as he grew comfortable with the occasional veto to push back on Congress. Yet the press was still a headache. Washington not liking Jimmy Carter could be useful for him politically, but the press finding him standoffish and odd was not helpful at all. In an age before the Joe Rogans roamed the media landscape, there were few ways beyond advertising to get to people other than through the pillars of the press who ran the newsrooms, networks, and magazines.

Back in granddaughter Jaclyn’s dining room, Rafshoon shows me another one of his private memos to Carter, dated September 30, 1978. It reads like a pleading with the president to do what he loathed: court a press corps he found hostile.

On page 21 and 22, Rafshoon offers Carter a checklist of proposals with space for Carter to mark “yes” or “no,” including interviews with CBS’s Walter Cronkite, PBS’s Bill Moyers, The Washington Post’s David Broder, The New York Times’ James Reston, and CBS commentator Rod MacLeish, among others. There is a suggestion he talk with Howard Cosell as part of “attending the Redskins-Dallas Monday night game.”

Further down is a “yes” or “no” on whether Carter would continue holding “media dinners.”

Rafshoon remembered Carter at first being wary of the idea but agreeing to hold them at the White House if Rafshoon was sure they would help him get better coverage. Advertising might have been sufficient during the campaign to win power but holding power was another matter and demanded a different kind of salesmanship—the lean across the table, the confidential aside, the occasional flattery of someone you wish you could ignore because they were pals with Senator Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts, who would go on to challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination.

“At the end of going through the whole list” of media people with Carter, Rafshoon said he asked him, “Who else would you like to have over for dinner?”

“You have another list?” Carter asked. “I thought this was it.”

“Well, who do you like?”

Carter grimaced.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said.

Later, Rafshoon said he told the president he needed to have Katherine Graham, the powerful publisher of The Washington Post over for dinner.

“You be there,” Carter said sternly.

Rafshoon then suggested Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn, who had become one of the Post’s marquee writers and a social force in town.

“I don’t need Sally Quinn,” Carter said.

“I said, ‘I need Sally Quinn. You call her and say it’s Ben only.’”

Quinn ended up going.

“We had a terrific time,” Quinn told me in a phone call this week. “Ben and Carter really liked each other. Carter, of course, was going to like Ben. I don’t know what they thought we’d be, some Kennedy, East Coast elitists. But it wasn’t like that at all. Ben was a woodsman, he worked out in the woods, spent time burning brush, and he and Carter got into that.

“I got along really well with Jimmy Carter, had a good relationship with him, really liked him,” Quinn said, adding that Jerry “got it. He got Washington, and he got that it was important for Carter to make friends in Washington.”

When Carter Spoke With Trump

Carter’s death at age 100, coming so close to the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, has made Carter’s contrast with Trump even starker. For Rafshoon and others who knew Carter, it feels like watching not only the end of a life but the end of a certain kind of American president.

Trump’s personal code is transaction—the art of the deal. Brute force. Bending enemies and friends to his will, whether it’s through “love letters” or through a barrage of Truth Social posts. As Trump told me and Bob Woodward in 2016, “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”

Carter’s eyes could instill fear in those who crossed him, and he could be stubborn, ruthless, and competitive to the point where he turned off even those who loved him. But Carter seeing real power as fear? It’s hard to imagine. This was a president who sat in a cardigan sweater before a fire in 1977 and asked Americans to make sacrifices due to a cold winter and gas shortages.

“Carter was tough, but he didn’t go out of his way to hurt people’s feelings,” Rafshoon said.

“He was never for Trump,” he added. “Trump probably couldn’t understand anything about Carter.”

Still, Carter had a knack for popping up from time to time during Trump’s presidency, despite his age and physical deterioration, never too far removed from the action even when he found it politically off or personally unsound.

Rafshoon told me Carter once spoke by phone with Trump in early 2019, ahead of Trump’s trip to North Korea to meet with dictator Kim Jong Un. Rafshoon recalled Carter telling him that he told Trump that he did not like John Bolton, who was serving as Trump’s national security adviser. Rafshoon said Carter said that Trump cracked that he did not like Bolton, either.

When Rafshoon pressed Carter for more anecdotes from the call, Carter glared at him and said Trump “wants me to get you to go work for him.” They laughed and Rafshoon did not ask any further questions about Trump.

I told Rafshoon that I briefly said hello to President Carter and Rosalynn Carter a few minutes before Trump’s inauguration in 2017. They nodded kindly as they walked through the Capitol, saying little on the way to their seats.

Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon was hovering nearby. He noticed Carter had come, and said that while he did not admire Carter’s presidency, he was impressed by the elderly couple and the way they carried themselves. “Old school,” Bannon said.

Carter won’t be there for Trump’s second inaugural. But the U.S. flags fluttering outside, 48 years after Carter’s inauguration, will be half-staff in his honor.