Jimmy Carter RIP
Why not the best?
That question is not a mere rhetorical question.
In fact, in the fall of 1975, this was the title, Why Not the Best?, of a bestselling book by a new figure on the national stage: former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. The question had first been posed directly to the young Ensign and then Navy Lt. Carter by his strict and legendary commanding officer, Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover, Carter would write, “He asked me and every other young naval officer in the atomic submarine program.” It was a question Carter never forgot.
For those not around in the day, Carter’s rise was an improbable story in the day.
America was just emerging from a seriously divisive period.
First came the Vietnam War. The war was so divisive in the 1960s and early 1970s that it had cost the once overwhelmingly popular Democrat President Lyndon Johnson — elected in a massive landslide over the GOP’s Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 — his renomination. Under attack in 1968 from anti-war Democrat Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (father of today’s RFK Jr.), LBJ was forced to withdraw from what all assumed was his certain re-election bid.
The Democrats then turned not to McCarthy or Kennedy — the latter assassinated the night he won the California Democratic primary — but to LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, seen as LBJ’s heir, was so divisive the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was the cause of massive Chicago riots, all televised in vivid detail.
In the wake of that, the GOP nominated its losing 1960 standard bearer, former Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon won and was re-elected in a landslide in 1972. The war extended beyond Nixon’s time in office, ending in disaster in 1975 as the South Vietnam capital of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Communists, the remaining Americans in the U.S. Embassy were captured on video dramatically being rescued off the Embassy roof by American helicopters.
And then.
And then what became known as the “Watergate scandal” erupted, a political drama revolving around a break-in by Nixon campaign staffers to the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office/apartment complex in Washington. For the next two years, the scandal unwound in a myriad of congressional committee investigations and prosecutions by so-called “Special Prosecutors.”
After much slam and bang, the scandal ended abruptly in August 1974 when Nixon, about to be impeached, resigned, making Vice President Gerald Ford the new president. By 1976 Ford himself was under challenge for re-nomination by former California Governor Ronald Reagan. That race was close, literally ending in a tense showdown at the Republican National Convention when a handful of delegates switched their allegiance from Reagan to Ford, putting Ford over the top.
As all of these multiple dramas unfolded, seemingly out of nowhere this smiling, soft-spoken former Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter appeared. He was so totally removed from the Vietnam and Nixon controversies that he had an instant appeal.
A Georgia peanut farmer, Naval Academy graduate, submarine officer, state senator, and one-term governor, suddenly Carter was a political version of the Beatles. It was learned he had left the Navy and a promising career to return home at his father’s passing to save the family’s peanut farm. He did. Americans were suddenly crazy for Jimmy Carter. He was an Outsider, a political rock star. And, on January 20, 1977, having defeated the incumbent President Ford, he was being sworn in as president.
And then.
And then “Mr. Jimmy” (as he was called in his small hometown of Plains, Georgia) was doing battle with the Washington Swamp creatures. And as time unfolded, it eventually didn’t go well.
Carter’s young Georgia staffers, symbolized by so-called “good ole boy” Hamilton Jordan as chief of staff and Jody Powell as White House press secretary, had as much contempt for Washington insiders as those insiders were growing to have for Carter and themselves.
The contempt of insider Democrats manifested itself in a 1980 renomination battle with Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, that Carter, after a pitched battle, managed to win. In November of 1979, as the Kennedy challenge was getting underway, Iranian student radicals raided the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking the American embassy staffers hostage and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Reagan was running again, and this time captured the 1980 GOP nomination, setting himself up as a serious threat to the politically wounded Carter — with Reagan eventually winning in a landslide.
Said Carter later to Jordan: “1980 was pure hell — the Kennedy challenge, Afghanistan, having to put the SALT Treaty on the shelf, the recession, Ronald Reagan, and the hostages … always the hostages! It was one crisis after another.”
One crisis after another indeed. Carter left office viewed as one of the worst American presidents ever. Earning for himself the kind of reputation Republican President Herbert Hoover had earned from his presidency when the 1929 Great Depression hit the nation.
What to do? A serious Christian — he was famous for teaching Sunday school at his Plains Baptist Church even while president — Carter set about using his presidential influence to help solve various international disputes. While he pursued the typical post-presidential task of setting up his presidential library, he went on to do something else entirely.
That would be the establishment of what is known as “The Carter Center,” an organization devoted to Carter’s “lifelong mission to improve life for the world’s poorest people by championing freedom and improving health,” as the Center describes itself.
And in that self-created role, Carter was a stunning success. Years later the Washington Post would write of Carter’s post-presidential years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize that “the prize recognized the singular achievements of a one-term president who had turned his post-White House career into a self-built monument to world peace and human dignity.”
Indeed.
As Jimmy Carter now passes on, he leaves a reputation for what future presidents can achieve whenever it is that they leave office.
With future presidents asking of themselves, “Why Not the Best.’
An excellent question — and one for all Americans to ask of themselves as well.
RIP Mr. President.
And thanks for your service.
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