America needs more Jimmy Carters

A Strange Story About The One-Term, Small-town U.S. President James Earl Carter Jr. : A Memoir from the Very Early 1980’s

A familiar story surrounds the one-term, small-town president who was James Earl Carter Jr.: a good and honest man, well intentioned but overmatched in his White House tenure, selfless and admired in his postpresidential vocations. When you reach the end of Carter’s 1982 White House memoir, “Keeping Faith,” and find him musing that “as one of the youngest of former presidents, I expected to have many useful years ahead of me,” it’s hard not to smile. Yes, he did.

Those impulses recur in distant moments. As a boy, for instance, he spent a lot of time with the African American families who worked as tenant farmers or day laborers on his father’s land. He absorbed what he could of their values and even tried to duplicate their manner of speech as he played with their children. It is hard to picture what they were like when they were here, but for Carter it was necessary to look at himself as the outsider and to emulate their habits and language. When he was an interpreter, he made his share of mistakes and tried to shift between the two dialects, but he noticed that the Black adults were worried about their finances and personal issues. He stated that he usually found a way to bring up the issues at home.

Mr. Carter was nominated for the Peace Prize a number of times, but it was finally awarded to him in 2002 for his significant contribution to Camp David and his work against tropical diseases.

Mr. Carter came to the presidency owing little to anyone, including his own party. Assembling a formidable coalition of small-town and rural voters, white blue-collar voters and African Americans, he surprised everyone in America — except perhaps himself and his wife, Rosalynn — when he beat Gerald Ford in the 1976 election.

In retrospect, he could not have run at a more auspicious moment. The previous decade had been brutal for the United States. One president, Lyndon Johnson, chose not to seek another term because of rising public anger at an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Another, Richard Nixon, resigned to avoid impeachment. Kennedy, Bobby, as well as King, the nation’s premier civil rights leader, were killed by assassins. The war ended badly.