Lozada: Carter’s life was one trust exercise after another

By Carlos Lozada / The New York Times

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.

That story has plenty of truth to it, but it need not be the only version of Carter we choose to remember. Among his more than two dozen books, Carter wrote several autobiographical works, and those reflections and memories show how the instincts and ambitions that drove him — animating both his presidency and his postpresidency — were apparent early in his life. Carter’s writings reveal a man striving to earn trust from others, displaying unerring trust in himself and forever trusting in a country that did not always return the favor.

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 played with their children, joined them for meals in their homes, absorbed what he could of their values and even sought to replicate their manner of speech. It is hard (or maybe not so hard) to imagine what they made of such zeal, but for Carter, “it was only natural for me to consider myself the outsider and to strive to emulate their habits and language,” as he wrote in “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” a 2001 memoir about growing up in Depression-era Georgia. He took earnest pride in serving as interpreter between his mother and their Black neighbors — “I made my share of mistakes when trying to shift between the two dialects,” he admitted — and he noticed that the Black adults confided their personal and financial concerns to him, hoping, he assumed, that he would pass them on to his parents. “I usually found a way to bring up these issues at home when I thought it might help,” he wrote.

Decades later, during the 1978 Camp David peace talks with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Carter again served as intermediary between two parties who, despite living side by side, did not comprehend each other. Begin and Sadat went days without addressing each other directly, so Carter, along with his team, acted as a “referee” or “bridge” between the two camps, he recalled in “Keeping Faith.” The other leaders’ “assessment of my integrity” was a vital factor, Carter decided. The Egyptian president seemed to trust him too much, but the Israeli prime minister not enough; and he took it personally. “My greatest strength here is your confidence,” Carter said to Begin, almost shouting, when he felt the Israeli leader was holding back. “But I don’t feel that I have your trust.”

The presidency of Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday in his birthplace, Plains, Georgia, was one big trust exercise. So was his life.

More trust in intentions than ability

In a 1962 Georgia state Senate race, Carter fought back against his opponent’s shameless electoral fraud, trusting that such corruption would soon become “a fading memory” in the South. (In response, his own mother dismissed him as “so naive.”) He understood that disillusioned Americans entrusted him with the White House because they believed he would not repeat tragedies like Vietnam and Watergate. As president, he cultivated the confidence of world leaders — some even privately shared their faith struggles with him — but failed to sustain the support of Congress or of the American people, who, not without reason, came to trust more in his good intentions than his executive ability.

In “Keeping Faith,” Carter marveled that the United States somehow kept it together from one election to the next, from one administration to another. Given the fragmented political system, the fallibility of elected officials and the pressures encroaching on every decision, “it is almost a miracle how well our nation survives and prospers.” Carter trusted in Americans, if not always in their leaders, to deliver that miracle. Even though we sometimes “deviate radically from our nation’s historic path,” he wrote, “we are able to correct our mistakes, repair what we have damaged and move on to better days.”

In 1980, voters decided that those better days would not include Carter, at least not in the White House. The public that embraced him as the answer to Richard Nixon’s calculated malevolence discarded him in favor of Ronald Reagan’s blithe optimism. Carter wanted to help repair a nation’s trust in itself and restore a world’s trust in his nation. As president, he struggled in that effort, but he did not tire of it.

The country did. Frustrated with Plains, we went Hollywood.

A love of farming

The Carter family’s farm and home were in Archery, Georgia, a spot just beyond Plains that was never quite a real town, Carter wrote, a place that now persists only on old maps yet was “substantial enough to be the center of my world.” It is where he grew up from age 4, where the sand and loam and clay of the soil “caressed my bare feet,” as he put it, and it is where he learned to love farming.

“The farm operation always seemed to me a fascinating system, like a huge clock, with each of its many parts depending on all the rest.” He dreamed that someday he would take over the family farm from his father, that he would become “master of this machine, with its wonderful intricacies.” Carter wrote lovingly of agricultural life’s painstaking obsessions, of shaping wood pieces with froe, drawknife and spokeshave; of scraping and gutting hogs; of shaking the peanut crops to remove clinging dirt; of learning to use harrows and other cultivating equipment; of weaving the seats of chairs; of tracking the price of cotton, “the single most important economic factor in our lives”; of trailing along and taking notes as his father inspected timber to determine the value of land. “I was eager to grow bigger and learn as much as possible, to become like him, able to oversee the farm’s complex and interconnected processes,” Carter wrote. He really meant it: He has a 188-word sentence on optimal plowing techniques, and it’s wonderful.

Attention to detail

He did grow bigger, and the most intricate and interconnected machinery he came to oversee was the U.S. federal government. Carter’s endless forays into the smallest of details of governance, sometimes to his political detriment, are consistent with his training as a naval engineer but also feel rooted in the habits and imperatives of the family farm. He scrutinized “every line” of the communiqués going to the U.S. liaison in China in a period of intense diplomatic negotiations in 1978. During some rare free time in the White House over a Fourth of July weekend, he “caught up on back reading” regarding Middle East politics, reviewing maps, histories and U.N. resolutions. In the final moments of the Iran hostage negotiations, he spent hours poring over the financial arrangements for the repatriation of frozen Iranian assets, a complicated operation involving multiple U.S. and foreign banks. And to secure a key Senate vote, he inhaled a textbook on semantics by Sen. S.I. Hayakawa of California and called him to discuss it. “It may not have been bedtime reading,” Carter deadpanned, “but I needed his vote.”

The president’s relentless attention to the details of governing might have come at the expense of his focus on the country’s broader economic struggles, at least as reflected in his writings. The problems of ordinary citizens make only occasional cameos in his presidential memoir; they almost read like interruptions. Though Middle East peace building and the Panama Canal treaties rank among his proudest achievements, Carter wondered if they were “worth the tremendous investment of my time and energy.” (He wrote as if they were: The chapters of “Keeping Faith” surrounding the Camp David talks consume roughly a quarter of the memoir.) He governed as if each of many parts depended on the rest and as though all depended on him.

During the summer of 1979, as the country struggled with rising prices, long gas lines and labor strikes, Carter gathered political advisers, religious leaders, business executives, labor organizers and energy experts to counsel him. Some feedback proved harsh. “They told me that I seemed bogged down in the details of administration and that the public was disillusioned,” he wrote, “after their expectations had been so elevated at the time of my election.” The president recorded the most striking comments: “We have a crisis of confidence.” “There is a malaise of civilization.” “Mr. President, you’re not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government.”

Taking responsibility

For Carter, managing the government was a duty to discharge but also one to relish. “I ran for Congress and then shifted to governor to fill a competitive urge, and then really enjoyed making decisions as a top government executive,” he wrote in “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” published in 2015. In that book, he looked back on his various assignments after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, lingering on his submarine service. While some enlisted men could zero in on their own duties — whether as engine men or electricians or torpedo experts — the officers had to master every discipline. “We knew,” he wrote, “that one mistake in judgment, a lack of knowledge or an error in opening or closing a valve could endanger everyone on board.” As farmer, as naval officer, as president, Carter eagerly shouldered every responsibility.

In his famous July 1979 Oval Office address on the crisis of confidence he saw in America — remembered by critics as the “malaise” speech, although he did not employ that word — he lamented a “growing disrespect” in the country for essential national institutions. Yet at times he could betray a similar disdain. Carter decried the inertia of Congress and its “insatiable desire for consultation,” and in a diary entry that he cited in his White House memoir, he called the legislative branch “disgusting” when it would not grant him the authority he sought over energy rationing and conservation measures. (The sentiment is especially striking, given that Democrats held comfortable majorities in both chambers.) He frequently trashed the news media, reserving special ire for The Washington Post, which he felt exaggerated the dangers of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. (“They were undeterred in their crusade to frighten as many people as possible,” he complained decades later in “A Full Life.”) He was disturbed that career staff members in the State Department did not always carry out his directives regarding Iran “fully and with enthusiasm” and even summoned the Iran desk officers to the White House, suspecting them of leaking unflattering stories and telling them “they would have to be loyal to me or resign.”

Disdain for ‘Imperial Presidency’

He was proud of his public service but aware of the self-regard it could induce; he understood that mistrust and overconfidence are occupational hazards of the country’s highest office. Twice in his White House memoir, he brought up the idea of an imperial presidency — Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s book “The Imperial Presidency” was published just three years before Carter won the White House — and he tried to lessen the aura around the job. His decision to walk the parade route with his family on Inauguration Day rather than avail himself of the limousine, for example, was “a tangible indication of some reduction in the imperial status of the president,” he wrote. After grumblings about the loss of White House pomp, he brought back “Hail to the Chief” for special occasions. “I found it to be impressive and enjoyed it,” he confessed, an aside that almost seems apologetic.

This desire to scale back the trappings of the presidency came in part from the memories of the Nixon-era scandals. “In spite of Ford’s healing service, the ghosts of Watergate still haunted the White House,” Carter wrote, and they lurk throughout his books. The first movie he watched in the White House was “All the President’s Men,” released in 1976 — imagine what that screening must have felt like — and the new president worried that every minor functionary in the executive branch “wanted to be Deep Throat.” (He even recalled a phone conversation with Nixon, who, Carter wrote, “cautioned me about the difficulty of maintaining secrecy and the danger of placing too much faith in subordinates!”) He wanted to restore the “moral fiber” of the U.S. government and “exorcise” the Watergate ghosts, he wrote, opening the door wide to “friendlier spirits.”

Among the priorities Carter listed in his inaugural address were human rights, environmental quality, nuclear arms control and “wars against poverty, ignorance and injustice.” Among his regrets after leaving office, however, was that his administration had been “somewhat ostentatious” about its moral standards. It is an enduring trade-off. In “Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age,” a 1992 memoir describing his first political campaign 30 years earlier, he recalled a conversation with a traveling preacher who questioned his decision to run for state Senate. “If you want to be of service to other people, why don’t you go into the ministry or some honorable social service work?” the preacher asked. Carter, then in his late 30s, offered a peevish retort: “How would you like to be the pastor of a church with 80,000 members?”

Carter won that race after the initial results were thrown out because of ballot stuffing, voter harassment and all manner of cheating by the opposition — an appalling story that he shares to entertaining effect, including his mother’s skepticism, in “Turning Point.” (No surprise that, decades later, international election monitoring would become a focus of Carter’s postpresidential work.) He then ran for governor in 1966 but lost after no candidate won a majority and the legislature selected Lester Maddox, whose campaign symbol, Carter pointed out, was the pick handle Maddox used to turn away Black customers from his restaurant in Atlanta. “I could not believe that God, or the Georgia voters, would let this person beat me and become the governor of our state,” Carter wrote.

God and the Georgia voters made Carter governor four years later. Then Carter set his sights on the White House, or, as he might have thought of it then, a church with more than 200 million members.

Self-assurance, self-doubt

Carter’s writings have the flashes of self-assurance typical of anyone seeking the presidency but also moments of insecurity about how faithfully he was living out his values. One bout of self-doubt, which he describes in two memoirs, involved his father’s death and Carter’s motives for leaving the Navy and coming back home in 1953.

While on leave from his duties as a nuclear submarine officer to visit his ailing father, Carter witnessed a stream of visitors coming by with gifts and gratitude for the ways in which James Earl Carter Sr. had helped them. The elder Carter, dying of pancreatic cancer, had been active in church, in business and in politics, but the younger Carter was especially struck by “the many reports to me of Daddy’s benevolent activities,” which had been unknown even to his family. “It was obvious to me that he was putting his religious beliefs into action every day and making a profound impact on the lives of many people,” Carter wrote. “I felt besieged by an unwelcome comparison of the ultimate value of my life with his.” Carter would not be the first or last president to wrestle with daddy issues, but his particular response was dramatic: He decided to resign his naval commission and return home; essentially, to take his father’s place. His wife, Rosalynn, whom he informed but did not consult about the move, was “shocked and furious,” he acknowledged.

More than half of those visitors to his father’s deathbed were Black, Carter noticed. “My father always treated his African American customers and employees with meticulous fairness and respect, but he believed completely that the two races should be segregated,” he wrote. The outpouring of affection surprised Carter, who considered himself more racially enlightened. “More than anyone else in my family, perhaps even including my father, I could understand the plight of the Black families, because I lived so much among them,” he wrote in “An Hour Before Daylight.” Now his understanding of his father — and of himself — was challenged.

Race and ‘unearned deference’

The role of race in American life is an undercurrent in Carter’s memoirs, and it occasionally breaks to the surface with unexpected force. The first moment he recalls grasping the power of his racial status was at age 14, when he and two Black friends were walking through a field and came upon a pasture gate. The other boys stepped back to let him walk through first. “I was surprised, and immediately thought they must be playing a trick on me, with perhaps a trip wire near the ground on which I would stumble,” he wrote. But there was no wire and no trick other than the “unearned deference” he had been granted. The three boys never discussed it, but Carter later surmised that his playmates had been instructed by their parents to begin conforming to long-settled racial norms; to let him take the lead. Years later, he wrote a poem about the episode, “The Pasture Gate,” which includes these lines:

“We only saw it vaguely then,

but we were transformed at that place.

A silent line was drawn between

friend and friend, race and race.”

His life was marked by many such lines, not always silent ones. Whenever William Decker Johnson, the African Methodist Episcopal bishop whom a young Carter considered “the epitome of success and power” in their community, visited his parents’ home, it was considered unacceptable for him to come to the front door, but neither would he be humiliated to call at the back. Instead, his driver parked in their yard and honked the horn, and Carter’s father went outside to talk with Johnson. That yard again played a role on the night of the 1938 boxing rematch between Germany’s Max Schmeling (favored in Carter’s all-white school) and the African American hero Joe Louis. Some Black families who lived near the Carter home asked Carter’s father if they could listen to the broadcast from his yard, so the radio was placed by the window. After Louis demolished the German in the opening round, they thanked Carter’s father, walked in silence across the road and railroad tracks, entered their tenant house and closed the door. “Then all hell broke loose, and their celebration lasted all night,” Carter recalled. “Daddy was tight-lipped, but all the mores of our segregated society had been honored.”

The Civil War was a “living reality” in his life, Carter wrote in his childhood memoir. “I grew up in one of the families whose people could not forget that we had been conquered.” The evils of slavery never came up in his home; the evils of Reconstruction often did. As he grew older, Carter began to take his own stands. In “Turning Point,” he recalled visiting his home in 1951 and proudly telling his parents that the officers and crew on his submarine had been invited to attend a dance by the British governor general in Jamaica but that they had unanimously declined because Black crewmen were not invited. When he finished the story, there was silence. “The governor of Jamaica was absolutely right,” Carter’s father said before getting up and leaving the room. “Jimmy, it’s too soon for our folks here to think about Black and white people going to a dance together,” Carter’s mother told him. (In “A Full Life,” published more than 60 years after the incident, Carter recalled the dance as occurring in the Bahamas, though his parents’ reaction is rendered no less vividly.)

Defiance of segregation, not of the South

When Carter returned to Plains after his father’s death and was building up his farming business, various neighbors and political leaders urged him to join the local White Citizens’ Council, a group that formed out of the backlash against court-ordered desegregation. One day some of his most loyal customers went to his warehouse to pressure him, even volunteering to pay the $5 dues. He took a $5 bill out of his cash register and said, “I’ll take this and flush it down the toilet, but I am not going to join the White Citizens’ Council.” He lost their business for a while, he wrote, but most ended up returning. “These racial struggles now seem like ancient history,” he wrote in “A Full Life,” an assessment both heartfelt and premature.

These outlier attitudes coexisted with Carter’s unflagging devotion to his Southern roots. At the Naval Academy, he wrote, the “Yankees” among the upperclassmen targeted him for extra hazing. “As a Southerner, I refused to sing ‘Marching Through Georgia’ or agree to any demands that reflected badly on my region of the country.” Still, he came to see his political career as a means for regional redemption. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he declared in his 1971 inaugural address as governor, and more than 40 years later he still highlighted the May 31, 1971, cover of Time magazine, which featured his portrait under the line “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.” (The illustration behind Carter’s face featured the U.S. and Confederate flags.) He believed that his campaign for the presidency could have a similarly conciliatory effect. “The possibility that the nation would actually choose as a leader someone from the Deep South meant that the bitterness of the past could be overcome,” he wrote.

In “An Hour Before Daylight,” published in 2001, Carter explained that the close Black friendships of his youth made it “more difficult for me to justify or explain my own attitudes and actions during the segregation era.” He was gratified by the improved state of race relations in Plains since that time but worried that it had come at the cost of those close personal ties. “My own life was shaped by a degree of personal intimacy between Black and white people that is now almost completely unknown and largely forgotten,” he wrote. In 1992’s “Turning Point” he observed that segregation in America remained “insidious,” called out divides of both race and class and concluded that “legal changes and government policies alone are not sufficient to achieve the related goals of justice and freedom.”

On his way to a rally in Alabama during his presidential reelection campaign in 1980, Carter saw a group of Klan members holding up pro-Reagan signs; he went on to condemn them in his speech and to decry the Klan’s use of the Confederacy’s banner. “As a Southerner, it makes me feel angry when I see them with a Confederate battle flag, because I remember Judah P. Benjamin, who was secretary of state of the Confederacy; he was a Jew. And I remember Gen. Pat Cleburne of Arkansas, who died in battle not very far from this very spot, and General Beauregard of Louisiana — brave men. Both were Catholics, and so were many others who served under that flag.”

This is far from a simple rejection of the Confederate flag. Rather, Carter seemed to suggest that the Klan, which in “An Hour Before Daylight” he assailed as “the scum of the community, and a source of embarrassment to law-abiding citizens,” was dishonoring the banner and the courageous men — including Catholics and Jews, whom the Klan also targeted — who fought for it. In 2015, when his book tour promoting “A Full Life” coincided with a national debate over Confederate imagery triggered by the mass shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the former president told CNN that the flag should be “done away with” out of respect for Americans who see it as an emblem of oppression and white superiority, even as he believed that “very few people” still regard it as racist.

If his own regional loyalties and racial justice imperatives came into conflict, Carter seemed to have made his peace with the tension.

Lonelieness at the top

The solitary burden of the commander in chief’s unique responsibilities is a frequent theme of presidential memoirs, and in this respect Carter is little different from those who came before and after. “My most vivid impression of the presidency remains the loneliness in which the most difficult decisions had to be made,” he wrote in “Keeping Faith.” That loneliness is also present in his recounting of his family life, in which, following the example of his father, Carter alone made all the significant decisions in his marriage and household, with little input from Rosalynn. “I cannot understand in retrospect why I didn’t at least consult her concerning decisions that affected all our family, including leaving the Navy, dividing my father’s estate and running for public office,” he wrote.

Aside from his decision to leave the service, which turned relations between the Carters “quite cool,” he recounted in his memoirs only one other episode that placed a severe strain on their relationship. In the mid-1980s, they had agreed to write a book together about personal health and decided to divide up the chapters and submit drafts to each other for editing. “I write very rapidly,” Carter explained, “and Rosalynn treated my chapters as rough drafts. She writes slowly and carefully, and considers the resulting sentences as though they have come down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone.” They had frequent arguments about edits and soon could communicate only through harsh written messages. The book “evolved into the worst threat we ever experienced to our marriage,” he wrote. Only when their editor went to Plains and brokered a solution — they split the most contentious paragraphs between them and wrote them separately, without the other’s input — could they finish the project. “In the book,” Carter explained, “each of these paragraphs is identified by a ‘J’ or an ‘R,’ and our marriage survived.”

Rosalynn’s role

Over time, Carter wrote, Rosalynn came to play a vital role in the family business, particularly with bookkeeping and managing their warehouse, and in his political campaigns as well. “She liked the entire political process more than I did,” he wrote. She was especially effective in swaying doubtful voters, he explained, “and I soon realized that people were more inclined to express their beliefs or concerns to her than to me.” By the time he became a state lawmaker, they had finally become “real partners” in their marriage, Carter concluded.

“Rosalynn and I had a kind of blind faith that we would be successful in overcoming great political odds, as we had done so many times before,” Carter recalled of his effort to win a second presidential term. He had faith in his own judgment (“I was convinced that my decisions had been the right ones,”) and in the public (“If we can present our case clearly to the American people, we will win overwhelmingly”). It must have taken a great deal of faith, indeed; the year of the election featured a failed military operation to rescue the American hostages in Iran (in which eight U.S. servicemen died), runaway inflation, the eruption of Mount St. Helens, Sen. Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge for the Democratic nomination and what Carter described as a “very brief but steep recession.” The chapter of his White House memoir dealing with these challenges is titled “Beleaguered,” rarely a word politicians wish to see in the vicinity of their names, let alone one they put there themselves.

The view of Reagan

The irony of Carter’s defeat in 1980, when he carried only six states and Washington, D.C., is that he had judged Ronald Reagan the “weakest” standard-bearer the Republicans could have chosen. “I was pleased that Governor Reagan was the nominee,” Carter wrote in his White House memoir, and his logic may sound familiar. “My campaign analysts had been carefully studying what he had been saying during the Republican primary elections, and it seemed inconceivable that he would be acceptable as president when his positions were exposed clearly to the public,” Carter wrote. “I did not realize then that the press and the public would not believe that Reagan actually meant what he was saying.”

Carter initially hewed to the tradition, less honored lately, of not trash-talking subsequent occupants of the Oval Office. In “Keeping Faith” he held forth on Reagan the candidate and president-elect, not Reagan the president. He criticized the candidate’s “ridiculous theory” that tax cuts produce greater tax revenue and pointed out that the president-elect asked no questions when they met after the election. “Some of the information was quite complex, and I did not see how he could possibly retain all of it merely by listening,” Carter wrote, adding innocently that Reagan later requested a copy of Carter’s notes. In later books, Carter let loose, noting that the religious right supported Reagan “despite his previous incompatibility with their basic principles,” and accusing his opponent of “playing the race card” by making a 1980 campaign speech in support of states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. And looking back in 2015, Carter noted that “as a symbolic gesture, I installed 36 solar panels at the White House, but they were removed by President Reagan.”

Carter’s memoir of his childhood, “An Hour Before Daylight,” is the most captivating of these autobiographical works, whereas “Keeping Faith” may be the least. (Upon its publication, The Washington Post called the White House memoir a “sad memorial,” and The New York Times noted how “little introspection” it contained.) That contrast makes sense once we realize that the presidency, while the most newsworthy part of his life, might not have been the most meaningful to him. He had a feeling of “unreality” about being president, he wrote in his diary in the hours after his inauguration, and the office never defined him. “I spent four of my 90 years in the White House, and they were, of course, the pinnacle of my political life,” he wrote in 2015. “Those years, though, do not dominate my chain of memories.” Nor should they dominate our memories about him.

An accounting of self and others

In his recollections of the Camp David negotiations with Begin and Sadat, Carter wrote that the other two leaders viewed themselves as “men of destiny.” So how did Carter see his own purpose? As a bridge between the other two men, he said. Yes. But he was a bridge for his own country, too. A bridge, however narrow and incomplete, between Black and white. A labored gasp of decency between an era of scandal and another of self-indulgence. A man not of Washington but of Plains, a place whose citizens, as he described them, “resist moving away to distant places.”

Plains is where Jimmy met Rosalynn when she was a baby in the house next door, and it is where Rosalynn died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96. It is the home he left to visit distant places during his first presidential campaign, which he likened to a “graduate course in America,” a course “in the streets, in the factories, on the farms” of a vast nation. It is the place to which he returned to spend those final years that seemed they’d never end. “Plains is where I’ve seen the members of my family laid to rest, and where we expect to be buried,” Carter wrote in 2015. “There is a sense of permanence in Plains.”

There is a sense of permanence to Jimmy Carter, too, one that need not dissipate with his death. Consider this passage from the 1962 endorsement by the editors of The Americus Times-Recorder, when he was running to represent the 14th District in the Georgia state Senate:

“Jimmy Carter has shown his courage of conviction and stood for what he considered right, sometimes in the face of strong opposition among his own people, and still retained their respect and friendship. This is an important attribute for a man in public office, since win or lose, he must retain the respect and confidence of his colleagues and constituents.”

More than six decades later, there is little need to amend that description.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.