In Their Own Words: Jimmy Carter (Dalaklis Media Enterprises, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. KPBS showed one of the vest-pocket hour-long In Their Own Words documentaries – though the “in their own words” aspect simply means that quotes from the people being profiled get projected periodically on the screen – on former President Jimmy Carter, whom I’ve long classed with John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover on the list of one-term presidents who did more good for the country after their presidencies than they did during them. Certainly after the depressing political news about the current Democratic president, Joe Biden – who’s looking awfully Carteresque these days with his legislative agenda stuck in Congress, his poll numbers in free fall and a looming set of by-elections (notably the governor’s race in Virginia) in which the races are trending against him and the Democrats, it was both appropriate and saddening to watch a show about the last Democratic President who was defeated for re-election.

At only an hour, the show couldn’t delve much into Carter’s history – his small-town upbringing in Plains, Georgia; his involvement in Admiral Hyman Rickover’s Navy nuclear submarine force (where, Carter recalled, they lived every day under the awareness that what they were doing could eliminate all life on earth), his retirement from the Navy when his father became terminally ill, his first run for office (as a Georgia state senator in 1962), his first campaign for governor of Georgia in 1966 – when he ran as a racial moderate and, like George Wallace in his first campaign for governor of Alabama in 1958, lost to an out-and-out racist blowhard) and his second try for the Georgia governorship in 1970, when he won. Unlike Wallace, who told friends after his first loss for governor as a racial moderate that the winner, Jim Patterson, “out-niggered me, and I’ll never be out-niggered again,” Carter learned a different lesson, running a more or less openly racist campaign for governor in 1970 and then making a dramatic announcement during his inaugural address that “the era of racial discrimination is over.” This left a lot of Georgia’s white voters accusing him of a bait-and-switch, but Carter didn’t care, and there’s a fascinating follow-up story from when he and the other candidates for the 1976 Democratic Presidential nomination met with the Congressional Black Caucus. The Black Caucus members asked them how many African-Americans they had on their staffs, and the other candidates said they had one – the most “liberal” of them said he had none but was looking for one – while Carter couldn’t remember because he had so many (27).

The show followed the 1976 Presidential campaign (which I remember as the subject of an even more compelling PBS documentary that was shown during the 2016 campaign) and how Carter, at least according to this analysis, blew a 30-point lead in the polls with his infamous Playboy interview and his admission that “I have lusted in my heart many times” – a bit of born-again Christianspeak that, like a lot of Carter’s utterances, just sounded weird to many Northern liberal voters otherwise inclined to support him. The show explained that Carter’s term wasn’t the disaster it’s often made out in the histories – in his first year he got 15 major bills through Congress, largely about environmental issues but also about deregulation, especially of air travel (which may not have been a good thing), a record they argued compared to Lyndon Johnson’s, and it charts Carter’s decline and fall in political popularity largely as the result of the economy (specifically the return of gas lines in 1979) as well as the Iranian hostage crisis. The hostage-taking was triggered by the U.S.’s decision to admit the deposed Shah of Iran to the U.S. for medical treatment for cancer, which Carter initially opposed – he actually said, “What am I going to do when they take our people in response?” – but was talked into by Henry Kissinger and Carter’s own vice-president, Walter Mondale. It touched on the way the hostages became a weapon for the Ayatollah Khomeini in his power struggle against secular Iranian politicians, and mentioned the hideously botched April 1980 attempt to stage a raid to free them, which made the U.S. military look like the Keystone Kops. It didn’t mention that Carter had a primary challenger in 1980, Ted Kennedy, whose campaign fizzled but not before doing Carter lasting damage, and it took a “Print the Legend” version of Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan as a “blow-out.” (It was in the Electoral College but not in the popular vote – Reagan got less than 52 percent, a substantial victory but hardly a landslide.)

The parallels between Carter and Biden were virtually inescapable – both ran to replace a scandal-ridden Presidency, both had early legislative successes but then got bogged down in Congress, and both were accused of bait-and-switch tactics to win: Carter not only posed as more racist than he was to win the governorship of Georgia, but he mobilized the evangelical Christian community to support him (despite their traditionally apolitical stance) and then governed on a liberal agenda that was pro-choice on abortion and pro-Queer. (It was Carter who issued the executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in non-military federal employment – which is still in place today; when Donald Trump took office Mike Pence tried to get him to repeal it but Trump didn’t.) The evangelical Christian community turned out to be a sleeping giant politically, so enraged with Carter that in the 1980 campaign they mobilized to defeat him and created the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition and the other hard-Right “Christian” organizations that have become so enduring and so powerful a part of our politics, pushing America generally towards the Right. Biden has encountered similar disappointment, running for President as a moderate and then endorsing a big progressive agenda he’s had neither the power nor the legislative chops to push through – he presented himself as a deal-maker but he’s allowed his entire agenda to be held hostage by two Senators from relatively small states and right now it’s looking good for the Republicans to retake both houses of Congress in 2022 and turn Biden into a one-term President in 2024.