The NPR Politics Podcast - The Life & Legacy Of Jimmy Carter

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

Though he only served one term, Jimmy Carter occupies a unique place among U.S. presidents. His presidency was defined by challenges at home and abroad, but his overall legacy is largely shaped by his post-presidential work. We explore how Carter ascended to the presidency, and how he will be remembered. This episode: political correspondent Sarah McCammon, senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. And it's 1040 a.m. on Monday, December 30th, 2024. And on the pod today, we will look back at the life of President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday. Ron Elving and Mara Liason are joining me now to talk about his life and legacy. Hi, Mara and Ron. Hi there. Good to be with you Sarah. Ron I'm going to begin with you. Jimmy Carter was of course a Democrat. He was president from 1977 to 1981. But I want to talk about his life before that, before he was president. How did he find his

way to the highest office in the land? Everybody knows I suppose that he started life in rural Georgia in a little town called Plains. His big break, in a sense, was going to the United States Naval Academy in the 1940s in the latter part of World War II. Came out of that and went into, for a short time, the nuclear navy under Admiral Rickover, a kind of a glamorous part of the navy at that time. But the family business needed help. He went back to help the Carter family peanut business, and that's when he became known as a peanut farmer. A little

later on he ran for the state legislature, served a short period of time there, ran for governor, lost to segregationist Lester Maddox, but came back after four years, challenged Maddox again and won. And in his inauguration speech as governor of Georgia announced to the stunned audience, the era of racial discrimination is over. So not long after that Time magazine put him on the cover, called him a symbol of the new South. And not long after that, he started telling people he was running for president, 2% name

recognition, and a couple years later, he was president. Danielle Pletka And Ron, what was stunning about that? Was it the fact that he had won that election or was it his statement that was so explicitly anti-segregation? It was the statement, the fact that he took this moment when everyone in the state of Georgia would be paying attention and many people in the rest of the country, as he's well-known, and suddenly declared that he was, in a sense, the spokesman for a new South, in which segregation would not be the be-all and end-all of politics, and where, in fact, he would say, we need, as Georgia Democrats, to line up against racial segregation.

That was a very big deal in that era. And then he decides to run for president. Richard S Yes. And he had an aide named Hamilton Jordan, who was a remarkable man and who wrote a memo lining up exactly how Carter, as a one-term governor of Georgia, he only served one term, could transfer himself into Iowa and New Hampshire as the earliest voting primary states or caucus states of the presidential process and exploit something that we had first seen used in 1972 by the George McGovern

campaign but really take it to the max. I mean, go into Iowa, become practically a resident. And he did that. And he resonated with a lot of people in Iowa with his rural background and his farmer background and his very strong identification with his Baptist faith, his evangelical side. And that in Iowa played very, very well. He shocked the world by winning the Iowa caucuses. And then the next thing you know, he's winning New Hampshire, the first primary, the one that the people on the East Coast really pay attention to.

And suddenly he was one of the front runners for their presidential nomination in 1976. So, Mara, what...I mean, remind us what was happening in the country at this time during the 76 campaign. What was Carter's appeal to Americans at that moment? Well, Carter's appeal, as most presidents, present themselves as a foil to the last unpopular president, but we'd gone through the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, a President Richard Nixon, who had lied to the American people. And he very famously, when he campaigned for president, said,

I'll never tell a lie. I'll never make a misleading statement. I'll never betray the trust of those who have confidence in me. And I will never avoid a controversial issue. It's very hard to see Carter's presidency without seeing it through the filter of his post-presidency, which was so grounded in American values of selflessness and small town living and, you know, he wasn't in there to make money. But he was supposed to be the antidote to the chaos and corruption, really, of the Nixon

years. And I think that's one of the reasons he became president. Now, he did later speak about these same themes when he gave his famous malaise speech, which actually didn't use the word malaise, where he said, human identity... It's no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. And he lived by that. Now, that was a speech he gave, right, during his presidency, during a time when he was

struggling. Yeah, he was struggling. He had high inflation, so he had to do all of the unpopular things to bring inflation down. And it was stagflation. It was high unemployment and high inflation, so he had to do all of the unpopular things to bring inflation down. And it was stagflation. It was high unemployment and high inflation. And he had a Federal Reserve chair, Paul Volcker, who was willing to serve the country some very bitter medicine to get the inflation rate down. Plus, he had the hostage crisis where 52 American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran. He had a failed attempt to rescue them using the

US military. And of course, in the end, the Iranians decided they would only release the hostages once Carter was out of office. And when Ronald Reagan was elected, the hostages were released, another kind of insult by Iran to Jimmy Carter. Danielle Pletka Now, Ron, we've said that Carter faced a lot of challenges. I think the conventional wisdom is that he was not a particularly effective president overall. But what do you see as his biggest accomplishments? He had several.

There was the ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, which were an important part of changing our relationship with all of Latin America. He brought that to fruition in a fairly short period of time. And then in his second year as president, he actually got Israel and Egypt to sign a peace treaty. The dedication and determination of these two world statesmen have borne fruit. Peace has come to Israel and to Egypt. And of course, there were visionary leaders in both of those countries at that time who saw it in their interest, but Carter brought it together. He brokered the deal. He brought

them to Camp David. They were called the Camp David Accords. And that was also a triumph. But at the same time, he had this confluence of problems, the energy crisis, as Mara has said, the inflation that was left over from all the way back to the Arab-Israeli War 1973, which really spiked oil prices. Carter also did some far-sided things with respect to energy. He said, we've got to cut back on our consumption of energy of all kinds. We've got to stop importing so much oil. And all those things were really accomplished over time.

But he started the pain all the way back in saying we should only increase our use of a total increase of energy 2% a year. That just was a too tight pair of shoes for most Americans to wear. Now, when Carter ran for reelection in 1980, he faced kind of the ultimate challenge as an incumbent president, which was a primary from, of course, within his own party. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy challenged him in the Democratic primary. What was Kennedy's critique of Carter at the time? Danielle Pletka Ron has a longer memory than me, but my memory is that things were not going well. Inflation was too high. The hostages had been held for

too long. And Kennedy was famously asked why he was running for president and couldn't really articulate it, but it was enough that there was an intra-party fight and that historically always damages the incumbent and it certainly did this time. Peter Van Doren There had been a critique too of Carter that while he was a Democrat, that he was never really a liberal, that he wasn't as liberal as Teddy Kennedy, that he was not even trying to be and didn't want to be. And you know, all the way back to 76, there was a wonderful Jeff McNeely editorial cartoon

that showed two vehicles at a stoplight. One's a pickup truck, the other's a Volvo. The pickup has a gun rack and a Confederate flag, you get the picture, and there's a hound dog in the back, and it's got a bumper sticker in the back that says Jimmy Carter, 76. And then on the Volvo side, you've got a tweety looking professor smoking a pipe, and his bumper sticker says, save the whales, and his other bumper sticker says Jimmy Carter in 76. That was a pretty tough straddle for any politician, and Jimmy Carter had a lot of charm when he was a candidate

in 1976. It just didn't wear as well in office. And there was some high-handedness on the part of the people he brought with him from Georgia that never really fit in in Washington and tried to give a lot of orders to people who thought they knew why they were in Washington. And all of that led to a rebellion within the party, particularly on the left. Danielle Pletka Yeah. And it's interesting because every successful politician, every successful presidential candidate figures out how to straddle the two wings of their own party. I mean, Bill Clinton didn't just merely move the Democrats to the center. He united the center and the left. Jimmy Carter did it too. But I agree

that once he was in office, especially after he was defeated, there was a whole bill of particulars against all the ways that he failed, including micromanaging who would use the White House tennis courts. So I think that history will see his presidency in a more favorable light than it has so far, especially because he had such an exemplary post-presidency. Danielle Pletka In a moment, we're gonna talk about Carter's than it has so far, especially because he had such an exemplary post-presidency. In a moment, we're going to talk about Carter's post-presidency, but first it's time for a quick break. We'll be back.

And we're back. Carter, of course, served only one term. He was not reelected, but he had the longest post-presidency ever of more than 43 years. He devoted his life after he was president to humanitarian work alongside his wife, Rosalind, and that eventually earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Where did the Carters decide to focus their humanitarian work? Well, he did a couple things. He worked for Habitat for Humanity, and there are countless pictures, photographs of Jimmy Carter with a hammer in his hand, building low-income housing. He also worked to eradicate the guinea worm disease in Africa. He lived a humble life of public service. He famously taught Sunday school at his Baptist church for decades and decades.

He was an exemplary public servant. SONIA DARA-MARGOLIS Yeah, I mean, he really kind of eschewed the celebrity status and the big speaking fees that some past first families have embraced, like the Clintons and Obamas, for example. Carter, as you noted, Mara, he lived a relatively modest life after leaving office. What was it about Carter that made him choose that kind of life? I think he really believed in those values. He could have made a lot of money. It wasn't important to him.

He got meaning from his life when he was doing something to help others. Lauren Henry Ron, what about his foreign policy legacy after he left office? Ron Cunningham Yes, we should at least mention that in the year 2002, 22 years after he left office, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Prize for his worldwide humanitarian efforts to eradicating disease and hunger, going after very specific things like the guinea worm, but also going after things as broadly suffered

as a lack of education, lack of sufficient supplies of food. He really took on the big ones. And that was impressive to a number of international organizations that honored him over the years. But certainly the thing that gets mentioned in the first paragraph is the Nobel Prize. Danielle Pletka Carter's funeral has been scheduled for January 9th, and there will be many more reflections in the coming days. Ron Amara, before I let you go, any final thoughts on Carter's life and legacy? Ron Amara Well, I guess my reflection is how he represented American values that have become, from this point in history, looking

back, seem quaint, if not completely outmoded, like when he said, I will never lie to you, the way he lived his post-presidency with humility, eschewing materialism. That's right. I think we're going to be remembering Jimmy Carter as one of the Poles, the polar opposites of different approaches not only to the presidency but to governing, to politics, to whether or not it is a blood sport, to whether or not it is something that tries to bring out the very best in people, even to the point of bringing out religious values of the most shared kind so that any people of religion, whatever their religion, can recognize

it as sincere and look up to it. I mean, this is, this is, Jimmy Carter was the anomaly. He was the person who was quite different in personality from most of the people who have fought their way to the presidency of the United States. All right, we'll leave it there for today. I'm Sarah McCammon, I cover politics. I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. Ron Ilving And I'm Ron Ilving, editor-correspondent. Sarah McKammon And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen to this podcast, sponsor free on Amazon Music with a Prime membership or any podcast

app by subscribing to NPR Politics Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.