Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 497

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life," by Jonathan Alter.

Midway through my research, it struck me that Carter was the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s, without electricity or running water, might as well have been in the nineteenth. He was connected—before, during, and after his presidency—to many of the big events and transformative social movements of the twentieth. And the Carter Center, the nongovernmental organization he founded, is focused on conflict resolution, global health, and strengthening democracy—cutting-edge challenges of the twenty-first.

Carter never would have been appointed to the school board if, a mere three years after he came home, he had been considered unreliable on school desegregation. Throughout this period, he not only did nothing to carry out Brown, he actively catered to the demands of white parents, often as part of his single-minded commitment to fiscal prudence. His very first motion on the board in early 1956 was to use lower-than-expected black enrollment as an opportunity to shift resources from black schools to white ones. He introduced a resolution that called for “leaving off two classrooms from each of the county’s three negro elementary school buildings, and then reassigning those six rooms, or the equivalent in equipment, to another project, or building, for the purpose of answering the needs of the white high school pupils of Sumter County, since these rooms are not needed in the negro schools.” It may be that his visits to black schools, then just beginning, opened his eyes to the error of that motion. Or perhaps his colleagues found his efficiencies over the top. In any case, the minutes of the next month’s board of education meeting record without explanation that two other board members withdrew Carter’s resolution.

Throughout this period, President Kennedy remained the closest any politician ever came to being Carter’s role model: moderate, energetic, charismatic. On November 22, 1963, Carter was in the warehouse when he learned of Kennedy’s assassination. He knelt on the steps and prayed, then cried for the first time in the ten years since his father died. The following weekend, he recalled being sickened at a Georgia Tech football game when some fans booed during a moment of silence for the slain president. 

When news of JFK’s assassination was announced in Chip’s classroom at Plains High School, the teacher said, “Good!” and students applauded. Chip picked up a chair and flung it in the teacher’s direction. In the principal’s office, Mr. Sheffield expressed his sympathies over the president’s death and sent Chip home, where Jimmy and Rosalynn declined to punish him.

Wallace’s own 1970 gubernatorial campaign next door was a rancid racial throwback. It included a print ad with the line “Wake up, Alabama! Blacks Vow to Take Over Alabama” over pictures of seven menacing black boys surrounding a white girl. Much later, long after leaving the presidency, Carter called it “one of the most racist campaigns in modern southern history.” But that year, he even stole one of Wallace’s slogans: “Our kind of man. Our kind of governor.” You didn’t have to be a linguistics professor to understand the meaning of “our kind.”

So did evangelicals—a newly organized force in politics that had no problem castigating one of their own. They denounced Carter’s refusal to restore the tax-exempt status of fundamentalist Bob Jones University (because it discriminated against blacks); his opposition to constitutional amendments that banned abortion and enshrined school prayer; his backing of the ERA; and his hosting of the June 1980 White House Conference on Families, which evangelicals opposed because it counted single mothers as families and allowed discussion of contraception and divorce. (The fact that Reagan was divorced and didn’t go to church often was apparently a nonissue for them.)