a Jimmy in 1976
Gerald Ford was a pretty decent guy. I would have been fine with him continuing as our president back in the mid-’70s. But he never had a chance of getting my vote in 1976. That’s because he was up against Jimmy Carter.
I had voted for the first time in 1972, and I had a terrible time getting the job done. I must have been in that booth — and we had actual booths back in those days — at least 15 minutes. The holdup was voting for president. I didn’t think much of McGovern. He had run a lame campaign. I was still mad at him for dumping Eagleton. Eagleton had actually been treated for his mental problem. Think what a comfort that would be to us today as we look forward to the inauguration in the coming month.
Mostly, I thought McGovern’s blundering incompetence was an indicator he’d be terrible at the job. Meanwhile, I knew Nixon at least knew how to do the job — but I didn’t trust him one bit. I was sure, even at that early point in the investigations, that he was involved in Watergate. Fortunately, there was a solution — I was sure McGovern was going to lose. So I voted for him, as a protest vote against Nixon. I suppose I finally pulled that lever just as the election volunteers were contemplating sending a search party in after me.
I was happy to have no such problem in ’76. I was for Jimmy all the way. I liked everthing about the guy, mainly that he was different. No, and not “different” like the excuse people use today. He was different in that he was not a crook like Nixon, and a more inspirational figure than poor Ford. And I’m not going simply by the influence of that new show, SNL — which had told me Ford was a klutz, and Carter was the coolest presidential candidate ever — a guy who could, if called upon, talk you down from a bum trip on Orange Sunshine (the cure involved listening to the Allman Brothers).
And it was more than the fact that he had that million-watt smile, which made us feel like everything was going to be fine. Jimmy was here, and we were done with all the crap the country had just been through.
There were more serious reasons. I liked what I had read about what he had done as governor of Georgia. I liked how that might translate into performance as president.
I liked the fact that he was a smart guy — one of Admiral Rickover’s nuclear Navy whiz kids. And he spoke to us as thought he thought we had brains, as well. He leveled with people, even if it set him up for embarrassment, such as when he told Playboy that he had “lusted in his heart” after women other than his wife — and everyone mocked him. At the very peak — or perhaps I should say nadir — of the sexual revolution, he dared to speak of right and wrong, and admit his own failings.
He dared to speak of God, and inspire us by living his life as a man who loved God, and wanted to live according to the wisdom that faith brought him.
I was a copyeditor at The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun at that early point in my career, fresh out of school. I had just joined the paper in the fall of ’75. I was frustrated not getting to write, and looked for anything that could add that enrichment to my dull routine. I volunteered to review books, and our managing editor — who was also our book editor, because that was something he loved — funneled to me any books about this exciting novelty, Jimmy Carter, who had just burst upon the national scene. That fed my enthusiasm.
Being a copyeditor, a desk man, I understood that reporters couldn’t go around with candidates’ bumper stickers on their cars, but cloistered as I was in the newsroom, I saw myself as an exception. And I really liked his green-and-white sticker scheme — a departure from all the blue and red I’d seen in my life, signifying that Jimmy, too, was a departure, and a welcome one. So I put one on the bumper of my orange Chevy Vega.
Probably the clearest (and least relevant, I realize) memory I have of that sticker was on one of my volunteer writing assigments. One weekend I went to Memphis for a book fair, attended by a number of prominent writers of that moment. The organizers set me up to take Mary Hemingway (How It Was) to lunch, and asked me if I’d pick up historian John Toland at the airport. I did so, but as I had not read his new biography of Hitler, we didn’t have much to talk about — except Jimmy Carter. He liked him, too, and therefore liked my sticker. He went back to my bmper and autographed it when I dropped him off at the hotel. By the way, I later read his book, and I recommend it. I learned a lot from it.
Early in the campaign, I got a chance to meet Carter — by, of course, volunteering to go cover a campaign event in Memphis. Since I was there in a journalistic capacity, I knew I wasn’t there to make like a fan. But I did shake his hand. I remember debating with myself whether that was OK, and I think I eventually decided it was. At least, I hope I decided that. It would pain me to realize I passed up that opportunity.
I remained a huge fan for the rest of his life. And it affected me. In the ’90s, I would become president of the board of our local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. That was totally due to Jimmy Carter.
At this point I should probably be running over things he did in office and analyzing them in detail. But while I thought Jimmy did a great job, that’s not why I was such an admirer. I liked and respected Jimmy Carter because he was the best human being to become president of the United States in my lifetime.
And now I thank God for letting him stick around here with us for as long as He did…
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You know how I loved him. What a wonderful article about a truly great man.
Georgia’s gift to the world!
Happy New Year!
I know it’s been said many times, many ways, but what a difference there is in character and intellect between the incoming ex-president and the recently departed ex-president.
I was listening to Carter’s “malaise speech” the other day, and I was struck by how prescient he was, and how the problems he identified with American society have only gotten worse since he spoke of them in 1979. Carter was mainly addressing our energy crisis, now we’re trying to maintain our system of government and our rights. And he never said the word “malaise.”
Here’s part of it if you feel like running it.
”
… So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.
It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is 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. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed. Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.
Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans. …
We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.
We ourselves are the same Americans who just ten years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem. …”
People still hate this speech, and they still hate Carter for all sorts of reasons. But I think he was on to something. We shoulda listened.
I voted for the loser of the Nixon vs McGovern race. I’m just not going to reveal who I voted for.
Ford vs Carter… I may have voted for Carter. Ford’s WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons were lame.
I was on the air at WUSC-AM, USC’s student radio station, when Spiro Agnew resigned. I did more reading of news ripped from the teletype than playing rock music (it wasn’t called classic rock back then).
2024: Don’t blame me. I voted for democracy. Prior to the election, I had concerns for democracy. Post election, I have fears for democracy. My assessment of Trump hasn’t wavered from 2015. Prior to 2018, I was an independent voter. I went straight party Democrat in 2018 when I saw Trumpism wasn’t going to die.
I am the “enemy within”.
As for Spiro… I was ripping copy in the wire room — a dozen or so chattering machines in a glassed in room, to deaden the sound — of The Commercial Appeal when I first read the term “unindicted co-conspirator.” So we must be close to the same age. Those were the days when even if you were a sleazeball, you resigned when you got in that kind of situation. As even Nixon did. This was back when shame meant something…
We’re a few months apart. I recall you writing about crossing 70 sometime in ’23. I crossed 70 in May ’24.
What’s it like being such a young fella?
You know, it’s a little weird interacting with comments the way I do — I see all the recent submissions in order of when they came in, completely divorced from the posts and from anything they may be responding to.
So, when I saw Ralph’s comment right now, I had forgotten my own comment suggesting we were about the same age, and I had trouble realizing what the numbers meant. I had just been rerereading one of my Aubrey/Maturin novels (yes, again) and had been through a harrowing passage in which the ship was desperately looking for a place to land before sinking after striking an iceberg, so I thought in terms of latitude. And indeed, 70 (south) would be a cold place indeed.
Then I rejected that and thought of U.S. 70, which I used to travel on frequently between Memphis and Jackson, Tenn. (Tina Turner’s “Nutbush” is along that path, just outside Brownsville.) But I certainly never traveled on it in “’23!” How old do you think I AM.
Then I realized you meant THIS century’s 23, and my mind settled down a bit, and I worked out that indeed age was your point, and I had brought it up…
The human brain is weird…
Fortunately my mind still works like a steel trap. A few years ago, a LinkedIn friend posted a photo of a storefront on Main St that it would be the home of the Columbia Architects Guild.
I commented, “That’s where Jammin’ Java used to be.”
My mother had Alzheimer’s. That is a horrible disease!
Trump and Obama appeared to have a very cordial conversation during the Carter funeral.. which seemed to tick off Kamala. Prior to this clip, Obama was seen laughing at something Trump said. Very odd to treat literal Hitler that way, isn’t it?
https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1877390064235241696
I don’t know what you mean about literal Hitler, but that’s the way one is supposed to behave in such situations…
Sure, pretend Democrats didn’t say the world was ending if Trump was elected.. a fascist, racist, misogynist who is Putin’s puppet… But apparently not SO bad that Obama can’t share a joke or two with him.
They’re all phonies.
Doug, I am so very sorry that you don’t understand what has happened and is happening. But since you don’t accept a word I say, I see zero reason to post your misinformed, bitter comments, because when I choose to do that, I feel obliged to explain what’s wrong with what you’re saying — not for you, but for people who are open to what I’m explaining.
And I just don’t have that kind of time.
Of course, it’s not just me whose words you don’t hear and accept. For instance, you assert that “Democrats” said “the world was ending.” No, what I heard them say, to a ridiculous extent, that Trump was a threat to “democracy.” That was what they said was ending.
And they were wrong. The election of Donald Trump by a vote of a majority WAS democracy, at its ugliest.
The Framers of our Constitution did their best to protect this infant country from direct democracy from the start, and for awhile they were successful. But Jeffersonians and Jacksonians and others started injecting direct democracy into our system from the start. And up until 2016, the system still held together. For more than two centuries, the people never seriously considered, much less elected, a grossly unqualified man to the presidency. Call it “the wisdom of crowds,” or whatever you choose. But that’s over now. With parties reduced to nothing, and nominees named according to how the folks who turn out for primaries happen to be twitching at a given moment, and somehow a vast portion of the electorate having decided there’s no such thing as an objective fact — there’s only what they choose to believe — the American system was done with.
So if you like, you can say the American world HAS ended. I know that doesn’t matter to Doug, he’s indicated many times that he’s never regarded this country as anything special. But it certainly does matter to me. I’ll address that subject at greater length in a later post, when I can find several hours to do so. But there’s a foretaste of it — which is why I allowed Doug’s comment. I thought it was worth starting to sketch that out…
even serial killers being led to the death chamber typically have cordial conversations with the guards, if they speak at all.
The guards don’t suddenly pronounce the serial killer “a great guy” because of a brief conversation and the reports we read about don’t describe them arguing with each other or about to fight.