A few days after losing re-election in 1980, president Jimmy Carter attended a tribute to Aaron Copland that included the composer’s Fanfare for the Common Man. If any president embodied that work, it was Carter. Citizen, veteran, farmer, governor, president, Sunday school teacher, peace promoter, home builder for those without shelter.
Carter was the antidote to the disgraced president Richard Nixon and all the damage he had inflicted on America’s democracy. Carter projected honesty, compassion, religious rectitude, morality, racial justice and public service. Rosalynn, his life partner in marriage and governance, his wife of 77 years and first lady, was as devoted to public service as her husband.
Carter’s virtues embroidered his presidency. He worked so hard. His ambitions were noble. Carter’s approval rating was 75 per cent in his first months in office in 1977. But a series of events overtook him. Carter’s highest priority, a national energy plan, took 18 months to enact and was only a marginal success. In 1979, the United States was hit with an oil shock spurred by Iran and OPEC that cut supplies and drove up prices. There were petrol lines everywhere.
That summer, the country was gripped by a sense of profound drift. For 10 days, Carter retreated to Camp David for meetings and consultations with experts and citizens to help him find answers to the country’s deepening malaise. Carter came down from the mountain and delivered a sermon to the country on what was wrong.
“It is a crisis of confidence,” he said. “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.”
A few days later, Carter fired five members of his cabinet. His approval rating sank to 30 per cent. The American people’s loss of confidence was in the president and his ability to govern.
In November 1979, following the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the overthrow of the Shah, who was aligned with the West, the US embassy in Tehran was seized and 52 American diplomats were taken hostage. A rescue mission failed spectacularly in April 1980, with American service members lost when their helicopters crashed in the desert. The Iranians, intent on further humiliating America and its leader, did not release the hostages until moments after Carter ceased being president.
Those were the depths of Carter’s presidency. The fights over his policy agenda were agonising. It got to a point where many Democrats in Congress took more relish in attacking and criticising the White House than in attacking and beating the Republicans. Inflation would hit an all-time high of 14.6 per cent in the election year of 1980, accompanied by even higher interest rates.
Those wars inside the party led many Democrats to support Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother of JFK and Bobby, to aim for the White House and reclaim the Kennedy mantle. The party was torn down the middle. Carter prevailed and won renomination, yet his presidency was fatally weakened. He was crushed by Republican Ronald Reagan in the election.
The Carter presidency continues to shape America’s destiny today. The reason Democrats were able to pass so much legislation under President Joe Biden is because they remembered that disunity was death to Carter’s domestic policy agenda.
During his presidency, Carter never visited Australia but met then-prime minister Malcolm Fraser three times. The leaders faced momentous events. In 1978, the US recognised China and severed ties with Taiwan. Australia formally joined the US boycott of the 1980 Olympics following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, although some Australian athletes competed in Moscow.
Most Americans at that time judged Jimmy Carter’s presidency as a failure. Yet, his profound virtues and decency, his compassion for humanity, the noble principles he stood for and sought to fulfil, his exemplary conduct as a former president, and his all-encompassing marriage to Rosalynn are being remembered and celebrated today, more than four decades later.
On taking office as governor of Georgia in 1971, Carter declared: “The time for racial discrimination is over.” As with his southern predecessor in the presidency, Lyndon Johnson, Carter fought segregation and was irrevocably committed to civil rights, racial justice and racial equity. Carter’s last public act was to live long enough, at age 100, to redeem his fundamental values with his vote to make Kamala Harris the first black woman to take the president’s oath of office.
Carter met a moment in American politics when the country was yearning for honesty, fidelity to basic American values, a restoration of faith in good government, and a belief that the country could go forward together. He could not fulfil his goals as president, but what Carter stood for endures.
