Former President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100. James Fallows, who was a White House speechwriter during the Carter administration, reflects on the death of a singular president:
Few people would remember it now, but the Jimmy Carter who emerged from obscurity into the White House had magic.
His piercing blue eyes. His big-toothed smile that became a trademark on campaign posters. His ease with the different cultures of a traumatized post-Vietnam America: poets and farmers, evangelicals and rock-and-rollers, war protesters and their fellow veterans, black and white alike. His ability to connect with so many of them made voters take a leap of faith with him. Watergate was still an open wound. Carter offered balm and healing. He said, “I will never lie to you.” He promised to give us the best.
In my 20s, I was thrilled to meet him at one of his famous softball games on the Plains and was honored to work as a speechwriter for his campaign. Americans yearn for the prospect of healing, of renewal, of fulfilling the best of our national ideals. That’s what the serious, intense, no-nonsense Jimmy Carter offered, and what much of the country accepted, hopefully.
During his first year in office, it worked. As the new president, Carter was more popular than almost anyone who came after him.
Then things went wrong. Runaway inflation. Endless gas lines. A hostage crisis in Iran. much more
Part of that was Carter’s fault, because of his rigidity and inexperience. It was very bad timing and bad luck. He was relatively young for a president and very fit. However, the ruthless cameras captured him being attacked by a ‘killer rabbit’ and looking deadly in a 10km race. These stuck as symbols of an administration in its last stages.
After working for him in the White House, I wrote a critical and controversial piece, calling his presidency a “dispassionate” one. What none of us could have known was that most of his adult life was still ahead of him—the years in which he would display his passions, values, and accomplishments as a builder, disease fighter, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
He would live to see his character and idealism recognised, and his time in office revalued.
Jimmy Carter had magic in the beginning. And he found it again.
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