James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024
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From Powerline - some observations that recall Carter in a less friendly way. These are from when Carter was president, or shortly thereafter.
People magazine, which Carter criticized during his presidency for its focus on self-absorbed celebrity, wrote about him 20 years ago: “Almost everyone agrees that Jimmy Carter was not our best President, but as former Presidents go, he’s tops,” while Time magazine wrote that Carter is the “consensus best ex-President.” Carter’s former chief of staff Jack Watson remarked effusively that Carter is “the only man in American history who used the United States presidency as a stepping-stone to greatness.” Howard Baker said in the 1980s that “history will be kind to Jimmy Carter.”
Carter’s one-time speechwriter Patrick Anderson observed that in Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, neighbors said of him that after an hour you love him, after a week you hate him, and after ten years you start to understand him. (Anderson added that anyone who didn’t have a personality conflict with Carter, didn’t have a personality.) Anderson also described him as a combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers.
The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn observed: “The conventional image of a sexy man is one who is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Carter is just the opposite.” Fellow Southern Baptist Bill Moyers said “In a ruthless business, Mr. Carter is a ruthless operator, even if he wears his broad smile and displays his southern charm.” Part of the mystique of Carter was his careful and successful positioning as someone “above politics.” He gave off an air that he is too good for us, or certainly better than the rest of his peers in politics. Carter exemplified the paradox of taking pride in denouncing the sin of pride. He also displays a talent for combining self-pity and self-righteousness, sometimes in the same sentence.
David Brinkley observed of Carter: “Despite his intelligence, he had a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people.” Eleanor Randolph of the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Carter likes to carve up an opponent, make his friends laugh at him and then call it a joke. . . [He] stretched the truth to the point where it becomes dishonest to call it exaggeration.”
His personal White House secretary, Susan Clough, recalled that Carter rarely said hello to her as he walked by her desk. Not a “Happy Thanksgiving,” or a “Merry Christmas.” Nothing, she says. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. judged Carter to be a “narcissistic loner.” “Carter was never a regular guy,” Patrick Anderson observed; “the sum of his parts never quite added up to that. . . Carter talked his way into the presidency, yet in some profound way he never learned the language of men.”
From Ronald Kessler's "First Family Detail."
“Carter was just very short and rude most of the time,” an agent recalls. “With agents, he’d just pretend like you were not around. You’d say hello, and he’d just look at you, like you weren’t there, like you were bothering him.”
Carter actually told Secret Service agents and uniformed officers he did not want them to greet him on his way to the Oval Office. It was appar“ently too much bother for him to have to say hello back to another human being.
Nor did Carter have much use for the military. Even though he was a Naval Academy graduate, Carter “talked down to the military, just talked like they didn’t know what they were talking about,” a former agent says.
“Carter didn’t want military aides to wear uniforms,” former agent Cliff Baranowski recalls.
Not surprisingly, of all the presidents in recent memory, Carter was the chief executive most detested by Secret Service agents. Agent John Piasecky was on Carter’s detail for three and a half years. That included seven months of driving him in the presidential limousine. Aside from giving directions, Carter never spoke to him, he says.”“As president, Carter—code-named Deacon—orchestrated more ruses involving his luggage.
“When he was traveling, he would get on the helicopter and fly to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base,” says former Secret Service agent Baranowski. “He would roll up his sleeves and carry his bag over his shoulder, but it was empty. He wanted people to think he was carrying his own bag.”
“Carter made a big show about taking a hang-up carryon out of the trunk of the limo when he’d go someplace, and there was nothing in it,” says another agent who was on his detail. “It was empty. It was just all show.”
Carter would regularly make a show of arriving early at the Oval Office to call attention to how hard he was working for the American people.
“He would walk into the Oval Office at 6 A.M., do a little work for half an hour, then close the curtains and take a nap,” says Robert B. Sulliman Jr., who was on Carter’s detail. “His staff would tell the press he was working.”
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Donald Trump has a good chance of being regarded as one of the most important and influential humans in the history of humans. Of course that history has yet to be written, but there's a reasonable chance. And of course people will differ, with some of us perpetually unable to give credit for effective social/political course correction as compared to the Obama and Biden regimes. Meanwhile, Carter had a good heart.
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@Horace said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
Carter had a good heart.
It lasted him 100 years.
However, if you read some of the contemporaneous reports about his behaviors, one might question how generous are good he was during his presidency.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@jon-nyc said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
Carter had a good heart.
And the comment we’re discussing was about just that.
I'm sorry to have diverted from the subject with some human language and thought. I know it's not fair to derail very specific narratives chosen by one participant in the conversation. So unfair. That's why I prefer bluesky these days. My mind slaves appear incapable of diverting discussions, and I love them for it.
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@George-K said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
@Horace said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
Carter had a good heart.
It lasted him 100 years.
However, if you read some of the contemporaneous reports about his behaviors, one might question how generous are good he was during his presidency.
I admit I haven't done any research on the guy, and am taking his heart on faith.
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If one were hiring for various positions, each position might require different amounts of "heart". If one is a social worker, you should probably have some heart. A president? Actually, many reasonable people would prefer to hire a win-first, play-fair-later sort. Because the first society to hire one of those sorts, will be at an advantage. Humans didn't dominate the planet by deploying their hearts, and societies have never won by deploying their hearts. Obviously the culture wars in Western nations are largely predicated on tribes that have very different conceptions on the importance of "heart" in cultural issues.
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@jon-nyc said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
@George-K said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
However, if you read some of the contemporaneous reports about his behaviors, one might question how generous are good he was during his presidency.
Now do the other guy.
I already did. I called him a wizzened senile grifting rapist child molester.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Where it becomes a little bit difficult to swallow, is when you see people who are obviously on the outlier end of win-first, play-fair-later compulsion, who then turn around and get outraged at Trump, who is that way, but actually admits it, bless his heart.
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@Horace said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
Donald Trump has a good chance of being regarded as one of the most important and influential humans in the history of humans. Of course that history has yet to be written, but there's a reasonable chance.
This seems to be it's own form of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
His last term, historically, wasn't particularly notable except for the pandemic and its effects, which were all negative, and his attempt to steal the 2020 election.
We got a bog-standard GOP tax cut. Three judges from the FedSoc list that any GOP president would have selected from (if there's a Justice hero for the GOP it was McConnell). Yeah we had good growth for a while, until we didn't. But that happens under most presidents. Yeah he tinkered with regulations, but many others have (not least Jimmy Carter). And yeah you could find a list of other things he did, but none are propelling him to Rushmore.
Perhaps his most notable achievement, for which I'm already grateful to see in its green shoots, is to be the catalyst for reform of the Democratic Party.
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
@jon-nyc said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
@Horace said in James Earl Carter Jr, 1924-2024:
Donald Trump has a good chance of being regarded as one of the most important and influential humans in the history of humans. Of course that history has yet to be written, but there's a reasonable chance.
This seems to be it's own form of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
His last term, historically, wasn't particularly notable except for the pandemic and its effects, which were all negative, and his attempt to steal the 2020 election.
We got a bog-standard GOP tax cut. Three judges from the FedSoc list that any GOP president would have selected from (if there's a Justice hero in the GOP it was McConnell). Yeah we had good growth for a while, until we didn't. But that happens under most presidents. Yeah he tinkered with regulations, but many others have (not least Jimmy Carter). And yeah you could find a list of other things he did, but none are propelling him to Rushmore.
Perhaps his most notable achievement, for which I'm already grateful to see in its green shoots, is to be the catalyst for reform of the Democratic Party.
I just find it amusing that our resident presidential historian has spent his adulthood hating the most important and influential president of your lifetime. Your cognitive processes never got past orange man bad. All that preparation, and you couldn't get past orange man bad.
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He was the first to use social media to go around institutional gatekeepers that would have prevented him from getting anywhere near the nomination, let alone the presidency. And he used it, for good or for ill, throughout his presidency. So yeah, that’s historic. Like FDR with the radio.
But that’s more about the tech than the man. Though first mover gets bragging rights too.
