The first thing I did after starting to cover the presidency of Jimmy Carter for The Times was to read his campaign autobiography, “Why Not the Best?”
Published in 1976 when he was an unknown former governor of Georgia, it opened with a quotation from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”
It was a revealing tipoff to the way Mr. Carter bore his presidency like a cross, stumbling and suffering through catastrophes, often not of his own making: the hostage crisis, the gas crisis, inflation, recession, the country’s 1970s “malaise.” To the public he could seem sanctimonious, aloof and a micromanager.
And yet in person he could be appealing and unassuming.
Once when I was invited to the White House family movie theater to watch “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” starring Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, I chatted afterward with the president about movies we both loved. He said he enjoyed the film because he knew Ms. Spacek. “She’s a friend of mine,’’ he said, proudly. Wow, I thought, a president could also be a name-dropper.
For journalists, Mr. Carter was accessible. I shared The Times’ White House beat with Terry Smith, a veteran foreign correspondent and a far more experienced reporter. I was the new guy. But if I was working on a big story, Jody Powell, the White House press secretary, could sometimes get the president on the phone to talk to me. Or if I had a question that Mr. Carter could answer, he would quickly check with “the boss” and get back to me.
On his vacations on the Georgia seacoast or on visits to Carter’s tiny hometown of Plains — it got its first traffic light only after he became president — the White House press corps was dragooned into playing softball against Mr. Carter and his staff. The press team’s captain was his ne’er-do-well brother Billy.
The president always took the mound for his team. My first time at bat, an intimidated and unathletic rookie facing pitches from the president of the United States, I managed a bloop single to right field. When the next batter got a more solid hit, I raced to second base, then third, where a guy on the bench waved me home. I was easily tagged out on the way there. He turned out to be a ringer, a member of the president’s Secret Service detail. It was humiliating. Carter just smiled at me, amused.
Mr. Carter had a notoriously rocky relationship with Capitol Hill, something I saw firsthand. I once shadowed him on a warm summer evening at a festive picnic on the South Lawn for members of Congress, people described in his diary as “just a bunch of disorganized juvenile delinquents.’’ The tables were piled high with mouthwatering food from around the country: lobster from Maine, barbecue from Texas, gumbo from Louisiana. Mr. Carter made the rounds at each picnic table, dutifully shaking hands and welcoming everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, with me right behind him.
Finally, he turned to his wife, Rosalynn, and whispered, “Let’s go to dinner.” And off they went to their lonely White House. It would have helped him politically to socialize with those folks, but I guess he just found it a waste of time.
I’ll never forget the last weekend of the 1980 campaign. Mr. Carter and Ronald Reagan were close in the polls most of that fall. The president was frantically campaigning across the country until word came of a possible agreement to free the hostages in Iran. He raced back to the White House, but the deal fell through.
Back we all went to the campaign trail. On the tarmac at one of his stops that final weekend, I was chatting with Jody Powell and others on the White House staff: Hendrik (Rick) Hertzberg, the chief White House speechwriter, my friend since our time as journalists in New York; Chris Matthews and David Rubenstein. Their pained faces told the story. New polls had come in that morning showing that the bottom had dropped out from under the incumbent. Reagan was headed for a landslide victory.
It seems in retrospect that everything Mr. Carter did or decided caused him political harm. Even his signature diplomatic achievement, the Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, earned him little political credit.
But Mr. Carter soldiered on. His steadfastness, basic decency and faltering attempts to do the right thing are what I prefer to remember as his legacy.
