Jimmy Carter: Good Man, Middling President
The man from Plains was a formidable talent. But he never mastered the dark arts of presidential power.
A (sometimes) happy warrior.
Source: HUM Images/Universal Images Group
“I will never lie to you.” So went the plain-spoken refrain of Jimmy Carter, the man from Plains, whose improbable century-long journey came to an end on Sunday. Carter became the 39th president in no small part because voters felt that simple offer of honesty was sufficient after the turmoil of the Richard Nixon era. Unfortunately for Carter and the country, it was never quite enough.
Carter’s life spanned 10 decades of dizzying change. He was the first president born in a hospital and will surely be the last to remember life before electricity. His childhood farm in Georgia had been decimated by the Depression, then revived by the New Deal. He graduated from the Naval Academy the year before the Cold War began, and he took office shortly before the final Soviet invasion. His presidency bridged the end of FDR’s majority with the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. It also prefigured some of the defining challenges — energy dependence, climate change, partisan polarization — of the decades to come.