American Insights

28

The Greatness of Jimmy Carter

The crowd roared, stymieing the opening words of an awkward statesman from Georgia who stood before the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Thursday, July 15, 1976, to accept the party’s nomination for president of the United States. “My name is Jimmy Carter,” the man said, “and I’m running for president.”

A man uncomfortable with the cheers and worship of supporters, Jimmy Carter was a plain man from Plains, Georgia, attempting to restore the American dream at a time when that dream, however one defined it, seemed shaken, even broken, beyond belief or repair. Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines “turbulence” as a “disturbed state; tumult; confusion; as the turbulence of the times.” In ways noticeable and invisible, Carter arrived at the apex of an American political scene marked by those very definitions.

“Our country has lived through a time of torment,” Carter told the convention. “It is now a time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.” The dream was one of renewal: “An America on the move again, united, a diverse and vital and tolerant nation, entering our third century with pride and confidence, an America that lives up to the majesty of our Constitution and the simple decency of our people.”

A nation rocked since the beginning of what one historian has labeled “the turbulent sixties,” ordinary Americans had had to come to terms with the reality that the spiritual optimism and material prosperity of the postwar era had run its course. 

Socially, the Civil Rights Movement remained a powerfully divisive force in the South, the anti-Vietnam War movement had blurred the lines between patriotism and dissidence, and the sexual revolution spurred a fiercely conservative counterculture driven by reactionary men like Jerry Falwell. 

Politically, the presidency was imperiled, tainted by unpopular and controversial wars against Communism in Vietnam and Cambodia and a wiretapping scandal that left Americans questioning the integrity of their highest institutions. The Cold War, too, seemed only to intensify and broaden rather than abate and weaken, reminding Americans that the specter of Soviet Communism—and nuclear war—was not yet a bygone force. 

Morally and spiritually, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy appeared to sink the hopes of change that radiated inside countless Americans and raised questions about the soul of the country. 

At a time when presidents dropped bombs, toppled regimes, sent Americans to fight in the jungle, and spied on political opponents, Carter offered a different path to a bewildered nation. “It is time for America to move and to speak not with boasting and belligerence but with a quiet strength,” he said, “to depend in world affairs not merely on the size of an arsenal but on the nobility of ideas, and to govern at home not by confusion and crisis but with grace and imagination and common sense.” 

Less than one year later, Jimmy Carter stood at the East Front of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., now the 39th president, calling on Americans to join in “the affirmation of our Nation’s continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever-expanding American dream.” Carter said to rectify the present problems, “We must once again have full faith in our country—and in one another.” 

Time, as with most presidencies, brought idealism down to earth, reminding leaders and supporters alike that what is hoped for is often far easier to accomplish with words than deeds. 

Exactly three years after Carter’s acceptance speech in New York City, the president addressed a nation that found itself once again facing confusion and crisis. Soaring energy prices and interest rates, paired with rising unemployment and global instability worsened by the Iranian Revolution, had brought a once-stable and vibrant economy into recession—the worst since the Second World War. In his inaugural address, Carter had optimistically told the people, “Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes.”

By Sunday, July 15, 1979, Carter, while laying out policy proposals, seemed to express doubt at whether the people were in the right place to offer the strength he needed—an assumption, it turns out, that came across as arrogant, deflective, and unassuring, and which shattered his already fragile political capital ahead of a fierce contest against the rising populist star of Reaganism. The speech, given in the Oval Office, was, to one New York Times writer, “part sermon, part program, part warning.”

There was “a fundamental threat to American democracy,” Carter said. “It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Years “filled with shocks and tragedy” had, as Martin Luther King, Jr., had observed years earlier, brought on a morally inclement situation, where, as Carter continued, “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.” 

As American democracy rests on and reflects, as James Madison had pointed out, the virtues and vices of the people, Carter called on the people to do their part. “We must simply have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation,” he said. “Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.” 

However ill-timed on occasion, Carter’s words highlighted a recurring theme in the American struggle—the battle to secure confidence in the experiment of self-rule. Carter understood, just as the colonists had, that the erosion of confidence, even in the most fundamental sense, threatens the very existence of self-government and cripples our ability to make progress. 

In 1977, posthumously awarding King the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Carter stated in the citation that the preacher and civil rights leader “made our nation stronger because he made it better.” 

The same can be said of Jimmy Carter. When America faced a crisis of confidence in itself, a plain man from Plains reminded the people that the first step toward renewal takes place within the soul, that American democracy can, in time, be as good as the people it serves, but only if we remain confident in the American ideals.

It is in the “small, meaningful things we do,” Carter once wrote in a Bible lesson, that “in God’s eyes… make us worthy of exaltation.” The same, he knew, is true of America. 

Carter was great not because of his political achievements. He was great because he saw and was confident in the greatness in us.

 

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