What I Learned About Jimmy Carter and Life Itself When I Built Houses With Him
The Daily Beast’s brilliant political columnist Eleanor Clift reveals how she saw the truth about Jimmy Carter up close–and how when a source told her a story to attack Carter it really revealed the greatness of the man.
Jimmy Carter’s legacy is defined more by the causes he embraced and the work that he did as an ex-president than his single term in the White House.
Among those causes was Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for low-income people.
My husband and I volunteered one summer to work on a project in Atlanta headed by Carter. We stayed in the dorms at Agnes Scott College, and each day boarded a bus to the work site to arrive by 7 a.m. That first morning, I remember looking out the window and there was Carter jogging the seven miles to where a full day of hard work awaited.
Once there, he wasn’t merely a supervisor. He was fearless, climbing on top of roofs when one house crew fell behind. He was there not so much to cheer them on, but to drive them the way he drove himself.
From the Archives: Read the Daily Beast’s Brilliant Jimmy Carter Stories
In the more than four decades after his presidency ended, Carter built such an eclectic list of accomplishments—from leading the fight against guinea-worm disease in Africa to building museum-quality furniture—that he must have been motivated by far more than the loss of an election.
Carter lived each day as though it might be his last, knowing that his three siblings and his father had all been taken in the prime of life by pancreatic cancer. His mother, the indomitable Miss Lillian, lived into her 80s, but she was felled by the same disease.
It’s as though Carter, given the gift of time, was determined to make the most of every minute. He was a relentless self-improver, bringing a Spanish-speaking barber into the White House so he could practice his Spanish while getting a haircut, and having a plaque put on each tree on the grounds so he could identify the different types of foliage.
He typically arrived in the Oval Office before dawn and prided himself on turning everything around from his inbox–a real one, obviously, not email–within 24 hours.
As president, he had more than his share of crises, compounded by rotten luck. The rescue mission he ordered to save 53 Americans held hostage in Tehran failed when four of the nine helicopters proved unworkable and a fifth collided with one of the C-130 aircraft dispatched to a staging area at a remote desert strip, killing eight American servicemen and wounding four others. Carter’s presidency pretty much went up in flames along with the aborted mission.
Years later, a member of Carter’s national-security team told me about briefing the president on the original rescue plan and how it was supposed to unfold. First, Carter had been advised to also bomb Tehran. That way, if the risky rescue operation failed, the headline would be “Carter Bombs Tehran,” and any attempt to free the hostages would be a sidebar.
Carter refused to escalate the confrontation. Secondly, the student protesters who had taken over the U.S. Embassy in November 1979 would probably be called terrorists today, but Carter was reluctant to take their lives. He asked the briefer if they would be killed in the rescue operation, and when told that they would, he wanted to know if stun guns could be used instead.
The briefer who related the story rolled his eyes at this point, conveying distaste for Carter’s reluctance to fully deploy American force. I’ve always felt it was Carter’s finest hour.
With images of Iranian students shouting “Death to America” and burning the American flag, Carter would have had the country’s backing to bomb Tehran, but with untold consequences. He showed admirable restraint, and after 444 days of captivity, the hostages were released unharmed in time to celebrate the swearing-in of Carter’s successor.
Carter came to Washington with his loyal band of Georgians, a mischievous bunch epitomized by the Rolling Stone cover of Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell posing as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
His political family was taken too soon—Jordan by cancer and Powell by a heart attack. “I thought Jody would speak at my memorial service,” Carter said in the fall of 2009, just days after his 85th birthday, as he eulogized the man who had been with him from the start. (The two of them had traveled through Iowa together in those early days, staying in people’s homes, and when they couldn’t find free lodging, sharing a room in the cheapest motel they could find.)
Powell was Carter’s alter ego, and the bond the two men shared was unshakable. “We breathed the same air,” he said at Powell’s memorial. Carter recalled that when students at the University of Wisconsin pelted him with peanuts, Powell quipped, “I’m only glad you didn’t grow watermelons.”
After four years of watching his boss take the media’s pummeling, Powell said to me that he had begun to wonder whether Richard Nixon had indeed gotten a raw deal. I think he was joking, but maybe not.
