Remembering The Man, Jimmy Carter

by Kevin Burton

   Classes let out on the day of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration as the 39^th President of the United States. So I watched part of it in the library at the Ohio State School for the Blind in Columbus.

   Carter and his wife Rosalynn famously got out of their limousine and walked up Pennsylvania Avenue during the inaugural parade. Carter, the former Governor of Georgia but also a former peanut farmer, was positioning himself as a man of the people.

   That was in January of 1977. I was 13 years old, in eighth grade. The country had recently been put through the Watergate scandal, which was to that point, the greatest test to the resilience of the American constitution.

   President Nixon had been forced from office in 1974, succeeded by the only unelected president (so far), Gerald Ford.

   Watergate was such a stench in the nostrils of most Americans, that the 1976 election was the Democrats’ to lose. At some points Carter had a big lead in the polls but he ended up with a narrow victory.

   There was a sense of a new breeze blowing through America.

   But things did not go well for Carter as president. His political goose was cooked when Iranian extremists stormed the American embassy and held dozens of its citizens hostage for more than a year.

   During my final semester at the blind school,  they changed the name of the library to the “media center.” By that time Carter was gone from office, defeated by Ronald Reagan in a landslide in November of 1980.

   Yesterday was a national day of mourning for Carter, who died Dec. 28 in his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100. After the state funeral in Washington, he was laid to rest in Plains, alongside Rosalynn.

   Carter is never listed among the best presidents. I don’t remember hearing anything about this during the Reagan years, but Carter would blossom into perhaps the best ex-president we’ve ever had.

   Carter couldn’t find a way to get his basic decency and sense of fair play into public policy while in office. He was blamed for things outside his control – as all presidents are. 

   Maybe he wasn’t the greatest leader in the presidency, but as a private citizen he became an example of what America used to be about, a man to emulate for sure.

   “Many point to the work Carter did in the more than four decades since leaving the White House as his greatest legacy, and with good reason,” wrote Dan Rather, longtime CBS reporter and anchorman. “He wrote numerous books, including political memoirs, poetry, and children’s literature. He worked as a diplomat in places like Israel, North Korea, and Taiwan. He founded the Carter Center in 1982.”

   “For his work there on eradicating disease, advancing human rights, and improving the quality of life for people in more than 80 countries, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He helped build thousands of homes with Habitat for Humanity — and I mean build. I saw him up on ladders hammering two-by-fours in his 80s,” Rather wrote.

   Our local NBC television affiliate KSNW TV-3 caught up with Lorrie Beck, a woman who volunteered for Habitat alongside Carter.

   “‘President Carter rarely gave autographs,’ Beck said, while holding a Habitat for Humanity baseball cap.”

    “‘I asked him, ‘Would you please sign my hat?’ And he scribbled it quickly,” Beck said, gesturing at the scrawl on the cap.

   “Beck took part in annual Carter Work projects for Habitat for Humanity International. She would fly to a location for a week out of the year to help build as many houses as possible.”
   “President Carter pretty much tells you on day one, ‘This is not about me; do not pull your phones out and take pictures of me,’” Beck said.

   Until just a few years ago, when he and his wife retired from their on-the-ground roles, President Carter helped build the Carter Work Project.

   “He put his morals, his humanity into action,” Beck said.

   Beck said that when she worked alongside Carter, she saw his quiet passion for what he did. During a Carter Work project in South Africa, he insisted on helping build each house.

 “There was a hundred houses being built in Durban, and he spent much of that week then building the front porches of every house we were constructing,” Beck said.

   A testament, she said, to Carter’s character.

   “He just didn’t hide and make millions on speeches and commencement addresses. He was just a very kind of a silent presence there in Georgia, but also all over the world,” Beck said.