It was April 1975, about halfway between the time of the first resignation of an American president and the time when a relatively unknown Georgia governor would dominate the Iowa caucus. In Charlottesville that month the Virginia Young Democrats were having their annual convention, which Larry Roberts, then a first-year University of Virginia student, attended.
“The main speaker was Dale Bumpers from Arkansas,” Roberts told The Daily Progress. “The second speaker was Robert Byrd, the senator from West Virginia.”
“And the third speaker, who very few people had heard of, was a guy named Jimmy Carter,” said Roberts. “And he had the least desirable speaking spot — an afternoon spot — and a group of about 25 or 30 students heard him speak.”
But Carter made an impression.
“I ran out to a pay phone in the hallway, which tells you how long ago it was,” said Roberts, “and called my parents and said, ‘I just met the next president of the United States.’”
Now the director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, Roberts said he saw a profound type of leadership in the man who became the nation’s 39th president and who died last Sunday at the the age of 100.
“I think his leadership style was one of caring and listening and humility,” Roberts said. “There are pluses and minuses, but certainly the skills that he had with listening and empathy and patience resulted in the Camp David Accords, which was a huge positive for the Middle East; Egypt and Israel have not been at war.”
Derided by detractors as a “peanut farmer,” Carter shook up Washington by sometimes wearing a sweater instead of a business suit, and he partied with country music star Willie Nelson, who notoriously claimed to have fired up a bowl of his favorite green weed — out of the president’s sight — on the roof of the White House.
On that same roof, Carter famously installed a set of solar panels, a symbolic act amid an energy crisis caused by a Mideast oil embargo that sent the price of petroleum fuels skyrocketing and led to “stagflation,” an unusual combination of economic stagnation and price inflation.
In the spring of 1979, while he was on a fishing trip in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Carter was photographed splashing at a swamp rabbit that was swimming aggressively toward his johnboat. The press had a field day: “Killer rabbit” one New York Times headline read; “Bunny goes bugs: Rabbit attacks president,” the Washington Post printed on its front page. Pundits magnified the incident for days on end, amplifying Carter’s reputation as a weak president.
Later that fall, Carter’s presidency faced its most formidable challenge — one that ultimately defined his presidential legacy. Amid the Iranian Revolution, militarized students seized 52 Americans as hostages. Carter approved an attempted military rescue in April 1980, but the mission was aborted and then ended in disaster when two American aircrafts collided over an Iranian desert, killing eight members of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force.
“There are times when exigent circumstances just cause people to say, ‘I just I want a stronger person in place,’” said Roberts. “That’s what Reagan seized on to defeat Carter.”
“But,” continued Roberts, “I don’t think that there was ever a sense that we don’t like Jimmy Carter as a person. I think that most people would have been happy to see him succeed.”
Although Ronald Reagan ran on anti-government messaging, it was Carter who signed the legislation deregulating both the trucking and the airline industries, ushering in an era of starkly lower prices in both industries.
Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford, had been the Republican vice president under Richard Nixon and assumed the presidency without ever being subjected to a national vote. Then, in one of his first major acts, Ford pardoned Nixon for all crimes, including any role in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. Carter’s was the first presidency distant from the Watergate scandal.
“He brought back a sense that we were an ethical country,” Roberts said. “It seems a little distant now, but during the time of Watergate, people wondered whether we were going to survive as a constitutional democracy.”
For Roberts, news of Carter’s death rekindled the memory of making that phone call to his parents after hearing Carter speak — as well as a time when, Roberts said, America needed an ethical lift.
“I personally felt that the country benefited from that return to ethics and building trust in our institutions,” said Roberts. “And I would have liked to have seen him be president at a time, like a longer period of time, to build those into the system, because I think they’re sorely needed now.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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