It’s President’s Day weekend.  When I was a kid, we had a day off from school for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and another one for George Washington’s.  But when the calendar got too crowded, giving us days off to celebrate other notables in history, it was decided to lump all the presidents together and honor them all at once, in a single day.  That means we can celebrate any president we want, Chester Arthur, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, Franklin Pierce…  Take your pick.  With the news yesterday that former President Carter has decided to go into hospice, I decided to focus on him this President’s Day. 

Jimmy Carter was the only president I ever saw in person.  It was 1977, the day of his inauguration.  I was a first-year seminary student in Washington D.C. and decided to head across town to see him take his oath of office.  It was a frosty January day, and thousands of us packed into the area between the capitol building and the Supreme Court. The temperature was in the twenties, with a wind chill in the teens.  It was so tight in that crowd that I couldn’t move my arms.  But our closeness kept us from freezing.  

Carter was sworn in with two Bibles, which should not have been a surprise, knowing him.  The first was the Bible George Washington used when he took the oath in 1789.  The other was a Bible Carter’s mother had given him.  The family Bible was opened to Micah 6:8.  

Carter’s inauguration speech only lasted 15 minutes.  His first words were addressed to Gerald Ford, the man he was replacing, the man he defeated in the 1976 election:  “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”  Carter could be gracious, when he wanted to be. 

Early in his speech, he set forth his understanding of the U.S.A.  “Ours was the first society openly to define itself in terms of both spirituality and human liberty.”  He mentioned our “moral duties.”  To those standards he remained true, even beyond his presidency.  

There was a sense in the speech that good times were just around the corner.  “Let us learn together and laugh together…”  In retrospect, the Age of Carter turned out to not be an age of laughter.  His administration had to contend with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian capture of American hostages, OPEC imposed gas shortages, double digit inflation, high unemployment, a meltdown in a nuclear power plant, lingering low morale from both Viet Nam and Watergate, the rise of a mean-spirited religious right, a split in the Democratic Party, and eccentric relatives and staff members who kept embarrassing the president.  The word on Carter was that he had a failed presidency. New books out in the past five years are challenging that notion, as more objective observers are reconsidering both the accomplishments and the real flaws of his presidency.  

Carter would cause some of his own problems by not playing the game of Washington politics. Upon his election, he didn’t know how to handle either congress or the press, and he didn’t care that he didn’t know.  He approached both with a self-righteousness that was both irksome and naïve.  Consequently, he got painted with ridicule and half-truths that are only now being debunked by historians.  He did not micromanage the White House tennis courts, for example.  He was also not ineffective: getting more of his legislative agenda through than Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Trump.  In the past seven decades, only Lyndon Johnson surpassed Carter in getting more legislation through congress and into law. Carter’s legislative agenda was so vast that much did fail to pass, including several of his high-profile requests, all of which blinded the public to all the things he did accomplish.  

As I stood in the crowd that day, I wanted to applaud (had I been able to move my arms) when he said, “Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair, our natural beauty preserved.”  “We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems…we cannot afford to do everything…in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best.”  He would be soundly defeated for reelection within four years because of such honesty.  People didn’t want to hear it about limitations or sacrifice.  We wanted to applaud others for making sacrifices, and but we didn’t want to go back to a World War II ethic where everyone pitched in.

In his inauguration, Carter laid a trap for himself, the same trap that has caught nearly all of our modern presidents:  “…there can be no nobler, no more ambitious task for America to undertake…than to help shape a just and peaceful world that is truly humane.”  Unfortunately, even the President of the United States can’t keep pace with those who would perpetrate injustice, war, and indecency. When you’re trying to catch up with the bad actors in history, it’s hard to come up with solutions that don’t make things worse.  Every president has faced this conundrum.  

Carter closed his speech with a tribute to the prophet Micah, pledging himself and the country to renew the quest for justice, mercy, and humility.  At every turn during his four years in office, he would be attacked for trying to do just those things.  When he left office, and the public eye, he continued his quest for justice, mercy, and humility, through the Carter Center and through his personal life.  The same people who attacked him for trying to live out his faith while president ended up exalting him with praise when he pursued those exact goals and policies as an ex-president.  It goes to show how much politics poisons our rationality.

I got a ticket to watch the inaugural parade from in front of the White House, where I got to see Carter walk (the first president to walk in his own inaugural parade.) Colonel Sanders was in that parade, along with a giant peanut, politicians galore, and military bands.

While other modern ex-presidents went on to become filthy rich, Jimmy and Rosalynn poured all their earnings into the non-profit Carter Center, devoted to fighting diseases, poverty, and tyranny.  They continued to live in the ranch house they built in the early 60s, where they live to this day. It is a two-bedroom ranch, valued at less than $200,000.  He refused expensive speaking engagements, the kind that have netted other ex-presidents $100,000 a pop.  Instead, he has written and published 32 books since he left the White House, the source of most of his income, along with a $200,000 pension for being an ex-president. 

Carter is now 98 years old.  No president of the U.S. has lived so long.  In fact, he and Rosalynn have been married 77 years, longer than the lifespan of most U.S. presidents.

I had the chance to meet Carter, briefly, in 1998, at a book signing. He was polite, but not warm. He had just given a speech to a roomful of historians, and his talk was blunt and challenging.  

I noted earlier that it’s just like Carter to bring two Bibles with him to his inauguration.  He loved the Bible, was a Bible teacher nearly all his life in Sunday School, even while he was president.  He took the Bible seriously and tried to live his life, and even do politics by its spirit.  As far as presidents go, he was as honest, sincere, and intelligent as they come.  He wasn’t a politician though, and he wasn’t an effective communicator.  He could be a loner and tone deaf to what other people thought.  I’ve always had a fondness for him, however, partially because I share so many of his convictions about the Bible and following Jesus Christ.  He didn’t always get it right, and neither do I.  But I’ve learned much from watching him try.