President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  Both Carter and his mentor had a ferocious certitude about their goals and plowed through individuals and other obstacles to achieve them. To Rickover’s consternation (as he expressed during some of his visits to my office), he felt his protégé did not always demand the highest level of performance from some of his closest staff and maintained almost a family relationship with some of them, disregarding the foibles Rickover would never have tolerated in his subordinates.

  HIS FATHER’S SON

  After six years of service he earned a prize post as the senior officer on the nuclear submarine USS Seawolf, and his career path to senior ranks in the navy seemed assured.16 Then came an unexpected turning point in his life, without which he would never have been a resident of the White House: His father contracted cancer—a disease that ran in his family but did not strike him until his ninetieth year. Lieutenant (j.g.) Carter decided to leave a career he loved and return to Plains to take over his father’s peanut warehouse. This provoked one of the few significant personal disagreements in his long, loving, successful marriage to Rosalynn. After traveling the world with Jimmy in the navy, the last thing she wanted was to return to the narrow life of a small, mosquito-ridden Southern town.17 He bluntly admitted he made the decision without her approval, “in fact with very strong disapproval!”18 “She almost quit on me,” he later said.19 It was one of the few times he acted without her input,20 and she barely spoke to him on the long trip from Hawaii back to Plains.21

  Carter idolized his father, who was a model town squire as well as the town’s principal employer. As he sat by the bedside of his dying father, he was struck by the stream of blacks and whites who came by to thank him for his private acts of generosity.22 More than anything else Jimmy Carter wanted to live up to his namesake and follow in his footsteps. After his father’s death in 1953, while serving his first term in the Georgia legislature, the seat was offered to his mother, who refused. Jimmy discovered only after his father’s death that—although a successful businessman—the senior Carter had extended so many loans to his workers and townspeople to tide them over hard times that when his remaining assets were divided among his children, there was little left for Jimmy and Rosalynn. They lived for a year in government-subsidized public housing.23 Another serious family problem was Jimmy’s younger brother, Billy Carter, who felt he should have taken over the business. Billy’s resentment would come back to bite his older brother when he became president.

  A more serious obstacle immediately facing Carter as he tried to salvage the family business was the pervasive issue of race. About fifteen of his father’s former customers, who were members of the local White Citizens Council, paid him a visit and told him he was the only white man in Plains who had not joined their virulently antiblack organization. He refused, and they even offered to pay his five-dollar membership fee. “I told them I would take the five-dollar bill and flush it down the toilet,” he recalled, whereupon they threatened to boycott his business and pressure his suppliers as well. That included the owner of the local gas station, who refused to fill the tank on his pickup truck, so Carter installed his own gas pump at the warehouse. His customers gradually started returning, and the business thrived because of his good service.

  Almost immediately he plunged into politics as chairman of the Sumter County Board of Education in 1955, in his own words, “almost exclusively to protect the public school system” from being closed down to evade the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, ordering the racial integration of the nation’s public schools. This began a lifelong passion to improve public education for blacks as well as whites; he was shocked to discover books in the separate but supposedly equal black schools that had been discarded a decade earlier by the white school system. Black children walked to school while school buses whizzed by them carrying white pupils, and sixteen-year-old black students had to sit on “little tiny chairs for three-year-olds.” He said, “I was not only angry but embarrassed, and I felt from that moment on a responsibility, and I believed that my concern was so genuine that there was no subterfuge. And I think that black people, even though they were suspect at first, soon realized that I was genuine, and I felt at home with them, and I didn’t feel like I was an alien when I was in a black church, whereas I didn’t feel at home speaking to the AFL-CIO annual conventions.”24

  In 1962 he ran for state senate, in part to get support for establishing a four-year college in impoverished southwest Georgia, where one million people had access only to a community college and vocational schools. Carter lost by sixty votes, but his senate race was corrupted by ballot stuffing organized by the Quitman County political boss, Joe Hurst, who wanted Jimmy’s opponent to win. He and his crowd watched as voters put their paper ballots into an Old Crow liquor box. Carter was determined to muster the evidence to challenge the results, despite a visitor’s frightening warning to Rosalynn at the warehouse that the last time anyone had crossed Joe Hurst, his business had burned down.25 The loss was overturned through the efforts of an Atlanta lawyer, Charles Kirbo, who found out through a drunken local ne’er-do-well that 123 blank ballots had been taken home by a supporter of Carter’s opponent and filled in. That was the giveaway: The ballots added up to more than the number of registered voters. Thus began Carter’s political rise, sealing Kirbo’s relationship with him for life and demonstrating that his client was a dogged fighter.

  Mr. Kirbo, as we called him, was a legend among those around Carter. A partner in Atlanta’s leading law firm of King & Spalding, he was tall, balding, conservative, and spoke as slowly as molasses in January—as the local expression went—but tersely, colloquially, and as elliptically as the Greek oracle at Delphi; you had to strain to hear him and grasp his meaning.

  After Carter was elected president he asked Kirbo several times to move to Washington. The Atlanta lawyer flew to the capital about twice a month to discuss problems and perform occasional missions. But his wife did not want to move, and he later regretted staying in Atlanta because he felt he could have accomplished much and enjoyed government.26 When Bert Lance was forced to resign as budget director, the absence of a senior eminence and a resident wise man like Kirbo, whose conservatism and Southern ties could have balanced Vice President Walter Mondale’s liberalism—and to a degree mine—was a grievous loss.

  As president, Carter once assigned him to study the growth of government pension programs, and after a year, Kirbo reported: “We’ve talked about it and reviewed it with statisticians, and I think the best thing is just sit on it.” Incredulous, the president said, “What!?” Kirbo repeated, “Let it sit.” That was the end of it. Carter so trusted Kirbo’s judgment that he would never have accepted such unadorned advice from anyone else.27

  * * *

  After running unopposed for a second term as state senator in 1964, the only reelection in his political career, Carter announced his intention to seek an open congressional seat for the 1966 election, for which he would have been the front-runner. But fate intervened when former governor Ernest Vandiver, the favorite in the gubernatorial race, had a heart attack. To the dismay of his supporters—especially Rosalynn, who was looking forward to escaping from Plains and moving to Washington—he suddenly decided to announce for governor. Carter faced two major candidates: a liberal former governor, Ellis Arnall, and an archsegregationist, Lester Maddox, famous in Georgia for wielding an ax handle to prevent blacks from eating in his restaurant after the 1964 Civil Rights Act barred discrimination in public facilities. Not for the last time did Carter take the most difficult road. Given his late entry, he ran a slapdash campaign, but another problem put him at great disadvantage.

  In the midst of this 1966 gubernatorial race, his solidarity with blacks led to a shift in his own church affiliation at the Plains Baptist Church, where his parents had prayed and he was a deacon. When local blacks asked to join, Carter was the only one of twelve deacons who voted to admit them. When the whole church voted, Carter remembered th
at some of the white members argued that blacks were inferior, as descendants of Ham. Carter and his family cast the only votes to admit blacks, along with one man who was thought to be hard of hearing. The family left the church that had been so much a part of their lives and joined the nearby Maranatha Baptist Church, which was willing to integrate. To this day they remain members, and Carter teaches Sunday school classes, now overflowing with visitors, including myself on one occasion.28

  These were the choices of a principled antipolitician, almost ending his political career before it began. Carter ran an indefatigable campaign, attacking Arnall as too liberal while aggressively seeking the black vote and courting black ministers.29 He finished a strong third to Arnall and Maddox, getting just under 21 percent of the vote to Maddox’s 23.5 percent and Arnall’s 29 percent, but he returned to Plains depressed at having turned down a safe congressional seat to gamble and lose a bid for the governorship, while also losing twenty-two pounds and taking on $66,000 in debt.

  THE GEORGIA MAFIA

  This sobering experience taught Carter never to enter another race without careful advance planning. He also met several supporters who would become the core of his presidential campaign. Foremost among them was Hamilton Jordan, his youth coordinator, later the brilliant strategist for his insurgent presidential campaign and his top White House aide. Robert Lipshutz, a lawyer and prominent member of Atlanta’s Jewish community, would become a leading fund-raiser in his presidential campaign, and then White House counsel. On a campaign swing that coincided with a regional planning commission meeting, he met Bert Lance, who would become his highway commissioner when he finally was elected governor, follow him to Washington as his budget director, and ultimately become a huge political problem. Frank Moore, who headed the Northwest Georgia Planning Commission, succeeded Ham as executive secretary, and became White House congressional liaison.

  One other benefit flowed from the political loss: The campaign hired Gerald Rafshoon, a young, New York–born, irrepressible Atlanta advertising executive, to oversee media. Rafshoon—we all called him that, perhaps because he was so irreverent—would eventually take a similar role in the White House. Jody Powell, whose father was a peanut farmer in Vienna, near Plains, became Carter’s driver, personal assistant, and de facto press secretary, the position he would formally hold in the White House. This became the heart of Carter’s “Georgia Mafia,” as the press would dub them.

  There was also a spiritual dimension to Carter’s depressing loss. His sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, a charismatic evangelical faith healer with a degree in religion, told her brother that one way to deal with his painful loss was to recommit himself to Jesus Christ. This led him to his born-again faith, a process that as a Jew I could never understand but respected, and that became an essential part of his personal and political life. He put his reinvigorated faith into action, going door-to-door in lower-income neighborhoods in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to ask voters to accept Christ in their lives and offer them Bibles.

  * * *

  He spent a good part of the next four years preparing for his successful 1970 gubernatorial campaign. He was an indefatigable campaigner, hitting factory shifts early in the morning, knocking on doors, going into shops in the smallest towns around the state. Charles Kirbo recalled that “Rosalynn would pack a lunch, Jimmy would drive to some town, stop in the woods to eat, then go to a local rally and make a folksy speech using the same joke he had told at another site a while before.”30

  But it took more than burning shoe-leather to beat Carl Sanders, the popular former governor. Carter and his team knew that—while still holding on to a substantial percentage of the black vote—they needed to win the white working-class, rural, small-town, conservative, and segregationist vote Lester Maddox had captured in beating Carter in 1966. So they focused their attacks on the wealth that Sanders had accumulated after his term as governor, becoming the senior partner at a prestigious Atlanta law firm, and owning a share of the Atlanta Hawks professional basketball team. They called him “Cuff-Link Carl,” and said he was supported by the big money in Atlanta, while portraying Carter as the hardworking peanut farmer from Plains. One particularly scurrilous TV spot showed Sanders celebrating a Hawks victory in the locker room surrounded by his team’s black players. I was disturbed enough to ask Rafshoon about it, but he simply shrugged and insisted Carter had never reviewed it. Carter also opposed mandatory school busing and, even more disturbing, promised to invite Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, to speak in Georgia.

  This populist, antiestablishment campaign was a model for his presidential campaign. The appeal to conservative whites was mirrored by Carter’s 1976 comment about maintaining the “ethnic purity” of working-class white neighborhoods in the northern industrial states. The 1970 campaign against Sanders reflected another aspect of Jimmy Carter, repeated in his biting attacks against Gerald Ford in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980: He was a brass-knuckled, no-holds-barred campaigner for office. But after winning, he abjured the same type of tough politics when governing, parking politics at the governor’s and then the Oval Office door.

  Carter was often ferried around by David Rabhan, a Savannah native and amateur pilot of his own twin-engine Cessna 360. One of his first plane rides had a momentous impact: It petrified Carter but led to one of the most important political statements he would make in his home state. One evening, flying from Brunswick to the little Georgia town of West, David napped and let Jimmy fly the plane. The engines suddenly cut out and, petrified, Jimmy screamed, “David! David!” as Rabhan pretended to be sleeping. “So I knocked the heck out of him with my elbow. I said, ‘Wake up, the plane’s going down.’” David grinned, reached over, and turned the knob that kicked in the gas supply from the backup tank. “He thought it was very funny. I was really pissed off.”

  Carter, greatly relieved, conceded that he had helped him in many ways, not least flying him around Georgia at no charge, and asked if he could ever do anything to repay these many favors—“win or lose.” Rabhan then grew solemn, and asked the future governor for a pencil and paper. After Carter reached behind the seat and pulled out a small map of Georgia that located all the state’s airports, he told his passenger to write: “I want you to promise that if you are elected Governor you will say that the time for racial discrimination is over.”31

  As a Jewish businessman, Rabhan had known discrimination and felt great sympathy for the black citizens of Georgia, who were treated far worse than were the Jews. He had trained Israeli pilots secretly at an airfield in Athens, the home of his alma mater, the University of Georgia. But he had another reason: His parents ran a bakery in Savannah and were partners in building nursing homes with Martin Luther King, Sr.—“Daddy King,” as he was affectionately known. Carter had not yet met King’s legendary son, but he obtained something far more important early in his political career. During the campaign Daddy King introduced him to the politically influential black ministers who helped deliver the black vote across Georgia. With the election secured, Carter was free to fulfill Rabhan’s request.

  In his brief inaugural speech he declared that he had traveled the state widely, and “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Never again shall a black child be deprived of equal rights to education, health or social services.” He might have made that pledge without that harrowing experience aloft, because he well knew that there would be no future for him in the national Democratic Party without a demonstrated commitment to civil rights. Carter insists Rabhan’s request was the catalyst, and further, “That statement got me on the front cover of Time magazine.”32 He was not far wrong. The editors were looking for a face representing what was seen as a more tolerant New South, and in Carter they found it. While the statement gave the new governor of Georgia national prominence, it was a politically courageous and deeply unpopular sentiment among white voters in his own Deep South state. That did not stop Carter from hanging a portrait
of the martyred civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in Georgia’s Capitol, or from criticizing the very Sumter County School Board on which he had served for “driving white children from the public school system.”33 He appointed record numbers of women and blacks and reformed the criminal justice and mental health systems, which were heavily biased against blacks.

  For good or ill, Carter’s presidency was foreshadowed by the way he governed in Georgia. He showed his determination to address tough issues by abolishing and combining three hundred state agencies, boards, and commissions into twenty-two. At the same time he left the necessary backroom bargaining with the state legislature to Bert Lance, his highway commissioner, allowing Carter to avoid the messy political compromises he found distasteful. Bert was all too happy to promise new or repaired roads, highways, and bridges to win over recalcitrant legislators.

  Carter also showed his commitment to the environment by an unprecedented decision (with shades of the water wars he would fight in Washington) to block the Sprewell Bluff Dam, a job- and park-creating project of the Army Engineers that would have damaged the swamps, streams, and wild rivers Carter prized as God’s creation. No governor in any state had ever blocked a water project fully paid for by the federal government. His willingness to take on vested interests, combined with his stellar civil rights record, made it unlikely that he would have been reelected if the Georgia Constitution had permitted governors to serve two consecutive terms.34 But Carter was already setting his sights higher than that.