In Oliver Stone’s film Nixon, Anthony Hopkins sweats and soliloquizes in an eerily empty White House, dreaming of the Vietnam War as a virus and yelling at his mother’s ghost. Historical quibbling aside, the real Richard Nixon did at least invite a Shakespearean caricature. As paranoid as Lear and as guilty as Macbeth, Nixon personified the crisis of America raging against itself, struggling to uphold the myth of its essential goodness, but losing a war against its most vicious desires.
Jimmy Carter, according to biographer Kenneth Morris, also reflected the spirit of the nation-in this case a nation struggling to redefine itself. Walking hand in hand with Rosalynn down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, Carter brought to the beleaguered White House not so much an avenging Hamlet as Mr. Smith, a good-natured and guileless citizen who preferred to enter office on his own two feet (the heck with the motorcade). A newcomer to national politics, he promised to restore faith and trust to government. He would never, he said, lie to the American people. Nor would he make any secret of his Christian beliefs, having written freely of his “born-again” experience in his campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best? (recently reissued with a new introduction). Carter may have been the last public figure to say those words without wincing.
Although Carter owed his presidential victory more to political circumstances than to personal charm, he certainly appealed to post-Watergate Americans cynical about politics. Defining himself as a farmer, a nuclear engineer, and a serious Bob Dylan fan (among other things), he appeared complex and idiosyncratic beside the elephants and donkeys of Washington. His thoughtful answers to difficult questions clearly sprang from a deep well of reflection rather than party ideology.
Carter’s obvious individualism, says Morris, mirrored the national individualism born a decade earlier. The revolution of the sixties had actually been an implosion-a massive buckling of political energy into the smaller sphere of the personal. From freedom marches to Woodstock, the defining social movements of the era had actually been struggles for the power and worth of the individual. “The personal is political,” one contemporary slogan had declared. The Port Huron Manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society had proclaimed that the goal of man and society was human independence, “a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”
Of course, Jimmy Carter was no ex-hippy. Throughout the sixties he had kept his morals and his crewcut. Like the Woodstock rebels, however, he approached politics as a quest for personal meaning. Like them, he had a passion for individual human rights. He spoke on the subject with an eloquence that he reserved for nothing else, often declaring that the chief duty of government was to promote justice for the poor and the illiterate-“to speak for those who have no adequate spokesman.” Furthermore, he extended his native language of civil rights to call for international human rights, demonstrating a deep concern for the world’s poor that he shared with his mother, Lillian, a Peace Corps volunteer in her sixties. Though Carter campaigned as a conservative Southern Democrat, prick him and he would bleed counterculture.
From the beginning, many Americans found both Carter’s politics and his person too enigmatic. They complained about the fuzziness of his positions, his long agenda of worthy but seemingly unconnected legislative goals, and his inability to cooperate with Congress. Their uncertainty only grew as his presidency picked up steam. Always preferring a pragmatic, issue-by-issue approach to governing, Carter appeared to lack a central ideology-a core vision that showed Americans who he was and where he might lead them. Though he bitterly criticized uncontrolled capitalism, for instance, he offered only the mildest corrections to it, instead concentrating on nuts-and-bolts issues such as improved government efficiency and the establishment of a national energy policy; sometimes he sounded like nothing so much as a Republican.
Meanwhile, the country wilted under high unemployment, high inflation, and a worsening energy crisis. In the summer of 1979, Carter’s approval ratings plummeted to 30 percent. While Vice President Walter Mondale and other angry officials demanded decisive action on policy and legislative fronts, Carter searched instinctively for the spiritual roots of the national discontent. He turned to Patrick Cadell, a brilliant young administration pollster who had his own diagnosis of America’s ills. America, Cadell believed, had fallen into a crisis of confidence in the American dream. Ordinary citizens no longer had faith in “a tomorrow better than today.” Moreover, the unifying bonds of civility had broken down, leaving a mesmerizing diversity in their place.
Carter seized on Cadell’s idea, and in a televised speech on July 15, 1979, he held forth about a “moral and spiritual crisis in America,” where “too many . . . worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Saying that legislation alone could never solve America’s deeper problems, he harked back to themes of his 1976 campaign, urging a renewal of faith-“faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation.”
The speech brought immediate acclaim and a 12-point jump in those wretched polls. Yet within just a few weeks, enthusiasm for the doomsayer president waned, the crisis remained, and the nation plodded along in its fog of unease.
Jimmy Carter came to the crossroads of history and stood still: he neither showed nor apparently saw any clear direction out of the slough of meaninglessness. Heavy on woes and light on beatitudes, his address itself came to be remembered as the “malaise speech,” just as his presidential term would often be called “the malaise years.” And well before the Iranian hostage crisis, or Ted Kennedy’s nearly successful bid for the Democratic nomination, Ronald Reagan began to sharpen his own populist, antigovernment vision for the country, getting ready to bury Carter alive.
In the most disturbing chapter of Morris’s biography (“The Spiritual Passion of Politics”), the author attempts to sort out the roots of this “visionless” presidency. Carter, he says, drawing on his earlier biographical chapters, was a just individual who could not envision a just society. His handicap stemmed partly from a socially isolated childhood in an emotionally detached family. Though his childhood family lived and worked together (and, according to Carter’s own account, genuinely loved each other), they were a collection of disparate and eccentric personalities, headed by a demanding father and a distracted mother. Moreover, the community they lived in (Archery, Georgia, near Plains) functioned primarily as a patriarchy, with the Carters as patriarchs. The only other inhabitants were black tenants and a few transient white families. Though young Jimmy spent a lot of his boyhood working, fishing, and playing ball with his black buddies, southern custom dictated that both whites and blacks observe careful codes of privilege and deference. In such guarded relationships, the complete communion of friendship rarely thrived.
Morris may be right that Carter suffered from a lack of close relationships as a child, particularly with his father. Carter himself has said as much, both in his poetry and most recently in his spiritual autobiography,Living Faith. Though in the early, biographical chapters ofAmerican Moralist Morris goes too far in characterizing the Earl Carter family as odd and alienated-even suggesting that Jimmy Carter was never allowed to develop a true “self”-he does make a compelling case that Carter grew up as a “loner,” both in his family and in his community.
Along with this early social alienation, Morris says, the intellectual legacy of the civil-rights era pushed Carter toward moral individualism. Before the triumph of the “one man, one vote” principle, small-town southerners had embraced a political philosophy of “particularism”-a communal form of voting that, at its best, helped defend rural interests against urban intrusion and, at its worst, protected shameless discrimination. When civil justice finally rolled down, so did political “universalism,” a philosophy that doled out the voting power in equal portions. Universalism had a lot to recommend it, obviously, but it didn’t count as a “social vision,” since it recognized society as only an aggregate of many individuals. It offered no guidance to leaders trying to weigh the needs and privileges of competing groups.
As an early supporter of civil rights, Carter accepted political universalism wholeheartedly, and his Christian theology gave it a spiritual legitimacy. Morris identifies Carter as an evangelical, and evangelicals, he says, tend to elevate personal salvation above social justice. Though they may practice politics as a means of enhancing their ability to do good on this earth, they assume that a just state is impossible, since all human institutions are tainted with sin.
Evangelicalis, of course, an elusive term, and it is important to say that Carter’s faith appears as idiosyncratic as everything else about him. True, as a child he once trotted down the aisle at revival meetings. True, he says that his talk with his lay-evangelist sister in the Georgia woods prompted him to “give his life over to God” so completely that he could “find it again”-terms used by evangelicals of the 1970s as religious mating calls, enabling them to identify others of the same species. Also, in a biography of Carter that emphasizes his spiritual life (The Carpenter’s Apprentice), his own pastor, Dan Ariail, describes him as a man of intense personal commitment to Christ, dedication to the kingdom of God, and deep love of the Scriptures-someone you would not mind inviting to dinner on the same night as, say, Carl Henry.
At times in his own writings, however, includingLiving Faith, Carter waffles on core evangelical beliefs such as the deity of Christ and the historicity of the Gospels. (Cancel that date with Carl.) Some of the uncertainty in Carter’s religious writing can be credited to his trademark honesty. He owns up to doubts that many feel but don’t express. On the other hand, his obvious resentment of the conservatives in his own Southern Baptist denomination makes one wonder how he might define himself. As a moderate evangelical, perhaps? A Campolo-ite?
In any case, Carter does certainly hold that perfect justice is impossible on earth. In Living Faith, he writes that “any government, even the most benevolent, has inherent limitations. The best it can do is strive to establish a society that enhances freedom, equality, and justice. There are deeper religious values, such as atonement, forgiveness, and love that transcend what government can achieve.”
As Morris sees it, this transcendent spirituality spelled Carter’s doom as a social reformer. At an important juncture in American history, when instability and unease had created such a spiritual vacuum that real social reformmighthave been possible, Carter failed to tell the nation what a reformed society would look like. He failed because his early circumstances had made him an individualist, a man of integrity placing all his political faith in the integrity of individuals; evangelical theology had confirmed to him that salvation was only for the individual, anyway-society itself was irredeemable. Thus, when he told the country to rise out of its malaise and move forward again, he looked like an old man kicking a dead dog on the side of the road: he could preach, but he couldn’t resurrect.
What Morris hopes to prove in his account of Carter’s presidency is that American moral individualism cannot work as a political philosophy. Because it recognizes only individual voices, it fails to unite the diverse and discordant strands of American society, all competing for political preeminence, all unwilling to submit to a structure that transcends individual or even group needs. Eventually, he predicts gloomily, moral individualism will bring down the very nation thatbecamea nation in order to create it. That prophecy does ring true today, as our country divides and subdivides, splintering like some medieval kingdom into warring fiefs.
It is very difficult to see what exactly Kenneth Morris wants us to do about our “excessively individualistic morality that has mushroomed into moral solipsism,” breaking down restraints on desire and ambition, ushering in violence, viciousness, and chaos. He himself sounds almost fatalistic about America’s ongoing spiritual crisis, suggesting that perhaps the role of modern leadership in the search for moral renewal is to lay out the options as clearly as possible and coordinate the discussion-as if a president were a glorified talk-show host.
The real problem, though, comes not in accepting dire conclusions about moral individualism but in accepting that a bad social philosophy explains Jimmy Carter’s difficulties as president. Morris is, no surprise, a sociologist, and has an implicit interest in linking bad politics to the individualism he so deplores. Because Carter failed to communicate a social vision, he gets some of the blame. But did Carter have no social vision?
Morris himself points out how often and articulately Carter spoke on foreign affairs. In a more sympathetic biography, Carter’s friend and former staffer Peter Bourne portrays him as an activist president taking vigorous leadership on the world scene. Carter apparently did have a well-defined and coordinated international agenda, centered on the promotion of human rights abroad. His own greatest triumphs as president were triumphs for international equity and peace: the return of the Panama Canal and a hard-won treaty between Egypt and Israel. Sure, it’s fair to say that his approach to overseas problems was yet another campaign for moral individualism. However, in a better-organized administration and with more inspiring legislation, Carter’s international vision still might have served as a unifying point for the diverse groups of Americans who hungered to find “meaning,” and to leave malaise behind.
Unfortunately, his internationalism left his country cold. Perhaps Americans had little appetite for foreign intervention after Vietnam. Perhaps the dull legislative proposals and endless energy speeches lulled them to sleep like so many sermons on Leviticus. Or, perhaps, as a religious visionary, Carter simply asked Americans for too much voluntary self-sacrifice, too much mortification of desire. Transcendent values don’t mix well with politics.
Interestingly, Carter says inLiving Faiththat he has always had a hard time listening to other viewpoints, except in the case of real enemies. In disagreements with friends and family, he is notoriously hard-headed. Only in diplomacy does he keep his objectivity. Then, like a cool-headed gambler, he tries to see through the eyes of the opponent. He understood Brezhnev better, for instance, by staring at a globe and imagining himself surrounded by frozen seas and well-armed enemies.
In a parallel passage, Carter mentions that he tended to be stern and oppressive early on with his own wife and children. As stubborn as his father, he had a hard time admitting his failure and moving on. This is a Jimmy Carter we never really knew, obstinate and even harsh with those close to him (at least as a younger man), but naturally humble and patient with others-from the less famous members of his church to warlords and dictators.
It may be wrong, then, to blame an early lack of family closeness and community for Jimmy Carter’s inability to inspire America with a positive social vision. The fault lay rather in his habit of viewing his nation as his family and community. Like a player in a game, the candidate Carter understood the nation he had to convince. But as a patriarchal president (a role his childhood clearly prepared him for) he saw Americans as rebellious children, an obstinate and stiff-necked people. If so, then one reason the famous malaise speech lacked direction and vision is that Carter figured the nation already knew where he wanted them to go-they just refused to go there.
As an older man, Carter became more patient with his own family. At the same time, he learned to express his spiritual and political beliefs better to the American people, as he does so well inLiving Faith-a book he says he waited years to write. It will always be possible for biographers (even some as good as Kenneth Morris) to suggest that Carter is a man without a center, to see the moral inertia of a whole nation reflected in his complex character and presidency. And it will be possible, too, for the rest of us to praise him as a fine Christian humanitarian and a brilliant negotiator for peace.
Whatever we say about Jimmy Carter, though, we must say this. As president, he fulfilled his promise never to lie to the nation. If he failed to unite the country under one ideology, at least he never invented a more attractive ideology purely in order to lead with it. And what he told us about self-sacrifice, he proved with a sacrificial life. In those respects, if not in all others, he more than fills the oversized shoes of another great moralist president, Abraham Lincoln.
Betty Smartt Carter’s first novel, I Read It in the Wordless Book, was recently published by Baker Book House; her second novel, The Tower, The Mask, and the Grave, a mystery, is forthcoming from Harold Shaw.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 16
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