“There’s Jimmy Carter,” the guy behind me in the barbecue line said, gesturing with a joint toward a man with a singularly toothy smile, standing a few feet away beside the host of this outdoor bash near Macon, Capricorn Records co-founder Phil Walden.
I wasn’t there for Jimmy, far from it. I had decided early in my reporting days to avoid politics as much as possible. I had been dispatched to this outdoor party by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, mainly on stakeout to see if Cher and Gregg Allman, whose recent marriage was off to a bumpy start, would show up with each other. A former governor launching what looked like a mercurial presidential campaign seemed at that moment like only an interesting side note to the big story of rock-and-roll romance.
That was 1975. The following summer, having clinched the Democratic nomination, Carter returned to Walden’s annual picnic amid a crush of media, security and hangers-on. It was as far from the laid-back vibe of the year before as it could be. Everybody was there — I met Andy Warhol, the palest man I’d ever seen. There used to be a sound when so many electric releases from the cameras photographers used back then were going off simultaneously that it made a continuous, anxious buzz — the sound of true celebrity. That was the first time I ever heard that sound.
What Carter and a Georgia braintrust with very limited experience in national politics accomplished over that year between the picnics was without precedent in the presidential politics of the modern era. With a canny understanding of the way media coverage of campaigns was changing, Carter became the most recognizable figure in the Democratic field in a matter of months — that grin again. Approaching his goal one muddy pig farm at the time, Carter and his strategists virtually invented their first big victory, trumpeting their victory in the Iowa caucuses, which had previously been no big deal.
There’s been only one example of a similarly meteoric entrance into national politics. Neither Carter nor Donald Trump would be comfortable with that comparison.
Over the four years Carter was in the White House, a legion of young Georgians made their way to Washington, landing jobs that ranged from top positions in the new administration to bartending at the right hotel bars. Some very notable careers began in those years. A Carter connection was golden in D.C. And it was a two-way street — many talented people came to Georgia through their connections to the Carter campaign.
I’m like many thousands of Georgians whose lives were changed by Jimmy Carter, mostly in peripheral and many times in unlikely ways. I phoned notables around the country for reactions on the night he was elected and did the front-page write-through after the failed effort to rescue the embassy hostages in Iran. The first big article I landed as editor of the Sunday Perspective section was about the Panama Canal.
I never made much note of the ways in which his place in history affected me personally until this week, and I imagine there must be many others who are doing the same.
As Carter moved from politics to post-presidency, I was being drawn inexorably into the subject I’d avoided when I was younger until, eventually, I returned to writing about politics full-time. I had come to know Bert Lance, one of the first people to plant the idea of the presidency in Carter’s ear. As I traveled across the South trying to understand politics in every state, I would check in with Lance, who might just have gotten off the phone with an aspiring candidate or worried incumbent. Our conversations, conducted almost entirely by phone, eventually spanned decades.
I don’t live far from the Carter Center, and I’ve seen the former president on any number of public occasions. We were well acquainted with many of the same people. But I don’t believe I ever got any closer to him than I was that afternoon in 1976, shoved up close to him at a picnic table where he and Walden pretended to enjoy their barbecue amid that insistent, loud buzz of fame. That fleeting buzz.
There’s nothing so unusual about my Jimmy Carter story, and that’s the point of it, really. We all have stories. In large ways and small, he touched all of us.
