“I am a farmer, an engineer, a businessman, a planner, a scientist, a governor, and a Christian,” Jimmy Carter introduced himself to elite journalists — and by extension their audiences — at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 1974, during the announcement speech launching his 1976 presidential campaign. Over the next five decades, the media, increasingly the primary power brokers under the new rules of U.S. politics, shaped Carter’s image. As the nation grapples with Carter’s legacy after he died on Sunday, Dec. 29, aged 100, Americans may have to contend with the fact that his presidency signaled a shift toward a more adversarial relationship between politicians and the press.
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Initially, national political reporters struggled to understand the Georgia governor who “whistled a different tune.” He was a White southerner who declared that “the time for racial discrimination [was] over.” He was a peanut farmer turned nuclear physicist. A deeply religious man, he also often quoted the words of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
Many bought into an initial assessment from the New York Times: “Carter, like the South, is … an enigma and contradiction.”
Such an observation was not just about Carter. It reflected a shifting journalistic environment. As the Chicago Tribune’s rookie campaign reporter later explained to Carter biographer Betty Glad: “The Nixon Presidency helped create a whole breed of political journalists, who appeared in great numbers in 1976 to explain the character of Presidential candidates. It was a kind of Teddy White-ism gone wild … Yet for all of us out there trying to explain what kind of person Jimmy Carter was, most of us didn’t or couldn’t and opted to call him an enigma.”
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The collective shorthand among journalists, inspired by their lingering anxieties over corrupt politicians, signified their uneasiness and shared antipathy toward the still little-known candidate. They may have admired his candor, but they feared that behind his enigmatic mask lurked another opportunistic politician.
This suspicion and other nagging uncertainties about the New South’s redeemer lingered in the minds of traveling reporters throughout the 1976 presidential campaign. As Village Voice staff writer Ken Auletta contended in the November 1976 issue of More: The Media Magazine, the cynical campaign pack remained distrustful of the politician who “with a straight face … promises never to lie” and kept Carter under constant scrutiny on the trail. “They are always on guard, watchful of his every move,” Auletta wrote. “[Only Carter’s] absurd claim gives the press their potential advantage in the chess game. So they spend a fair amount of time searching for evidence Carter is lying — or at least fudging.”
Shortly after the end of President Carter’s First 100 Days, political reporters, lusting to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, seized on their first strategic opportunity — a financial scandal involving Carter’s longtime adviser and Office of Management and Budget Director Bert Lance — what became known in the popular parlance of the era as Lance-gate.
Throughout the investigation into Lance’s alleged misdeeds, Carter stood by his man, reaffirming his faith in Lance as a “man of complete integrity.” But, amid persistent negative coverage and calls from the Senate for Lance’s resignation, Carter succumbed to pressure to cut ties with his longtime adviser.
In the aftermath of the Lance Affair, the relationship between the Carter Administration and the press became more contentious and hostile. Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell contended that journalistic attack dogs foamed at the mouth. Amid an increasingly adversarial milieu, they pounced on the failures of the Carter Administration in the handling of domestic challenges and international threats, as well as self-inflicted political embarrassments.
After his landslide defeat at the hands of former actor and California Gov. Ronald Reagan, the adversarial pack dismissed Carter’s presidency as a failure, and many historians followed their lead. Carter was “a good and decent man,” the popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once put it. But this depiction often coincided with understanding his one-term presidency as a failure.
Yet, his post-presidency made clear the values Carter attempted to infuse into the Democratic Party — that “love must be aggressively translated into simple justice,” a line from his 1976 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. After he left the White House, he focused his attention on combating “disease, hunger, poverty, conflict and oppression” from the Carter Center and, in his spare time, teaching the Gospel from the pulpit at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., and building houses for the poor — the labor of love he remained committed to even after he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma brain cancer in August 2015 and suffered a subdural hematoma in October 2019.
It is worth remembering this commitment to the message of moral improvement that attracted supporters equally among liberals, conservatives, and moderates during the 1976 primaries.
And finally, journalists are taking note of more than his failures. Pulse news site executive Paul Brannan wrote that Carter “deserves better” before pointing to his work on the Camp David Accords in 1978, his role as a champion of human rights, and his efforts to move the nation past the era of the credibility gap. “Telling the truth, obeying the law, keeping the peace, and championing human rights is quite a legacy,” he concluded. “So forget Iran … and all of the other perceived failings.”
The challenge in constructing Carter’s legacy rests in separating the media hype from the historical work he did. In the end, however, Jimmy Carter told journalists that he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” perhaps the only question that remains is — are we?
In the wake of Watergate, a newly adversarial political press scrutinized Jimmy Carter, looking for any sign that he was breaking his pledge not to lie, and pouncing on any blunders that his administration made. This shaped perceptions of Carter as a failed president, but his post-presidency complicates that idea and highlights aspects of his presidency often missed by the media in the moment.
Amber Roessner is a professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Media and author of Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign (LSU Press, 2020). Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.
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