I was in the car and on the last leg on my 400-mile journey back home today when during a phone conversation my interlocutor interjected, "Jimmy Carter just died."
Though not on the level of people remembering where they were and what they were doing when they heard John Kennedy was shot or Pearl Harbor attacked — profoundly memorable events because of the shock — doubtless I will recall the long stretch of highway before me, the gray skies, the intermittent rains and idle phone chat when I heard of President Carter's death.
I'll recollect the circumstances not because of any sudden anguish or jolted emotions; after all, he was 100 years of age. Rather, what I happened to be doing on the last day of this remarkable man's life will assume an unforgettability because of his.
I've read no Carter obits tonight. I needn't read them to be reminded of his many — and major — endeavors. Those, I know of. But, I left them for another reason, a reason of real significance to me, anyway. Here I wished to impart only three memories without having my compositional head clouded by the near-epic sweeps of journalism's lifespan wrap-ups crammed into one column.
One is the vaguest of recalls, my first memory of the man — a virtually unknown gentleman sitting on a (Sunday afternoon?) panel in Iowa, 1975. The cries could be heard throughout public affairs TV land: Who the hell is this guy? He was of course America's next president and commander on chief. The point, though, is Carter's political brilliance at the time.
Iowa held its first "first-state" caucus in 1972 with only the Democratic Party participating, Sens. McGovern and Muskie campaigning. (The GOP waited until April to hold its gathering.) Four years later, both parties held caucuses on the same day, which vastly increased media attention.
Carter alone targeted Iowa in '76, realizing that the state's caucus winner could sell his victory as something future Vice President Joe Biden would call something else a "big fucking deal." And that's just what Jimmy did. He caught his well-known opponents off guard and left them to play catchup.
That bit of really keen political foresight compelled me to read his presidential-year autobiography, Why not the Best? Such works are, in general, perfunctory and loaded with excessive disingenuity — in brief, a terrific way to squander valuable reading time. The principal segment in Carter's bio, however, struck me as genuine, and from that, admirable.
It provided the book's title. While a young officer in the submarine service Carter was interviewed by Admiral Rickover, who asked how he did as a student at the Naval Academy. Once provided the answer (the specifics of which I forget), Rickover followed up with what he most wanted to know: Did you do your best? Carter had to admit, not always. Why not? was Rickover's response. That lit a revelatory fire in Lt. Carter's mind.
Both memories, deeply impressive. Yet more than those highlights of Carter's long life — here I include even his presidency — it was his Christianity that awestruck me. I say that as a non-Christian; I say it as a person of no other religion; going further, I say it as a person who positively abhors organized religion.
My aversion to such is nondiscriminatory: I abhor them all. I agree with Christopher Hitchens that "religion poisons everything," although contra Hitch, I'm an agnostic — no atheist here — simply because I can't know and atheists claim to (a claim strikingly similar to religion's). Perhaps above all else, I see no connection whatsoever between God or gods, should He/She/It or they exist, and humankind's religions.
I pass along those seemingly unrelated observations only to make this furthest point. My total absence of religious faith — put another way, my lack of faith in faith — is why Jimmy Carter's so awesomely struck me. Rare is the man who transcends belief in his religion by authentically living it; by converting faith into everyday actions — Every. Day. — most appreciably in his post-presidency.
That's what I saw in James Earl Carter Jr. No, he wasn't a saint, nor did he pretend to be one (putting aside his religion's exclusion of sainthood). Still, he came across as a man nearly unequaled in his strivings to at least approach fulfilling Christianity's impossible demands on human beings.
I'll close this quick little assessment by noting the faintest of paradoxical Baptist irony; that Jimmy Carter was in fact a living saint if we compare him with that demonically foul heap of professed though profoundly false Christianity, Donald Trump.
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