Patricia Murphy
When Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington in 1977, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight on the Washington side of the relationship. The peanut farmers from Plains were outsiders, in both style and substance, and seemed to have little interest in adapting to the ways of the nation’s capital. President Carter, in particular, clashed with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, who complained that he never figured out how Washington was supposed to work.
But more than 40 years and a lifetime later, Congress is giving Carter the respect he deserved all along, with a somber ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda where he’ll lie in state after his death last month at the age of 100. In the same halls of Congress where members used to chafe at his politics and policies, Carter was lauded Tuesday as a man of character and a leader ahead of his time.
With Supreme Court Justices, senators, House members, and Vice President Kamala Harris watching on, Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was just 4-years-old when Carter was inaugurated, but he admires him still today.
Along with appreciating the late president’s legendary thrift, Johnson said, “I’m reminded of his admonition to ‘live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon,’ and of his amazing personal reflection, ‘If I have one life and one chance to make it count for something.’ We all agree that he certainly did.”
For anyone who watched Carter battle with Congress during his own years in the White House, seeing Congress honor his legacy was a full circle moment.
Carter promised voters in 1976 that he would bring change to Washington, and as soon as he arrived, it was clear he had been telling the truth. Instead of glad handing and boozing with members of Congress, he immediately sold off the presidential yacht, Sequoia, to save the taxpayers money. Also, hard liquor was no longer served at White House receptions.
The Carters also had a dog named “Grits,” and decided early on that their daughter, Amy, would attend a local public school instead of one of the private schools where most children of congressional leaders enrolled. But the choice that seemed to immediately send Washington insiders over the edge was Rosalynn Carter’s choice of an inaugural gown, namely the same blue chiffon gown she had worn to her husband’s inaugural gala after he became governor of Georgia six years before.
The fashion critic at The New York Times scoffed that the modest Mrs. Carter had decided to wear “something old and something blue.” The Washington Post ran an editorial cartoon depicting the Carter family with straw coming out of their ears. Time magazine put Carter’s new White House staff on the cover, but drew them with overalls and fishing poles.
As different as the Carters were in style from the Washington establishment, Jimmy Carter was even more different in substance from the congressional leaders he needed to work with when he arrived. He was the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to be elected to the White House without congressional experience, and it often showed.
House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a classic patronage pol, complained to The New York Times at the time that he and Carter simply didn’t speak the same language. “I said to the president once, ‘Keep your left hand high,’” raising his fist in a boxing move. “He didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Another language spoken in Washington at the time was social, and, again, congressional leaders complained the Carter White House didn’t play the game right.
O’Neill was offended by the placement of the seats he got from the White House for a Kennedy Center event. Other Democrats said they were not invited to the Camp David presidential retreat until late in Carter’s first term. Were the members of Congress seeking favors or simply looking to build a relationship with the new president who had few?
No subject seemed to spark a bigger disagreement between Carter and Congress than federal spending, including weapons systems and pork barrel projects, which Carter said early on he wanted to cut.
But where Carter saw fat in the budget, leaders like Democrat O’Neill and then-chief Deputy Whip Dan Rostenkowski saw jobs for their districts and grease for favor-trading to get larger bills initiatives passed. When Carter proposed to cut 19 previously approved federal water projects, he battled powerful leaders in his own party to pass what he thought should have been an easy win . US Sen. Ted Kennedy, a fellow Democrat, eventually challenged Carter for the White House in 1980.
Although he did eventually find ways to work with Democrats and Republicans on some issues, the fights he had with Congress made passing the agenda he promised nearly impossible.
Carter was defeated after one term by Ronald Reagan, the former California governor and Hollywood actor whose wife, Nancy Reagan, wore glamorous designer gowns to Reagan’s inaugural galas. It was a departure in nearly every way from the sober, serious Carter years.
But all of that is history now and much of it seems incredibly petty with the distance of time. Carter went on to fulfill his post-presidency years in a way he never quite realized in the White House — working for world peace, helping to cure diseases, building affordable housing people could see and touch, and, of course, living a life in Plains with a spirit of service and relaxed graciousness.
The great irony and the biggest tribute of all to Carter is the fact that much of the thrift and austerity that cost Carter the good favor of Congress years ago is being embraced by the Congress of today. Republican members are so quick to condemn federal spending, they’re proud to sleep on cots in their offices to prove their budget-friendly ways. And Democrats are quick to point out the climate crisis Carter warned about is upon us now and needs a solution. And that refashioned inaugural gown of the first lady’s? Young women in Washington will do the same thing in two weeks for Donald Trump’s inaugural balls and call it
“vintage.”
Jimmy Carter, in so many ways, deserved Washington’s respect all along. This week he’s getting it.
