Goodbye Jimmy Carter and the 1970s

The last link to an era

Jimmy Carter has died. The first president to hit 100 years of age. In 2015, he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, which had spread to his liver. That’s pretty much a death sentence for mere mortals. But not the 39th President of the United States. The presidents all live to ripe old ages now. And Jimmy Carter lived the longest.

Carter already seemed like an anachronism, when he was given that grim prognosis at the age of 91. It has never been explained how someone that old, with the most dire cancer imaginable, could somehow overcome it, and pick up his Habitat for Humanity hammer once again. It’s an executive branch thing, you wouldn’t understand. He was the last living link to my political awakening in the mid-1970s. Morris Udall, whom I preferred over Carter in 1976, died in 1998. Birch Bayh died at 91 in 2019. He seemed good to a starry eyed idealist like me, and had notably survived a 1964 plane crash, along with Ted Kennedy. Kennedys get in an inordinate number of plane crashes. Honestly, it’s an actuarially impossible number. But only Teddy survived one. And, of course, Teddy was my favorite politician of all when I was young. He was the heir to Camelot, and I was waiting with bated breath for him to launch a presidential run.

When I first waded into the political waters, I was a faithful Democrat. My family were all Democrats. My father voted for FDR four times. The only Republican he ever voted for was Barry Goldwater. He hated LBJ, and openly shared his belief that he had been behind the death of JFK. He especially hated Richard Nixon. Nixon was a dirty word in our house. So it was natural for me to gravitate to the Democrats. I was far more radical than my father ever was, and got my ACLU card before I was old enough to be eligible to vote. Few in Congress were liberal enough for me. I loved Frank Church, and followed the hearings of the Church Committee closely. That was where Americans first learned of the diabolical actions of the CIA. I admired the young, reformist Democrats who were elected to Congress in 1974, in the wake of Watergate. We didn’t get much out of that, except for the Freedom of Information Act.

Since I was finally old enough to vote in 1976, I paid extra attention to the Democratic Party presidential candidates. I liked Fred Harris, the only one who mentioned that he supported a new investigation into the JFK assassination. Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor turned peanut farmer, was my least favorite of the bunch. So of course he became the media-anointed “frontrunner.” Before a single primary vote had been cast. I was quickly learning just how the system worked. Carter was backed by David Rockefeller and his new Trilateral Commission. They were kind of an updated Council on Foreign Relations. Globalist chicanery at work. If David Rockefeller was supporting a politician, you knew that politician was bought and paid for. Carter didn’t impress me at all. I admit to being prejudiced against southern politicians. I got that from my father. Except for Huey Long, of course, who is my all time hero.

Carter ran as kind of a neoliberal, before the term became popular. That would come to fruition in 1992, when Bill Clinton shattered the concept of classical liberalism forever. But I still thought the Democrats were the good guys, and I cast my first vote for Carter. I certainly wasn’t going to vote for Warren Commission member Gerald Ford. Carter’s family was undeniably colorful. There was his elderly mother Lillian. And brother Billy, the black sheep of the family. But those of us partying hard at the time will always remember Billy Beer. At least it was better than Carling Black Label. And there was his sister, lovely Ruth Carter Stapleton, who was interested in the JFK assassination. Unlike her brother the president, who never mentioned the subject while he was in office, despite the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Ruth died at only 54 in 1983. I would have loved to have known her.

Carter’s great longevity didn’t come from genetics. His mother lived to be 85, but his father who died at age 58, Ruth, brother Billy, at age 51, and sister Gloria, at age 63, all succumbed to pancreatic cancer. So I guess some people are just really lucky. Gloria was a real motorcycle aficionado, a member of the Harley Davidson Hall of Fame. Ruth was a devout Christian and a faith healer. She even converted Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt briefly. They were attracted to each other by a common interest in the conspiracy to kill JFK. Billy, well, he did have a beer named after him. Carter lived long enough to be a member of the Black Eye Club at an advanced age. Probably the oldest member ever. Just like being the oldest president. That’s a pretty nice accomplishment, even if he isn’t in the Harley Davidson Hall of Fame. Jimmy talked about “lusting in his heart,” which I could definitely relate to, as a youthful luster.

Carter tried to inject a few populist strains into his presidency. He walked during his inauguration. He banned the playing of “Hail to the Chief.” He quoted Bob Dylan. Dan Aykroyd impersonated him in a flattering style on Saturday Night Live, intentionally making him seem a lot cooler than he really was. It was the 1970s, and to be “cool” was the ultimate compliment. I didn’t think Carter earned that. To his credit, we were not involved in any wars during his four years. That’s pretty much a twentieth century record for our meddlesome nation. He also granted amnesty to the Vietnam War draft evaders. I would have been one, if I’d just been a few years older. I was already checking out places in Canada. He also tried to get Ted Sorensen, JFK’s chief speechwriter and a man of character, approved as director of the CIA. Sorensen may not have abolished the CIA, but they certainly weren’t going to let him lead it.

Carter also sent his young daughter Amy to a Washington, D.C. public school. Not Sidwell Friends, the chic private school where almost all offspring of the political elite go. So that was at least walking the walk. Carter unfortunately added even more useless, unconstitutional agencies to the federal bureaucracy. Trump has vowed to eliminate Carter’s Department of Education, but said nothing about the pointless Department of Energy. They are still suppressing alternative forms of energy, so what are we paying for? And then there is Carter’s FEMA, which I would scrap before any other agency. Finally, despite his relatively unbiased Middle East policy, Carter created the Office of Special Investigations monstrosity, which tracked down elderly men whose families had chosen to side with the Nazis over the Soviets in WWII. It was shameful harassment, but it made the Israeli lobby happy.

Compared to the presidents before him (since they killed JFK), and all that came after him, Jimmy Carter would come to look pretty good by comparison. Sure, we waited in long gas lines, and had those terrible 21 percent interest rates. But Carter was the only president since JFK to at least attempt some kind of even handedness in the Middle East, which is again to his credit. The Iranian hostage situation blew up in his face, and then the October Surprise scandal (which I covered thoroughly in Hidden History) finished him off, allowing Ronald Reagan to defeat him in a landslide in the 1980 election. Ted Kennedy oddly chose to suddenly challenge Carter for the 1980 nomination, and the mainstream media dutifully drudged up Chappaquiddick, which they had ignored for over a decade. Carter snidely focused on the scandal, while claiming he wasn’t going to mention it. He had an almost irrational hatred of Teddy.

Was Jimmy Carter’s presidency really that much of a disaster? After he was soundly defeated for reelection, the very word “liberal” became associated with failure, weakness, and naivete. I certainly stopped calling myself liberal. I really wanted Teddy to beat him for the nomination, and even though I had already grown cynical about liberalism, I was impressed by his “the dream shall never die” speech at the convention. Both Ted Sorensen and JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. helped draft what is generally considered to be Ted Kennedy’s greatest speech. Teddy would stay on in the Senate for an incredible forty seven years, until his death in 2009. In many ways, he came to epitomize the diminishment of the good Democrats. He lost me after JFK, Jr. was murdered in 1999, and he actually seemed to help orchestrate the coverup. He saw too many unnatural deaths of loved ones, and compensated by abusing alcohol.

Jimmy Carter lived for some forty four years after he left the presidency. Needless to say, that is probably a record that will never be broken. He was involved for a long time with Habitat for Humanity, which builds affordable housing around the world. You’d think they would concentrate on housing in this country, but Carter was a diehard globalist . I’d like to believe that he actually broke a sweat hammering nails in himself, but the cynic in me imagines that he was there for photo ops and served to publicize the organization. If he actually engaged in constructing homes himself, then that is pretty remarkable. If he was just the face of a group, pretending to do so, then he was like millions of other fallible human beings. Not literally a crisis actor, but not literally a humanitarian, either. I know plenty of people in the JFK research community especially who revere him. Again, I guess he looks good in retrospect.

Carter had been involved in helping Ninoy Aquino, the primary opponent to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. In 1986, Carter was head of the international observers team whose job it was to make sure the election was legitimate. It was ironic that the one time leader of a country with its own history of electoral fraud should be considered an expert on honest voting. Despite Marcos officially winning the vote, the international observers simply declared Ninoy’s widow Cory Aquino the winner, and Marcos fled in exile. Carter lost what little credibility he had on the subject in 2016, when he declared that Donald Trump was an “illegitimate” president who was helped by Russian “collusion.” Yes, Jimmy believed in “Russia! Russia! Russia!” Carter would describe Trump as a “disaster” as president, which was close to what Trump said about Carter, calling him a “nice man” but “terrible president.”

Now that Carter is finally dead at age 100, President-Elect Donald Trump has said that we owe him “a debt of gratitude.” To be fair, Trump also said that the Clintons were “good people” once the 2016 election was over. If Nancy Pelosi ever dies, and Trump survives her, he will probably say the nation owes her “a debt of gratitude” as well. Carter wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on January 7, 2022, in which he said, “One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power.” He also “affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election.” Like every other Democrat, he laughably called it an “insurrection” that “threatens our democracy.” Carter was considered an early “pathfinder” on the topic of LGBTQ+ rights. He never said 9/11 was an “inside job.” And he failed to speak up about the JFK assassination, even though he was president at the height of public criticism of the Warren Report.

Carter to me was a relic of my wild and often misspent youth. The 1970s were like a “lost decade.” Too many drugs. Too many shortcuts. Too much meaningless sex. A severe lack of production values, in Hollywood and in life. Garish softball style uniforms for Major League Baseball teams. Smelly hippies. They really did stink. A combination of pot and smelly underarms. They didn’t shower regularly, or wash their jeans. No wonder Eric Cartman hated them so much. Bad fashion. Yes, I had a lime green leisure suit. Fortunately, I can’t find any photos of me wearing it. And disco. Have I mentioned how much I hated disco? Even though I had some great times at 1970s’ parties, I recognize now how much of a blur the decade was. If only I’d been more ambitious, I might be writing a Substack with a pretentious “Dr.” in front of my name, as an Ivy League graduate, instead of a mere community college dropout.

The 1970s featured a popular bumper sticker. “Keep on Truckin’.” Inspired by Robert Crumb’s 1968 comic, it came to epitomize an era that was largely devoid of substance. Nobody really knew what “Keep on Truckin’” meant. The Simpsons made fun of it during their heyday. Other forgettable ‘70s gems included screaming “Oww!” loudly, especially at concerts. I could never figure out what “Jesus H. Christ” meant. I guess you had to be really high. Cartoons took Hanna-Barbera’s minimalist animation to absurd lengths. Many 1970s cartoons were no more sophisticated than 1914’s Gertie the Dinosaur. At least they were in color. The 1976 remake of 1933’s classic King Kong had less impressive special effects. There was Astroturf. Unbuttoned shirts exposing crispy chest hairs and gaudy medallions. I mean, any decade that has to own up to pet rocks, not to mention disco, cannot be taken seriously. Perhaps I should go a bit easier on modern culture. My salad days were pretty ridiculous.

The world of the 1970s seems like it never existed now. Everything about it is foreign to what has devolved into this horrific America 2.0. The music is still great to listen to. Except for the disco. That’s as bad as Lil’-Diddy-Puffy-Snoopy hip-hop. The television shows were really bad. I didn’t like most of the movies, although when I watch one from that era now it does evoke strong nostalgia in me. Those were my times. I was writing my own songs, and dreaming that I could be the next Bob Dylan or Jackson Browne. I wasn’t worried about the future. I was concerned with where the next party was going to be. Or more importantly, who my next girlfriend would be. Jimmy Carter was about the last surviving U.S. leader who was prominent back then. And now he’s gone. Just like the 1970s. I started dating my wife in late 1979. When Carter was president. So you know how out of circulation I am. Time flies, as they say.

Instead of going away to college, and planning for my future, I had continuous fun in the 1970s. I was actually living “in the moment,” which has now become all the rage. Ironically, I’ve never lived in the moment since then. Now, I always brood about the past or worry about the future. When my old party buddy Dave showed back up at Fairfax Hospital in the early ‘90s as a security guard, we sat down and talked over old times. Only there wasn’t much to talk about. I realized that I had never witnessed him sober. At one point he shook his head and said, “the 1970s, man.” We never really talked again. You had to be there to understand. It’s strange to feel nostalgic over a time that really repelled anything traditional. Like Bob Dylan’s great song My Back Pages, when the 1980s hit, I could honestly say that “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” So, farewell to Jimmy Carter. And farewell to an era.