A good heart, extended to all, is Jimmy Carter's legacy

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John C. Danforth

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in the Post-Dispatch opinion section on March 1, 2023, after the announcement that former President Jimmy Carter had entered hospice. Carter died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, at age 100.

Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977 occurred just days after I became a United States Senator. We were on the east front of the Capitol, Democrats and Republicans mixed together, I between two Democrats, my Missouri colleague Tom Eagleton and Dale Bumpers, a senator from Arkansas. The new president asked us to stand and hold hands as he began his inaugural address with a prayer. It was an uncomfortable moment for mostly male members of Congress.

Immediately after his prayer, Carter turned to his predecessor, Gerald Ford, the man he had just defeated in the 1976 election, and on behalf of a grateful nation thanked him for holding America together after the traumas of Watergate and the resignation of the disgraced Richard Nixon.

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The graciousness then is hard to imagine today.

My closest association with Carter came in 1990, 10 years after the end of his one-term presidency. Together, we made two trips to Nicaragua as he headed a team to observe an election between then President Daniel Ortega and challenger and eventual winner, Violeta Chamorro.

During our initial trip, made to survey the runup to the election, the Carter team was in a motorcade on a two-lane road in the town of Rivas. When it happened that another motorcade bearing Ortega was headed in the opposite direction, both lines of vehicles stopped, and all occupants headed into and through the nearest house to its back yard, where chairs were hastily arranged for the two presidents and an interpreter. With a crowing rooster providing accompaniment, Presidents Carter and Ortega proceeded to the business at hand — negotiations relating to trucks the Nicaraguan government would provide to deliver election material throughout the country.

Later, during our second visit, I was assigned to observe voting in rural Nicaragua. After a very long day, I returned to our hotel in Managua and proceeded to our hospitality room to find something cold to drink. Carter was there, alone with one adviser, on the phone with James Baker, the secretary of state under then-President George H.W. Bush. Carter was briefing Baker on the day’s events and advising him on how Baker might respond to the election. The next morning, I turned on CNN to hear Baker say just what Carter had suggested.

That a former president of the United States would sit in a dusty back yard in Rivas, Nicaragua, and negotiate about trucks, and that he would make a late-night call to the secretary of state with talking points for a statement, is a window into who Jimmy Carter was back then. He was an engineer by training, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who focused intently on details.

I don’t think that great presidents get into the weeds the way Carter did. They are visionaries with a few big ideas that they advance relentlessly. Ronald Reagan was a great president because he advanced a few big ideas. As President, Carter was into the nitty gritty. It seemed that, every month or so, he had a new message on the economy, a tweak here, a tweak there. It was confusing, herky-jerky, hard to follow. He was not a great president.

But he was a great former president, because in the four decades after leaving the White House, he applied himself to the hands-on work of important missions: personally building housing for the needy, personally negotiating for trucks in Nicaragua. Never satisfied with pontificating from 30,000 feet, Jimmy Carter rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

Often when we envision former presidents, the picture is distant, even stuffy: men in dark suits and neckties captured in formal poses as though engaged in deep thoughts. My picture of Carter is quite the contrary. He is in a back yard in Rivas. A crowing rooster is at his feet. An earnest expression is on his face. He’s not talking statecraft; he’s talking trucks.

What is very clear in that picture is that this is a man with a good heart that he displayed not by occasional generalities but in a lifetime of focused action. That good heart is Carter’s most important legacy to America as he enters hospice care in his home town of Plains, Georgia. And while special to him, it’s what we should expect from all who lead us.

Danforth served three terms as Republican U.S. senator from Missouri and later as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

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A good heart, extended to all, is Jimmy Carter’s legacy

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