Curtis Wilkie remembers Jimmy Carter’s campaign and presidency

Editor’s note: Former President Jimmy Carter died Sunday at the age of 100 after almost two years in hospice care. Curtis Wilkie, inaugural fellow at the Overby Center, covered Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign against Gerald Ford from the beginning for the Boston Globe, and he was White House reporter during Carter’s four years as president. Charles Overby, chairman of the Overby Center, recently interviewed Wilkie.

Curtis Wilkie covered the Carter campaign and his presidency as a reporter for the Boston Globe.

Overby: How did you first get to know Jimmy Carter?

Wilkie:  I was in my second year at the Boston Globe, and I didn’t have a lot of seniority. The Globe had a lot of good political writers. They were dividing up the various candidates. There were six or eight Democratic candidates. They gave me this obscure farmer from Georgia. The better-known candidates went to others. It was a quirk that I began covering him in November of 1975. I got to see his campaign blossom and grow. It was a remarkable experience for me as a young reporter.

Overby: Do you recall the first time you met him? What were your first impressions of him?

Wilkie: Carter was not a warm personality. He didn’t like small talk. And I always had the impression that he tolerated reporters rather than enjoying being with them. Sometimes I was the only reporter with him, and the crowds would be small in New Hampshire. He struck me as being very intense and very smart–so much so that I concluded that while other people in the press were ignoring him, this is a guy who might end up on the ticket, certainly no better than as the running mate for whoever got the nomination. I was impressed with him.

Overby: What was his appeal?

 Wilkie: This was in the era of Watergate. He had this image of being squeaky-clean. He even had a mantra of “I will never lie to you.” That appealed to a lot of people. But it also provoked a lot of ridicule from reporters because he would occasionally exaggerate. A guy named Steven Brill wrote a devastating article before the New Hampshire primary. The headline was “Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies.” That didn’t exactly endear Carter to reporters and vice versa. But I saw the appeal that he had with people.

Overby: He was running against some heavyweight candidates.

Wilkie: We thought that was the case. I thought Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana would be the most formidable one. But he was gone very quickly. It turned out Mo Udall, congressman from Arizona, was his chief rival. Udall was remarkably funny and progressive with a great track record as an environmentalist. Yet Carter beat him in primary after primary. Everybody dropped out pretty quickly. The thing was over weeks before the formal end.

Overby: What was the magic for Carter?

The official White House portrait of President Jimmy Carter.

Wilkie: He was driven. For all that great smile that he had, behind that smile was a cold and calculating mind. Carter spent long hours on the campaign trail. He was tireless. He rarely had anything to drink. If he did, it would be a watered-down cocktail. He struck many people as honest, honorable with a pretty good record in his one term as governor of Georgia. He won in many places that surprised people. He was the first southern candidate to be successful in getting the Democratic nomination since the civil war.

Overby: Carter was so furious about your coverage of him that he called your bosses at the Globe and tried to get you pulled from covering him. Why did he try to do that?

Wilkie: He just got annoyed with me. I know there was a story I did early, in January before the New Hampshire Primary. By that time, people were beginning  to notice Carter. So the Globe told me to go down to Georgia and find out what people think about him. I went to Georgia and talked to a lot of legislators. I discovered that he had terrible relationships with those Georgia legislators. One might say that was to Carter’s credit because the Georgia legislature was about like the Mississippi legislature is today, largely a bunch of bumpkins who have no business being in public office. So Carter was contemptuous of them. And this became a somewhat fatal fallacy for him when he went to Washington as president. He had been in the State Senate before he was elected governor. He had complete contempt for them and didn’t work well with them. I wrote about this, and the Globe ran the story on a Sunday across the top of the front page. The headline was something like, “Strong on the Road, Weak at Home.”  I quoted a number of people, including Julian Bond, one of the first blacks elected to the legislature and a hero in the civil rights movement. Even with Carter’s strong affinity with Blacks, Julian told me you couldn’t work with him. He was stubborn. I talked with a lot of people, including some of his enemies, like Tom Murphy, who I think was Speaker of the House, They were slashing in their remarks. Some were identified by name and some not. Right after that story appeared, I boarded the Carter plane in Manchester (N.H.). I will never forget my friend Jim Wooten of the New York Times came up to me and said, “You better watch out. He’s on the war path.” Sure enough, about three minutes later, Carter confronts me. It was there for first time I ever saw that famous Carterglare that apparently developed after working for Adm. Rickover in the U.S. Navy. Carter has these very pale blue eyes and he fixed them on me for the first time, not for  the last time, I might add. He said to me. “Hello, my friend, I see you have been to Georgia talking to all my good friends down there. Let me me tell you about some of them. They’ve been eating out of the trough of the government, etc., etc.” That story, which was early in my time with him, angered him. I don’t think he ever forgave me, maybe after he left the White House. Our relationship warmed once he wasn’t in the White House.

Overby: So, he didn’t like you?

Wilkie: He thought I was a smart ass. And I probably was. I was young, irreverent. It was only the second presidential campaign that I covered, and I was covering it for a major newspaper. I figured I could banter with the guy and occasionally ask him a smart-ass question. And he resented that. Once, I asked him on the plane why he had never used self-deprecating humor. He snarled back something like, “I guess that’s because someone with a Mississippi accent doesn’t understand a Georgia accent.” The next day, damned if he didn’t attempt to tell a self-deprecating joke, and it was so horrible and lame that he never did it again. Everybody on the plane wrote that Carter had finally tried to use a device that Mo Udall was using very successfully to show a human side that he wasn’t an automaton like he sometimes appeared. There were a series of things over the year that kept him annoyed at me. There were times when he could be a little bit of fun to be around. By and large, he did not have a great sense of humor. Early on, he said one of the reasons he ran for president was when he was governor, all of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 had come to visit him. And he said he wasn’t impressed with any of them.  He decided that he was smarter than any of them. He had a high regard for his own intelligence. He was a very intelligent guy. He didn’t like to be ridiculed.

Overby: Did this uneasy relationship bother you?

Wilkie: In part, it is the role of a journalist to keep an arm’s length relationship from the person you’re covering and be quick to write about anything that strikes the reporter that the public needs to be aware of. It is a reporter’s job to report about what the candidates are like. Covering character—some people say we have no business doing that. We are not psychiatrists. Carter was kind of quirky. And here’s where I differ from a lot of other people who covered him. I was Southern, from Mississippi, so I didn’t have this sense that he was incompetent because he was from Georgia. A lot of my colleagues were at first unwilling to accept him as a serious candidate because he was from the South. Obviously, that was not something that ever entered into my thinking at all. He was a very unconventional candidate. We were accustomed to dealing with more conventional politicians.

Overby: Did you ever find Carter intimidating personally?

Wilkie: Not really. There was one experience in New Hampshire. Somebody from the Globe got a tip that Carter had had a secret meeting and cut some kind of deal with William Loeb, the irascible right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader. I was asked by my editors to ask Carter about it. In a private meeting with Carter. I said, “Governor, I want to ask you about a report that you had a meeting with William Loeb.” He said, ”Yes, I met with Mr. Loeb once when I first came up here.” Well, everybody knew about that. I said, “No, governor, that’s not the meeting I’m talking about. This is one that occurred recently, and you guys reached some kind of accommodation.” He denied it. And I pursued it. “Governor, did you talk to him on the phone?” And Carter says–and here’s the glare again, “I told you I had no meeting with Mr. Loeb.” I said, “I understand that, Governor, but did you talk to him on the phone.” And he’s getting madder and said, “I told you I had no meeting with him.” I said, “Governor, I hear that. I am just trying to get to the bottom of this report. Did any member of your staff meet with Loeb?” At this point, he exploded. The glare was ferocious. He said, “I am not a liar. I do not tell lies.” He got up abruptly from the table, marched out to the motorcade, and the motorcade left me stranded in this little town in New Hampshire. I wasn’t intimidated but I had never had that ugly an exchange with anybody running for president.

Overby: You played softball with Jimmy Carter in Plains. There is a famous picture of you and him jockeying for a fly ball. What did you learn from playing softball with Carter?

Wilkie: I learned he was a fierce competitor, even in softball. He always wanted to pitch.   I remember Rick Kaplan, the CBS producer, and I were going to choose sides. It was the first time Carter ever came out and played with us. Kaplan and I agreed that we wouldn’t choose him right away. We would leave him twisting slowly in the wind waiting to be chosen. He assumed he would be the first person chosen. When there were only two or three people left, I said, “OK, Governor, you’re on my side.” And I said something like, “I assume you want to pitch.” And, of course, he did. I played third base. The very first pitch, the batter popped it up basically to me. And as I watched the ball descend, I heard Carter clomping over toward me. Carter had big feet for a little man. His feet were about size 13. I could hear those feet hitting into the red clay of Georgia and damned if he doesn’t collide with me. And he is the one who snatches the ball and nearly knocked me down. But that picture shows that I got a good elbow to his Adam’s apple. I said to him, “Governor, now I know how Scoop Jackson (Senator from state of Washington) felt as a candidate.” Carter ran over him pretty quickly for the nomination. Carter looked at me and said, “Aw, it’s just another run-in with the Boston Globe.”

Overby: Was Carter any good as a player?

Wilkie: Carter was a good player. He knew about baseball— when to run, when not to run. He knew the sport. At one point, he decided to be the umpire as well as the pitcher. By that time, he was playing on the team of Secret Service people against the reporters’ team. We played every day for weeks. He called somebody out at first base, and Jody Powell (his press secretary) was playing with us. Jody made a crack, “He is a mean little son of a bitch, isn’t he?” That resulted in the dirtiest look I ever saw Carter give anybody. Jody kind of withered after Carter gave him the glare. We had a lot of fun that summer. I think he warmed up to some of us, me included. But I never had a warm relationship with him.

Overby: Tell us about attending the Sunday School class that Carter taught.

Wilkie: I didn’t ordinarily go to church with Carter like so many of my colleagues did. His mother, Miss Lillian, used to upbraid me because I was not attending church. I spent Sunday morning at the service station of Billy (Carter’s brother). Back then in Georgia, you could not sell alcohol on Sundays. So Billy gave away the beer to his friends. I was very good friends with Billy. He liked me because I was Southern. Billy was smart, for all his crazy shenanigans. And he was good company, fresh air to the campaign because he was irreverent and so different. I usually spent my Sunday mornings drinking beer with Billy. Finally, I decided I needed to go see Carter at church at least once. So I went into his Sunday School class. The room was fairly full because tourists went to the class as well as members. Before he began the lesson, he asked if anybody needed a Bible. I raised my hand, and he said, “Of course, you would need one.” And he loaned me his Bible. And I began to try to follow his lesson and the scriptures he cited. But I also started thumbing through his Bible. It was dog-eared and annotated and underlined throughout. I found it very touching and very impressive. A lot of reporters had been very scornful of his Southern Baptist background. I didn’t buy into his Baptist fundamentalism, but I appreciated where he was coming from. Hell, three quarters of the people I grew up with were Southern Baptists. I never again said anything at all snide about Jimmy Carter’s religious faith because it was clear it was genuine. It was very impressive.

Overby: Finally, after all those months on the campaign trail with Carter, we get to election night. You and I were both on the election night flight with Carter. And you had a somewhat combative encounter with Carter shortly after he learned that he had been elected president.

Wilkie: We flew up to Atlanta from south Georgia for the returns and the election-night party. He was cocky on the plane going up there. He told us that this was going to be easy and that it was not even going to be close. He said the polls had it wrong. We get to Atlanta and instead of the election being a cakewalk for Carter, it was nip and tuck between Carter and President Ford. It goes on into the night, maybe about 3 am. Carter needed about three more electoral votes to go over the top. Finally, my home state of Mississippi was called for Carter, and that gave him enough electoral votes to be declared the winner. As we prepared to fly back to South Georgia, the press bus got separated from the motorcade. We were late reaching the plane. We didn’t know it, but Carter was furious because he didn’t want to be delayed, especially by the press. He had been prepared to fly off and leave us stranded in Atlanta. Finally we get on the plane. I go up to my seat, which is two or three rows behind first class. I was talking to all my colleagues. We are happy that the campaign is over. I think most of us are glad Carter won. I did, basically because he was Southern. Suddenly, here comes Jimmy Carter out of the first-class compartment and goes past us to the rear of the plane and is personally expediting the loading of bags onto the plane. And he comes stomping back down the aisle. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was clearly annoyed. I innocently thought this would be a good time to congratulate him. He’s just been elected president two hours before. The first state that went for Carter was Massachusetts. I said, “Governor, congratulations. I didn’t have to do much to deliver Massachusetts, but I had to work like hell to get Mississippi.” And he looked at me with that glare and said to me, “If it weren’t for people like you, this election would have been over at 9 pm.” And he turned his back and went back to the first-class compartment. To which I then said to four or five of nearby reporters, “There goes the biggest asshole I’ve ever known.” And unfortunately, that quote wound up in Rolling Stone magazine. Looking back on it, it was a rocky road co-existing for a year on the campaign with Carter.

Overby: After the election, the Globe assigned you to the White House beat to cover Carter.  How did you feel about that?

Wilkie: I wasn’t wild to do it. I wound up covering his four years in the White House and his 1980 campaign.

Overby: Looking back on things now, how would you rate his presidency?

Wilkie: I wouldn’t rate it nearly as bad as some people have. I feel somewhat vindicated in that view because there have been two recent biographies about Carter by very able journalists, Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird. Their take was very similar. It was sort of revisionist thinking that Carter was a very good president. I thought he was a mixed president. Certainly, one could say that he was a failed president because he was beaten so badly when he ran for reelection. But he accomplished a lot. The greatest thing he did was the Camp David summit, where he brought the Israelis and Egyptians together to sign a peace treaty and established relations between those two countries that had not existed ever. It paved the way for easing tensions in the Middle East. It was a daring thing he did because a lot of people said it was bound to fail. But he was so dogged in keeping Sadat and Begin at Camp David. They both threatened to leave, but he kept them there. They all began talking about their children and grandchildren. In addition, he raised consciousness about the environment. A lot of people made fun of him over his first fireside chat. He wore a cardigan sweater and urged everybody to turn down their thermostats. He turned off all the lights at the wonderful monuments in DC. Suddenly, the city is plunged into darkness so he can symbolically save money. It kind of backfired on him. Most of his beliefs were honest, not necessarily wise, but it was what he felt. The bottom line was that he was a good environmentalist as president. He had no wars. I mentioned earlier that he had a terrible relationship with the Georgia legislature. That attitude carried over to Washington when he got there. I think that he equated the U.S. Congress with the Georgia legislature. In fact. Congress was full of a lot of smart, capable figures on both sides of the aisle. Carter didn’t want to deal with them. Tip O’Neill (Speaker of the House) told me he was looking forward to working with Carter after dealing with the Republican White House for eight years. Tip said, “We can really get some great things accomplished with Carter.” But Carter didn’t want to deal with them. He angered Democratic chairmen of various committees very early by eliminating from the budget with a stroke of the pen a bunch of water projects in a lot of states. Mo Udall, chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, was a pretty good friend of mine. Mo was from Arizona where they had two or three huge projects. Carter didn’t even bother to tell him what he was going to do., Udall never forgave him. He felt it was a slap in his face. There were any number of times when Carter just disregarded his own Democratic Congress and set off on his own. That led to his failure to be reelected.

Overby: When was the last time you communicated with him and was there a warmer feeling between the two of you?

Wilkie: I had a session with him at the Carter Center in Atlanta. It was probably not the last time I saw him but it was the last meaningful one-on-one conversation I had with him. The Globe had asked me to do a magazine piece on the work of the Carter Center. So I spent about a week there. Carter was very gracious to me. He took me with him to luncheons where he spoke or to classes he taught at Emory. He would always introduce me to the students, and he would say, “He knows as many people in Plains as I do.” We finally sat down for an interview. His brother Billy had died recently, and he knew that Billy and I had been friends. So we talked a bit about Billy. It was the warmest conversation I ever had with him. And we talked about the Middle East. Our views were very compatible. The things he was doing internationally, as well as things like Habitat for Humanity, were proof that he was exemplary as a former president.

Overby: It is hard to imagine two more different presidents than Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump. How do you account for our country electing such disparate individuals?

Wilkie: Different times produce different election results. Carter ran in the wake of Watergate. His campaign extolling honesty resonated. Still not sure why this country voted for Trump. He exploited the P.T. Barnum maxim, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” In this case 63 million suckers. Not to be forgotten, Hillary got three million more votes, but lost in the electoral college.

Overby: Could Carter have won the presidency in today’s environment?

Wilkie: It is hard to imagine someone like Carter being successful in a political atmosphere as poisonous as ours is today. Trump types are more likely to thrive.

Overby: What is the lesson voters should learn from electing Jimmy Carter?

Wilkie: Though Carter is remembered for a “failed presidency,” his vice president Walter Mondale had his own memorable assessment of their administration: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.”