The death of the 100-year old former president Jimmy Carter on December 29, 2024, has occasioned much reflection on his remarkable life, career, and decades of public service. In that spirit, I’d like to share a happy memory of a time my professional life intersected with his.
Carter’s presidency is my first political memory, growing up in the suburbs outside Washington DC. He seemed a decent fellow (as we now know him to have always been). The Carters’ daughter Amy was then about my age (also, bookish, redheaded) and I felt an affinity with her. I remember depicting President Carter in my diary – at his Oval Office desk, thinking about the hostages in Iran in a big thought bubble over his head – but when I went to find that diary this week, I didn’t see that page. Maybe I imagined that.
In 2006 I was a post-graduate adjunct lecturer at Brandeis and kicking around second book projects. One that I explored for a while was about faith-based NGOs at the United Nations and how they mapped onto Right / Left politics and the Fundamentalist / Liberal spectrum in American Protestantism. I proposed a paper on the Carter administration’s relationship with the U.N. to an academic conference at the University of Georgia on “The Carter Presidency: Lessons for the 21st Century,” and to my delight was accepted. The conference, in January 2007, coincided with the 30th anniversary of Carter’s inauguration, brought back a good number of administration officials as commentators and speakers, and the former president and Rosalynn would even be in attendance for several of the events.
As it happened, the foreign policy-themed session in which I gave my paper ended up being selected for broadcast on CSPAN, which is surely my 15 minutes of fame. My talk is at timestamp 51:40 – 1:06:00, followed by discussant Ambler Moss, Ambassador to Panama under Carter. (Whether to return the Panama Canal Zone to Panama consumed Senate debate for months in 1977-1978). Pardon my use of “Third World” in my talk — I certainly wouldn’t use that term now.
The conference’s highlight was a spectacular evening gala, attended by the Carters, recreating one of their 1977 inaugural balls. It was the grandest and fanciest banquet I’ve ever attended, and everyone in attendance got a gift at our place setting: a crystal commemorative cube engraved to honor the occasion. I don’t have any pictures of the event (pretty sure I had a flip phone in 2007), but I do have this hefty, sparkly reminder of a good man and his important legacies … as well as the valuable work of historians, weighing the measure of our leaders.
