Jimmy Carter had little use for the presidents club but formed a friendship for the ages with Ford
WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Jimmy Carter and the man he defeated for president, Gerald Ford, became so close after leaving office that their friendship became something of a buddy movie, complete with road trips that were never long enough because they had so much to chat about.
Carter did not get along nearly as well with the other living presidents. The The outside president was an outlier Even after his presidency.
Nevertheless, former and current residents of Carter’s office will attend state funeral this week in what could be the presidents club’s largest meeting since five people attended George HW Bush’s services in Washington in December 2018.
As a member of that elite, informal club, Carter was uniquely positioned to do important work for his successors, whether they were Democrat or Republican. He achieved significant results sometimes due to his public status as a peacemaker, humanitarian and champion of democracy and his deep relationships with foreign leaders, including troublemakers.
But with Carter, you never knew when he was going to go rogue. This was a man so confident that he described himself as “probably superior” to the other ex-presidents still around. He is gruff when it comes to taking orders, but can be invaluable to the man in office, annoying, or both at the same time.
The others often bonded over “what a nasty curse Carter could be,” Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote in their book “The Presidents Club.”
“Carter was the driven, self-righteous, impatient perfectionist who united the other club members around what seemed like an eternal question: Was Jimmy Carter worth it?”
He was, in the mind of Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College historian of religion and Carter’s rise to the presidency. Balmer points to the violence averted in the final hours before the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti, when Carter, to the benefit of Democratic President Bill Clinton and countless lives saved, struck a deal with the leader of Haiti’s military coup to to step aside and restore democracy.
“Anytime you can avoid a military conflict, you consider it a victory,” Balmer said.
Four years earlier, Carter, on behalf of Republican President George HW Bush and the lives at stake in the region, secured peace in Nicaragua on the brink of bloodshed when he convinced leftist leader Daniel Ortega to accept electoral defeat. which had so shocked the voters. Sandinistas.
John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, accompanied Carter on missions to lay the groundwork for and then monitor Nicaragua’s 1990 elections. In the first, Carter’s entourage encountered Ortega’s motorcade on a dusty road through the city of Rivas.
The two men retreated to the backyard of the nearest house for an impromptu negotiation over the government trucks Carter wanted Ortega to send around the country to deliver election materials.
“When we imagine former presidents, the image is often distant, even stuffy: men in dark suits and ties captured in formal poses as if deep in thought,” Danforth wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in February 2023. “My Carter’s photo is the exact opposite. It stands in a backyard in Rivas. There is a crowing rooster on his face.
Still, he could infuriate those in power. Years after the US-led Gulf War rolled back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it emerged that Carter had lobbied UN Security Council members and foreign leaders to reject the elder Bush’s request to authorize the use of force .
After being largely sidelined by the man who defeated him in 1980, Ronald Reagan, Carter was given several assignments by Bush until the Gulf War, when he was cut, Gibbs and Duffy write.
His relationship with Clinton was limited and uneasy, caused in part by Clinton’s reluctance to appeal to a figure who symbolized the humiliating election defeat for the Democrats, and by Carter’s disapproval of Clinton’s behavior outside his marriage.
But after Clinton won the White House in 1992, he sent Carter to North Korea to measure up to dictator Kim Il Sung. Clinton aides were outraged when Carter went beyond his brief, entering into unauthorized negotiations with Kim and speaking about it on TV.
But Carter was always one step apart from the rest. He was also someone who pointed the finger at the political establishment, if not to pulverize it as Donald Trump did.
In January 2009, President George W. Bush invited other members of the Presidents’ Club to the White House for lunch and Oval Office photos. Bush, his father, Clinton and newly elected President Barack Obama are seen together in front of the Resolute Desk. Carter is conspicuously off to the side – outside.
The footage spoke volumes about Carter’s place in the club, Balmer said. “Jimmy Carter didn’t fit in with a lot of people. He was really an introvert, not someone who warms up easily.”
However, while politics makes strange bedfellows, post-politics makes even stranger bedfellows. Embedded hostilities between Democrat and Republican can melt away in the president’s club as former rivals become unlikely friends.
Except with Trump. Regardless of party, club members disdained Trump during his first term, and he had no use for them.
When Carter turned 100 in October, Trump marked the occasion by declaring that Joe Biden is such a bad president that Carter “must be the luckiest man because Carter is considered a brilliant president by comparison.”
Trump was more level-headed in response to Carter’s death, saying: “The challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything he could to improve the lives of all Americans. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for that.”
Democrat Lyndon Johnson regularly leaned on Republican predecessor Dwight Eisenhower and told him, “You are the best chief of staff I have.” On the night of John Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ sought Ike’s advice on what to say to Congress, adding, “I need you now more than ever.”
Reagan once pulled Clinton aside to tell him that the military salute he performed during the campaign was too weak for the presidency. He taught him how to make it spicy. Clinton, in turn, cherished his long and frequent telephone conversations with Richard Nixon, confiding in the disgraced but shrewd Republican about the foreign policy issues of the day.
Clinton also grew close to the Republican he defeated in 1992, joining the elder Bush in Maine for golf, smooth boat rides and nights by the sea.
More consequentially, the younger Bush asked his father and Clinton to lead a fundraising mission for countries devastated by the 2004 tsunami, giving rise to a bipartisan duo pushing for more efforts such as hurricane relief Katrina. “I just loved him,” Clinton said after Bush’s death in 2018.
Obama and the younger Bush have also worked together on occasion and Bush has a particularly good-natured relationship with Michelle Obama.
But Jimmy and Jerry’s friendship was one for the ages.
Carter took it as a point of pride when two historians, speaking separately at a White House 200th anniversary commemoration, said his friendship with Ford was the most intensely personal between two presidents in history.
Carter said it started in 1981, when the two were sent by Reagan to represent the U.S. at the funeral of Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian leader. Nixon was also traveling, somewhat uncomfortably. The other two argued with each other, commiserating about how difficult it can be to raise money for a presidential library when you’ve been removed from office.
They were both Navy men, had three sons, a strong religious faith that Ford was quieter about than Carter, and independent husbands who also bonded. “All four of us learned to love each other,” Carter said.
Carter and Ford spoke regularly, worked together as co-leaders on dozens of projects, and decided together which events to attend and skip together.
“When we were traveling somewhere in a car or plane, we hated getting to our destination because we enjoyed the private times we had together,” Carter said.
That’s what he told the mourners in January 2007, at a Ford service, the month after he died at age 93.
The Democrat and the Republican he so cherished had made a pact, one of which is difficult to imagine in this age of partisan poison: whoever died first would be praised by the other.