As the election of 1976 heated up, voters perused a lengthy slate of candidates, most of whom came from northern or western states. When the former Georgia governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter tossed his hat in the ring, his name recognition was at 2 percent. A thumbnail sketch defined him as a southern Democrat with a broad toothy smile, a full head of sandy-silver hair, and a taste for grits. But that was about it. The press described him as “mysterious,” but his flinty mother, Lillian Carter, had another take: “Jimmy isn’t mysterious. I would say he is original and stubborn.”
A vote for Carter was seen as a leap of faith. But in truth, he understood politics better than many people gave him credit for. He knew that his outsiderness was an asset and that optics were important. Carter was a peanut farmer and the son of a peanut farmer, and his devotion to southern food was integral to his pitch. When he hosted a “down-home lunch” in Georgia, the menu included fried chicken, baked cheese grits, turnip greens, candied apples, corn bread, and biscuits. It was the kind of familiar yet exotic menu that set him apart in the public imagination.
“Jimmy,” as everyone called him, and his wife, Rosalynn, liked to cook together—as they did much else, including discussing politics and policy. Their table in the small town of Plains, Georgia, featured southern staples: catfish, biscuits, wild rice, country ham with redeye gravy (ham drippings mixed with coffee), and homemade peach ice cream. They liked Brunswick stew (a vegetable mélange traditionally made with squirrel or rabbit, though the Carters used chicken) or “a mess of greens”—collard, mustard, or turnip greens, boiled with salt pork—and poured their pot likker (leftover cooking liquid) on corn bread. They made Hoppin’ John (black-eyed peas with rice flavored by bacon or salted pork) and “Red and White” (red beans and white rice); they turned eggplant, zucchini, yellow-neck squashes, turnips, and tomatoes into casseroles.
Like Eisenhower, Carter grew up fishing for bream and bass, shooting quail and duck with a 16-gauge shotgun, growing vegetables in his garden, and cooking. Jimmy was not a gourmet, but enjoyed making a good meal and was, for my money, the second-best presidential cook after Ike. Rosalynn made Sally Lunn (a light tea cake served hot with butter) and local specialties such as the “Plains Special”—a molded ring of cheddar cheese mixed with a pound of grated nuts, onion, mayonnaise, and a sprinkle of pepper, served with crackers and her own strawberry preserves. Theirs was “the kind of cooking…to which [those] who strayed away from the simple ways of our forebears’ prepared food are now returning,” she said.
These homey dishes added color, texture, and dimension to Carter’s biography as a navy submarine officer and small-towner made good. In the end America took a chance on him, and he beat Ford by a slim margin—50.1 percent to 48 percent of the vote. The couple from Plains were the first residents of the Executive Mansion from the Deep South since Woodrow Wilson, who hailed from Virginia, or, some said, Zachary Taylor, who was born in Virginia and raised in Kentucky.
On their first morning in the White House, in January 1977, the Carters ordered eggs and grits for breakfast. Grits, the cornmeal staple of southern states, was a dish that the family served at any meal. Nine-year-old Amy Carter reported that “Daddy makes grits…then breaks a couple of eggs into it and adds some cheese, and it’s yummy.” Grits are made from hulled corn kernels that have been washed and boiled into hominy, a word that originated with the Algonquin word tack-hummin, or “ground corn” (and might have also derived from the Old English grytt, or “coarse meal”). There are two grades of hominy: coarsely ground grits, and finely ground cornmeal, called polenta in Italy and Latin America. Their preparation is simple, requiring just cornmeal, water, salt, and plenty of stirring. In southern kitchens they are served hot with melted butter, fried golden brown, or baked with vegetables or cheese. Italian polenta is generally not a breakfast food; it is served later in the day with olive oil or tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese.
“While New Englanders gasped and Midwesterners gagged, Southerners smiled with knowing satisfaction” at the Carters’ grits, the chef Henry Haller recalled. In time, “distinguished visitors really expected to be served grits, and most were pleasantly surprised to discover they actually liked the taste.”
“That sounds mighty good to me,” Julia Child said. She was thrilled that the Carters would bring “authentic Southern” cooking to Washington. And why stop there? she wondered. Why not showcase dishes from Cajun Louisiana, Yankee New England, the Florida Keys, the midwestern corn belt, the desert Southwest, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or Guam? The new First Family should spread the gospel of American regional cuisine far and wide, Julia urged. And she wrote, “Whatever our new First Lady does to make White House entertaining more American, let her vigorously publicize it.”
Rosalynn Carter didn’t need encouragement to ballyhoo southern hospitality, for it was a subject she had given a good deal of thought to. In the February 1977 issue of McCall’s—which hit newsstands just as she moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the First Lady introduced herself to the nation like this:
Each family that occupies the White House brings something of its own region to Washington. Despite the protocol and continuity in style that is tradition, there are differences in flavor of entertaining. What Jimmy and I hope to bring to the White House is a bit of that elusive pleasure we call Southern hospitality: We enjoy having people in and we know that we can help them feel welcome, whatever the occasion.
Mrs. Carter believed the point of entertaining was human contact, the sharing of sustenance, and a generosity of spirit that would inspire reciprocal acts of kindness—or commensality, if you will—in a positive feedback loop. She made clear this was the essence of her church teaching and real southern hospitality, as opposed to the advertised or Hollywoodized version of “southernness.”
In 1953, Jimmy Carter inherited his father’s peanut farm in Americus, Georgia. The next year the region faced a drought and the farm made just $187. But Jimmy was patient—or “stubborn,” as his mother said—and by 1970 had become a prosperous agribusinessman. Rosalynn grew up three miles away and was three years younger than he. The daughter of a farmer-mechanic, she helped her mother cook, sew, and take care of her three siblings when her father died. As newlyweds, the Carters did their own shopping, cooking, and cleaning; “Jimmy cooked as much as I did,” she said. When you read Mrs. Carter closely, you discern her pride in her heritage and a warning not to condescend:
There probably are still people who think of Southern hospitality in terms of magnolias and leisure, grand balls and crinoline, and a house full of servants. I guess there was something like that in the South once upon a time. But never, I assure you, for most of us. My life was not like that. My mother’s life was not like that. And I don’t think that lavish entertaining is what Southern hospitality is all about. To me, what it is, and always has been, is simply a genuinely warm welcome to anyone who drops in….My mother, Jimmy’s mother, and I have always worked, and we never had household help. In this respect, Southern women are just like women everywhere else, trying to balance off the demands of a job against the real pleasures of having a home and sharing it with friends.
The Carters didn’t mind when hungry friends or relatives dropped by uninvited, and they were not embarrassed to return the favor. “If there’s any secret to hospitality, maybe it’s just that everything doesn’t have to be perfect,” Rosalynn wrote. “The house might not be perfectly straight and the children aren’t going to be perfectly neat. The only thing you can do is just relax and make everyone else more comfortable….Jimmy used to say to me, ‘Just do your best and the rest will take care of itself.’ That’s especially good advice.”
It was a generous and relatable sentiment, but one that did not always translate easily to Washington, D.C., where some people approached their entertaining, like their politics, as a blood sport. “The press had painted us as country farm people who would bring gingham and square dances to the White House. We did. Sometimes. But we also brought a parade of America’s greatest classical talent and some of the most elegant events.”
In this way, the Carters began their tenure with a surge of goodwill: they were honest, well intentioned, and effective. At first. But over time, it became clear they were not all that interested in adapting to Washington’s ways, and eventually the District dismissed them as starchy, pious, stingy, and parochial. The end of the Carter administration was seeded in its beginnings.
The First Lady liked to cook at home in Plains, but in moving to busy Washington, she was thrilled to have a staff who would shop and prepare meals for her family and friends, many of whom were eager to spend a night at the White House. But her generosity wasn’t cheap. While Henry Haller and his four kitchen assistants were government employees, the president is required to pay for the food and drink he, his family, and private guests consume. (State dinners are paid for by taxpayers.) When Mrs. Carter was presented with a $600 food bill for their first ten days of residency in January 1977, she suffered sticker shock. From then on, she insisted the staff buy the cheapest brands of food and use leftovers whenever possible.
She cut the number of White House calligraphers in half, sent xeroxed invitations to a picnic, and once asked her music teacher to perform as the after-dinner entertainment. To further reduce costs, the Carters sold the presidential yacht, Sequoia, and greatly reduced the number of televisions, radios, and newspapers and magazines in the White House.
Unlike the suit-wearing Nixon, Carter often dressed in a folksy plaid shirt, jeans, work boots, and a loose cardigan—made famous on his televised “Fireside Chats.” And he didn’t welcome guests with trumpets and flourishes, but would drawl, “Hi! C’mon in!” Social ceremony “does not appeal to me,” he explained. “I’m no better than anyone else, and…I don’t think we need to put on the trappings of a monarchy in a nation like our own.”
The Carters had four children. While one or more of their three grown sons—John William (Jack), James Earl (Chip), Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff)—occasionally stayed over at the White House, only Amy, the Carters’ youngest, grew up there. She wore glasses, attended public school, and raised eyebrows by reading a book at a state dinner for Canada’s Pierre Trudeau. For her twelfth birthday, the French-born executive pastry chef Roland Mesnier, whom the First Lady hired in 1979, baked a cake decorated with marzipan versions of some of her favorite possessions: her cat Misty Malarky; a piano; a violin; and a pair of roller skates.
Amy loved her skates, but they occasionally landed her in trouble. Some worried her scooting would damage the mansion’s hardwood floors, and they could be a distraction. After a day at public school, the First Daughter liked to bake sugar cookies in the family kitchen. Mesnier would send ingredients from his pastry kitchen—butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, an egg—so Amy could mix them herself. She’d cut out the cookies and set them in the oven, and while they baked, she’d start roller-skating. When smoke poured forth and a burning smell filled the halls, Secret Service agents would scramble. Finding the burned cookies, they opened windows for a clearing breeze. Crestfallen, Amy would say, “There was a small accident.” (Mesnier kept extra cookies on hand that she could take to school.)
Another person who pushed the boundaries of propriety at the White House was the “outlaw” country musician Willie Nelson, a good friend of the Carters’. One night in 1980, Willie joined them for dinner and played a concert on the South Lawn. Later, Willie and “a friend inside the White House” crept out of the third-floor solarium to take in the sights “with a beer in one hand and a fat Austin Torpedo in the other,” Rolling Stone reported. Later, the insider was identified as Chip, the Carters’ middle son. “Could have been [him], yeah,” Willie said. “It seemed like the thing to do….[W]hy not, you know?…[The president] knew me and he knew Chip so, you know, there wasn’t much we could do to embarrass him.”
When it came to official entertaining, President Carter drew praise and criticism for his economizing and simplifying. He wore off-the-rack suits and cut the color guard and the playing of “Hail to the Chief.” He occasionally deputized Vice President and Mrs. Mondale, or Carter family members, to stand in for him at dinners.
Moreover, the Carters were light drinkers. The president was fonder of coffee, tea, or milk than alcohol, but was not averse to the occasional beer, scotch, or margarita in the private quarters. But to his wife’s mind, hard liquor was “unnecessary” at official functions, and not serving it “saved money.” As Georgia’s First Lady, Rosalynn served only domestic wine or vermouth with cassis at receptions, beer at picnics, and wine at formal dinners. “I don’t know how I would have managed to squeeze out money for hard liquor,” she explained. She continued this habit in Washington, probably due to a combination of personal taste, religious belief, and life experience. (Jimmy’s brother, Billy, was an alcoholic who made headlines with intemperate statements, business failures, and the loud promotion of his Billy Beer.) When critics labeled her “Rosé Rosalynn,” she bristled: “They make me sound like a real prude. I’m not a prude!” Besides, she pointed out, the Carter state dinners cost taxpayers a mere $4.50 per serving.
Such economy was deliberate, said Mary Finch Hoyt, Mrs. Carter’s press secretary. The “Man from Plains” wanted to set a low-key tone yet retain the “policy, protocol, the whole image of an Administration that leaves a definite imprint on history.”
Rosalynn Carter was a thoughtful, self-sufficient woman who never fully adapted to White House life, with its helpmeets, limits, expectations, and scrutiny. “Official entertaining can’t replace the kind of entertaining I love to do in my home,” she said. “It can never be truly spontaneous. It is done to support a policy, to forge alliances with other countries and to create good will.” Her husband generally agreed, but there was one notable exception to that rule, a singular moment when presidential food and spontaneity helped create the conditions for a remarkable diplomatic breakthrough.
It was at breakfast on the morning of July 20, 1978, that Jimmy Carter decided once and for all to tackle an issue that had bothered him for years: the blood feud between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Jews and Muslims had been killing each other for centuries, and practically everyone warned that it would be “impossible” to resolve the conflict. But Carter was a willful optimist who believed that under the right circumstances he could bring the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, together to negotiate a truce. “First Egyptian-Jewish peace since time of Jeremiah,” Carter scribbled to himself.
He had decided that “peace in the Middle East would be one of his most important responsibilities,” Rosalynn wrote. “He was convinced that an end to war in that region was vital to the peace of the world.”
His advisers worried that a failed peace talk could destroy his administration or haunt his reelection bid. But the more people doubted him, the more Carter dug in. “I slowly became hardened against them, and as stubborn as at any other time I can remember,” he recalled.
Carter knew the negotiations required a special kind of meeting place. “It was necessary we be completely isolated from the press so that neither Begin nor Sadat nor their representatives would feel constrained…to explain what they were doing,” he wrote. When he and a team decamped to Camp David, the remote presidential retreat on Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain, to discuss the plan, he was struck by how tranquil the 125-acre compound was. No president had brokered peace between foreign leaders on U.S. soil before, but, Carter mused, “It’s so beautiful here. I don’t believe anybody could stay in this place, close to nature, peaceful and isolated…and still carry a grudge….If I could get Sadat and Begin both here together, we could work out some of the problems between them.”
The camp was built by FDR, who called it Shangri-La; it was rechristened Camp David by Eisenhower, after his father and grandson. The grounds include rustic cabins with trails, tennis, golf, fishing, books, movies, games, and excellent food prepared by navy stewards. Less well known is that burrowed deep beneath the pastoral camp is a bunker, Orange One, fortified against nuclear attack. Some considered Camp David a gilded cage because it is so remote and heavily guarded. But practically speaking, it was just a thirty-five-minute helicopter ride from the White House. Carter invited the combatants to a peace summit there, and to the surprise of many both the Israelis and the Egyptians accepted.
On September 5, 1978, the three—Begin, an Orthodox Jew; Sadat, a pious Muslim; and Carter, a devout Baptist—went into the mountains of Maryland to forge peace in the Holy Land. Feeling bullish, the president predicted it would take a week, tops, to achieve his goal. “Compromises will be mandatory,” he said. “Without them, no progress can be expected.” Sadat was tall, trim, and urbane, with a bald pate rimmed by dark hair, a mustache, thin lips, and almond-shaped eyes in an oval face. Begin was shorter and more rectilinear in shape, with thick dark-rimmed glasses, a slash of a mouth, and a serious look in his eye.
Both had strong personalities. “Whereas Begin has a tendency toward literalism and an obsession with detail, Sadat is often imprecise with words and has little patience for precision and for real negotiating,” Carter’s brief read. “In this situation, the danger of genuine misunderstanding, followed by feelings of betrayal and recrimination, is very great.”
On Tuesday, September 5, Carter surprised his guests by welcoming the Israeli and Egyptian delegates dressed in faded blue jeans and an open-necked shirt. Sadat was a stylish dresser who favored beige leisure suits and black turtlenecks; he took a brisk walk around the camp every morning. Begin almost always wore a gray jacket and tie: in poor health, he took slow walks with his wife, Aliza. Camp David’s rustic cabins are named after trees: the Carters stayed in Aspen; Sadat was in Dogwood; and the Begins were housed in Birch. They were a hundred yards away from each other, and Carter hoped the proximity would encourage chance encounters and friendly talk.
Each side had a large entourage of delegates who were billeted in nearby cabins, while the American advisers were relegated to a military barracks. The challenge of feeding more than a hundred people with different diets and religious strictures was “complicated,” Mrs. Carter recalled. After lengthy discussions about food security, the parties agreed that cooking for the three leaders would be done in the Carters’ kitchen in Aspen lodge and served in their residences.
Sadat was a heart attack survivor who maintained a low-sodium diet: he brought a personal chef to provide boiled meat and vegetables. As devout Muslims, the Egyptian delegation drank water or fruit juice, and Sadat was partial to mint tea sweetened by honey. To conform to kosher dietary laws, the Israelis brought a mashgiach, or food supervisor, who ensured that nonkosher ingredients—such as shellfish, lard, or gelatin—did not touch the food. In a section of the Aspen kitchen reserved for the Israelis, a rabbi passed a blowtorch over the stoves, worktables, and pots; tableware, floors, and walls were scrubbed clean. With that, “we marveled at the ease with which Sadat’s chef, our regular stewards, and the kosher cooks shared the same kitchen,” Mrs. Carter wrote. “We had a lot of laughs about the food.”
As the talks got under way, Sadat and Begin avoided each other, warily, while Carter shuttled between them. Begin declared that Israel would not give back any territory captured in the 1967 war. Expecting this, Carter nodded patiently and met with Sadat, who began with a similar hard line—that Israel must return the captured territory and pay for its use. But then he slipped the president a list of concessions he was prepared to make.
Emboldened, Carter brought the two leaders together for a conversation on the Aspen patio. It didn’t go well. Sadat demanded that Israel withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, relinquish East Jerusalem, and allow a Palestinian nation. Glaring at his enemy, Begin responded with a few words, harshly delivered: “Sinai settlements must stay!”
“Security yes! Land no!” Sadat shouted back.
Acrimony polluted the air like smoke from a grease fire. A weary Carter told his team, “It was mean. They were brutal with each other, personal.” The two men were so incompatible, he realized, that “any subject deteriorated into an unproductive argument.”
This arrangement left many of the Egyptian, Israeli, and American officials with a lot of nervous energy but not much to do. When not preparing documents for their leaders, the delegates shot pool, drove golf carts, watched 58 movies, and ate. A lot. The delegates’ meals were prepared by U.S. Navy stewards in the large staff canteen at Laurel. The food was delicious, but the Israeli and Egyptian visitors sat at opposite ends of the dining room, and “the atmosphere remained oppressive and tense,” an Israeli recalled.
Carter resorted to “proximity talks,” in which Begin and Sadat would be in the same area but not talk directly, while the Americans shuffled proposals back and forth and the delegates worked through the details. There were more meetings and more confrontations, and Carter worried that his historic opportunity was slipping away. “There must be a way” to peace, he insisted. “There must be.”
Rosalynn had an idea. Hosting a reception for the delegates, she arranged for platters of food to be displayed in different rooms—cheese fondue here, strawberries dipped in chocolate there, drinks on the patio—“hoping people would circulate instead of staying in small cliques,” she said. The bored, hungry Israelis and Egyptians followed the cookie crumbs, as it were, and were soon chatting with each other. The American pies, cakes, and mousses were so popular that the delegates were “gaining too much weight. But the desserts were too good to pass up,” the First Lady noted. “For months afterward the participants complained about the ten extra pounds they’d put on at Camp David.” In a more serious vein, she wondered, if the delegates could “talk peacefully” and enjoy cookies together, “why couldn’t their leaders?”
On Friday, President Carter spent hours with Sadat and Begin and persuaded them to agree in principle to a peace proposal. It was an important step forward. That evening, the movie theater was converted into a banquet hall for Shabbat (rest) eve, the traditional Jewish Sabbath dinner. The day’s tension seemed to evaporate as the Carters joined the Israeli delegation in eating, singing, and laughter, because, as Begin said, “the Bible says you cannot serve God with sadness.”
Then it was back to negotiating, with meetings running from sunup to sundown, and sometimes until 3:45 in the morning. On the Israeli side, Begin proved less flexible than his deputies. On the Egyptian side, Sadat proved more flexible than his advisers. The negotiations bogged down, and a frustrated Sadat packed his bags for Egypt. Carter warned that if he left, it would end their diplomatic gains, their personal friendship, and probably his presidency. Reluctantly, the Egyptian unpacked his bags. In gratitude, Carter requested “a little more wheat and corn” for Egypt, which Congress approved. The two relaxed by watching Muhammad Ali defeat Leon Spinks to reclaim the world heavyweight boxing championship. Then the Baptist and Muslim presidents called the Muslim American boxer to congratulate him.
Time was running out. In the tense stalemate, Begin and Sadat avoided each other and lost their appetites. Neither would budge on the question of Israeli settlements in the Sinai and on the West Bank. On the penultimate night, Mrs. Carter sent a platter of cheese and crackers into Begin and Carter. At midnight they broke up their meeting, and Carter wolfed down the pepper steak that had been made hours earlier, and collapsed into bed.
In the final minutes of the summit’s final day, Sunday, September 17, a draft peace agreement was initialed by Carter, Begin, and Sadat. Against all security precautions, the three leaders flew in the same helicopter to the White House, and a crowd cheered as they touched down on the South Lawn. When they signed the accords in the East Room, everyone there had tears in their eyes. Henry Haller cobbled together enough food to feed two hundred—a few leftovers from a brunch, pecan and strawberry tarts from a concert, and some extra carrot cakes from the fridge. It wasn’t a perfect banquet, but it would do.
The president looked dazed. The weary Israeli held up a glass of wine. The frazzled Egyptian held a glass of orange juice. They toasted to achieving the impossible. “History was indeed made that night,” Rosalynn wrote.
After thirteen days of intense bargaining in the mountains and months of follow-up, the Camp David Accords led to a formal peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. It was signed at the White House on March 26, 1979. That night, the Carters hosted a celebratory Peace Treaty Dinner for 1,340 people, the largest sit-down meal in White House history to that point. Under an enormous yellow tent and six smaller orange tents on the South Lawn, 280 waiters served 134 tables “with militaristic precision,” Haller fondly recalled. The dinner began with Columbia River salmon in aspic and moved on to roasted sirloin steaks with green beans, carrots, and mushrooms, and ended with a hazelnut and chocolate Gianduja mousse. (A hundred and ten kosher meals were served to the Jewish guests.) After dinner, an Egyptian rock band, an Israeli duo, and the American soprano Leontyne Price performed, and the party stretched till midnight.
As Carter smiled and shook hands, Sadat thanked the president, saying, “I think that he worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.”
The treaty was built on diligence, compromise, and the connections made over food. It dared the world to hope that a lasting peace in the Middle East was in hand. And remarkably it was. Sadat and Begin were awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize; in 2002, Carter was awarded a Nobel for his human rights work. Jihadis assassinated Sadat in Cairo in 1981, Begin grew embittered and reclusive, and bloody conflicts continue to flare between Israelis and Palestinians; yet the truce between Egypt and Israel has held since 1978.
“The impossible had been made possible,” Rosalynn Carter wrote. “A miracle? Yes…it was a miracle.”
Initially, observers cheered the end of Nixon’s “imperial presidency” and the arrival of the Carters as a breath of fresh air. But as time went on, those cheers turned to sniping about the Carters’ low-budget informality, which made them—and therefore the nation—appear cheap, naive, and not to be taken seriously.
Perception informs reality, but some of the carping was unfair. The Carters were frugal, but they did not stint on official entertaining, and hosted nearly a hundred presidents, prime ministers, kings, and Pope John Paul II at “glittering” dinners. The food served by chef Henry Haller at these events was no worse than his much lauded meals for the Johnsons, Nixons, Fords, and later the Reagans. To build rapport with their guests, the Carters chose thoughtful personal gifts or events—presenting German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his wife pots of crepe myrtle, a small purple flower they loved; arranging for Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was “hooked” on American Westerns, to be serenaded by the Statler Brothers, a gospel and country music group; and ensuring that Japanese prime minister Masayoshi Ohira was feted at an outdoor barbecue while Bobby Short played jazz standards. Occasionally, things didn’t go exactly as planned—such as the night when the Carters descended the Grand Staircase for a state dinner preceeded by Amy’s cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang.
But the Carters made no major social mistakes, and it seemed gratuitous when the press “pigeonholed [Carter] as a hick peanut farmer who knew nothing about fine food,” recalled pastry chef Roland Mesnier. “This was completely untrue, as I knew very well.”
Though Carter had achieved notable policy successes—the establishment of the Departments of Energy and Education, the SALT II talks, the Camp David Accords—he was denounced for pardoning Vietnam draft dodgers, and presiding during the 1979 energy crisis, debilitating unemployment and inflation, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Praised early on for his calm resolve, Carter was increasingly portrayed as weak, pettifogging, and indecisive. Then came the killing blow.
On November 4, 1979, a group of Muslim students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. It was the longest hostage crisis in American history, and it gripped the world’s attention. In characteristic fashion, Carter threw himself into negotiations with Ayatollah Khomeini, camped out in the Oval Office, and survived on stale sandwiches. As the Iranians used the hostages as a bargaining chip, Carter ordered a covert rescue mission, Operation Eagle Claw. Landing in Iran’s Great Salt Desert, American special forces encountered a dust storm and unexpected civilians. When they aborted the mission, a helicopter crashed into a transport plane, which exploded in a bright fireball, and killed eight Americans and an Iranian. It was a debacle.
In the election of 1980, Carter ran neck and neck with his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, while negotiating with Iran. Pressure mounted on the president to show decisiveness and bomb Tehran. But Carter, a deeply moral man, didn’t want to risk killing the hostages. The ayatollah did not release the Americans, and Reagan won 50.7 percent of the vote to Carter’s 41 percent. “There’s no doubt about it,” Carter said. “Had the hostages been released…I would’ve been reelected.” And if he had bombed Tehran, Rosalynn added, he would have won.
As the moving men packed lamps and books and rugs, the Carters hosted a “final supper” at the White House. Haller served southern specialties in the private dining room to just a dozen guests, mostly family and friends. Almost everyone was teary. Between courses, a thirteenth guest arrived: Willie Nelson, carrying his battered guitar “Trigger,” named after Roy Rogers’s horse. And in his high, scratchy voice, Willie sang the Carters out with a bittersweet rendition of “Georgia on My Mind.”