WHEN JIMMY CARTER, A BORN-AGAIN Christian and former governor of Georgia, defeated Ford in 1976, Americans seemed eager for a new spirit of rectitude and competence in the White House.
Carter gave it to them—at first. A frequent Bible studies teacher and devout Baptist, he was one of America’s most moralistic presidents, and tried to shape his policies according to a strict code.
He was independent to a fault. Carter told me that he relished his role as a maverick even after he was nominated by the Democratic party as “a lonely peanut farmer who promised not to tell a lie.” He knew that this outsider’s image appealed to independent voters. Likewise, his status as a former governor untainted by scandal had considerable allure in the wake of Watergate and the Nixon pardon. And Carter seemed to be a brilliant thinker, especially when compared with the lightweight image of his predecessor. During his early months he proposed a vast array of initiatives and displayed a mastery of each one.
Throughout his four turbulent years in the White House, he tried to remain true to his inaugural address, when he said, “Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair, our national beauty preserved; the powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced… . We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems … we must simply do our best.”
His conquest of the political Establishment with a brilliant grass-roots campaign surprised even the new president himself. On his first flight aboard Air Force One, he turned to Press Secretary Jody Powell and said in wonderment: “Three years ago, I was flat broke, and now we’re flying on the president’s airplane!” But that sense of joy was short-lived.
In an ironic twist on his 1976 campaign song, “Why Not the Best?” Carter’s best wasn’t enough, and he was quickly consumed by the nation’s problems. “We had some very dangerous times when I was president,” Carter recalls. “We tried to bring peace to other people as much as we possibly could, and human rights was a basic foundation of our entire foreign policy… . We never found a need to drop a bomb or launch a missile… . Peace and human rights and democracy and freedom and environmental quality and alleviation of suffering—those are the measures in my opinion of a great nation.”
These were grand goals. But Carter could never deliver much in the way of results on the issues Americans cared most about. Specifically, he could not discourage the Soviet Union’s militaristic adventures. He failed to project U.S. strength around the world. And he could not stop the deterioration of the domestic economy amid severe oil shortages, high unemployment, and rampant inflation. At one point, he suggested that the nation’s biggest problem was a vague, soul-destroying sense of malaise. His pessimistic outlook lent credence to the idea, then popular among some intellectuals, that America’s best days were behind her. But many everyday voters came to believe he was making excuses for his own lack of leadership.
AT FIRST, RELATIONS WITH MOSCOW dominated foreign policy. “That’s an interesting fulcrum to divide our times,” says Jody Powell. “Our main concern was that some series of miscalculations would lead to us and the Russians blowing up the goddamn world. Now the concern is that some religious fanatic is going to crash a Piper Cub into something, or is going to blow up a truck.”
The U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Afghanistan was bad enough, taking Carter by surprise and making him seem hopelessly naïve. Even worse was the fact that 52 Americans were taken hostage in Iran, and Carter was unable to free them for the final year of his presidency.
Carter’s relations with the news media also deteriorated. “Obviously, Watergate made a profound change in the attitude of reporters toward the presidency,” he said in our interview. “When I got there, there was an extreme degree of inquisitiveness. A lot of the reporters felt that something in my background was worthy of revelation and they were going to replace Bernstein and Woodward [Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story in The Washington Post]. They never found anything, as a matter of fact, but they were constantly searching. So there was more of a deep inquiry into the personal affairs and a more confrontational relationship than maybe in the past.”
CARTER’S BEHAVIOR on Air Force One illustrated his problems. He worked very hard and traveled widely, and he did achieve a breakthrough in the Middle East by brokering a historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel that culminated in a dramatic signing by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at the White House. But he became preoccupied with micro-management, and delved into areas he should have delegated to subordinates, such as deciding who should use the White House tennis courts, sometimes making the assignments from Air Force One.
He was often aloof and moody, but at other times he could be friendly and gregarious—altogether unpredictable. One flight steward said it was often difficult for Carter to put himself into the toothy, grinning persona that he cultivated as his public image. Aboard Air Force One, he would frequently lose his gregariousness and retreat to his stateroom, as if he were a windup doll whose spring had wound down. Before Carter boarded the plane, Powell and other senior aides would warn the flight crew if he was in a snit. That meant they should keep him at arm’s length. Carter would make that clear as soon as he entered his stateroom. If he was in a dark mood, the president would tell a steward, “I won’t need anything,” and close the door. Message: Do not disturb.
Flight steward John Haigh said, “Carter was kind of an introvert, really. He didn’t come to the back of the airplane very often. And he didn’t like a lot of extra faces coming into his cabin,” so he ordered that only the head steward and his deputy serve him.
“The public was the opposite from the private,” said Haigh. “He stayed pretty much to himself. Most politicians are, ‘Hi, how are you!’ Not him. He didn’t talk to many people. I was on the plane a year and he never talked to me.”
This is much the same impression offered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, who traveled regularly with him: “I never doubted that I was dealing with a shrewd, rather deliberate yet fundamentally very decent and engaging person who combined high intelligence with occasionally surprising naiveté, genuine dedication to principle with sometimes excessive tactical flexibility… . He was generally very serene, and this helped to maintain a stable relationship—but one could also sense within that relationship major shifts from genuine warmth to sudden distance. The latter was especially the case when events, and perhaps my persuasion, made him do things that instinctively he would have preferred not to do.”
AFTER BOARDING THE PLANE, Carter would immediately enter his compartment, then reemerge an hour later, dressed in shirtsleeves and holding a handful of thank-you notes he had written for his staff to copy and send out. He would bring stacks of individually typed letters into his airborne office and sign them one by one. Aides marveled at his discipline.
He and the First Lady would chat briefly with the staff and guests, and on rare occasions he would wander to the rear of the plane, or have reporters join him in a forward cabin, to make remarks to the press pool. In such media encounters, he showed he was smart and intimately familiar with the details of policy.
Then he would return to his compartment to study his ever-present briefing books, sometimes correcting errors he found in the appendices. He liked to talk policy with advisers and occasionally gossip about other politicians or world leaders. He deeply admired Egyptian leader Sadat for his bold ideas and his courage in trying to make peace with Israel. He respected France’s Valery Giscard d’Estaing for his brilliant analytical mind, which was in some ways like Carter’s own, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his cold appreciation of the use of power and his sense of global politics. But he disliked Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany, above all, for what he considered a patronizing attitude. At home, he never got along well with Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee, even though Baker was the most gracious of men. No one around Carter was quite sure why this was so, but some of his associates speculated that he envied Baker’s way of ingratiating himself with people.
A formal man who learned many of his straitlaced habits in the Navy, he would take his jacket and tie off, but would not change into casual clothes except on very long trips or when he was heading for a vacation at his family farm in Plains, Georgia, or elsewhere. He drank alcohol only rarely.
“His memory was phenomenal, his reading voracious, and his thirst for more knowledge unquenchable,” recalls Brzezinski. “At times, Carter could also be extremely pedantic. Memos addressed to him would come back with penciled corrections of spelling mistakes or grammatical improvements. He also delighted in giving me lists of security violations committed by my staff (such as leaving a safe unlocked) that had been brought to his attention by the security office… . I found the whole thing amusing, for it showed the extent to which he was still a Navy lieutenant who very much enjoyed keeping the ship in trim and proper shape.”
Typical of his micro-management was his order to severely limit the supply of trinkets that passengers could take home, such as Air Force One–inscribed matchbooks, decks of playing cards, coffee mugs, and notepads. He stopped the practice of carrying cigarettes on the plane altogether as a health measure—a wise move in itself but ahead of its time, so it made him seem prudish and petty.
“I tried to cut down the waste of money and the ostentatious nature of the presidency,” Carter said. “Some of my predecessors (and I say this without any criticism) had given quite expensive gifts, for instance, to everyone who came on board Air Force One—kind of like it was a mercantile establishment where people would carry away mementos quite costly to the American public. It was just contrary to my nature and so we did away with that element of Air Force One.”
However, he did arrange for the flight crew to keep a supply of expensive, leather-bound Bibles on board. He would autograph them and give them to religious leaders and special dignitaries who traveled with him—all paid for by the Air Force.
He made a dramatic point of carrying his luggage, at least a bag or two, onto Air Force One rather than have the stewards or baggage handlers do it for him. This was more of a problem than it seemed. The flight attendants were offended because, as one told me, “that was my job, and he had better things to do. It was kind of disappointing.”
It turned out that Carter would generally bring only one extra suit, two shirts, and a couple of changes of underwear, no matter where he was going and no matter how long he would be away. This meant that his traveling valet (a perquisite he never gave up, along with First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s traveling hairdresser) would have to wash and iron a shirt for him every night. Given that his two suits also needed frequent pressing, the president would often look the worse for wear.
Starting with Carter, the Air Force One crew took it upon themselves to keep an entire change of clothes aboard for every president, just in case. “They weren’t always aware of this,” recalls former chief flight steward Charles Palmer. And Carter stopped routinely carrying his bags eventually.
Carter also wanted it known that he was a man of simple Southern tastes in many ways, as illustrated by his preference for grits and buttermilk at breakfast, simple sandwiches for lunch, and for dinner, lentil-and-franks soup, country ham with redeye gravy, fried chicken, and again, grits. He famously preferred cardigan sweaters to business suits. And he would sometimes make fishing flies on Air Force One for catching trout.
His cost cutting extended to Air Force One personnel, much to the consternation of the crew. He wanted to reduce the number of stewards from six to five because commercial airliners had only five flight attendants on their 707s. But he didn’t realize that the Air Force One stewards had many more duties than normal flight attendants, such as helping to maintain and clean the aircraft once the president departed and going to the store to purchase food for the aircraft. Carter was finally talked out of this idea.
He also wanted to transport the vehicles for presidential motorcades by truck rather than by plane, assuming it would save money. It didn’t. Carter hadn’t reckoned on the need for Secret Service agents, maintenance people, and others to travel with the vehicles, adding hotel rooms, food, and other costs to their trips. In the end, he backed off this cost-saving scheme, too.
Carter ordered that the Air Force One crew stop accepting free drinks and snacks—items donated by private businesses—for the plane’s larder. He thought it was a conflict of interest. He soon found that this austerity program cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars on an annual basis because those items now had to be bought at commercial rates, but he continued the program because he felt it was the right thing to do.
HIS MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS extended to his immediate family. Neither the president nor the First Lady could adequately control their adolescent daughter, Amy, whom many of the stewards on Air Force One considered spoiled. She would play loud rock music in her mother’s cabin, annoying everyone in the vicinity, including her mom. Rather than tell her to quit making such a racket, the long-suffering First Lady sometimes slept on the floor of her husband’s stateroom. Amy Carter would also crush soda crackers and scatter them around her, just to make mischief, according to former steward Gerald Pisha. Carter has denied the story, but Pisha says, “Guess who had to vacuum it up?” Former Air Force One chief of communications Jim Bull, whose console was close to the presidential quarters, adds: “Her greatest thrill was coloring with crayon on the walls of the airplane,” which the crew considered insulting. “We were very proud of that airplane,” Bull says.
For her part, Rosalynn Carter could be aloof and brittle, just like her husband. The first couple showed affection for each other, occasionally holding hands or kissing in the president’s stateroom, but they mostly spent time in separate rooms and they were often unfriendly to those around them. “It took a year and a half for Rosalynn Carter to realize we were there for them and were not against them,” says former chief steward Palmer. “I think at first she thought we were the enemy. Maybe she felt a little inferior, a little insecure.”
Palmer adds: “The Carters sometimes got mad at each other over Amy. It depended on what she was doing. There was a spanking or two [administered by the First Lady]. She needed it. Maybe thirty or forty minutes from landing, she was told to get ready and change clothes. She would listen to her music. She [Rosalynn] slapped her hand. Maybe they were meeting a foreign head of state. There are a lot of tensions involved in those things. It was not an everyday occurrence. I never witnessed Jimmy spank her. Sometimes there was control, sometimes they let her go. It was inconsistent.”
CARTER COULD BE remarkably inconsiderate of those around him. During a trip to the Middle East, he told Colonel Lester McClelland, his pilot, that he wanted to fly over the Aswan Dam, which required a last-minute change in the flight plan. Carter told an aide to make sure McClelland knew that the president sat on the right side of the plane, so the pilot could provide him with the best view possible. That reminder was unnecessary and offensive, since no one knew the layout of the aircraft better than the pilot.
When Mount St. Helens erupted, Carter decided he wanted to tour the disaster site in Washington State immediately. A White House telephone operator reached Bob Ruddick, the Air Force One pilot who succeeded McClelland, on the racquetball court and said the president wanted to take off in less than four hours. Ruddick rushed back to Andrews Air Force Base to make the preparations.
As the plane flew over the volcano, Carter took over the jumpseat behind the pilot to get a better view, and he spouted facts and figures about volcanoes in general and this volcano in particular. He was, in part, showing off, but everyone was impressed with his retentive powers. “He was a very intelligent man,” Ruddick says.
LATE IN CARTER’S third year, on November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and took 52 Americans hostage. This proved to be the defining crisis of the Carter administration, and for more than a year, Carter worked doggedly to free them. In fact, he became so obsessed with the crisis that he declared a near-moratorium on his own travel so he could devote full time to liberating them. For much of 1980, until the fall campaign against Ronald Reagan, Air Force One was rarely used.
This made the president a prisoner in the White House, and the TV networks began using logos on their nightly newscasts keeping count of each day the hostage crisis dragged on. It made matters worse when the zealots paraded the blindfolded hostages before screaming, threatening crowds in Teheran, all before the television cameras. America seemed helpless.
In April 1980, Carter ordered a military mission to free them, but it failed miserably when a U.S. helicopter collided with a C-130 aircraft in the Iranian desert, killing several American troops. This only deepened the public’s sense that he was in over his head. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who resigned after Carter overruled his opposition to the rescue mission, said it was a unique folly. “The decision,” Vance wrote in his memoirs, “to attempt to extract the hostages by force from the center of a city of over five million, more than six thousand miles from the United States, and which could be reached only by flying over difficult terrain, was different: I was convinced that the decision was wrong and that it carried great risks for the hostages and our national interests.”
THE CRISIS DRAGGED on interminably. Then, at 3:45 A.M. on November 2, 1980, two days before the election, Carter got a call during a campaign trip from Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher with what seemed to be good news: The Iranian leaders had moved toward an agreement to free the hostages. Nothing was final, but things looked promising. Carter cancelled his campaign schedule for that Sunday and flew back to Washington to work on the deal.
“I will never forget the flight back to Washington, heading eastward into the rising sun,” he would write later. “I was in the cockpit of Air Force One talking to the flight crew, and through the towering clouds we watched one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen. My prayer was that the Iranian nightmare would soon be over, and that my judgment and my decisions might be wise ones. In a strange way, I felt relieved. It was out of my hands. Now my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control. If the hostages were released, I was convinced my reelection would be assured; if the expectations of the American people were dashed again, there was little chance that I could win.”
The deal fell through.
THE MONDAY BEFORE Election Day, Carter’s last stop was a 9-P.M. rally at an airplane hangar in Seattle. As the presidential party was disembarking, a steward collared Jody Powell and said a phone call had just arrived. It was Democratic pollster Pat Caddell and White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, back at the White House. They wanted to pass along the final poll results, and as soon as Powell got on the line he could hear the disappointment in their voices.
The news was disastrous: The tide had shifted dramatically at the very end, and it was running strongly toward Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. Carter would lose, big time.
Powell turned protective. “We don’t need to tell the president that before he makes the last speech of the campaign,” he said to Caddell.
The three aides agreed not to inform the president until after his remarks.
Once back on the plane, Powell again fretted about breaking the news to his boss, for whom he had worked for many years. Before he could take the president aside, Carter began chatting with the traveling press. Powell took a call from Washington, where Caddell and Jordan wanted to know if he had broken the news. As Powell explained that he hadn’t had a chance, Carter suddenly appeared in the staff compartment and leaned on the back of Powell’s chair. Drinks were ordered, and the president began to reminisce about the previous four years and what they had accomplished. It was a warm and chummy moment, and Powell didn’t want to interrupt.
Air Force One continued its cruise to Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he wanted to receive the returns, and at 2 A.M. Eastern time, Caddell and Jordan called the plane again. This time, Carter excused himself and went to his private cabin. Informed how badly he would be defeated, his reaction was typically matter of fact. “Oh, really?” he said to Caddell.
He ordered his advisers to keep the information to themselves because a premature leak could depress Democratic turnout in the Western time zones and cost congressional Democrats much-needed votes. Carter then calmly instructed his staff to draft a statement he could deliver in Plains that might at least help bring Democrats back to the ticket and save Democratic candidates in other races.
Most of his aides were disconsolate at the political humiliation that was taking shape. Senior adviser Stu Eizenstat came into the president’s cabin and, as Carter later recalled in his diary, “burst into tears. I put my arms around him to comfort him. It was hard for us to believe the dimensions of what Pat was telling us, but it later proved to be accurate.”
THE MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS aboard the presidential aircraft for Carter came on January 21, 1981, the day after he left office. The Iranian hostages were released shortly after Ronald Reagan was sworn in, and the new president immediately asked Carter to fly over on his 707 and welcome the Americans to freedom in Germany. Carter was grateful for the chance. He wrote later: “It is impossible for me to put into words how much the hostages had come to mean to me.”
Phil Wise, Carter’s chief scheduler who traveled with him from August 1977 to the end of his presidency, was on that trip. “It was very emotional,” Wise recalls. “It seems today like such a negative in history for Carter and the rest of us. We were so caught up in it our last year in the White House. To see every hostage come out of there alive was really a victory, but bittersweet.”
Carter, chatting with aides on the eight-hour trip to Wiesbaden, revealed his fears that the hostages might not respond positively to him since he had been unable to secure their release for so long. The reality turned out to be mixed. Upon meeting him, many of the former captives expressed gratitude that Carter had not done anything rash that would have resulted in their execution. Others kept their distance, blaming their former commander in chief for getting them into their predicament and failing to extricate them for a year. Still others felt Carter could have gotten them killed with his failed rescue mission in the desert.
Carter defused the situation by acknowledging that the former hostages had mixed feelings toward him but he wanted to say welcome and explain that nothing had been more important to him than getting them home safely and with honor. After his remarks, the atmosphere turned friendly, and many of the hostages gathered around Carter to shake his hand and have their pictures taken with him.
On the way home, Carter and his senior staff were reunited one last time. “Usually after a foreign trip there was a general release of pent-up tensions on the journey back to the States,” said Hamilton Jordan. “The speechwriters had no more speeches or welcoming remarks or toasts to write, the advance staff could forget about the president’s schedule and who would sit where at each meeting, the Secret Service agents could relax and play cards, and, for better or worse, the work of the chief executive and his advisers was done. So, when everyone climbed back on Air Force One, there was usually a joyous mood, if not to celebrate the results of the trip, at least to toast its conclusion.”
This flight was different. Carter spent the first couple of hours writing a report to Reagan about the condition of the hostages and the agreement that he had negotiated to win their freedom. He also wrote thank-you notes to officials who were instrumental in the final talks with Iran. Outside his cabin, there was a bittersweet atmosphere, and after a private dinner, the former peanut farmer from Plains joined his aides to share recollections about the Carter years.
At one point, Carter broke out the champagne and raised his glass: “To freedom.” These two words seemed to mark for the president and his entourage not only the release of the hostages but the personal liberation they felt now that their White House years were over.