Presidential Election of 1980

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    The Formidable Rosalynn Carter

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    I saw Rosalynn Carter angry only twice. Both occasions involved Ronald Reagan, who had crushed Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, and both reflected her passion and decency.The first concerned a free public swimming pool in the Carters’ hometown, Plains, Ga., that they built in the 1950s. She recounted to me during an interview that when Mr. Reagan was president, local conservatives turned it into a whites-only private club. Mr. Reagan made people “comfortable with their prejudices,” she snapped.The second related to the landmark Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, a major investment in community mental health centers that Mrs. Carter spearheaded with the help of her husband’s other archrival, Senator Edward Kennedy. Sitting in her office at the Carter Center in 2015, she grew upset as she described how Mr. Reagan had defunded the ambitious program, leaving tens of thousands of people untreated. It took 30 years — until Obamacare — before ​​federal funding for community mental health treatment centers was fully resurrected with her help.Perhaps in death Mrs. Carter will finally be properly appreciated for her role as this country’s premier champion of mental health. It’s only one of the many unheralded accomplishments of a formidable and gracious woman who belongs in the first rank of influential first ladies.Over nearly 80 years, the Carters forged the longest, closest and arguably most productive high-level political partnership in American history — more seamless than those between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt or Bill and Hillary Clinton because it lacked the personal drama of those marriages.Although each agreed that the secret to a long, happy marriage was to spend some time apart, they did almost everything together — from learning to read the Bible in Spanish before bed to dodging gunfire in Africa after the presidency and fly-fishing in Siberia when he was 90 and she was 88.The Carters were married for 77 years, a distinction enjoyed by an estimated 1,000 or so American couples. But they knew each other for an astonishing 96 years, first meeting a few days after Rosalynn Smith was born in 1927 when Jimmy’s mother, the nurse who delivered Rosalynn, brought her toddler over to see the new baby.On their first date in 1945, when Jimmy was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, they went to a movie neither remembered. Nearly half a century later, Jimmy wrote a poem entitled “Rosalynn”:I’d pay to sit behind her, blind to whatwas on the screen, and watch the image flickerupon her hair.I’d glow when her diminished voice would clearmy muddled thoughts, like lightning flashing ina gloomy sky.Mr. Carter said he would not have won his long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency without her charm, hard work and smart advice. Spending an astonishing 75 days campaigning in Florida, she proved instrumental in helping him prevail in a historic primary there. His victory in Florida over George Wallace all but assured his nomination and marked the end of the racist wing of the Democratic Party.Inside the White House, Mrs. Carter was the first presidential spouse with her own professional policy staff. In 1977 she assumed an unprecedented role as her husband’s personal envoy and forcefully confronted authoritarian heads of state in Latin America on their human rights abuses. She took action to combat age discrimination by working closely with the congressman Claude Pepper to loosen rules on mandatory retirement, which affected the careers of millions. And touched by the plight of the Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing Communist Vietnam, she helped persuade her husband to more than double the number of refugees admitted from Southeast Asia.Mr. Carter described their relationship as “like one person acting in concert.” Asked about his decision-making on foreign policy, he said that he confirmed his judgment with “Rosalynn, Cy” (Cyrus Vance, his secretary of state), “Zbig” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser) “and Ham” (Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff). As the Time correspondent Hugh Sidey wrote in 1979, “Note the order.” On the domestic side, Mrs. Carter pushed her husband hard to appoint more women to important positions, and he did, naming five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined.Known as the Steel Magnolia, a nickname she liked, Mrs. Carter set off controversy when she sat in (silently) on cabinet meetings. But she was enthusiastically welcomed there as a critical part of the policy process. While most presidential aides view first ladies warily, the senior staff in the Carter White House often wished the stubborn president listened even more to his impressive wife, especially on politics, where, as Mr. Carter acknowledged, her instincts were better than his.One achievement with contemporary resonance: Mrs. Carter, along with Betty Bumpers, the wife of Senator Dale Bumpers, traveled around the country and persuaded 33 state legislatures to change their laws to require proof of vaccination for children to enter school. This led to a joke in the late 1970s: Everywhere the first lady goes, kids cry — for fear of getting a shot.In 1980, Mrs. Carter thought her husband was “seemingly pompous” in explaining why he wouldn’t make politically expedient decisions. As she recounted in her memoirs, he would say something like, “I’ll never do anything to hurt my country.” And she’d reply, “The thing you can do to hurt your country most is not get re-elected.”When Mr. Carter lost, Mrs. Carter grew depressed and wanted her husband to run for president again against Mr. Reagan. When Mr. Carter rejected that idea out of hand, she helped him reinvent the post-presidency by establishing the Carter Center. They traveled the globe together, “waging peace,” as they put it, supervising elections, starting impressive global health initiatives and building houses for the poor. On the road, Mrs. Carter served as note-taker in important peace talks; at home, she established fellowships for journalists covering mental health issues and, as the founder of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers, did as much as anyone to popularize a concept that barely had a name until the 1980s.The Carters’ eight-decade love affair was one for the ages. When I was at work on my biography, Mrs. Carter shared with me her husband’s letters from sea. One of them from 1949 read:When I have been away from you this long … I feel lonely and lost, and it seems that I am not really living but just waiting to live again when you are with me.Rosalynn Carter kept those letters in a drawer close by until the day she died.Jonathan Alter is a journalist and the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Rosalynn Carter, First Lady and a Political Partner, Dies at 96

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      She helped propel Jimmy Carter from rural Georgia to the White House and became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor RooseveltRosalynn Carter, a true life partner to Jimmy Carter who helped propel him from rural Georgia to the White House in a single decade and became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, died on Sunday in Plains, Ga. She was 96. The Carter Center in Atlanta announced her death. It had disclosed on May 30 that Mrs. Carter had dementia. “She continues to live happily at home with her husband, enjoying spring in Plains and visits with loved ones,” a statement by the center said at the time. On Friday, the center said she had entered hospice care at home.Mr. Carter, 99, the longest-living president in American history, has also been in hospice care at their home, but so far he has defied expectations. The Carter Center had announced in February that he was stopping full-scale medical care “after a series of short hospital stays,” and his family was preparing for the end. But he has hung on — and celebrated his most recent birthday on Oct. 1.Mrs. Carter was the second longest-lived first lady; Bess Truman, the widow of President Harry S. Truman, was 97 when she died in 1982.Over their nearly eight decades together, Mr. and Mrs. Carter forged the closest of bonds, developing a personal and professional symbiosis remarkable for its sheer longevity.Their extraordinary union began formally with their marriage in 1946, but, in a manner of speaking, it began long before that, with a touch of kismet, just after Rosalynn (pronounced ROSE-a-lynn) was born in Plains in 1927.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Donald Trump, and the Tradition of Suppressing October Surprises

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      Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials.American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James A. Garfield claimed he wanted more immigration from China, a position so unpopular it nearly cost him the election. Weeks before the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary kneed a Black police officer in the groin, just as the president was trying to woo skeptical Black voters. (Roosevelt’s response made history: He appointed the first Black general and created the Tuskegee Airmen.)But the scandal that has ensnared Donald J. Trump, the paying of hush money to a pornographic film star in 2016, is in a rare class: an attempt not to bring to light an election-altering event, but to suppress one.The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Mr. Trump can trace its lineage to at least two other episodes foiling an October surprise. The first was in 1968, when aides to Richard M. Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to thwart peace talks in the closing days of that election. The second was in 1980. Fresh revelations have emerged that allies of Ronald Reagan may well have labored to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the defeat of Jimmy Carter.Richard M. Nixon at the end of his presidential campaign in 1968.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe tortured debate over precisely which election law might have been violated in 2016 is missing the broader point — all three events might have changed the course of history.“There have been three cases at a minimum,” said Gary Sick, a former national security aide to President Carter who for more than two decades has been pursuing his case that the Reagan campaign in 1980 delayed the release of the hostages from Iran. “And if you had the stomach for it, you’d have to say it worked.”The potential criminal charges against Mr. Trump for his role in the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels — falsifying business records to cover up the payment and a possible election law violation — may seem trivial when compared to the prior efforts to fend off a history-altering October surprise.This month, a former lieutenant governor of Texas came forward to say that he accompanied a Reagan ally to the Middle East to try to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the 1980 election. And notes discovered in 2016 appeared to confirm that senior aides to Mr. Nixon worked through back channels in 1968 to hinder the commencement of peace talks to end the war in Vietnam — and secure Mr. Nixon’s victory over Hubert H. Humphrey.“Hold on,” Anna Chennault, Mr. Nixon’s emissary to the South Vietnamese, told Saigon government officials, as she pressed them to boycott the Paris peace talks. “We are gonna win.”But the chicaneries of 1968 and 1980 were left to historians and partisans to sort out and debate decades later. What separates the allegations against Mr. Trump is that they could make him the first former president to be indicted by a grand jury, forcing him to answer for charges in a court of law.President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam shortly before the presidential election in 1968.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe concept of an October surprise has been around American politics since at least 1838, when federal prosecutors announced plans to charge top Whig Party officials with “most stupendous and atrocious fraud” for paying Pennsylvanians to vote in New York for their candidates.Two weeks before the 1888 election, Republicans published a letter from the British ambassador to the United States suggesting that the English favored Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate. It galvanized Irish American voters, and Mr. Cleveland lost the presidency to Benjamin Harrison.Just days before the 2000 election, Thomas J. Connolly, a defense lawyer and former Democratic candidate for governor in Maine, confirmed that George W. Bush had been arrested for driving while intoxicated in the state in 1976. Some have said it cost Mr. Bush just enough votes to turn a narrow popular-vote victory into one of the most contested presidential elections in American history.What links the allegations of 1968, 1980 and 2016 is the fear that such a surprise would happen. In all three cases, those accused of perpetrating the skulduggery palpably worried that it would..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It is probably as old as campaigning itself,” said John Dean, the Nixon White House lawyer whose testimony before the congressional Watergate committees helped bring to light perhaps the most famous campaign dirty trick of all time. “I’m sure that when campaigns learn of negative stories, they do all they can to suppress them.”The accusations against Mr. Trump are of a different scale than 1968 or 1980. No Americans were left to languish in captivity. No armies remained on the battlefield longer than necessary. No civilians died in napalm conflagrations. Indeed, the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels is hardly the worst accusation leveled against a president who was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine to extract a political favor, and impeached again for inciting a riot designed to overturn a lawful election that he lost.But because the 2016 election was so close, the suppression of a late-breaking sex scandal just may have delivered the White House to one of American history’s most divisive leaders. Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, and won the presidency by securing victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 78,652 votes, a smaller total than a sellout crowd at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.The plane carrying freed American hostages arriving at the Frankfurt airport. The hostages had been held in Iran for 444 days.Jean-Louis Atlan/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, suffered her own surprise when just days before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, reopened a closed investigation into emails she sent on a private server when she was secretary of state. Given the margin, that alone may have cost Mrs. Clinton the White House.Ms. Daniels’s claim that she had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006 while his wife, Melania, was nursing their only baby had been floating around since 2011, seemingly raising few fears in Trump world. But in early October 2016, that changed when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump described in lewd terms how he groped women.Amid the ensuing furor and defections from some Republican leaders, the effort to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence went into overdrive. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and others feared that a second punch, landing just after the “Access Hollywood” outrage was dissipating, could knock their pugilistic boss out of the presidential race and expose them to legal action.“It could look awfully bad for everyone,” Dylan Howard, the editor of The National Enquirer, wrote in a text to Mr. Cohen, noting that if Ms. Daniels went public, their work to cover up her account of a sexual encounter might also become known.The 1980 election is remembered as a landslide victory, hardly one that seemed vulnerable to a late-breaking course change. But in fact, aides and allies of Mr. Reagan openly feared the release of the hostages in the campaign’s final weeks could re-elect Mr. Carter, so much so that the term “October surprise” is often attributed to the Reagan camp’s trepidations.“All I know is there’s concern, not just with us but I think generally amongst the electorate, well, this Carter’s a politically tough fellow, he’ll do anything to get re-elected, and let’s be prepared for some October surprise,” Mr. Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush, said at the time.Ronald Reagan and his campaign feared an October surprise from President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGerald Rafshoon, who was Mr. Carter’s White House communications director and campaign media adviser, said in an interview that he was confident the release of the hostages would have secured the president’s re-election. The polls had been tightening that fall amid rising optimism about the captives’ release. Then Mr. Carter’s position collapsed.“If the little farmer can’t handle a two-bit ayatollah,” Mr. Rafshoon recalled one woman telling him, “I’ll take my chances on the cowboy.”He added: “It’s not that I hold any grudges about those sons of bitches. I’ve gotten on with my life, and so has Jimmy.”Mr. Sick is not so sure a hostage release would have had much impact. “It would certainly have changed some votes, but would Carter have won? He only won one state,” he said. “People who run campaigns get very paranoid and talk themselves into these things.”The election of 1968 is a closer call.Ken Hughes, a researcher at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, whose book “Chasing Shadows” chronicled the Nixon campaign’s efforts to impede peace talks, said Mr. Nixon had a strong lead in the polls over Mr. Humphrey in mid-September. By mid-October, Mr. Nixon’s lead was down to eight percentage points. Then, days before the election, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, and the news media began reporting chatter of looming talks to end the war.Again, the candidate who went on to win showed his fears, which were based on Mr. Nixon’s conviction that Democratic dirty tricks in 1960 had denied him the presidency. “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” or South Vietnam, Mr. Nixon implored, according to the notes of a top aide, H.R. Haldeman.On the eve of the election, The Christian Science Monitor was preparing an article on the efforts of the Nixon campaign to thwart the peace talks. Mr. Johnson convened a conference call with his security cabinet to seek advice on whether to confirm the story, which he knew to be true from F.B.I. and C.I.A. wiretaps.“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual elected,” his secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, said of Mr. Nixon on a recorded call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”White House officials said nothing. More

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      Former Iran Hostages Are Divided on Jimmy Carter and a Sabotage Claim

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      A report about a covert effort to delay their release until after the 1980 presidential election drew anger, resignation and disbelief from the survivors of the crisis.They are the last survivors of an international crisis that hobbled Jimmy Carter’s presidency and may have cost him re-election. Many are now in their 80s.With the former president gravely ill in hospice care, some of the 52 Americans who were held hostage in Iran for 444 days are looking back on Mr. Carter’s legacy with a mix of frustration, sadness and gratitude.Many feel neglected by the government, which has paid them only about a quarter of the $4.4 million that they were each promised by Congress in 2015, after decades of lobbying for compensation, said their lawyer, V. Thomas Lankford. Some endured physical and mental abuse, including mock executions, during the hostage crisis. About half have died.Jimmy Carter preparing to address the American people from the Oval Office on April 25, 1980, on the failed mission to rescue the Iran hostages.Associated PressLast week, their ordeal was thrust back into the news with the account of a covert effort to delay their release until after the 1980 presidential election in a bid to help the campaign of Mr. Carter’s Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.A former Texas politician, Ben Barnes, told The New York Times that he had toured the Middle East that summer with John B. Connally Jr., the former Texas governor, who told regional leaders that Mr. Reagan would win and give the Iranians a “better deal.” Mr. Connally, a former Democrat turned Republican, was angling for a cabinet position.Mr. Barnes, 84, said that he was speaking out now because “history needs to know that this happened.”He told The Times that he did not know if the message that Mr. Connally gave to Middle Eastern leaders ever reached the Iranians, or whether it influenced them. Mr. Connally died in 1993. Nor was it clear if Mr. Reagan knew about the trip. Mr. Barnes said Mr. Connally had briefed William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in an airport lounge after the trip.The account stirred anger among some of the former hostages, while others dismissed his story of election sabotage as not credible. They are a diverse group that includes former diplomats, retired military officers and academics, and members of both major political parties.“It’s nice that Mr. Barnes is trying to soothe his soul during the last years of his life,” said Barry Rosen, 79, who was press attaché at the embassy in Tehran when it was overrun on Nov. 4, 1979. “But for the hostages who went through hell, he has not helped us at all. He has made it just as bad or worse.”Mr. Rosen, who lives in New York, said that Mr. Barnes should have come forward 43 years ago, given the decades of speculation about political interference.“It’s the definition of treason,” he said, “knowing that there was a possibility that the Carter administration might have been able to negotiate us out of Iran earlier.”Kathryn Koob, 84, of Waterloo, Iowa, who was the director of an Iranian-American cultural program when she was taken hostage, said, “If somebody wanted to be so cruel as to use us for political gain, that’s on their conscience, and they have to deal with it.”That Mr. Connally could have been engaged in political skulduggery was hardly shocking after Watergate, said John W. Limbert, 80, who was a political officer at the embassy when he was taken hostage.“It’s basically just confirmation of what we strongly suspected all along,” Mr. Limbert said. “We should not be surprised about this in American politics — people willing to stoop to anything.”He credited Mr. Carter with showing patience during the crisis, even if voters blamed him for mishandling the showdown with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader whose followers stormed the embassy after the Carter administration admitted Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the deposed shah of Iran, to the United States for medical treatment.“He basically sacrificed his presidency to get us out alive,” Mr. Limbert said.But Kevin Hermening, a certified financial planner in Mosinee, Wis., who was a Marine Corps sergeant guarding the embassy, said that he did not believe Mr. Barnes’s account and that, even if it were true, the effort would not have influenced his captors.“The Iranians were very clear that they were not going to release us while President Carter was in office,” said Mr. Hermening, 63. “He was despised by the mullahs and those people who followed the Ayatollah.”And Don Cooke, 68, of Gaithersburg, Md., a retired Foreign Service officer who was vice consul at the embassy, called Mr. Barnes’s account “mildly amusing.”It suggested, he said, that there were “these other dark forces that were sabotaging our efforts to get these hostages free, and I just don’t buy that.”Mr. Cooke still blames Mr. Carter for the crisis. He said the president should have cleared the embassy of its personnel before he admitted the shah or have refused to allow the shah to enter the country.When Mr. Carter flew to Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany to greet the freed hostages, Mr. Cooke said he snubbed the former president, staying on the phone with his parents as Mr. Carter put a hand on his back. He handed the phone to Mr. Carter, who spoke to his mother.“The reason we were released was because Ronald Reagan was elected president,” Mr. Cooke said. “The Iranians were clearly afraid of Reagan. No question about that. And they had every right to be.”Ben Barnes, left, with Lady Bird Johnson and former President Lyndon B. Johnson in Austin, Tex., on Aug. 29, 1970.Ted Powers/Associated PressThe hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, minutes after Mr. Reagan took office.It was the end of an anguished chapter. Network news anchors had kept nightly counts of how long the hostages had been in captivity, accompanied by martial music and “America Held Hostage” graphics. People across the country tied yellow ribbons around trees in a show of support for the hostages.After months of fruitless negotiations, Mr. Carter had authorized a rescue mission in April 1980 that ended in disaster when a helicopter crashed into a plane in the Iranian desert. Eight service members were killed, and their charred bodies were displayed by Iranian officials.In the end, Mr. Carter did not pull off the pre-election “October surprise” that some in Mr. Reagan’s orbit feared. It was only after Mr. Carter’s defeat that his outgoing administration struck a deal that released billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets.Those assets were “the weapon that kept us alive,” said Mr. Rosen, the former press attaché. Referring to Mr. Carter, he added, “I think the thing he did — and did absolutely right — was to free the American hostages without us getting murdered.”The Barnes account cast a new light on these long-ago events, troubling David M. Roeder, a retired colonel who was the deputy Air Force attaché at the embassy. Mr. Roeder said that he had repeatedly told his captors that if Mr. Reagan won, they would be dealing with a “much tougher person.”“I have come to the conclusion — perhaps because I want to — that hopefully President Reagan was unaware that this was going on,” said Mr. Roeder, 83, of Pinehurst, N.C.But, he added, “I gained a great deal more respect for President Carter because I’ve seen what he went through with us in captivity.” More

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      The Iran Hostages, and a Plot to Thwart Carter

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      More from our inbox:Why the U.S. Invaded Iraq: Theories AboundWhite Supremacy PropagandaCare at the End of Life“History needs to know that this happened,” Ben Barnes now says of his trip to the Middle East in 1980.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “43-Year Secret of Sabotage: Mission to Subvert Carter Is Revealed” (front page, March 19), about an effort to delay release of the American hostages in Iran to weaken Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign:By way of apology to Mr. Carter, Ben Barnes details the mission to ensure that the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran were not released on Mr. Carter’s watch. Mr. Barnes’s candor, though overdue, is welcome, but his apology is somewhat misdirected.While Jimmy Carter might rightly claim that he suffered defeat in 1980 because Ronald Reagan’s campaign engaged in a contemptible plot, he was nevertheless a “second tier” victim.More than 50 Americans were held in terror for 444 days, not knowing whether they would live or die. If, as Mr. Barnes implies, his mission resulted in extending the hostages’ captivity, they stand at the front of the line of those to whom he should apologize.Mark SteinbergLos AngelesTo the Editor:How would President Jimmy Carter have responded to this news that, according to Ben Barnes, the G.O.P. was involved in an effort to thwart Mr. Carter’s efforts to win the American hostages’ release?I was on Air Force One accompanying Mr. Carter in the days leading up to the 1980 election. All efforts were focused on getting those Americans home.Our last hope came when news reached Mr. Carter at 2 a.m., Chicago time, on the Sunday before the election. Learning that the Iranian mullahs had modified their demands, the president put off campaigning and raced back to Washington. Unfortunately, Mr. Carter realized that obstacles remained.Imagine if he’d just learned that a Republican ally of President Reagan had been spreading the word in Arab capitals that Iran should keep the 52 hostages until after he had taken office? Imagine if Mr. Carter had gotten this story just before his final debate with Ronald Reagan? It would have put the G.O.P. challenger on the defensive.Imagine if …Chris MatthewsChevy Chase, Md.The writer, the former longtime host of the MSNBC show “Hardball,” was a speechwriter for President Carter.To the Editor:Ben Barnes’s revelations that political operatives met with overseas governments before the 1980 presidential election didn’t surprise me. The release of American hostages from Iranian captivity a few minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 was too much of a coincidence.This unwarranted interference in American foreign affairs by private citizens reminded me of Richard Nixon’s intrigues to entice the South Vietnamese government to stall the Paris peace talks in an effort to derail a Democratic victory in the 1968 presidential election.Shame on all those involved for risking American lives to benefit their political ambitions.Paul L. NewmanMerion Station, Pa.To the Editor:Thanks for an important and credible addition to the narrative of the Iran hostage crisis.An addendum: John Connally and Ben Barnes would almost certainly have received a chilly response to their scheme from President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, who was close to President Carter and loyal to him.Moreover, at the time of the trip, Sadat had welcomed his friend, the recently deposed shah of Iran, to Egypt, and the shah died there in July. Thus there is little chance Sadat conveyed the Connally-Barnes message to Tehran, though other Middle Eastern heads of state might have done so.Jonathan AlterMontclair, N.J.The writer is the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”Why the U.S. Invaded Iraq: Theories AboundOnly a statue of Saddam Hussein remained standing at an Iraqi communications center that was the target of a bombing attack by American forces in 2003.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the U.S. Invade?,” by Max Fisher (The Interpreter, March 19), suggests that the triggering motive for the 2003 invasion of Iraq will remain unknown.The article says “a critical mass of senior officials all came to the table wanting to topple” Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, “for their own reasons, and then talked one another into believing the most readily available justification”: weapons of mass destruction.The clear goal was to topple Mr. Hussein. Recall that President George W. Bush desired revenge on Mr. Hussein for an attempt on his father’s life and that he was reportedly advised that only wartime presidents become great.The missing piece of the puzzle is that neoconservative advisers, with an array of reasons for toppling Mr. Hussein, were able to play on President Bush’s personal aspirations to get the go-ahead for the invasion.Richard ReillyOlean, N.Y.To the Editor:“Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the U.S. Invade?” gives plausible answers. Another possible explanation was foretold by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address.He warned of “the unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” telling us, in effect, that those who make money from war and those whose careers benefit from these actions have both influence and a shared interest in military interventions.His words are still worth heeding.Barbara H. ChasinIthaca, N.Y.The writer is emerita professor of sociology at Montclair State University and the author of “Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism.”White Supremacy Propaganda Michael Dwyer/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “White Supremacist Propaganda Soared Last Year, Report Finds” (news article, March 10):The alarming rise of white nationalist vandalism and propaganda, the majority of which is being spread by Patriot Front, is more than offensive — it is often a criminal offense. Legislators, prosecutors and law enforcement should recognize the dangers these attempts to intimidate, recruit and inspire violence pose to American communities.White nationalist activities are occurring nationwide, are coordinated and are often evading accountability in local jurisdictions. The arrest of 31 Patriot Front members preparing to disrupt an L.G.B.T.Q.+ Pride celebration in Idaho last summer should have been the notice federal authorities needed. After the mass arrest, 17 organizations called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Patriot Front.We hope that The Times’s coverage of this disturbing trend adds urgency to the appeal for federal action against these dangerous campaigns of hate. Our local communities — and our democracy — can’t afford to be left to manage this threat alone any longer.Lindsay SchubinerBerkeley, Calif.The writer is the program director for the Western States Center, a nationwide group that works to strengthen inclusive democracy.Care at the End of Life Nadia HafidTo the Editor:Re “Aggressive Care Still Common at Life’s End” (The New Old Age, March 14):As a nurse practitioner in a large hospital, I see this kind of aggressive care all too often.In addition to the physical and emotional stress it places on patients and families, there’s a financial cost, since such care isn’t free.I will never forget an older man who spent his last months in one of our I.C.U.s. His wife not only lost him when he died but also their house, as the cost of medical care made her unable to pay the mortgage.These kinds of nonmedical consequences need to be considered, acknowledged and regularly assessed for. Something else our health care system doesn’t do.Marian GrantReisterstown, Md. More

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      An Untold Story Behind Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Defeat

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      WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.The hostage crisis in Iran hampered Mr. Carter’s effort to win a second term.Associated PressWhat happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.William J. Casey, left, went on to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Reagan administration.Getty ImagesMr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.Mr. Barnes, right, with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. via Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential LibraryMr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.Brief news accounts at the time reported on some of Mr. Connally’s stops with scant detail, describing the trip as “strictly private.” An intriguing note in Mr. Connally’s file confirms Mr. Barnes’s memory that there was contact with the Reagan camp early in the trip. Under the heading “Governor Reagan,” a note from an assistant reported to Mr. Connally on July 21: “Nancy Reagan called — they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings.” There was no record of his response.Mr. Barnes recalled joining Mr. Connally in early September to sit down with Mr. Casey to report on their trip during a three-hour meeting in the American Airlines lounge at what was then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport. An entry in Mr. Connally’s calendar found this past week showed that he traveled to Dallas on Sept. 10. A search of Mr. Casey’s archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University turned up no documents indicating whether he was in Dallas then or not.Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Mr. Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office.Iran released the American hostages minutes after Mr. Carter left office at noon on Jan. 20, 1981.Associated PressJohn B. Connally III, the former governor’s eldest son, said in an interview on Friday that he remembered his father taking the Middle East trip but never heard about any message to Iran. While he did not join the trip, the younger Mr. Connally said he accompanied his father to a meeting with Mr. Reagan to discuss it without Mr. Barnes and the conversation centered on the Arab-Israeli conflict and other issues the next president would confront.“No mention was made in any meeting I was in about any message being sent to the Iranians,” said Mr. Connally. “It doesn’t sound like my dad.” He added: “I can’t challenge Ben’s memory about it, but it’s not consistent with my memory of the trip.”Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Mr. Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November.The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.Mr. Reagan welcomed Bruce Laingen, a former hostage in Iran, to the White House in January 1981. Mr. Laingen and 51 other Americans had been held for 444 days in Tehran.Associated PressThe House and Senate separately authorized investigations and both ultimately rejected the claims. The bipartisan House task force, led by a Democrat, Representative Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, and controlled by Democrats 8 to 5, concluded in a consensus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that stories of covert dealings were not backed by credible testimony, documents or intelligence reports.Still, a White House memo produced in November 1991 by a lawyer for President George H.W. Bush reported the existence of “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” That memo was not turned over to Mr. Hamilton’s task force and was discovered two decades later by Robert Parry, a journalist who helped produce a “Frontline” documentary on the October surprise.Reached by telephone this past week, Mr. Sick said he never heard of any involvement by Mr. Connally but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as verifying the broad concerns he had raised. “This is really very interesting and it really does add significantly to the base level of information on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The story goes “further than anything that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is really new.”Michael F. Zeldin, a Democratic lawyer for the task force, and David H. Laufman, a Republican lawyer for the task force, both said in recent interviews that Mr. Connally never crossed their radar screen during the inquiry and so they had no basis to judge Mr. Barnes’s account.While Mr. Casey was never proved to have been engaged in any October surprise deal-making, he was later accused of surreptitiously obtaining a Carter campaign briefing book before the lone debate between the two candidates, although he denied involvement.Mr. Carter meeting with Gary Sick, a national security aide, in the Oval Office. Mr. Sick advanced a theory after Mr. Carter’s loss that a Reagan ally had brokered a deal with Iran for the hostages’ post-election release in exchange for arms.Associated PressNews of Mr. Barnes’s account came as validation to some of Mr. Carter’s remaining advisers. Gerald Rafshoon, who was his White House communications director, said any interference may have changed history. “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”Mr. Connally was a political giant of his era. Raised on a South Texas cotton farm, he served in the Navy in World War II and became a confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson, helping run five of his campaigns, including his disputed 1948 election to the Senate that was marred by credible allegations of fraud. Mr. Connally managed Mr. Johnson’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, then worked for the ticket of John F. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson. Mr. Connally was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the Navy. He then won a race for governor of Texas in 1962.He was in the presidential limousine sitting just in front of Mr. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire. Mr. Connally suffered injuries to his back, chest, wrist and thigh, but unlike Mr. Kennedy survived the ordeal. He won two more terms as governor, then became President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury and ultimately switched parties. He was a favorite of Mr. Nixon, who wanted to make him his vice president or successor as president.Mr. Connally was indicted on charges of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice in 1974, accused by prosecutors of taking $10,000 to support a milk price increase, but acquitted by a jury.Along the way, Mr. Connally found a political protégé in Mr. Barnes, who became “more a godson than a friend,” as James Reston Jr. put it in “The Lone Star,” his biography of Mr. Connally. The son of a peanut farmer who paid for college selling vacuum cleaners door to door, Mr. Barnes was elected to the Texas Legislature at age 21 and stood at Mr. Connally’s side for his first speech as a candidate for governor in 1962.Mr. Barnes said he and John B. Connally Jr. met with leaders across the Middle East — though not Iran — to thwart the release of the hostages until after the presidential election.Associated PressWith Mr. Connally’s help, Mr. Barnes became House speaker at 26 and was later elected lieutenant governor, a powerful position in Texas, only to fall short in his own bid for governor in 1972. He urged Mr. Connally to run for president in 1980 even though by then they were in different parties.After Mr. Connally’s campaign collapsed, he and Mr. Barnes went into business together, forming Barnes/Connally Investments. The two built apartment complexes, shopping centers and office buildings, and bought a commuter airline and an oil company, and later a barbecue house, a Western art magazine, a title company and an advertising company. But they overextended themselves, took on too much debt and, after falling oil prices shattered the Texas real estate market, filed for bankruptcy in 1987.The two stayed on good terms. “In spite of the disillusionment of our business arrangements, Ben Barnes and I remain friends, although I doubt that either of us would go back into business with the other,” Mr. Connally wrote in his memoir, “In History’s Shadow,” shortly before dying in 1993 at age 76. Mr. Barnes, for his part, said this past week that “I remain a great fan of him.”Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Mr. Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Connally was up to, he said.Mr. Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Connally repeated the same message at every stop in the region to leaders such as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. He thought his friend’s motive was clear. “It became very clear to me that Connally was running for secretary of state or secretary of defense,” Mr. Barnes said. (Mr. Connally was later offered energy secretary but declined.)From left, Mr. Barnes, Mr. Connally and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. Mr. Barnes said Mr. Connally promoted Mr. Reagan to every leader they met on their trip.via Ben BarnesMr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.” More

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      Jimmy Carter Made Me a Better American

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      When the Carter presidency began I was an 18-year-old Rockefeller Republican. By the time it ended, I was so liberal my own grandmother called me a Communist.My transformation may have been the inevitable result of eating the brownies at Wesleyan University, but I think it is more likely that it was Jimmy Carter’s time in the White House — with its remarkable mash-up of triumphs and failures — that helped me better understand my country and myself.As the former president enters the final stages of his senescence, I have been thinking a lot about who I was when I first encountered him, and how the country got where it is today. I am still grateful to Mr. Carter for demonstrating that it is possible to govern with morality, honesty and grace. It would be nice if those values didn’t seem so strangely old-fashioned.But I am still angry at him, too.It was Jimmy Carter who brought the Israelis and Egyptians together at Camp David; who brought about SALT II, limiting the nuclear capabilities of the United States and the Soviets; who urged Americans to embark on a path of moral renewal.But it was also, arguably, Jimmy Carter who gave us Ronald Reagan, the first president who made hating your own government fashionable. In so many ways, the Tea Party movement, the QAnon conspiracy and the Jan. 6 insurrection are all results of what Ronald Reagan started; supporters of each distrust government and find authoritarian figures strangely attractive.I had inherited my parents’ politics before I arrived at Wesleyan in the fall of 1976. (Their track record of G.O.P. support was unbroken from Barry Goldwater to Gerald Ford.) As a first-year student, I watched the presidential debates between Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter on a tiny black and white television on campus. In one, Mr. Ford insisted that there was “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.” In a way I felt bad for him; I knew what it was like to get terrified when you had to talk in front of other people.But then, I wasn’t the president. It gave me pause to consider, for the first time, if it was really a great idea to be led by a man who faltered, sometimes, when the pressure was on.Still, in the 1970s it was possible for entire weeks to pass by without anyone thinking about the president. In my mind’s eye those four years were very much what we had been promised during the campaign: Jimmy Carter would never lie to us. He was so earnest. I can still see him, flickering on a TV, delivering hard truths while wearing a cardigan.I was on a semester abroad in London when Mr. Carter brought about the seemingly impossible — forging a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. I remember how proud I felt. That night I was in a pub in Marylebone, and a stranger, learning that I was an American, bought me a Guinness. “God bless America,” he said. “Greatest country in the world!” He was a little drunk, but still. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a moment like that since.The Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat, left; President Carter, center; and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, at the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.Associated PressCamp David was not enough. In July of 1979, Mr. Carter told my fellow Americans we were suffering from a moral crisis. He called for a moral revival in the country. He said that “piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”I was working at the campus radio station that summer. I remember one of the other D.J.s saying, “Damn right.” After the long years of Nixon and Watergate and Vietnam and the staggering effects of skyrocketing inflation, and a shortage of gas, and all the many other ways in which the United States was just exhausted with itself — a moral revival seemed like just the thing.It was not to be. My senior year was dominated by the Iran hostage crisis that began that November. As the crisis wore on, it seemed the consciousness of the entire country was hostage alongside those 52 individuals. It was nearly impossible to have a conversation about anything else. Mr. Carter’s failures were our failures.As Mr. Carter scrambled, new voters like me began to think about alternatives. We wanted an American hero, not an all-too-thoughtful negotiator. California’s progressive candidate, Jerry Brown, had plenty of supporters on campus. So did Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. He came to campus to see his son, Ted Jr., in the fall of 1979. The visit was a zoo. It was like we were being visited by all four Beatles at once.Mr. Kennedy’s campaign sputtered out as quickly as it was briefly lit, but the damage to Mr. Carter was done. Ronald Reagan stopped seeming — to some — like such an impossible joke.That was when it occurred to me that the mirror Jimmy Carter held up to our flaws was not the thing we wanted. We didn’t want a guide to bettering our souls. We didn’t want to sacrifice for the common good. We wanted to be defined by what we owned, and what we wanted to own was as much junk as possible. We wanted to be told that we were great.Sometimes, we wanted people to lie to us.A few days after Ronald Reagan swept the national vote, I moved to New York with a single suitcase and an old Silvertone autoharp. I’d arrived in adulthood having been transformed into a progressive, not only by the liberalism of my Wesleyan education, but also by the ideals on display in the very best moments of the Carter presidency — and the call to action he had believed Americans might embrace. I’d become a Democrat at the exact moment that the wave of progressive politics had crested and begun to recede.It was as if I’d arrived at Woodstock just in time to see all my beatnik pals heading back — not to their hippie vans, but to a fleet of BMWs.I’ll always be disappointed that Jimmy Carter was unable to rally America around the idea of moral renewal. But I am forever grateful for the fleeting glimpses he gave us of the country we might still become.Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan) is a professor of English at Barnard College and a 2022-23 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Different From the Other Southerners’: Jimmy Carter’s Relationship With Black America

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      How a white politician from the South who once supported segregationist policies eventually won the enduring support of Black voters.ATLANTA — Without Black voters, there would have been no President Jimmy Carter.In 1976, African Americans catapulted the underdog Democrat to the White House with 83 percent support. Four years later, they stuck by him, delivering nearly identical numbers even as many white voters abandoned him in favor of his victorious Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.This enduring Black support for Mr. Carter illuminates two intertwined and epochal American stories, each of them powered by themes of pragmatism and redemption. One is the story of a white Georgia politician who began his quest for power in the Jim Crow South — a man who, as late as 1970, declared his respect for the arch-segregationist George Wallace in an effort to attract white votes, but whose personal convictions and political ambitions later pushed him to try to change the racist environment in which he had been raised.The other is the story of a historically oppressed people flexing their growing electoral muscle after the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed obstacles to the ballot box. Certainly, for some Black voters, candidate Carter was simply the least bad option. But for others, the elections of 1976 and 1980 were an opportunity to take the measure of this changing white man, recognizing the opportunity he presented, and even his better angels.“His example in Georgia as a representative of the New South, as one of the new governors from the South, was exciting, and it was appealing,” said Representative Sanford Bishop, a Democrat whose Georgia congressional district includes Mr. Carter’s home. “It carried the day in terms of people wanting a fresh moral face for the presidency.”Mr. Carter’s support for Black Americans sheds light on the political evolution of the man, who at 98, is America’s longest living president. (Mr. Carter entered hospice care earlier this month.)Mr. Carter at an event in Georgia during the fall 1976 presidential campaign.Guy DeLort/WWD, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesMr. Carter greeting supporters in New York City in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesThe foundation of his relationships with Black voters and leaders was built in his home base of Plains, in rural Sumter County, Ga. Its Black residents can recall his efforts to maintain and then later resist the racist policies and practices that targeted the majority Black community.Jonathan Alter, in his 2020 biography “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” noted that Mr. Carter, as a school board member, had made a number of moves to accommodate or uphold the local segregationist system of the 1950s, at one point trying to shift resources from Black schools to white schools in the name of sound fiscal management.But Bobby Fuse, 71, a longtime civil rights activist who grew up in Americus, Ga., a few miles from Plains, recalled that Mr. Carter had also shown moments of real character. Among other things, he noted Mr. Carter’s objection to his Baptist church’s refusal to allow Black people to worship there.“I wouldn’t have voted for anybody running against Jimmy Carter, more than likely,” said Mr. Fuse, who said he had first voted for Mr. Carter in his successful 1970 governor’s race. “Because I knew him to be an upright man different from the other Southerners.”There were seeds of this difference early in the life of Mr. Carter. But as a young politician, it did not always translate into action. And the repressive environment of the mid-20th century meant that he had no Black voters to woo when he started his first foray into electoral politics with a 1962 bid for a South Georgia State Senate seat. Due to racist restrictions, hardly any Black people were registered to vote in his district at the time.Mr. Carter waved to the crowd as he and his wife, Rosalynn, arrived at Plains Baptist Church to attend services in 1976.Associated PressPresident Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, with former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Carter at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHistorians say that Mr. Carter, early in his career, was both a creature and a critic of the strict segregationist system he had been born into. He largely kept his head down as civil rights advocates fought and sacrificed to change the status quo, with serious, and sometimes dangerous, protests and crackdowns flaring up in Sumter County.Later, once he had achieved positions of power, he was outspoken about renouncing racial discrimination, seeking means to redress it and trying to live up to those principles. During his presidency, he famously enrolled his daughter, Amy, in a public school in Washington, D.C. Decades after leaving the White House, he offered a full-throated rebuke of Barack Obama’s Republican critics, calling their attacks racism loosely disguised as partisanship during his presidency.“He saw his role as an elder statesman,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. “The fact that you have an elderly white president, from the South, who is there saying, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes; that argument has no weight; that dog won’t hunt,’ is something that he didn’t necessarily have to do.”Mr. Carter had grown up with Black playmates in the tiny community of Archery, Ga. As a boy, his moral and spiritual north star had been a Black woman, Rachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter property. He slept many nights on the floor of her home when his parents were out of town. Mr. Alter, the biographer,  wrote that she had taught him about nature and had impressed him with her selflessness. Mr. Alter wrote that Mr. Carter had even been teased in his all-white elementary school for “sounding Black.”Traffic in Warm Springs, Ga., as visitors arrived to hear Mr. Carter speak in 1976.Gary Settle/The New York TimesRachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter family’s farm, whom Mr. Carter credited with teaching him morals.National Park ServiceBy the mid-1950s, Mr. Carter returned from a stint as a naval officer and settled in Plains, where he built on the family’s successful peanut business. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, which dismantled the old separate-but-equal regime for American schools, had inflamed white Southerners. Despite his efforts to appease white parents while on the school board, he was also, Mr. Alter notes, “the only prominent white man in Plains” who declined to join the local chapter of the racist White Citizens’ Council.After winning his 1962 State Senate race, Mr. Carter, a man of searing ambition, set his sights on the governor’s mansion but was defeated in 1966. He ran again and won in 1970, with a campaign full of unsubtle dog whistles to aggrieved white voters that included promises to restore “law and order” to their communities and, according to Mr. Alter, the dissemination of a “fact sheet” that reminded white voters that Mr. Carter’s Democratic opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, had attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.In the Democratic primary, Black voters took notice: Mr. Sanders, in the runoff, garnered roughly 90 percent of their votes. But by the general election, Mr. Carter was campaigning heavily in Black churches.The dog-whistle strategy had generated its share of bitterness and criticism. But a course correction followed, in the form of Mr. Carter’s inaugural address.“The time for racial discrimination is over,” he said.Mr. Carter’s supporters at the Democratic convention.H. Christoph/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMembers of the Concord Baptist Church congregation listening to Mr. Carter speaking in Brooklyn in 1980.Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times“It was really dramatic for all of us, because he said it in that forum, as he was being sworn in,” Mr. Fuse recalled. “And hopefully we were going to see some activity from that.”They did. Mr. Carter expanded the presence of Black Georgians in state government, from senior officials to state troopers, and welcomed civil rights leaders to the governor’s office.Black skeptics were converted into allies in other ways. In an interview this week, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who would serve as ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Carter, recalled having “a real prejudice to overcome” when the two men first met as Mr. Carter was running for governor.When the matter of Fred Chappell, Sumter County’s notoriously racist sheriff, came up, Mr. Carter called him a “good friend.” Mr. Young was taken aback: Mr. Chappell had once arrested Dr. King after a protest. When Dr. King’s associates tried to bring him blankets to ward off the cold, Mr. Chappell refused them and turned on the fan instead.Later, however, Mr. Young said he had gotten to know Mr. Carter’s family, including his mother, Lillian. Mr. Young, too, came to trust him. “I decided that he was always all right on race,” Mr. Young said. “He never discriminated between his Black friends and white friends.”Mr. Carter, as president, meeting in 1977 with his commission for the appointment of Black Americans to the federal judiciary in the Fifth Circuit.Harvey Georges/Associated PressAndrew Young, right, campaigning for Mr. Carter in Boston in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesIt went the same way with other influential civil rights leaders in Georgia, including Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr. According to the author and journalist Kandy Stroud, the elder Mr. King sent a telegram to voters lauding Mr. Carter’s appointment of Black judges and his support for a fair housing law, among other things. “I know a man I can trust, Blacks can trust, and that man is Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.By the time Mr. Carter started his 1976 bid for the White House, it was these leaders who spread the message beyond Georgia voters that Mr. Carter was worthy of their trust. They helped bolster the “peanut brigade,” the nickname for the team of staff members and volunteers spread across the country to campaign for him, making it a mix of Black and white Carter supporters.“They had to tell these people in the rest of the country, ‘Yeah, he’s governor of Georgia, but he’s a different kind of governor of Georgia,’” Mr. Fuse said.In a recent interview, the Rev. Al Sharpton recalled that the King family had lobbied him to support Mr. Carter in 1976. That went a long way, he said, but so did Mr. Carter’s presentation. “A Southern guy that would stand up and talk about racism?” he said. “This was the kind of guy that my uncle trusted down South. And he connected with us for that.”As a presidential candidate, however, Mr. Carter again showed his propensity for trying to have it both ways in a racially divided country.George Skelton, a Los Angeles Times columnist, recently recalled covering the candidate as he campaigned in Wisconsin and watching as he seemed to give contradictory messages on school busing to separate groups of Black and white voters within the span of a single day.Mrs. Coretta King accepting the Presidential Medal on behalf of her late husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1977.Associated PressMr. Carter, second from right, shaking hands with Black seniors at the Watts Labor Community Action Council in Los Angeles, in 1976.Reed Saxon/Associated PressAnd in a speech about protecting neighborhoods, Mr. Carter used the phrase “ethnic purity,” creating a mini-scandal. Soon after, Mr. Young told him that the use of the phrase had been a “disaster for the campaign.” Mr. Carter issued an apology.But Mr. Carter also found common cultural ground with Black voters nationwide, many of whom shared his Christian faith. They saw how comfortable he was in Black churches. “‘Born again’ is the secret of his success with Blacks,” Ethel Allen, a Black surgeon from Philadelphia, told Ms. Stroud at the time.As president, Mr. Carter sought “to mend the racial divide,” said Kai Bird, another Carter biographer. Mr. Bird noted that food aid was significantly expanded under Mr. Carter, benefiting many poor Black residents in rural areas. Mr. Bird also noted that the Carter administration had toughened rules aimed at preventing racially discriminatory schools from claiming tax-exempt status.If that explains why Black voters stuck with Mr. Carter in 1980, it may have also sown the seeds of his defeat. “I think all of these decisions were too much for white America,” Mr. Bird said. “Ronald Reagan came along and appealed much more to white voters.”Mr. Fuse agrees. All these years later, he still laments the fact that Mr. Carter was denied a second term. Instead of focusing on the problems that plagued Mr. Carter’s time in office — the inflation, the energy crisis, the American hostages stuck in Tehran — Mr. Fuse spoke, instead, about that hope that Mr. Carter had engendered in 1976, and not just for Black voters.“When this white man comes along who’s grinning with a broad smile after Watergate, he lifted our spirits,” Mr. Fuse said. “He lifted everybody’s spirits.” More

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      La presidencia incomprendida de Jimmy Carter

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      El hombre no era como piensas. Era duro. Era muy intimidante. Jimmy Carter fue probablemente el hombre más inteligente, trabajador y decente que haya ocupado el Despacho Oval en el siglo XX.Cuando lo entrevisté con regularidad hace unos años, rondaba los 90 años y, sin embargo, seguía levantándose al amanecer para ponerse a trabajar temprano. Una vez lo vi dirigir un acto a las 7 a. m. en el Centro Carter, donde estuvo 40 minutos caminando de un lado al otro del estrado, explicando los detalles de su programa para erradicar la enfermedad de la lombriz de Guinea. Era incansable. Ese mismo día me concedió a mí, su biógrafo, 50 minutos exactos para hablar sobre sus años en la Casa Blanca. Aquellos brillantes ojos azules se clavaron en mí con una intensidad alarmante. Pero era evidente que a él le interesaba más la lombriz de Guinea.Carter sigue siendo el presidente más incomprendido del último siglo. Era un liberal sureño que sabía que el racismo era el pecado original de Estados Unidos. Fue progresista en la cuestión racial; en su primer discurso como gobernador de Georgia, en 1971, declaró que “los tiempos de la discriminación han terminado”, para gran incomodidad de muchos estadounidenses, incluidos muchos de sus paisanos del sur. Y, sin embargo, creció descalzo en la tierra roja de Archery, una pequeña aldea del sur de Georgia, por lo que estaba impregnado de una cultura que había experimentado la derrota y la ocupación. Eso lo convirtió en un pragmático.El periodista gonzo Hunter S. Thompson dijo una vez que Carter era el “hombre más maquiavélico” que había conocido jamás. Thompson se refería a que era implacable y ambicioso, a su empeño en ganar para llegar al poder: primero, a la gobernación de Georgia; después, a la presidencia. Aquella época, tras Watergate y la guerra de Vietnam, marcada por la desilusión con el excepcionalismo estadounidense, fue la oportunidad perfecta para un hombre que en gran medida basó su campaña en la religiosidad del cristiano renacido y la integridad personal. “Nunca les mentiré”, dijo en varias ocasiones durante la campaña, a lo que su abogado de toda la vida, Charlie Kirbo, respondió bromeando que iba a “perder el voto de los mentirosos”. Inopinadamente, Carter ganó y llegó a la Casa Blanca en 1976.Decidió utilizar el poder con rectitud, ignorar la política y hacer lo correcto. Fue, de hecho, un admirador del teólogo protestante favorito de la clase dirigente, Reinhold Niebuhr, que escribió: “Es el triste deber de la política establecer la justicia en un mundo pecaminoso”. Carter, bautista del sur niebuhriano, era una iglesia unipersonal, una auténtica rara avis. Él “pensaba que la política era pecaminosa”, dijo su vicepresidente, Walter Mondale. “Lo peor que podías decirle a Carter, si querías que hiciera alguna cosa, era que políticamente era lo mejor”. Carter rechazó constantemente los astutos consejos de su esposa, Rosalynn, y de otros, de posponer para su segundo mandato las iniciativas que tuvieran un costo político, como los tratados del canal de Panamá.Su presidencia se recuerda, de forma un tanto simplista, como un fracaso, pero fue más trascendental de lo que recuerda la mayoría. Llevó adelante los acuerdos de paz entre Egipto e Israel en Camp David, el acuerdo SALT II sobre control de armas, la normalización de las relaciones diplomáticas y comerciales con China y la reforma migratoria. Hizo del principio de los derechos humanos la piedra angular de la política exterior de Estados Unidos, y sembró las semillas para el desenlace de la Guerra Fría en Europa del este y Rusia.Liberalizó el sector de las aerolíneas, lo que allanó el camino a que un gran número de estadounidenses de clase media volaran por primera vez; y desreguló el gas natural, lo que sentó las bases de nuestra actual independencia energética. Trabajó para imponer en los autos los cinturones de seguridad o las bolsas de aire, que salvarían la vida de 9000 estadounidenses cada año. Inauguró la inversión nacional en investigación sobre energía solar y fue uno de los primeros presidentes estadounidenses que nos advirtió sobre los peligros del cambio climático. Impulsó la Ley de Conservación de Tierras de Alaska, mediante la cual se protegió el triple de los espacios naturales de Estados Unidos. Su liberalización de la industria de la cerveza casera abrió la puerta a la pujante industria de la cerveza artesanal estadounidense. Nombró a más afroestadounidenses, hispanos y mujeres para la magistratura federal, y aumentó considerablemente su número.Sin embargo, algunas de sus decisiones polémicas, dentro y fuera del país, fueron igual de trascendentes. Sacó a Egipto del campo de batalla en beneficio de Israel, pero siempre insistió en que Israel también estaba obligado a suspender la construcción de nuevos asentamientos en Cisjordania y a permitir a los palestinos cierto grado de autogobierno. A lo largo de las décadas, sostuvo que los asentamientos se habían convertido en un obstáculo para la solución de dos Estados y la resolución pacífica del conflicto. No se arredró al advertirle a todo el mundo que Israel estaba tomando un rumbo equivocado hacia el apartheid. Lamentablemente, algunos críticos llegaron a la imprudente conclusión de que era antiisraelí, o algo peor.Tras la revolución iraní, Carter hizo bien al resistirse durante muchos meses a las presiones de Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller y su propio consejero de Seguridad Nacional, Zbigniew Brzezinski, para que le concediera asilo político al sah depuesto. Carter temía que eso pudiera encender las pasiones iraníes y poner en peligro nuestra embajada en Teherán. Tenía razón. Solo unos días después de que accediera a regañadientes, y el sah ingresara en un hospital de Nueva York, la embajada estadounidense fue tomada. La crisis de los rehenes, que duró 444 días, hirió gravemente su presidencia.Pero Carter se negó a ordenar represalias militares contra el régimen rebelde de Teherán. Eso habría sido lo más fácil desde el punto de vista político, pero también era consciente de que pondría en peligro la vida de los rehenes. Insistió en que la diplomacia funcionaría. Sin embargo, ahora tenemos pruebas fehacientes de que Bill Casey, director de campaña de Ronald Reagan, hizo un viaje secreto en el verano de 1980 a Madrid, donde pudo haberse reunido con el representante del ayatolá Ruhollah Jomeini, y prolongar así la crisis de los rehenes. Si esto es cierto, con esa injerencia en las negociaciones sobre los rehenes se pretendió negarle al gobierno de Carter una buena noticia de cara a las elecciones —la liberación de los rehenes en la recta final de la campaña—, y fue una maniobra política sucia y una injusticia para los rehenes estadounidenses.La presidencia de Carter estuvo prácticamente impoluta en lo que a escándalos se refiere. Carter se pasaba 12 horas o más en el Despacho Oval leyendo 200 páginas de memorandos al día. Estaba empeñado en hacer lo correcto, y cuanto antes.Pero esa rectitud tendría consecuencias políticas. En 1976, aunque ganó los votos electorales del sur, y el voto popular de electores negros, judíos y sindicalistas, en 1980, el único gran margen que conservaba Carter era el de los votantes negros. Incluso los evangélicos lo abandonaron, porque insistía en retirar la exención fiscal a las academias religiosas exclusivamente blancas.La mayoría lo rechazó por ser un presidente demasiado adelantado a su época: demasiado yanqui georgiano para el nuevo sur, y demasiado populista y atípico para el norte. Si las elecciones de 1976 ofrecían la esperanza de sanar la división racial, su derrota marcó la vuelta de Estados Unidos a una etapa conservadora de partidismo áspero. Era una trágica historia que le resultaba familiar a cualquier sureño.Perder la reelección lo sumió durante un tiempo en una depresión. Pero, después, una noche de enero de 1982, su esposa se sobresaltó al verlo sentado en la cama, despierto. Le preguntó si se estaba sintiendo mal. “Ya sé lo que podemos hacer”, respondió. “Podemos desarrollar un lugar para ayudar a las personas que quieran dirimir sus disputas”. Ese fue el comienzo del Centro Carter, una institución dedicada a la resolución de conflictos, a las iniciativas en materia de salud pública y la supervisión de las elecciones en todo el mundo.Si bien antes pensaba que Carter era el único presidente que había utilizado la Casa Blanca como trampolín para lograr cosas más grandes, ahora entiendo que, en realidad, los últimos 43 años han sido una extensión de lo que él consideraba su presidencia inacabada. Dentro o fuera de la Casa Blanca, Carter dedicó su vida a resolver problemas como un ingeniero, prestando atención a las minucias de un mundo complicado. Una vez me dijo que esperaba vivir más que la última lombriz de Guinea. El año pasado solo hubo 13 casos de enfermedad de la lombriz de Guinea en humanos. Puede que lo haya conseguido.Kai Bird es biógrafo, ganador del Pulitzer, director del Leon Levy Center for Biography y autor de The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. More