Jimmy Carter Rests | The New Yorker
Some four thousand people, my mother and I among them, filled Atlanta’s historic Fox Theatre, in September, to celebrate Jimmy Carter’s centenary with a night of music, which the thirty-ninth President probably loved more than any other. Carter himself was in Plains, his home town. He’d watch a taping from hospice care, where he’d been already for the better part of two years. I imagined the amusement he might have felt as the evening’s events unfolded, some of which were surely unusual for a gathering to honor a former President: a few old guys vaping in the men’s room; a trippy light display onstage; a graying member of the B-52s inquiring, “Who’s ready to take a trip to the love shack?” (My mom’s hand shot up.) The former Atlanta Braves star Dale Murphy, the actress Renée Zellweger, the singer Angélique Kidjo, and the band Drive-By Truckers took the stage to appreciate Carter in word and song. Joe Biden did so onscreen, standing beside a White House portrait of Carter, who backed Biden’s first Senate run. In a taped tribute of his own, Jon Stewart marvelled at the manual labor Carter did, well into his nineties, with Habitat for Humanity. “There are people in the world who live in houses built by Jimmy Carter,” Stewart said. Another distinction: “This is the first time ever that people have come together to celebrate the hundredth birthday of an American President,” Jason Carter, one of Jimmy’s grandsons, told the crowd. There seemed to be justice in it: the kindest President living longer than the rest.
He didn’t make it to a hundred and one. But James Earl Carter, Jr., stayed alive long enough to cast a vote for Kamala Harris for President, before dying on December 29th, just weeks before Donald Trump will be inaugurated again. “If he’d been able to be there, he’d be at Trump’s Inauguration,” Jason assured me, recently. “He didn’t play politics in the way that so many of the rest of us live and die by it. He understood that the arc of history is long.” We were sitting in a hotel suite, in downtown Atlanta, on Friday, the day before a week of funerary rituals would begin. The forty-nine-year-old, who has his grandfather’s twinkly warmth, was still tinkering with the remarks that he would deliver along the road from Plains to Atlanta and, finally, Washington, D.C., where his grandfather will lie in state. “The draft that I pulled out this week was from March 9, 2023,” Jason told me. “I sat down then. I wrote and I wrote.” That first effort paraphrased a line from the old funeral hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”: Please drive slow / For this body you are hauling / Lord, I hate to see him go. “I still hate to see him go,” Jason told me. “But it felt a little odd to say that we needed to slow it down after he’d been in hospice for nineteen months.” The family had been told, when Carter entered hospice, that he might last only a few days. “So we changed the beginning and some other things,” Jason went on. “But the story itself hasn’t changed, and I think what you’ll hear from it is that it really is about love—which he took from his faith as the greatest commandment.”
Over the past few years, there’s been ample time to consider and reconsider the long and fruitful life of Jimmy Carter: from his peanut-farming days in Plains to the Camp David Accords and lesser-known accomplishments, like his designation of more than fifty million acres of Alaskan wilderness, roughly doubling the size of the country’s national-parks system. Books have covered these things. Jason has read them, since he didn’t experience them firsthand: the Administration of his “Pa-pa” ended when he was five years old. Memories—ones that aren’t in the books—have been resurfacing lately. “I got this call one time at 6 a.m.,” he told me. “My grandfather says, ‘Jason, have you heard the news?’ I said, ‘Oh, my god, no, what happened?’ He’s in his eighties. He says, ‘The Braves traded Craig Kimbrel.’ That was his favorite player. He was heartbroken, just like a little kid.” Another time, in more recent years, Jason went to his grandfather’s office in Plains. On his desk, beside letters from Rosalynn, his wife of seventy-seventy years, there was a Ronald Acuña, Jr., action figure. “Packaged, mint condition,” Jason said of the Braves All-Star.
Jimmy Carter addressing an outdoor rally in Plains, Georgia, during his Presidential campaign, in November, 1976.Photograph from UPI / Bettmann Archive / Getty
A small wooden bowl sat on the table in front of Jason as we spoke. He picked it up. “Whatever day this was in his life—say it’s forty years ago, he was sixty. He was running the Carter Center. He was incredibly busy. He had all this stuff to do. And this took the two of us hours to make. What he wanted to do on that day was to be with me in his shop, turning this bowl on his lathe.” He went on, “It’s dogwood, which is actually a difficult wood to work with. But he asked me what my favorite tree was, and I said dogwood, so he went and got a branch off of a tree for us.” He turned it over. Their names were etched into the wood: Jason and JC. There were many other things that emerged from Jimmy Carter’s woodshop: tables, chairs, and benches for the family’s mountain cabin in north Georgia. A crib for his first great-grandson. “In Plains,” Jason said, “there’s this little inn. They walked in one time, my grandmother and grandfather, and they didn’t like the plastic trash cans. So he went back to his woodshop and built some wood containers.” What did it all mean? “He was a practical problem solver,” Jason said. “It was about making yourself a tool for doing good and for other people. He poured himself into the work that he felt like he wanted to do. A labor of love—all of it was.”
This week, when they have a moment to themselves, Jason and his family plan to see “A Complete Unknown,” the film about Bob Dylan’s early years, starring Timothée Chalamet. He noted a poetic quality in the timing of its release. “He launched his career talking about Bob Dylan,” Jason said, referring to when his grandfather proclaimed, nearly fifty years ago, during his acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, “We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, ‘is busy being born, not busy dying.’ ” Carter’s admiration for the singer was evidently mutual. Dylan, in a rare interview from recent years, told a documentary filmmaker, “It’s impossible to define Jimmy.” He went on, “There’s many sides to him. He’s a nuclear engineer. Woodworking carpenter. He’s also a poet. He’s a dirt farmer. If you told me he was a race-car driver, I wouldn’t even be surprised.”
On Sunday, I spent a few hours at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, in downtown Atlanta, as a light rain fell outside, asking what some of the thousands of visiting mourners thought of the man. Established in the early nineteen-eighties, the center has overseen a range of humanitarian work that helped Carter win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002: pushing to eliminate infectious diseases, like guinea worm; advocating for mental-health care and reducing the stigma of mental illness; observing elections in forty countries, including Bolivia and Myanmar. Carter travelled extensively and he encouraged Jason to do the same. “He sent me, when I was still in college, to Gaza City,” Jason told me. “When I graduated, he said, ‘You should go to the Peace Corps.’ So I did. Not every grandparent says, ‘I’ve got a good idea: you should go spend six weeks in Liberia.’ ” A decade ago, Jason became the head of the center’s board of trustees, and often sits in his grandfather’s old office.
Past Rosalynn’s baby spoon and Jimmy’s rangefinder camera from his Navy days, I stopped to talk with a volunteer named Rosemary Magee. She spent forty years working at Emory University, eventually becoming the vice-president and secretary, where she invited notable people—Salman Rushdie, Natasha Trethewey, Edward Albee—to take part in taped conversations about creativity. In 2009, she was joined by Carter, who, as he noted at the outset of their chat, had just left the hospital, where he’d been receiving fluids throughout the previous night. “I slipped out of the I.V. to come and be with you all,” the then eighty-five-year-old told the crowd with a sly grin. “He had a bandage on his hand, and a bruise, and he looked very pale before he came onstage,” Magee said. “But once he walks out, he’s transformed. We had a very animated and intimate conversation about his poetry, his fiction, his woodworking—even peanut farming being a work of creativity.” (Carter: “I look on myself as an artist, particularly in the peanut field. I consider myself to have been the best producer of high-quality seed peanuts in Georgia, and perhaps in the whole United States.”) Magee recalled how uniquely present Carter was during their conversation, and how poetic. She pointed out a quote of his on a nearby wall: “I preferred to plow without wearing shoes, and I remember vividly the caress of the soft, damp and cool freshly turned earth on my feet.” Carter’s poetry, Magee told me, “was spare and personal,” and it seemed to bring him closer to revelation. “He said in our conversation that he didn’t feel like he really understood his father, and his kind of harsh ways, until he engaged in the process of writing a poem about him,” Magee said.
Beside a display case of gifts given to the Carters by foreign heads of state, I struck up a conversation with a retired realtor named Elizabeth Zappa, who happened to be Frank’s cousin. One day, in 2016, Zappa woke up and decided to drive her colorful 1957 vintage camper down to Maranatha Baptist Church, in Plains, to listen to Carter teach Sunday school. “I didn’t know anything. I just showed up the night before in a camper with a goat painted on the side. These two women in folding chairs told me, ‘Congratulations, you’re No. 7.’ I slept right there. In the morning, there was a TV crew wanting to interview me before I went inside. When the doors opened, the church people put me in the center about this far”—she held her arms apart—“from him. It was incredible.” Carter’s sermon, best she could recall, was about God’s reckoning. “He asked us something, like, ‘If your life ended today, would you be able to say that you lived it in a way that would be pleasing to God?’ That sobered us all up.”
A few yards away, reading about Carter’s relationship with Muhammad Ali, I met three generations of the Kotati family. Yombwe explained why he’d come to the center. “President Carter was influential with his policy toward West Africa,” he said. “My father is from the Congo and that was vitally important. Not all Presidents have reached out to Africa and considered some of the impacts of foreign policy, as well as trade.” He went on, “I think history will demonstrate that he was one of the most effective Presidents of all time.” Yombwe mentioned Carter’s work on civil-rights legislation, the Space Shuttle Program, and the Panama Canal. “He wasn’t about the flashy stuff; he was more about effective policy.”
Turning a corner, there, finally, was his flag-draped coffin, flanked by five members of the honor guard.
Outside, a little while later, the rain had picked up a bit. Not quite a hard rain, but it was falling. I stopped to talk to a young couple, Alex and Cate Tracey, under some shelter, as they walked to their car. “I didn’t realize that he established the Department of Education,” Alex said.
“And Rosalynn helped to get vaccines in schools,” Cate said.
She had written in one of the guestbooks sitting on a table by the exit. “I just said thank you for being an exceptional President,” she told me. ♦
