Jimmy Carter made enemies, then peace. Ask Ford, Kennedy, Clinton.
During the bruising 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter called President Gerald Ford “incompetent” and his policies “morally and politically and intellectually bankrupt.”
But after Carter, a Democrat, unseated the Republican incumbent in a close race, he praised Ford in his inaugural address: “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” Carter’s gracious words prompted a standing ovation for his recent rival.
The two men worked together on Carter’s transition to power, and began speaking regularly about issues, including reviving the economy and ratifying the Panama Canal treaty. In time, they became exceptionally close friends.
Carter did not make peace with every political opponent, most notably Ronald Reagan, the Republican who defeated him in 1980 and went on to dismantle many Carter policies, including environmental efforts to reduce the nation’s reliance on gas and oil.
But to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, Carter was determined throughout his life to reconcile with many of his political adversaries - not just Ford, for instance, but also Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, his most famous foe, who challenged him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980.
Sometimes Carter mended fences quickly, as with Ford. In other instances, time softened hard feelings. It was only relatively recently that he reached out to former president Bill Clinton to warm relations that had been chilled for 40 years.
Carter was complicated, a humble peacemaker as well as self-confident competitor. While other presidents tend to quietly cede the spotlight once they leave office, Carter did not, creating uneasy relations with most of the seven presidents elected after him.
“Carter wanted to be the one who says inconvenient truths that anger all the other ex-presidents,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
A competitor who wanted to be No. 1 and a politician who remembered those who crossed him, Carter was also a Baptist Sunday school teacher who believed in forgiveness and that there was good in everyone.
“This is one of the most interesting paradoxes about Carter,” Beschloss said. “He had very fierce feelings about people, but at the same time, he did like to reconcile. At least in my life experience, you don’t find both of those tendencies so intensely in the same person.”
In recent years, Carter spoke about how politics was dividing Americans and he seemed more determined to attend to his own personal rifts, one at a time.
Carter and Ford: ‘The closest bond’
Carter was proud of his unlikely friendship with Ford and described it “as the closest bond between any two former presidents.”
The two former presidents made a pact that the one who lived longer would speak at the other’s funeral, according to Richard Norton Smith, author of a Ford biography.
When Ford died in 2006, Carter stood in front of Ford’s flag-draped casket in a Michigan church and talked about what he and his former rival shared in common: They had both served in the Navy, married strong women, raised three sons and a daughter, and were committed to their religious faith and public service. And, he quipped, “we both enjoyed our unexpected promotion to commander in chief.”
Ford had helped Carter build a relationship with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. So after Carter mediated the Camp David peace accords with Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, the president made only one call from Marine One during the helicopter ride from Camp David to the White House: He phoned Ford. “It was nod to the credit he was due,” said Norton Smith.
After Sadat was assassinated in 1981, it was on the 16-hour flight back to the United States from his funeral in Egypt that Ford and Carter really set aside past slights and became friends. Together, they began working on hunger, electoral reform and two dozen other projects. Their wives became exceptionally close as well, and collaborated on mental health and addiction issues.
“The four of us learned to love each other,” Carter said at Ford’s funeral, as Betty Ford nodded and Rosalynn Carter dabbed tears from her eyes.
Reflecting on their friendship, Ron Nessen, Ford’s White House press secretary, said in a 2023 interview: “It’s pretty amazing when you consider politics these days. Now there is so much anger and dislike among politicians. In those days, it was a little nicer.”
Carter and Kennedy: ‘We were reconciled’
Perhaps Carter’s fiercest feud was with a rival in his own party - Kennedy. The president, known to dislike profane language, was so furious when he heard that the Massachusetts senator was considering challenging him for the 1980 nomination that he vowed, “If he runs, I’ll whip his ass!”
Carter felt Kennedy undermined his presidency and hurt his chances for a second term by positioning himself for a run for the White House.
“Kennedy really tried to coalesce all the power brokers” ahead of Carter’s arrival in Washington, Carter’s son James E. “Chip” Carter III said in an interview for the University of Georgia archives. “So we had a lot of that group against us in 1980 and it was really difficult to get them back.”
The Carter-Kennedy rift nearly turned the 1980 Democratic National Convention into a brawl and did long-term damage to the party. In a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Carter was asked to look back on his presidency. He quickly brought up Kennedy.
“Sure, I have a lot of regrets,” he said. “I could have spent more time holding the Democratic Party together. I could have been more accommodating to some of the requests that Ted Kennedy made of me. But I didn’t do either one of those things. I felt in my first year, [as] I wrote in my diary, the most helpful member of the House or Senate was Kennedy for me. But then he decided to run for president and did everything he could, in my opinion, to prevent my having successes. I’m not blaming him. We were reconciled pretty well before I left Washington.”
Carter told Jonathan Alter, who wrote a biography of the former president, that he wished he had agreed to Kennedy’s request to nominate Archibald Cox - U.S. solicitor general under President John F. Kennedy and Watergate special prosecutor - for a federal appeals court judgeship.
Cox had backed Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona over Carter in the 1976 Democratic nomination contest. In his memoir, Kennedy recounted discussing Cox in the Oval Office and Carter bringing up his endorsement of Udall, writing, “It seemed as though Carter was experiencing real pleasure in telling me that he was not going to support Archibald Cox.”
But, in one of his last acts as president, Carter did honor a Kennedy request by nominating an ally of the senator, Stephen G. Breyer, to be a federal appeals court judge. Breyer, chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kennedy chaired, was an architect of the airline deregulation bill, legislation Carter championed.
Days after the 1980 election that not only ousted Carter but flipped Democratic control of the Senate to Republicans, Breyer’s nomination was approved - notably with 31 Republican votes - and the Kennedy friend later served on the Supreme Court.
After Carter left the White House, Rosalynn Carter helped repair relations with Kennedy.
Rosalynn Carter and Kennedy’s son Patrick both advocated for greater public understanding of mental health. They joined forces to lobby for the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, a law to require insurance companies to stop limiting mental health coverage and treat those disorders the same as other medical problems.
While the former first lady and the younger Kennedy, then a member of the House representing Rhode Island, were together on Capitol Hill in 2007, a large group of journalists approached. But their questions strayed from the pending mental health bill. The 2008 Democratic presidential race was heating up and reporters asked if Rosalynn Carter supported Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, the two favorites.
Kennedy recalled that Carter avoided choosing one or the other - a headline that would have distracted from their mission to promote the mental health bill. “Mrs. Carter, without missing a beat, said, ‘I support Patrick Kennedy for president,’” Kennedy said, laughing as he reminisced about the exchange in an interview.
Kennedy said her quick answer was deft in another sense, too, because of the irony that “she was for a Kennedy for president!”
When Ted Kennedy heard that, “he loved it!” Patrick said. “My dad could get fired up and certainly as angry as the next person. But his gift was that he always kept moving forward - he was very, very good at not holding grudges. If he had harbored every resentment that he could have in his life, he never would have made it.”
Patrick Kennedy said he visited the Carter Center in Atlanta several times, and Jimmy Carter always made time to meet privately with him, which Kennedy interpreted as a gesture of peace to his father.
Carter’s son Chip, in his remarks at the University of Georgia, said that when he learned Ted Kennedy had brain cancer in 2008, he told his father it might be time for the two men to “work out some of their differences - and that maybe neither one of them would get to heaven until they did.”
Jimmy Carter told his son he already had.
Despite what Patrick Kennedy called their “huge mega-clash,” Carter attended Ted Kennedy’s 2009 funeral. Patrick Kennedy said he believed Carter “wanted to make sure that he corrected in every way possible whatever it was between my dad and him. My dad was not carrying that burden of resentment when he passed on, and Carter certainly had that lifted from him by being there for my dad and being so gracious to me.”
Carter and Clinton: ‘It is what it is’
Clinton’s often icy relations with Carter went back to Clinton’s days as Arkansas governor, a job he began in the final two years of Carter’s presidency.
In 1980, Carter sent thousands of Cuban refugees, including some with criminal records, to a military base in Arkansas. When hundreds escaped, the chaos caused by Carter’s move was widely seen as costing Clinton his reelection as governor.
During Clinton’s 1992 presidential run, he was often compared to Carter, the last Southern governor to win the White House and derided as a failed leader after his landslide loss to Reagan. Clinton made a point of distancing himself from Carter.
“Jimmy Carter and I are as different as daylight and dark,” Clinton said in a widely reported interview at the time. “I’m much less sort of mechanical and more intuitive dealing with politics than he is.”
Though less than enthusiastic about it, Carter in April 1992 publicly endorsed his fellow Democrat’s bid to unseat Republican President George H.W. Bush.
Clinton said that support came at a crucial time, amid questions about his character, including marital infidelity and his assertion that he said he “didn’t inhale” while smoking marijuana. In his autobiography, Clinton wrote, “No one had ever questioned Carter’s character,” so his endorsement “more than made up for the problems he had caused me during the Cuban refugee crisis in 1980.”
After Clinton won, Carter felt he deserved better treatment at Clinton’s 1993 inauguration. He was seething when Clinton did not even acknowledge his presence at the grand gala, though the new president recognized Barbra Streisand and others there.
Still, the next year, Carter offered to meet with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, who was building a nuclear program that could have armed the dictator with atomic bombs, and Clinton gave his blessing for Carter’s mission to Pyongyang.
But then Carter went rogue. Before informing Clinton, the commander in chief, and without giving the administration a chance to weigh in or to seek more concessions, Carter went on CNN and announced he had reached a deal.
The White House was furious, and Clinton advisers did not hide the fact that they believed the former president had been dangerously confident in his own wisdom.
Both Clinton and Carter knew it took one to forgive and two to reconcile, and they would have more ups and downs.
Carter could have stayed quiet as other former presidents did, but he publicly questioned Clinton’s morals during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Still, in 1999, Clinton gave him and Rosalynn the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “To call him the greatest former president, as many have, doesn’t do him or his work justice,” Clinton said.
It was a blow to the Clintons when Carter supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. So the arrival of the Clintons was the biggest surprise at the Carters’ 75th wedding anniversary celebration, held in 2021 at a high school auditorium in Plains. The event was relatively small, mainly family and friends, so it was significant that the Carters had invited Bill and Hillary Clinton. But event organizers weren’t sure they would show up.
When the Clintons’ black SUV pulled into Plains on a hot July afternoon, the couple was taken straight into a small room for a private meeting with Carter, then 96, who was seated in a wheelchair.
Carter lit up when he saw them. Now frail, he reached out to hold Hillary Clinton’s hand. Bill Clinton then rested his hand on Carter’s shoulder. The couples that had started out as friends more than 40 years earlier looked like it again.
“Why did you decide to come?” a Post reporter asked Bill Clinton as he left the anniversary party. Clinton paused and addressed his turbulent history with Carter, saying, “It is what it is.”
Smiling, he said that he was glad he had come and that any differences with Carter “had never destroyed our relationship.”
Carter and Trump: A ‘disaster’
More recently, Carter and Donald Trump were frequent antagonists. They were not direct rivals, coming from different eras of American politics.
In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Carter said in an interview with The Post that Trump was a “disaster” and that he had abandoned the principle of treating people equally. Under Trump, Carter said, “The United States doesn’t stand anymore for human rights.”
But in April 2019, Carter sent Trump a letter about China policy that the Trump White House called “beautiful.” Trump called Carter afterward, and the Trump White House said the two agreed on China.
Two months later, however, Carter publicly suggested that Trump had actually lost the 2016 election and “was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump routinely made Carter the butt of jokes. At many campaign rallies, even as Carter was in hospice care, Trump trashed him and President Joe Biden together. “Joe is the worst president in the history of our country,” Trump said. “Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because the Carter administration by comparison was totally brilliant.”
Carter said he wanted to live long enough to vote in November for Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, which he did.
Days before Carter died, Trump said he believed the United States should retake control of the Panama Canal - reversing one of Carter’s signature foreign policy moves to return ownership of the critical waterway to Panama.
On Sunday, when Carter died, Trump issued a statement saying Americans owe Carter “a debt of gratitude” because “he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans.”