Two vaguely interconnected events occurred in January 1976. Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucuses and I joined the NBC News Presidential Election Unit. Both were surprising in their own way, though only one registered on history’s seismograph. Surprising because Carter a relatively unknown Georgia governor and peanut farmer seemingly came out of nowhere to win the Iowa Caucuses and would go on to capture the White House. Surprising because I’d been fired from my former job at NBC News only to be rehired for a much better job.
Without going into detail, suffice it to say that at 22-years-old and fresh out of college I lacked the requisite maturity to hold down even a menial job such as the one I had as a desk assistant, the equivalent of a copy boy, at Newscenter 4, the network affiliate’s New York City news program. I was arguably even less qualified when, while skiing in Vermont, I got an urgent call from my father that somebody at NBC was trying to get in touch with me.
Turns out that a job I’d been interviewed but been passed over for the previous spring as a researcher on the 1976 campaign became available and was offered to me. Apparently, nobody checked my work history. My future boss, Roan Conrad, a brilliant political analyst had been charmed, if not by my thin resume, than at the bottom of the page where I listed collecting antique bottles from dumps, specifically the 19th century dump buried in the woods behind out house in Columbia County, as one of my hobbies.
I don’t recall the precise date my new job started but it was within days of the Iowa caucuses and NBC, along with every other news gathering operation, was scrambling to learn more about the Georgia governor. It was more likely through somebody’s connections than personal enterprise but I managed to track down an Annapolis classmate of Carter’s. We were less interested in his recollections of Carter — I don’t recall whether he had any — than of his graduating class college yearbook. Television is a visual medium, after all, and we wanted to run an image of Carter as a cadet and perhaps also of his senior page.
I mention this mostly because we knew so little about the future president — my recollection is that I also learned that he finished approximately 92nd in a class of more than 800 — and what my bosses concluded based on all the data points arriving was that Carter excelled at just about anything he ever attempted. Behind that toothy grin was a person of towering drive, ambition and self-discipline.
I saw those qualities on display that March when I accompanied Nightly News anchor John Chancellor to Maryland to take the measure of Jerry Brown. The California governor, barely a year into his first term, though a late entry into the presidential race, thought that he could overtake Carter. He failed, even though he won the Maryland primary and several others.
During that trip Chancellor and I also attended one of Carter’s press conferences where someone — I believe it was a local activist and not a journalist — started to harangue the candidate about something or other. Carter’s grin never faded but I watched the tension build and his left cheek start to throb. It seemed emblematic of his steely self-discipline.
I never got that close in physical proximity to Carter again even though I attended both that summer’s Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden and Carter’s inauguration. I met his Vice President, Walter Mondale, when he visited New York in 1977 to campaign for mayoral candidate Ed Koch; my job at NBC over I was hoping to land a position in the Koch administration if he won (he did and I did.) My challenge was to report to LaGuardia airport, collect the Vice President’s luggage from Air Force Two, take it to his midtown hotel, and retrieve it the following morning. I don’t know whether Mondale and his wife Joan, who accompanied him on the trip, were sleeping in or if there was a scheduling mishap but Ed Koch and I found ourselves pacing the corridor outside his hotel room waiting for Mondale to wake up.
My reward for selfless service to city and nation was the opportunity to climb aboard Air Force Two before it took off to meet the Vice President and have my photo taken with him. If there was film in the camera I never received the image, though I did get a handsome Air Force Two passenger pin and I took the opportunity to slip the Vice President my resume. Apparently, he or his staff were less impressed by my hobbies than my boss at NBC because I received a letter a few weeks later regretting that there were no jobs currently available at the White House for someone of my eccentric avocations.
Mondale, a former United States senator from Minnesota and the 1984 Democratic presidential candidate, became a partner to Carter and perhaps the most powerful Vice President to that point. Assuming he’d survive his former boss, Mondale, who died in 2021, wrote a eulogy that will be read at President Carter’s funeral. “We told the truth, we obeyed the law and we kept the peace,” Mondale wrote, according to the New York Times, in what sounds like a dig at the past and future president coming after the events of January 6th, 2021.
Given the current precarious state of democracy my hunch is that Jimmy Carter’s funeral will be something more than a send-off for a former head of state. Whatever the failures and successes of his presidency and the heralded successes of his post-presidency Carter succeeded in returning decency to the White House after the offenses of the Watergate era. Let’s hope that there are more Jimmy Carters in our future.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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