Carter had little use for presidents club, made friends with Gerald Ford

Jimmy Carter and the man he beat for president, Gerald Ford, got so tight after office that their friendship became a kind of buddy movie, complete with road trips that were never long enough because they had so much to gab about.

Carter did not get along nearly so well with the other living presidents. The outsider president was an outlier after his presidency, too.

Nevertheless, past and present Oval Office occupants will attend Carter's state funeral this week in what could be the largest gathering of the presidents club since five attended Washington services for George H W Bush in December 2018.

 

As a member of that elite, informal club, Carter was uniquely positioned to do important work for his successors, whether Democrat or Republican. He achieved significant results at times, thanks to his public stature as a peacemaker, humanitarian and champion of democracy, and his deep relationships with foreign leaders, troublemakers included.

But with Carter, you never knew when he'd go rogue. This was a man so self-confident, he described himself as probably superior to the other ex-presidents who were still knocking about. Ornery about taking orders, he could be invaluable to the man in office, exasperating, or both at once.

The others often bonded over what an annoying cuss Carter could be, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote in their book The Presidents Club.

Carter was the driven, self-righteous, impatient perfectionist who united the other club members around what seemed like an eternal question: was Jimmy Carter worth the trouble?  He was, in the mind of Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College historian of religion and Carter's rise to the presidency. Balmer points to the violence averted in the last hours before a US invasion of Haiti in 1994, when Carter, to the benefit of Democratic President Bill Clinton and countless lives saved, brokered a deal with a military coup leader to step aside and restore Haiti's democracy.

Four years earlier, for the benefit of Republican President George H W Bush and the lives at stake in the region, Carter secured peace in Nicaragua at the brink of bloodshed when he persuaded the leftist leader Daniel Ortega to accept the electoral defeat that had so shocked the Sandinistas.

Yet he could infuriate those in power. Years after the US-led Gulf War rolled back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, it emerged that Carter had lobbied UN Security Council members and foreign leaders to reject the elder Bush's request to authorise the use of force.

After being mostly sidelined by the man who defeated him in 1980, Ronald Reagan, Carter was given several missions by Bush until the Gulf War episode, after which he was cut off, Gibbs and Duffy write.

His relationship with Clinton was limited and uneasy, bookended by Clinton's reluctance to call on a figure who symbolised humiliating election defeat for Democrats and by Carter's disapproval of Clinton's behaviour outside his marriage.

But after Clinton won the White House in 1992, he sent Carter to North Korea to take the measure of dictator Kim Il Sung. Clinton aides became livid when Carter went beyond his brief, engaging in an unauthorised negotiation with Kim.

Carter was always a step apart from the rest. He was also one to wag a finger at the political establishment, if not to pulverise it like Donald Trump did.

Yet if politics makes strange bedfellows, post-politics makes even stranger ones. The hostilities of Democrat-versus-Republican can melt in the presidents club as former rivals become unlikely mates.

Except with Trump. Club members of both parties disdained Trump in his first term, and he had no use for them.

Democrat Lyndon Johnson leaned frequently on Republican predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, telling him You're the best chief of staff I've got. On the night of John Kennedy's assassination, LBJ sought Ike's advice on what to say to Congress, adding: I need you more than ever now.

Reagan once pulled Clinton aside to tell him the military salute he was executing during the campaign was too lame for the presidency. He taught him how make it snappy. Clinton in turn cherished his long and frequent phone calls with Richard Nixon, confiding in the disgraced but savvy Republican on foreign policy.

Clinton also became close to the Republican he vanquished in 1992, joining the elder Bush in Maine for golf, zippy boat rides and nights by the sea.

More consequentially, the younger Bush asked his dad and Clinton to lead a fund-raising mission for countries devastated by the 2004 tsunami, giving rise to a bipartisan pairing that pitched in on more endeavors, like Hurricane Katrina relief. I just loved him, Clinton said upon Bush's death in 2018.

But the Jimmy-Jerry friendship was one for the ages.

Carter took it as a point of pride when two historians, speaking separately at a commemoration of the 200th birthday of the White House, said his friendship with Ford was the most intensely personal between any two presidents in history.

Carter said it began in 1981, when the two were sent by Reagan to represent the US at the funeral of Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian leader.

They were both Navy men, had three sons, a strong religious faith that Ford was quieter about than Carter, and independent spouses who bonded as well. The four of us learned to love each other, Carter said.

Carter and Ford spoke regularly, teamed up as co-leaders on dozens of projects and decided together which events they'd attend or skip in tandem.

When we were travelling somewhere in an automobile or airplane, we hated to reach our destination, because we enjoyed the private times that we had together, Carter said.

That's what he told mourners in January 2007, at a service for Ford the month after he died at age 93.

The Democrat and the Republican he so cherished had made a pact, one hard to imagine in this time of partisan poison: Whoever died first would be eulogised by the other.