As the separation from him continues, Jimmy Carter gets to see one of the greatest displays of remorse and guilt for his sin in American politics. Publicists praise his presidency, leadership, integrity and personal ethics. Those who despised everything he represented as a southern president, now call him one of the greatest presidents. Sometimes the Mia Kolpa moments are somewhat exaggerated, certainly here as well, but Carter was always much more than the offensive line “Jimmy who?”. He probably isn’t looking for a place on Mount Rushmore, but everything that was good about him was also reflected in the years after his presidency. He worked to heal Africa; was a messenger to conflict sites; He supervised the purity of the elections in 40 countries; He eradicated diseases and built houses. Clinton and Obama became Hollywood style celebrities.
The questioning that guided him and gave him strength was “Why not me?”, meaning why I won’t run for president. He was elected and arrived in Washington with his men, in cowboy boots, bolo ties, jeans and an accent that irritated ears on the East Coast. They are the ones who helped him capture the votes of young voters. Only in 1972 did the voting age in America drop from 21 to 18. There were Judy Powell, the quick-witted speaker; political consultant Hamilton Jordan; media whistleblower Gerald Rapshon; Businessman Brett Lance and others. A young team, partially stoned, sharp, blunt and without rules and understanding of the game. Together they looked and behaved like the cowboys in the shared quarters in “Yellowstone”. Sometimes they crossed the line of good taste; Like at the cocktail party where Senior Advisor Hamilton Jordan looked at the cleavage of the Egyptian ambassador’s wife and said something distasteful about “her pyramids”. Carter scolded him, but he already told “Playboy” that “he desires other women in his heart”, although he remained happily married to Rosalyn for 76 years.
The first he recognized was the journalist Hunter Thompson, who arrived at the governor’s residence in Georgia on May 4, 1974 for an event called “Law Day”. That same year, Thompson saw his greatest detractor, Richard Nixon, resign and retire to his home. Thompson won but along the way announced, as usual, the death of the American dream. His working premise in Georgia was dreary speeches, jaw-dropping yawns and bourbon for every dry throat. Thompson accompanied Senator Ted Kennedy and his unfulfilled threat to run for president; In a Hawaiian shirt, aviator glasses and a cigarette in his mouth, the “Rolling Stone” messenger joined the infusion of alcohol. He didn’t listen to Jimmy Carter, who spoke at length; “It was a long speech in Benzona,” Thompson wrote.
Then, according to him, the most amazing thing in his career happened. He heard from Carter a speech that was such a wonderful work of thought of humanity, empathy and rhetorical ability that “it remains impressive many years later even if you don’t believe that Carter was honest in everything he said… It was a speech that by the criteria of verbal acrobatics and political theater, he It stands on a par with General MacArthur’s ‘Old Soldiers Don’t Die’ speech,” Thompson wrote. No one but him, including whiskey-swilling Ted Kennedy, felt the political earthquake.
“I am not allowed to talk to you about the law,” said Carter, “because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I am an engineer and a nuclear scientist and not a lawyer…, the source of my understanding – what is right and wrong in our society – is a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan.” An electric current passed through Thompson. Could it be that the governor of Georgia with the twitchy grin and lazy southern sneer, who always sounded like the warden having communication problems with inmate Paul Newman, called Dylan his friend? “Through listening to his records and the songs ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Times They are A-Changin’,” Carter said, “I learned to appreciate the dynamics and changes in modern society.”
Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President (photo: no credit)
“I asked someone sitting next to me,” Thompson wrote, “what the hell did I just hear? Of course I didn’t get an answer. But it was the most meaningful and gracious speech I’ve ever heard from a politician in my life. It was the sound of a populist farmer’s anger. Extremely accurate in his assertions and judgment and one of the most original statements , the most brilliant and with the most sleepy metaphors that anyone has ever heard in his life.” Thompson recognized in Carter political courage and intellectual integrity that he had read about in historical accounts of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He received a tape of the speech, which was found in the glove compartment of his Jeep after his suicide.
Two films do a good job of describing Carter, the president and the man. The first is “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President”. The film opens with the 95-year-old Carter sitting in his house and listening, alert and witty, to a record. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine” blares from the system, and Carter notes with a smile that the song “sounds familiar to him.” At the ceremony where he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, his friend Bono introduced him: “He ran for president of the Ullman Brothers company. If his hair had been longer, he could have been a member of the band.” Carter’s presidency coincided with the revival of Southern rock, and his prominent bands with the sound of wailing guitars sang the soundtrack that marched him to the White House, backed him up and supported him.
“The President of Rock ‘n’ Roll” also documents Carter’s unlikely connection with Dolly Parton, Muddy Waters, Sarah Vaughan and the unforgettable jazz line-up of Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and George Benson. For the first celebratory dinner of the presidency, the Carters invited Greg Ullman (the Ullman brothers) and his then-singing wife; The couple did not know that the small water cups were meant for dipping fingers between dishes and drank from them.
Chip Carter, the president’s son and his father’s contact with rock stars, said that “Greg played Harry Truman’s piano for three hours with the family sitting around him.” Ullman told about his first meeting with Carter in his autobiography: “The governor was in old Levi’s with holes, shirtless and barefoot. I asked who the homeless guy was hanging around the governor’s residence and they told me it was Jim.”
The film documents how the unknown Carter was carried to the White House by Dylan, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Buffett, Charlie Daniels and others. He mentions that Aretha Franklin sang “America the Beautiful” at his inauguration and Loretta Lin sang “Coal Miner’s Daughter” at the visit of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The dying John Wayne – not a political supporter of Carter – hosted the evening, Paul Simon sang, and John Lennon sat in the audience embalmed in a tuxedo. 98-year-old Carter survived most of them.
In an interview with him in 1978, Dylan was asked about his friendship with Carter. “I’m his friend,” Dylan replied, “Carter’s heart is in the right place.” In his meeting with Carter at the Governor’s Mansion, he had an epiphany: “It was the first time I realized that my songs had reached the mainstream, and it made me uncomfortable. Jimmy put me at ease when he expressed to me his sincere appreciation of my work. We were soul mates; he’s someone you don’t meet. Every day and you’re lucky if you met.”
Jonathan Demme directed “Jimmy Carter – The Man from the Plains” (2007), a film that follows Carter even after his presidency and presents the gallery of characters in his life; Brother Billy, a chatty beer guzzler with a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth, who when he wasn’t drunk was just plain stupid. Billy did business with the Arabs in the days when they embargoed America and went to visit his friend Muammar Gaddafi. Daughter Amy, a bespectacled model mother to Chelsea Clinton, flashed on the fringes of the presidency like an out-of-control piece of decor. And Miss Lillian, the white-haired mother, a nursing nurse who pronounced the name “Jimmy” made America squirm in displeasure. She was her son’s moral compass and taught him not to lie. Carter’s testimony about a giant rabbit he saw during a fishing trip sounded like something someone who has seen too many times the movie “Harvey” with Jimmy Stewart, and not Lillian’s son, would say.
Jimmy Carter – The Man from the Plains (photo: no credit)
No one could survive in the America bequeathed to him by his predecessors, especially the seething resentment towards everything political and the hasty and unfortunate withdrawal from Vietnam. There were days when Carter felt like Will Smith in I, Legend. The entire nation fell victim to a violent bacterium, and he alone was left, wandering with his body in the abandoned streets, defending himself against mutants who wanted to drink his blood and also swallowed many liters of it. Things got so bad that Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS news anchor, started counting every night the number of days the American hostages had been in the hands of the Iranians.
Mediocre presidents are always media punching bags and objects of slander in neighborhood bars after the detractors have fueled themselves with four double Jack Daniels; Between the blows to his head, Carter managed to stop the energy crisis, reduce phenomenal fuel consumption, give America the love it didn’t deserve.
In an intimate and non-intrusive approach, Demi followed Carter with a small team in the winter of 2006-2007, during the autograph signings and interviews to promote his book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid”.
Since the hugs with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at the signing of the peace agreement at the White House, Carter has remained connected in every vein to the unresolved conflict in the Middle East. He treated the conflict as an unfinished religious, moral and political mission, and with that uncompromising jaw-lock of his, he did not let go.
Jimmy Carter is a rare phenomenon for someone for whom the presidency was only the springboard and calling card for his continued contribution. The populist choice is not to understand him. Indeed, he admits in the film, the title of the book is not accidental and was chosen to upset, but the diagnoses in the text are sharp and distinct. Israel inside the green line, is a democratic country from which apartheid is on. This is Israel, the occupier of the territories, building the protective walls that bite into the Palestinian territory, harassing the residents at the checkpoints and leaving Gaza only to suffocate it, conducting an apartheid policy in the territories.
Demi’s camera accompanies Carter to all the confrontations, interviews, wholesale autographs in the bookstores, and apart from the astonishment caused by the vital wisdom found in the small details, it is startling to encounter the poor level of reasoning and the almost Talmudic assertiveness with which he is forced to deal with the delusions of his positions.
Prof. Alan Dershovich, an Israeli volunteer campaigner, threatens to take off from excitement in front of Demi’s camera. He is determined to find out if Carter said in the interview “this is the so-called holocaust.” If so, Carter is minced meat. With his head pressed against the computer screen and the transcript of the interview in question, Dershovich had to admit that Carter didn’t say that, and what he said was taken out of context. Rarely does the verbose jurist seem so drained of hot air.
The Israeli consul in Atlanta is prevented from admitting that the demon is not terrible and recites moldy positions that were put forward by Yekat 30 years ago. Despite her initial refusal to host him, Carter succeeds in changing the position of Brandeis Jewish University, when he waives the payment. In the heart of Jewish discrimination, the place where he was supposed to be plucked like a chicken for soup, Carter presents positions that cause intelligent students to reconsider their historical positions towards the conflict.
The tour to promote his book, Demi documented, was assigned by a girl from the publisher. Her need to show admiration for the elderly president whose mischievous twinkle in his eye has not gone out, causes great discomfort. Demi uses the long trips on rainy nights to let Carter write intimate memories, mainly About his late mother. When he talks about her, most of the time he wipes away a tear.
The news of Sadat’s assassination made Carter sob. Begin’s death does not appear in the film at all. The Israeli viewer will not like it, he never will, but despite the desire for fair objectivity, Carter’s heart inclination, as someone who lived the conflict for so many years and in such an intimate way, is towards the weak and the oppressed. Demi cuts between the severe attacks in Israeli cities and the Israeli harm to the Palestinians.
Jimmy Carter (Photo: Vertical)
The group of rabbis in Phoenix, Arizona, who are raising an outcry for the visit to the city, is persuaded by Carter in his conciliatory way to meet him. The meeting takes place under the condition that the words of the rabbis will not be heard and their faces will be hidden. What the viewer gets is Carter sitting in the middle of a group of people whose faces are hidden.
Carter was raised by a black nanny, who was his actual mother, and he loved her fiercely. Carter was elected as an unknown entity only because America felt obliged to take power from the Republicans and transfer it to a Democratic watch. In 1980, when he ran for a second term against Ronald Reagan, the great charmer, Ted Kennedy challenged Carter, a rare act against a sitting president, but failed. Reagan ran over Carter effortlessly.
The film betrays the fact that Carter imposed severe prohibitions on Demi regarding the disclosure of his home and privacy. His children do not appear at all. Mrs. Carter appears sparingly, even though this is a big love story. Moved through the Plains and as a governor is told too casually.
The Carter White House was populated by Good Old Boys, who believed in good times and all ate a lot of fried chicken. Fascinating and captivating in Demi’s film, the soundtrack recording session, which is a combination of country music and oriental music, including a curling singer in the background.
In Carter’s last gospel it is said that he lived before him. But don’t worry; This gesture will exhaust itself, and other voices will be quick to mention how hard and spartan his one term was.