Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (26 page)

Jimmy Carter

In 1963 Jimmy Carter was a forty-year-old Georgia state senator and farmer. Having inherited his father’s debt-ridden farm, he had to live in public housing while he studied agriculture at public libraries. He became governor of Georgia in 1971 and president of the United States in 1977. His post-presidency years, widely considered a model of humanitarianism and public service, have garnered him countless awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

K
ennedy was popular in Georgia. In fact, when I was first campaigning in Massachusetts, I was asked, “Why do you think you’re going get the votes in Massachusetts?” I pointed out that John Kennedy got a bigger margin of victory in Georgia than he did in Massachusetts when he ran for president, so he’d been pretty popular in Georgia except for some people who considered the race issue most important. Of course John Kennedy played a strong role in bringing about equality between the races, and that was not popular with a small fringe of people in Georgia. But I think he was popular.

In our family he was perhaps the most popular president in my lifetime—more than FDR. My father supported FDR in 1932, but he never voted for him again because he was basically opposed to government intrusion in private affairs; plus he was a farmer. When Roosevelt put a program into effect that required people to plough up cotton and peanuts, kill pigs, and initiate daylight saving time, my father felt that was an unwarranted intrusion. My daddy was a Libertarian more than a Democrat in those days, but my mother, I think, privately voted for Franklin Roosevelt because of Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t know for sure about that, but I think there was no doubt that before the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson
election, Georgia was overwhelmingly favorable toward Democrats, including John Kennedy.

I had been quite interested in politics, even when I was in the Navy, and when I resigned from the Navy to come home to work on the farm—I was a farmer for sixteen or seventeen years, growing mostly peanuts, cotton, and corn—John Kennedy was very important to me. My mother was a very strong supporter of the Kennedys. She supported Robert Kennedy also, when he ran for president.

I was working in my warehouse on the day John Kennedy was shot. I was on a tractor, as a matter of fact, hauling grain and peanuts back and forth. I unhooked my tractor from a trailer to weigh it and went into my warehouse where farmers were. Some of them were listening to the radio and told me that the president had just been shot. I was startled and grieved. In a few minutes the news came across—I think Walter Cronkite said it—that the president was no longer living. I went outside on the private porch and cried for a while. It was the first time I had really wept for more than ten years. The last time I had wept before that was when my father died. John Kennedy’s loss was a great personal blow to me, and I grieved along with the overwhelming portion of people in my own community and throughout the South. Later I had a chance, as president, to speak at the dedication of his library.

I grew up in a segregated society. I lived in Orchard, Georgia, which is west of Plains, just a small community. We were surrounded by about 215 African Americans, so all my playmates, all the people with whom I grew up, were African Americans, and they made a heavy and beneficial impact on my life. I saw at an early stage, particularly because of my mother being
a registered nurse and dealing with these families, the devastating impact of racial segregation, which at that time was supported by the Supreme Court, Congress, the American Bar Association, the churches, and everybody else, including the whole congressional delegation in Georgia and of other states as well. I saw the devastating, adverse impact of that very misguided thing that had lasted almost a hundred years after the Civil War, and I saw that John Kennedy and Robert were two of the people who were condemning it, maybe sometimes tentatively but effectively.

When he died, I didn’t know how John Kennedy’s replacement, Lyndon Johnson, would act, but he turned out to be a real hero. It was Johnson who actually put into effect the civil rights acts that have transformed our country, following in the footsteps of the Kennedys. I don’t believe that John Kennedy, even in a second term, would’ve been able to get the civil rights acts passed that Lyndon Johnson did, because it was a narrow margin when Johnson finally got Congress to agree. But his inimitable way to marshal the decisions of Congress to accommodate his desires was really what made it possible for us to get the civil rights acts passed. Maybe to some degree, it benefited from the aftermath of the assassination of John Kennedy. I think the sorrow and appreciation that went into the political environment because of John Kennedy’s death did help Lyndon Johnson put into effect the civil rights acts.

I had never thought about running for public office for those fifteen or sixteen years while I was farming, but I was always affected beneficially by the idealism and innovations John Kennedy brought to the presidency. He was the first president born in this century. He was young and vigorous, dynamic and eloquent. He was a Navy veteran, as I was, and as Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford were; we were all Navy veterans. He brought a good image and also good accomplishments to the White House. Those were the key elements that affected me: the Kennedys’ idealism and eloquence, Lyndon Johnson’s persuasiveness on Congress, and the need I felt to see racial segregation end in the South and throughout the nation.

That said, the tinge of the Vietnam War and the attempted assassinations, the anti-Cuban factor, and the Bay of Pigs disaster provide some remnants of negative memory of John Kennedy. But I think they’ve faded into relative secondary importance [when measured against] the idealism, vivacity, and progressiveness he brought, at least in my mind and, I think, in the general public’s. There’s a general feeling of good and gratitude toward John Kennedy.

Both Kennedy’s and Johnson’s administrations provided me not only with ideas but also with personnel. My secretary of defense, Harold Brown, has just written a book that covers a good deal about what he learned in direct meetings with John Kennedy on the nuclear issue, the Cold War with Russia, and the development of our nuclear arsenal. A lot of those top personnel who worked with Kennedy did work for me in the White House. I walked in his footsteps like I walked in the footsteps of all previous presidents in a way. But what John Kennedy brought to the White House has really not been duplicated, replicated, or even felt an element of competition. There’s still that vivacity and that change from one generation to another, which really has not existed since that time.

The most direct effect of John Kennedy’s administration was the Peace Corps. My mother, who worshipped John and Bobby Kennedy, went into the Peace Corps largely because of her affection for them. She was still in the Peace Corps when she was seventy years old, serving in India. Later, my oldest grandson, Jason Carter, my mother’s great-great grandson, fulfilled that position as a Peace Corps volunteer. He served in the Peace Corps in South Africa. So both my mother and my oldest grandson have served in the Peace Corps, partially honoring the legacy of John Kennedy.

One thing we should remember is to address the key issues of our nation truthfully and forthrightly, which I believe he did. In my opinion, there is a legacy of John Kennedy that emphasizes human rights and peace. Our country has gone backward tremendously in the aftermath of 9/11 in honoring the basic premises of human rights. There are thirty paragraphs in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United States is now violating ten of those premises. That would be inimical to what John Kennedy stood for.

Since the Second World War, the United States has been involved in conflict after conflict. John Kennedy was very heavily affected—as was I—by the need to avoid war because of a threat of a nuclear conflagration that would have destroyed the earth if we had gone to war with the Soviet Union. During the Cold War years, there was a great reticence to [get involved in] regional conflicts that could’ve led to a war between the two super powers. That was particularly on my mind when I saw the fighting between Israel and Egypt bring about a nuclear alert system when Nixon was in office. I tried to avoid that process by bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, and I think John Kennedy had that same feeling of foreboding that a regional war could erupt into a super power conflagration that would’ve brought a nuclear holocaust.

Bill Clinton

In 1963 seventeen-year-old Bill Clinton was the Hot Springs High School delegate to Boys State, where he was elected Arkansas’s delegate to Boys Nation. While attending Boys Nation in Washington, DC, Clinton shook hands with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. A photograph of that meeting, just four months before JFK was assassinated, remains one of President Clinton’s proudest possessions. Having attended Georgetown and then Oxford, he won the Arkansas governorship in 1978 and, after a later term as governor, the US presidency in 1992 for two terms. Since leaving the White House he has devoted himself to public speaking and humanitarian work through his philanthropic foundation. His Clinton Global Initiative has helped improve the lives of more than four hundred million people around the world.

I
doubt if he would have run without it [his father’s wealth and drive], and he probably wouldn’t have run if his brother—who by all accounts was a truly exceptional man—hadn’t been killed in World War II. But I think that by the time he ran he was quite a gifted politician who was smart enough, able enough, and knew enough to get himself elected president. And in the new era, when primaries prevailed, he turned out to be quite effective in those primaries.

1960 was the second presidential election I followed. We got a television shortly before the 1956 election. I was really involved. I lived in a Republican county, and when the election was going on, my ninth grade English teacher let us debate the election every day. I was virtually the only one taking Kennedy’s side. I was debating with my best friend, who came from a Republican family, who said, “Nixon has more experience, and he isn’t bad on civil rights,” which was true at the time. I said the country was
sluggish; we needed new leadership. It was very interesting to me, how it all played out. It was my first real obsessive following of politics day to day.

Photograph © Bettmann / CORBIS

For me what was interesting was that Kennedy came from a wealthy family, whose father was obviously much more conservative than he was. He was pro–civil rights, and he wanted an economy that worked for everybody. He seemed genuinely concerned about other people, and he was young and vigorous. You just had the feeling that if he got the job he’d do something with it, and I think he did.

The people he appointed clearly had deep convictions about civil rights. If you look at Burke Marshall, John Doar, and all those people in the Justice Department, they weren’t playing games. They were serious. It may have been a political masterstroke when he called Coretta King when Martin Luther King was jailed. It certainly meant a lot to me and other Southerners who were pro–civil rights.

But it’s important not to judge him now by the standards and the reality that prevailed then. He made a beginning, and some important things happened while he was president and before he was assassinated. President Johnson of course did much more and maybe felt it more because of his own upbringing. But it was made possible because Kennedy won that election and started the ball rolling.

He showed a concern for people who were dispossessed around the world. That’s what the Alliance for Progress was about. It’s what the Peace Corps was about—though I think his feelings were maybe not as rooted
in his own experience as President Johnson’s were. He was putting his toe in. He knew how much Harry Truman had angered the South while integrating the military and any number of other things, and we had Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party in 1948. He could see, like anybody who had eyes then, that there would be a price to pay. Remember, just a few years later, when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he said he had created a generation in which the Democrats wouldn’t win the South. It turned out to be painfully true.

When I go back to Georgetown, if I’m taking people there who are not familiar with it, I take them by the house and show them the stoop where he announced Bobby [as his attorney general] and said he thought Bobby ought to have a little experience before he went into private legal practice. It was a great line. But Bobby Kennedy had been counsel to the McClellan Committee, and he turned out to be one of finest attorneys general this country ever had.

I think he wanted Bobby because he knew Bobby would always have his back. I think you
should
want an attorney general who’ll tell you the truth about the law and not let you do something illegal but also understands that the presidency as an institution needs to be protected.

They [the press] liked him. I think they identified with him. It was something new, and as it turned out, it wasn’t only something new—there was substance there. At that time we were close enough to World War II, close enough to Korea—we were in the bulge of the Cold War—that the press knew the stakes were high, and they were a little more reluctant to troll the White House and play the “get-the-president” game. I think that happened more after Watergate happened and they became disillusioned.

We knew he was going to address us and all the Boys Nation people. There were a hundred of us, standing in the Rose Garden. We were lined up in alphabetical order, so I was near the front. I was bigger than everybody standing around me, and when it was obvious that he was going to come
down and shake hands—I didn’t know whether he’d shake hands with everybody—I got up there and made sure I shook hands with him.

It made me feel good about my country, not just him: the idea that somebody like me, who came from a family without any money or political connections, could actually be in the Rose Garden shaking hands with the president. It’s sort of like: That’s the way a democracy
ought to work
. People ought to be able to have access to their leaders, and we ought to have leaders who aren’t afraid of us. I was always so afraid after Kennedy got shot—and we did a much better job with security later on—that we would just keep pushing our leaders away from the people. He mingled with us that day and thanked us because we voted for a civil rights plank that the Senate wouldn’t adopt. He knew there were four Southerners, including me, who voted for it, and he was very glad about that. It was really touching, the whole thing, and it made a real impression on me.

One of the things I did after I became president was that every year I could be in Washington when Boys Nation was there, I had them come [to the White House], Girls Nation as well, and I always took pictures with all of them. I was glad I got to shake hands with Kennedy; probably only twenty or thirty of the one hundred did, and so I always made sure we did that. The first time we did it, Al Gore told them, “You might want to make sure you get this picture. It might come in handy someday.” It was really funny, but it was a moment in the life of a kid that I’ll never forget. I was grateful to him and was grateful to my country.

I wanted to go into politics by then. I figured the best I could ever do was to be a senator, and I wanted to be a good one if I ever had a chance to run. Everybody wants to say they knew they were going run for president. I didn’t. But I loved politics, and I believed in civil rights and in Kennedy’s economic policy, which was moving people out of poverty. I thought the purpose of politics was to change other people’s lives, and that’s what he was trying to do. So that’s what I was full of that day. I actually got to meet this guy I had supported, who was young and vigorous and was
actually getting things done. I was just so proud to be an American that day. It made me believe in my country, believe in democracy. I was a true believer in everything that was best about America—and the fact that the president would come down there and shake hands with us made me think I was lucky to be an American.

I was in my calculus class, my fourth-period advanced math class. I was a senior in high school. It was right after lunch that I heard. My teacher, Doyle Coe, was the assistant principal, and he was called to the phone. He came in totally ashen-faced and told us the president had been shot. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was heartbroken. I was hoping he would live. We didn’t know in the beginning whether he was dead. I just remember being totally bereft. There was a lot of hatred of Kennedy in the South over civil rights. The people who hated him, the right-wingers in the South, didn’t think he was being a pansy on civil rights.

I remember walking back to our main school building, and all these students were there. This girl who was in the band with me—I liked her, liked her whole family—said, “Maybe it will work out well for the country.” I knew they were much more conservative than I was, but I was just appalled. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would kill him. I didn’t know anything then about what later came out with all the conspiracy theories about Cuba and the Mafia and all the stuff I read.

I just thought it was a tragedy for the country, because we seemed to be moving in the right direction. We were taking on issues that we hadn’t taken on in a long time. I thought we were in good shape at home and around the world. For all the “best and the brightest” criticism he got, I thought he was pretty shrewd in making judgments about when not to take other people’s advice. I thought the way he maneuvered through the Cuban Missile Crisis indicated that. I’m not sure he would have been as vulnerable to the people who said we just had to keep building up, and building up, and building up, and throwing good people after good people and good money after bad in Vietnam. I’m just not sure he would have. We’ll never know, but I just was bereft. I felt that he was at the helm doing well, and I liked Lyndon Johnson.