How Jimmy Carter Lost His Job and Found His Mission: A Personal Remembrance

As the media has been blanketed with well-deserved praise for President Jimmy Carter’s noble life, it feels as though everything has now been said… but perhaps just not yet by everybody. While I didn’t serve in the Carter campaign or in his administration, for a dozen years—from 1989 to 2001—I worked with him on various projects after he left office. He wanted to expand the new Carter Center with business support, to work with other U.S. presidents and to support the Atlanta Olympics-related “Atlanta Project,” among other initiatives. This close view showed me how, after his election defeat, he improbably rebounded to be widely crowned as “America’s greatest ex-president.” It was not just his accomplishments but his unconventional earnest style which often worked—and sometimes backfired.

The glowing New York Times assessment regarding lessons for leaders movingly summarized Carter’s dedication to environmental conservation, Mideast peace efforts, and other such noble causes as well as the range of his post-Oval-Office commitments “using the residual star power of his office to help his successors and his country as a peacemaker, backstage diplomat, human rights champion, monitor of free elections and advocate for the homeless while finding time to write poetry and, by his own example, providing the best possible case for traditional religious values.” My vantage was that I saw a more personal side of his unconventional style beyond the glistening list of accomplishments showcased while in office and the chronicling after his exit so many have offered.

I was not a Carter supporter in the 1976 Democratic primary when he ran for the presidency, and many people at the university where I worked rallied around Senators Frank Church, Mo Udall, Jerry Brown, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, among others ultimately coalescing into a desperate “Anybody but Carter” movement. I came to be one of his biggest enthusiasts. There are wonderful people who knew Carter better and longer than I, such as Rev. Andrew Young, his UN ambassador, his centrist political ally Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, and his first national endorser, Joe Biden, who was then a prominent voice in the Senate. Young said on CNN, “Jimmy Carter loved everybody and made friends with everybody.” Biden declared, “All over the world people who never met him feel like they lost a friend.” Carter, he said, modeled a “life of principle, faith, and humility,” and his legacy should be “measured not by words but by his deeds. Forged peace, advanced global health, nutrition, human rights, election reforms, changing the life-prospects for millions.”

A one-term presidency is painful, especially as decisive a loss as Carter’s to Ronald Reagan. Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide with 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s 49, and 50.7 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent. Carter incurred massive campaign debt. A few years later, I asked Carter to join one of my first CEO Summits to discuss his plans for the future. We were instructed to be sensitive to Carter’s emotions as he worked on his rebound. At the opening dinner session, star-studded with major CEOs, largely Republican, in Atlanta’s newly opened flagship Ritz Buckhead, Carter sat on my left and Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus sat on my right. Marcus, a hugely generous, bold entrepreneur, was a revered friend of mine who sadly also passed away this year. He was also quite forthright in his politics and candid with his opinions. Just before I introduced Carter, as the entree plates were cleared, Marcus leaned towards Carter and asked loudly, “President Carter, why are you such an antisemite? Why do you hate Jews?” Marcus was convinced that Carter was too pro-Arab. Before I could figure out a diplomatic response, Carter stood up and said tersely, “Let’s go, Jeff.” I thought that meant he was so offended by Marcus that he was going to leave the event. Instead he elaborated, “Let’s start the group dialogue.”

I snagged a microphone for Carter. He confided that he did not enjoy looking backwards, but would on this night. He said that he did not initially appreciate the symbolic and subsequent cost to the U.S. of the takeover of the Iranian embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, where 50 Americans were held as hostages for 444 days—while being criticized for limited public explanation and failed rescue attempts. He also expressed frustration over his earlier July 15, 1979, candid speech on energy problems which extended to a discouraging view of America’s future, which was then labelled his “malaise speech.” He said these events cost him reelection.

At this point he quoted Marcus’ accusation, then asked if anyone in the room had ever been fired. Perhaps a quarter of the folks in the room raised their hands, and amazingly, Marcus was one. Marcus confessed that he and his cofounder Arthur Blank had been fired wrongly by a takeover artist Sanford C. Sigoloff, around the same time Carter had lost just a few years earlier. Sigoloff, who called himself “Ming the Merciless” after a cartoon character, had told Marcus that, at 50, he was too old to be in retail and that hardware stores were a dying category—disparaging Marcus’ integrity on the way out and firing 16,000 people.

Carter asked Marcus how it felt, and Marcus was fired up with anger about the injustice he felt as well as the sense of mission it provided. Marcus was determined to prove Sigoloff wrong and thankful for the support from investor Ken Langone which allowed him to get back on his feet. Carter replied, with tears welling up, “Bernie, that is how I felt, except, I wasn’t fired by a board manipulated by an activist, I was fired by the American people—in the spotlight and left with no purpose and my dream shattered and no financier to back me. But I am dedicated to waging peace.”

He explained his approach to getting mortal enemies to talk to each other in the Mideast; the new deal he had just struck with Merck CEO Roy Vagelos to donate ivermectin (Mectizan) to help eradicate river blindness, a parasite infection afflicting millions in Africa and Latin America; his success with DuPont CEO Irving Shapiro for the chemical industry to drive the Superfund cleanup of toxic waste sites, and global election reform. The Merck and DuPont CEOs were very proud. The formerly skeptical CEOs rose to their feet for a unanimous standing ovation and many—including UPS CEO Oz Nelson, a lifelong Republican—pledged to help Carter. Home Depot cofounder Arthur Blank signed on as a major donor.

Carter similarly built bridges across sectors in the aftermath of Atlanta winning their Olympic Games bid in 1994 for the summer of 1996. Carter believed that the spotlight of media attention and commercial activity over the two-year window of preparation could be directed toward “the rotting physical core of much of Atlanta’s substandard inner-city neighborhoods,” as he described it to me. He asked 20 of us with backgrounds in economic development to join him at a series of meetings at the Ritz Downtown to plan a multi-sector approach embracing political and religious leaders along with community activists but also reaching out to business leaders. Andrew Young strongly advised that business leaders, if productively engaged, can be the strongest forces for social justice, even more than the politicians and the clergy. Carter saw that as encouragement to not be beholden to existing public interest power figures, ruffling a few feathers. He enlisted the charming, wily chief operating officer of the Atlanta Olympics, AD Frazier, to help him round up business community support and asked me to join Frazier. Frazier, who also just recently passed away, was formerly a banker and later became CEO of asset manager Invesco, but earlier, in 1976, had produced the no-frills presidential inauguration Carter requested. Carter, famous for carrying his own bags, did not want any pageantry or grandiosity—unlike what we’ll be seeing in three weeks.

On other occasions, Carter could be a bewildering paradox, especially when it came to coalitions. On one hand, he not only had the political savvy to rise from a rural Plains, Georgia, peanut farm, to drive out a racist predecessor to lead Georgia as governor and become elected president of the United States—and also to win the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between Israel and Egypt. But on the other hand, he infuriated President George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War. In 1990, Bush had forged a formidable 42-country coalition to liberate Kuwait following Iraq’s unprovoked invasion. Carter, however, had written to the allies discouraging them from joining this military response, encouraging instead a negotiated solution. Carter confided to me over lunch, “I don’t know why Bush was so mad; I sent him a copy of the letter in advance.” He truly seemed bewildered that Bush saw this as an effort to undermine his own leadership in a global crisis.

Astoundingly, in 2000, Bush forgave Carter and invited him to join a cancer-fighting collaborative called the National Dialogue on Cancer. Bush’s son was running against Vice President Al Gore. George H. W. Bush’s initiative to pull together all the cancer-fighting forces from the National Cancer Institute, the EPA, and the CDC to the American Cancer Society, major pharmaceutical firms, the Susan B. Komen Foundation, the Leukemia Foundation, oncological nurses, survivor groups, and so on, might lead to some alignment between these rivalrous advocates fighting for funding on research, prevention, diagnosis, informed treatment, access. The word went out from some Gore operatives that if this succeeded, it would be beneficial to the candidacy of Bush’s son. The National Cancer Institute, the EPA, and the CDC threatened to withdraw if we didn’t secure a Democrat co-chair. Instead of being offended, Bush—whose efforts were strongly non-partisan in this cause—magnanimously invited Carter to join him.

At the last hour Carter insisted that Bush personally call him to ask him to be the chair with Bush serving as Vice Chair. Bush was willing to make that sacrifice but I strongly advised against it, as did the leadership of the American Cancer Society, and instead we moved on from Carter to invite Senator Barbara Boxer to be the co-chair to ensure successful bipartisan leadership. Part of this insistence was driven by Carter’s fixation on cancer. His father, sister and brother had died of pancreatic cancer and his mother, of breast cancer. He once told me that he had frequent regular biopsies throughout his adult life, constantly fearing he would miss a diagnosis until it was too late. He never imagined that he’d live to 100.

It was President Bill Clinton who realized how to best leverage Carter’s deep anti-war moral convictions. I had conversations with Clinton, Carter, Carter’s fellow Georgian Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell in 1994 while researching a New York Times essay on Clinton’s response to the military junta which had overthrown Haiti’s democratically-elected government. Despite certain cabinet members eagerness to invade Haiti, roughly 70 percent of the American public and most of Congress was opposed to a military invasion. Clinton wisely leveraged Carter’s determined, hands-on style, antiwar sentiment and readiness to speak his mind.

On Sept. 15, Clinton proclaimed that all peaceful channels had been explored for resolving the Haiti problem and that invasion was imminent. The very next day, he dispatched Jimmy Carter, Sam Nunn and Colin Powell on a bold mission to deal directly with the Haitian junta leaders. Initially, the junta leaders were impressed by the stature of this delegation, but as things stalled, it appeared that Clinton dispatched fighter jets to Haiti as Carter, Nunn and Powell were whisked out—seemingly leaving the chief Carter staffer Robert Pastor behind. Seeing the exit of the VIPs, Pastor convinced the Haitian leaders to accept the deal Carter had negotiated because they were about to attacked by the U.S. otherwise. The parallel lines of approach succeeded with Carter’s vision prevailing and Clinton triumphant.

The case for resilience is clear. Carter did not look backwards, relitigating defeat, but instead defined an inspiring future mission for himself. Always fearing he had limited time, he designed the Carter Center to be not just a presidential library for historic reflection but a fulcrum for social change in nutrition, the advancement of democracy, and other noble causes. The Carter Center projected impressive images of patriotism and an unmistakable presidential aura, but the former president himself did not mind rolling up his sleeves and returning to become one of the crowd, teaching Sunday school, building homes for the needy and assuming causes with no self-enrichment. When he came to my university classrooms, he had no agenda and listened intently to each student, eager to learn of their concerns. But when it came to leveraging power for large-scale social impact, the humility dissipated.

He believed in titles, symbolic stature, executive discretion, and a righteous purpose with an uncommon readiness to speak out on societal matters regardless of his successors’ agendas. Harry Truman famously said critically of his successor Dwight Eisenhower, “This isn’t the Army. Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” A proud man, Carter did not judge his peers who chose different paths or who had different styles. He told me that President Gerald Ford was one of his great friends even though Ford preferred roles in corporate board rooms and business forums over community activism and social causes. The flood of late-night epitaphs respectfully flatters his image as a humble servant but doesn’t explain the complexity of his character.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and the Lester Crown Professor of Management Practice at the Yale School of Management. He has published over 100 scholarly journals and seven books on leadership and governance. He won last year’s Distinguished Sclar Practitioner Award the Academy of Management, Greatest Impact on Corporate Boards award last year by Corporate Board Member Magazine, and Professor of the Year by Poest & Quants Magazine. He has informally advised five US presidents across parties and helped lead economic development in four states.