I stood at the front of the press corps on the White House lawn on Oct. 6, 1979, as President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter emerged from the front door to greet Pope John Paul II, who had come calling. My mind flashed back to the presidential race in 1960 when evangelicals, especially Southern Baptists, were hysterically opposing the election of John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, because they feared he would be too heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic pope in Rome — at that time the revolutionary Pope John XXIII.
Carter was a Southern Baptist who dared to do what John Kennedy could not. Kennedy had dodged the Baptist bullet to his political ambitions by meeting during his presidential campaign in Houston’s Rice Hotel with the nation’s Southern Baptist leadership and promising he would be steadfast in upholding the long American tradition of separation of church and state.
A few weeks prior to that meeting, John and Jacqueline Kennedy had traveled to Oklahoma City, the heart of the opposition, to hold a rally in a shopping center parking lot where Kennedy pled for Oklahoma support — “I need Oklahoma and Oklahoma needs me,” he said at the time, his words echoing in my mind for decades afterward.
Ironically, years later my office at the Houston Chronicle looked out on the Rice Hotel and the same room where Kennedy had met with his Baptist opposition leaders. The Kennedy Oklahoma City rally also had been held about a mile from my growing-up home and I was a goggled-eyed teenager watching the glamorous couple arrive in a convertible and waving enthusiastically at the crowd.
Six days earlier in 1979, Rosalynn Carter had set the stage for the historic meeting with the pope at the White House. She flew to Boston to greet John Paul when his plane landed at Logan Airport and welcomed him publicly to the United States of America. Tipping their hats to the previous controversy, the White House insisted that her plane not land until the pope’s plane was on the ground in Boston — political theater reminiscent of President Harry S. Truman’s confrontation on Wake Island in the Pacific with resistant Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
We in John Paul’s traveling press entourage on his first tour of the United States jokingly paraphrased the political drama of Pope Leo III’s crowning of Charlemagne, “He (or she) who lands last is greater than he (or she) who lands first.”
These and other memories of encounters with the Carters are flooding my mind in the wake of President Carter’s death in Plains, Ga., at age 100.
I first met President Carter in June 1974 when he was governor of Georgia and attended a Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas that I was covering as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Chronicle. He stayed in the room next door to mine at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Dallas. His bodyguard, a Georgia state trooper, stayed in the room on the opposite side.
Several times that week I encountered Gov. Carter in the hallway outside our rooms with the state trooper trailing a few steps behind him.
“On each encounter he greeted me warmly by name with a giant smile and friendly tone.”
“One of the friendliest people I’ve ever met,” I told friends later. On each encounter he greeted me warmly by name with a giant smile and friendly tone.
He also hung around the convention press room, something aspiring politicians at the time often did at large religious gatherings. In the press room, he would engage me in small talk with that same Southern-style friendliness and conversation. When he opted to hold a press conference, I publicly asked him if he was jockeying to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1976. No one at that time could have imagined he would emerge as the presidential nominee and later in November 1976 as the new president-elect who would defeat incumbent unelected President Gerald R. Ford.
Ironically, Ford in June 1974 was the speaker at a Friday morning meeting at the Hilton Hotel where Carter and I were staying. Carter was president of the SBC ‘s Brotherhood Commission at the time and the master of ceremonies for the event and the one who introduced Ford, then the vice president to President Richard Nixon. I encountered Carter in the hallway that morning and rode the elevator with him as we both headed to the breakfast. He was in a particularly chatty mood.
Regrettably, I was in a big hurry to get a front-row seat so I could see and hear Vice President Ford speak and maybe grab a quick handshake and mini-interview — and paid little attention to Carter’s banter that morning. For years afterward I vividly recalled mistakenly thinking, “He’s only the governor of Georgia and I don’t have time for him right now, since I’m on the way to see the vice president of the United States.”
Carter was approachable, friendly, decent, honorable and all the other adjectives that made him stand out in politicized Washington. These attributes, along with being the best former president the country has ever had, will be his epitaph. His attitude and charitable work after leaving the White House were truly remarkable and commendable. May he rest in peace.
Louis Moore is a veteran religion writer who from 1972 to 1986 served as religion editor of the Houston Chronicle. He later held several posts in Southern Baptist entities, including associate vice president for communications at the SBC International Mission Board. He and his wife, Kay, now live in Garland, Texas, where they are deeply involved in historical preservation work.
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