"The Riddle of Jimmy Carter," Nicholas Dawidoff

Rolling Stone has a lengthy piece on former president Jimmy Carter. (It's also available in a print-friendly format, but that version lacks any credit for Dawidoff. Odd.)

Modern presidents are fascinating creatures because it takes such uncommon determination to attain office, and even more uncommon skill to do well once there. Of course, "doing well" is in the eyes of the beholder, and Carter more than most presidents has suffered from a perception that he meant well but didn't do well in office.

I wasn't old enough to vote when Carter achieved the Oval Office. I was old enough to read, though, and I remember the many articles in that most populist (and admittedly, often fearmongering) of magazines, Readers Digest, that warned of the dangers that surrounded us. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a favorite topic, as was the energy crisis (it had expanded beyond the original "gas crisis" by then) due to inevitable fossil fuel depletion. There were even the first articles I remember about global warming. (Then there were the curious "I am Joe's [name of organ]" pieces -- but I digress.)

The adult world toward which my generation was hurtling seemed full of troubles that no one was addressing -- until Carter came along.

I was definitely in the minority in cheering the man when he tried to wean the country off fossil fuels. It was an ambitious goal, and one that would take decades, that much I knew. What I didn't know was that the American voter has no taste for self-abnegation or long-term thinking. Carter was booted out of office in a historic landslide for Reagan, and Carter's small but farsighted steps toward making an energy-independent future for ourselves were all but entirely undone by his successor (one of many reasons I have nothing but contempt for the whitewashing of Reagan's reputation by disingenuous or genuinely misinformed people).

Dawidoff's piece makes it clear that Jimmy Carter is still a riddle, even to longtime friends. He is full of demonstrable contradictions, and is not above reimagining and romanticizing his past like any other politician. This comes as an unwelcome surprise to those of us who believed that he was different from our other presidents in that he always told us the truth, no matter how much it hurt us (or him). As Dawidoff explains:

No one can become president without a tremendous aptitude for politics, and Carter has always been an enormously political man. Perhaps because his own faith and virtue have always been such vital political attributes, he just doesn't like us to think so.

Yet for a politician, Carter could be surprisingly tone-deaf. Perhaps that has to do with his conviction that the facts trump everything.

"He's an engineer," says Andrew Young, whose loyal support of Carter's political career led the new president to appoint him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the first African-American to hold the job. "Engineers will tell you exactly how to build a bridge, but they can't seem to explain why you need this bridge."

All in all, this is a fascinating attempt to make sense of a man few understand, even today.