Even in his twilight, Jimmy Carter is still just being himself

Jimmy Carter is once again beating the odds.

Seven months into hospice care, the former president is celebrating his 99th birthday with the same style that characterized his time in the Oval Office. I spoke with him in my last long interview to reflect on our shared time in the White House, when I was one of his speechwriters, and on the lasting impacts of his presidency, more than four decades after his term ended.

As a young writer from Philadelphia not long out of Holy Cross, I remained in awe of the White House. My most vivid memory of those days is of walking through the West Wing in the predawn hours with a speech draft I had spent much of the night trying to get right. I still recall the aroma of coffee already brewing and realizing that the only person up that early was Jimmy Carter. He was still the farmer, still the fellow who gets up early to do his job alone. Besides, he liked it when he could think and write by himself.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

The first thing Carter said in his inaugural address in 1977 was to offer that personal tribute to his predecessor, Gerald Ford. Next, he and Rosalynn got out of the limousine to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and greet the inaugural day throngs. He had gotten the idea from William Proxmire, the longtime Democratic senator from Wisconsin who was a physical fitness buff.

“I thought it was time for animosity and hatred in our country’s politics to be over.”

“I told the Secret Service what I was gonna do,” he told me with pride. “I didn’t ask their permission. I think it broke the ice. It showed that I trusted the American people, that I thought it was time for animosity and hatred in our country’s politics to be over.”

On his first day in the Oval Office, Carter was to pardon those who had gone to Canada to avoid the draft.

“I just thought it was time to get that bad episode in America’s history out of the way and not to have to fight about it again,” he said.

That was the note on which he began his presidency. As with Watergate and Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, he didn’t want to kick the problem of the perpetual conflicts in the Middle East once again down the road. He wanted it over and done with.

“Nobody ever asked me, for instance, to try to bring peace between Israel and Egypt,” he told me all those decades after his 1978 Camp David meetings that led to a peace treaty between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

The inspiration, Carter said, came from Sunday school. “It was just an idea that I had because I taught half the time in the Old Testament and half the time in the New Testament,” he recalled. “I decided to take on the task which nobody asked me to do, of bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, and I was ultimately successful.”

What those three gutsy men achieved has met the test of time. Before those 13 days at Camp David in Maryland, Egypt had led four wars against Israel — 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Since then, there have been none.

Next came the Panama Canal Treaty. It was another case of avoiding future problems. Getting the treaty approved by two-thirds of the Senate, Carter said, was even “more difficult than getting elected president.” Holding on to the canal could well have meant years of fighting hemispheric terrorism.

From the 1976 victory to every footstep down Pennsylvania Avenue to his emphasis on human rights with Russia, it was the former Georgia governor himself, along with his wife, Rosalynn, driving the stagecoach.

But ultimately, Jimmy Carter’s campaign shaped his presidency. The Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. Vietnam and Watergate had added to the sense of turmoil, and all of it a prelude to what we face today.

Unlike Donald Trump, who’s running for president a third time trying to exploit the horrors, Carter was bent on ending them.

He had campaigned and governed as a candidate of peace. He praised his successor, granted pardons to the Vietnam draft resisters, brought Egypt and Israel together, and avoided an endless, costly war over the Panama Canal.

When American hostages were taken by Iran in 1979, he could have threatened war. He ended up losing the presidency because an armed conflict would have simply made matters worse. He believed it would undoubtedly have cost the lives of the 52 American hostages.

Carter made the decisions himself. On Oct. 1, he will be 99 years old. Rosalynn is 96.

Having worked for him as a speechwriter, covered him in his life post-presidency, I asked him what had driven him all these years.

“You’re a writer, and you say that nobody had asked you to do it,” he replied. “Well, I just thought it was the best thing for me to be me, to be the best I could with the life that I had.”

Chris Matthews worked all four years in the Carter White House, the last two as a presidential speechwriter. He later covered Carter as a journalist for the San Francisco Examiner and MSNBC.