An Unlucky President, and a Lucky Man

Life is unfair, as a Democratic president once put it. That was John F. Kennedy, at a press conference early in his term.

Jimmy Carter did not go through as extreme a range of the blessings and cruelties of fate as did Kennedy and his family. But I think Carter’s long years in the public eye highlighted a theme of most lives, public and private: the tension between what we plan and what happens. Between the luck that people can make for themselves and the blind chance they cannot foresee or control.

In the decades of weekly Bible classes he led in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter must have covered Proverbs 19:21. One contemporary translation of that verse renders it as: “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Not everything in his life happened the way Jimmy Carter proposed or preferred. But he made the very most of the years that God and the fates granted him.

Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who