[Pages H76-H77]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

LIFE AND LEGACY OF PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER

(Ms. KAPTUR asked and was given permission to address the House for 1
minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, today our Nation paid tribute to the life
and works of President Jimmy ``James'' Earl Carter here in the Nation's
Capital. The ceremony was beautiful, appropriate, uplifting, and
hopeful.
I had the privilege of serving him during his term in the White
House, and I can attest to the man he was: faithful, honorable,
patriotic, measured, disciplined, and pensive, with the most genial,
broad smile that came from growing up in a real community of family and
friends.
He was a selfless, true American patriot. He was a graduate of the
Naval Academy in the top 10 percent of his class. He was a dear friend
of our Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Father of our Nuclear Navy who
selected him among the best of individuals in our Nation.
The President founded the Department of Energy and the U.S.
Department of Education because he wanted to help with America's future
security. I shall never forget the hope we all felt witnessing history
when President Carter negotiated the historic peace treaty between
Israel and Egypt with Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat standing next to
him on the lawn of the White House.
Finally, his brilliant national security team lead by Zbigniew
Brzezinski that set in place the dominoes that would ultimately result
in the collapse of the Soviet Union starting in Poland in 1989 and then
1991, the entire USSR, giving millions of people a chance to have
liberty for the first time in 100 years or more.
Though he served just one term, the travails of that period blurred
his extraordinary accomplishments. His historic accomplishments,
subsequent to his elected service when he returned home, defined what a
noble private citizen who never stops giving can do for his nation and
world. President Jimmy Carter set a standard for generations to come.
As time passes, he will shine forth in history as one of the rare, most
honorable Presidents. He faced severe political trials and
tribulations, yet gave everything he had to his family, our nation, and
its future.
I believe that President Carter will go down in history like
President Truman, an honest man, who, when he finished his service,
went back home to a place called Plains, Georgia, where he and
Rosalynn, his wife, and family lived out their years in a brick home
that they built themselves when they were first married.
He was not interested in money. He was not interested in power. He
was interested in preserving this republic and strengthening it. His
life is a lesson to all.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to place in the Record an
article titled: ``How Jimmy Carter's disdain for D.C. politics changed
Washington.''
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bresnahan). Is there objection to the
request of the gentlewoman from Ohio?
There was no objection.

How Jimmy Carter's Disdain for D.C. Politics Changed Washington

In a cynical time, Jimmy Carter spurned the establishment
and attracted a generation of idealists.

(By Marc Fisher)

Marcy Kaptur was on the streets of Chicago's Near Northwest
section, fending off real estate developers and a mayor who
aimed to raze a struggling neighborhood.

[[Page H77]]

Alexis Herman had been a social worker with Catholic
Charities, trying to find jobs for poor people at a shipyard
in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
Mary Elizabeth King was running a group designed to boost
the paltry number of women in the top ranks of the federal
government. And Joan Claybrook was one of Ralph Nader's
Raiders, the cadre of lawyers and researchers around the
country pushing for consumer protections.
In 1977, they and a few hundred idealistic, young, smart
activists like them came to Washington to join Jimmy Carter's
new administration--an injection of outsiders into a White
House that took pride in breaking out from the standard D.C.
playbook. Suddenly, the government was salted with battalions
of aides and agency chiefs who came not from Capitol Hill
jobs or lobbying firms, but from the anti-Vietnam War and
civil rights movements, environmentalist and feminist groups,
and an array of other nonprofits.
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and Richard M.
Nixon's disgracing of the White House, the country seemed
cynical about government and all institutions of power. Along
came Carter, the Democratic governor of Georgia who was
allergic to lobbyists, disdainful of Washington's powerful
social networks and adamant that government could be a force
for good.
His idealistic aims didn't always produce results, and
Carter, who died Dec. 29 at 100 years old, had to learn the
hard way that in Washington, massaging people could be as
important as having the facts on your side. But Carter's
roster of ex-activists changed the face of government for his
four years in office and, in some ways, for decades to come.
``All those other administrations, people go to dinner
parties for 30 years and then get their big government job,''
said King, a veteran civil rights activist who had worked on
anti-poverty programs in Georgia before being hired as
Carter's deputy director of ACTION, the agency that ran
volunteer programs such as the Peace Corps and VISTA.
``With Carter, people who viewed themselves as agents of
social change just sensed that he was a completely different
animal,'' she said. ``The Carters were not themselves
movement people; they didn't go to demonstrations. But they
were tuned in to the injustices the movement was fighting.''
Carter also saw in the activists a source of the knowledge
that he valued more than political savvy.
``He's the engineer who became president,'' said Kai Bird,
author of a recent biography, ``The Outlier: The Unfinished
Presidency of Jimmy Carter.'' ``He valued expertise. He hired
dozens of Ralph Nader acolytes because of their expertise on
policy and their emphasis on making things work.''
Carter ``brought to Washington an idealism about clean
government and about making government work,'' said Stuart
Eizenstat, who as a young lawyer ran the new president's
domestic policy shop. ``It wasn't an express desire to have
people without Washington experience, but we were really
admonished by Carter to open up and bring in new people, and
to include women, Blacks and Hispanics--a young, bright,
diverse staff. We really didn't want just an older group from
the Hill.''
For Kaptur, the transition at age 30 from inner-city
Chicago urban planner and activist to White House urban
policy adviser grew out of a spiritual foundation and
political outlook she shared with Carter. Both had a faith-
based desire to push back against developers and big-city
politicians and instead invest in grassroots housing and jobs
programs in struggling urban neighborhoods.
Carter's interest in investing in Black neighborhoods
emerged from his Christianity and his childhood in a
majority-Black town in Georgia; Kaptur had worked for a
Catholic priest who ministered to poor urban communities and
pushed banks to finance projects in low-income areas.
``I was certainly someone who came into the administration
from a very different place,'' said Kaptur, who has been a
Democratic congresswoman from Ohio for four decades--a path
she said ``I could not have imagined if Carter hadn't seen me
as the kind of person he wanted in government. To this day,
every time I gavel my committee into session, I think,
`President Carter, this is for you.' ''
But Kaptur, like other Carter alumni, said the president's
good intentions often fell short of full achievement because
``he was so preoccupied with the Arab oil embargo and the
Iran hostage crisis. And I often felt like such a failure
because again and again, the voice of the people got
overwhelmed by the big-money interests.''
Although administration alumni argue that Carter achieved
far more than his failure to win reelection and his mediocre
popularity ratings in the polls indicate, they concede that
his disconnect with the Washington establishment--including
his preference for outsiders--hindered his performance.
``The chemistry was never there,'' said Eizenstat, who
wrote a history of the administration, ``President Carter:
The White House Years.'' ``Carter could never satisfy the
liberal wing of the party. He ran as an outsider, but when
you're president, you're the ultimate insider.
``He tried to send a message by carrying his own luggage.
He banned `Hail to the Chief' for the first month, until we
convinced him there's a certain majesty to the presidency.
But the staff believed in him--young, very idealistic people
who worked 24/7 and got a lot done. They were crushed by his
defeat.''
Four years after Carter arrived as the clean, soft-spoken
antidote to Nixon's dark cynicism, he was swept out of office
by another Washington outsider, Ronald Reagan, who captivated
Americans with the opposite promise: to get government out of
people's lives and dismantle many of the initiatives Carter
had fought for.
But although the rhetoric of limited government became a
powerful trope in the post-Carter era, the generation of
idealistic liberals who served in his administration remained
an influential presence in Washington, serving for decades as
the intellectual and political engine of much of Democratic
politics.
``Maybe we were really hired as understudies,'' Kaptur
said, ``and now, through fate, we can really do something for
our country.''
During and after his presidency, Carter was widely
criticized by historians and politicians for taking his
outsider approach too far and alienating establishment
figures who could have helped him achieve more of his goals.
It's true that ``there was a cultural disconnect'' between
Carter and the Capitol Hill veterans, lobbyists and
Washington lawyers who view themselves as the country's
permanent power structure, Bird said.
``Carter had no experience with the Georgetown set,'' he
said. ``He more than once turned down invitations from
Katharine Graham,'' then the publisher of The Washington Post
and a strong believer in the power of social relationships to
grease the wheels of government.
Still, Carter's biographers have concluded that the young
idealists he seeded throughout the federal bureaucracy
changed American life and the nation's role in the world by
leading the deregulation of the airline and trucking
industries, engineering diplomatic recognition of China, and
emphasizing human rights in U.S. foreign policy.
``After Watergate, we were sort of the good guys,'' said
Jay Beck, who came to the Carter White House from Georgia and
has worked for decades since coordinating the Carter Center's
relationship with alumni of the administration. ``I spent the
Watergate period screaming at the TV, and now, the feeling
was `Let's go tilt some windmills, let's do something good
for the country.' ''
Alexis Herman was 29, on a student trip in Europe on the
night Carter was elected, and the headline she saw on a Paris
newspaper the next morning has stuck with her: ``Peanut
Farmer Elected President.''
This was not your standard-issue president, and that
unusual pedigree led Herman, then working at an Atlanta
campaign to place women of color in corporate jobs, to
believe that she and other ``ordinary people with practical
backgrounds'' had roles to play in the new administration.
Appointed head of the Women's Bureau, an office in the
Labor Department that develops policies on behalf of working
women, Herman found plenty of conflict on a staff that
included both outsiders eager to change the world and people
from more traditional places--Hill staffers, Washington
lawyers, even some lobbyists.
``There was tension: We thought we were representing the
people and they thought they knew what was going on and how
to make things happen,'' Herman said.
The result was an array of ambitious plans to push American
society to be greener, more equitable and more focused on the
needs of people who felt disconnected from their government.
``Having people like us in the administration had a big
impact on the kinds of policy initiatives Carter embraced,''
Herman said.
But many of those initiatives didn't get very far, in part
because of Carter's disdain for the way Washington worked,
said Claybrook, who served as Carter's head of the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration after years of working
on auto safety issues with Nader.
``Carter really intensely disliked the lobbying crowd, all
the White men who manipulated the government, the people who
believed the way you get things done is you trade a railroad
for an airport,'' said Claybrook, who went on to run Nader's
Public Citizen organization for 26 years after Carter's term.
``Carter would have none of that.''
Claybrook said she got her job because the president
``requested that a number of his appointees be women.'' She
said she and many other outsiders in the administration
adopted a more flexible approach than Carter's, engaging
members of Congress and building relationships that could
lead to deals.
Although the rift between insiders and outsiders was real,
the outsiders often helped one another push through their
priorities, Claybrook said. She recalled asking everyone at a
White House staff meeting on regulatory issues to introduce
themselves, and listening with pride as ``three-quarters of
the people turned out to have worked for Ralph and his public
interest research groups.''

____________________