The first thing I did after starting to cover the presidency of Jimmy Carter for The Times was to read his campaign autobiography, “Why Not the Best?”
Published in 1976 when he was an unknown former governor of Georgia, it opened with a quotation from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”
It was a revealing tipoff to the way Mr. Carter bore his presidency like a cross, stumbling and suffering through catastrophes, often not of his own making: the hostage crisis, the gas crisis, inflation, recession, the country’s 1970s “malaise.” To the public he could seem sanctimonious, aloof and a micromanager.
And yet in person he could be appealing and unassuming.
Once when I was invited to the White House family movie theater to watch “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” starring Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, I chatted afterward with the president about movies we both loved. He said he enjoyed the film because he knew Ms. Spacek. “She’s a friend of mine,’’ he said, proudly. Wow, I thought, a president could also be a name-dropper.
For journalists, Mr. Carter was accessible. I shared The Times’ White House beat with Terry Smith, a veteran foreign correspondent and a far more experienced reporter. I was the new guy. But if I was working on a big story, Jody Powell, the White House press secretary, could sometimes get the president on the phone to talk to me. Or if I had a question that Mr. Carter could answer, he would quickly check with “the boss” and get back to me.
Smartmatic, an election technology company, had accused Newsmax of trying to entice viewers from its rival, Fox News, by airing false reports that Smartmatic helped swing the 2020 election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Superior Court in 2021.
jackpot spinOn his vacations on the Georgia seacoast or on visits to Carter’s tiny hometown of Plains — it got its first traffic light only after he became president — the White House press corps was dragooned into playing softball against Mr. Carter and his staff. The press team’s captain was his ne’er-do-well brother Billy.
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