On December 29, 2024, James Earl Carter, Jr., thirty-ninth President of the United States passed away. President Biden has proclaimed today, January 9, 2025, a National Day of Mourning. To remember and honor the former president, we are sharing an excerpt from The Presidents and the Pastime (Nebraska, 2018) by Curt Smith which explores Carter’s presidency and his ties to the “most American” sport of baseball.
Curt Smith is the author of eighteen books, including George H. W. Bush: Character at the Core (Potomac, 2014); Memories at the Microphone: A Century of Baseball Broadcasting; and Voices of The Game, named by Esquire magazine among “the 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written.” A senior lecturer of English at the University of Rochester, Smith has addressed the White House Historical Association, hosted the “Voices of The Game” series at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and been named to the Judson Welliver Society of former presidential speechwriters.
From Softball to Hardball
Jimmy Carter, 1977–1981
Gerald Ford dreamt of being Speaker of the House of Representatives, but as with many dreams life intervened. He had retired by the time his Republican Party finally got a House majority in 1994. Meanwhile, President Nixon’s choice of Ford as vice president in 1973, then his next-year farewell, left the Michigander with a consolation prize—the presidency. By comparison, the dream of his successor, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., was realized in an American schoolbook way: “the small-town man [a peanut farmer from the tiny burg of Plains, Georgia] who dreams of becoming president, and who by hard work and against incredible odds achieves his ambition,” wrote TIME magazine columnist Hugh Sidey.
Carter came out of nowhere—indeed, beyond it—to win the presidency in 1976. Narrowly elected, he bred peace between Egypt and Israel with the Camp David Accords, created new departments of energy and education, and braved Islamic fanaticism that seized sixty-three hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. From 1977 through 1981 Carter’s image mixed, among other things, Plains itself, a miniature Branson, Missouri; the Bible-carrying president teaching Sunday school; his mother, Miss Lillian, a character from Tennessee Williams’s sunnier side; black sheep younger brother Billy, “like my mother,” Jimmy wrote, “a walking encyclopedia of minutiae about . . . baseball”; the family peanut business; and softball, where a form of no-nonsense conduct reigned.
Billy had originally been the Carter clan’s softball zealot, but Jimmy became its quintessence as president. “When I was on submarines,” explained the older brother and Naval Academy graduate, “I was the pitcher of our ball team.” In office, he logically became a hard-working hurler, with a Puritan distaste for sloth. At Plains and the presidential retreat at Camp David, Carter exerted his stern form of leisure, using softball to separate the weak and the strong. During the 1976 campaign the Democratic presidential nominee had forged a team of friends and Secret Service agents—the “News Makers”—against a group of reporters who called themselves the “News Twisters.” Carter seldom confused the two. “They may play softball in Plains,” Richard Nixon observed, “but they play hardball in the country.”
The Boston Globe correspondent Curtis Wilkie told Sports Illustrated of Carter’s no room for humor creed. “Someone hit a pop fly in my direction [third base]. It was out of my range, but I gave it a little chase anyway. When I got back . . . he [Carter] was standing there staring at me, and he said, ‘You should have had that one, Curtis.’ I never knew if he was serious.” One player said Carter’s teammates included “bionic Secret Service men,” especially a former Triple-A Minor League shortstop. “The Secret Service guys were terrified that if they messed up they’d wind up stationed in Ohio.” For most, Plains became their station, few mistaking it for Hyannis Port circa early 1960s.
By the 2010s Carter’s boyhood home, a national historic site, hosted the annual Peanut Classic Softball Tournament to support the Carter Center, a nonprofit founded to back global health and democracy. Forty years earlier peanuts had been as crucial to the Carter persona as his easy, toothy smile. It was misleading: Jimmy could be as tough as Lyndon Johnson. The nation saw “the Grin,” the press’s moniker for the face Carter made at softball. According to Baseball: The Presidents’ Game, in 1977 newsmen ensured that “the Grin w[ould] not win,” realigning softball squads so that the Secret Service joined the media.
Sam Donaldson was then ABC-TV White House correspondent. “To us it was a grudge match,” he said of softball. “Carter had always got the Service on his side, but now the agents got us bums in the media.” Disliking their improvement, the Grin flashed a frown. For much of his life Carter enjoyed playing more than watching, many thinking that he disliked baseball, softball’s more famous kin, or at least didn’t know much about the game—ironic given his baseball-crazed clan.
This word spread like contagion through the sport. Used to Ford and especially Nixon, Bowie Kuhn asked what time he might give Carter his 1977 season ticket pass, a rite dating to Theodore Roosevelt. The new president was supposed to have said he would forgo it since he had campaigned on the novel, not traditional.
At last an appointment was made. The commissioner arrived at the White House, was taken to the basement, and was then summarily dispatched, having given a pass to Carter’s son Chip in the president’s name. The baseball–White House “Special Relationship,” as precious to its realm as the United States–United Kingdom is to its, seemed less special than at any time since Miss Lillian was a child.
Born October 1, 1924, in Plains, Carter grew up with a Class D team in nearby Americus. Uncle Alton was a league director, always had tickets, “and never missed a home game.” Each year’s Zion for Jimmy’s parents came in lay-by time, when the farm work load was lightest and Lillian and James Earl Sr. felt free to indulge their zeal. “My parents, my uncle Alton, and his wife would drive ‘up north’ to spend” up to ten days “immersed in major league baseball,” Jimmy wrote. “To see the world,” they chose one burg a year, rotating among the big leagues’ sixteen teams in eleven cities. One year the Carters stayed in Boston for an entire Braves or Red Sox homestand; the next, Washington, for the Senators and several al foils; another, Pittsburgh, for the Bucs series against the Cubs, Cards, and Reds. Travel was slower then, homestands longer. “It was clear to all,” he wrote, “that these annual baseball excursions bridged gaps in the family and, in a strange way, even bound all of us younger Carters together. We children knew that these were the best experiences of our parents’ lives, and they chose to share them. It was a lesson I never forgot.”
Cover photo courtesy of the Carter Center, credited to the LBJ Library.
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