Ep. 14 - Steely-eyed Jimmy Carter w/ author Jon Ward

Jon Ward, author of "Camelot's End" about the 1980 Democratic primary between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, dishes on what America got wrong about Carter, and what he discovered about his true nature

Jon Ward

is one of the most thoughtful journalists I know. He also wrote an an excellent book on a rarely dissected moment in American history, the 1980 Democratic primary between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, titled “Camelot’s End”.

So with Carter’s passing Sunday, this seemed like a good time to get Ward on the podcast. (

Patrick Pfingsten

is on paternity leave for another week, enjoying his beautiful new baby girl and perhaps finding a spot of rest.)

In his reporting, Ward found much more to the often dismissed and misunderstood 39th president, including a “steely-eyed” fortitude and determination easily shrouded by his soft-spoken delivery and the occasional White House cardigan.

Ward and I also discussed Carter’s faith at length, including his birth again in Christ in 1966, his pragmatism studying theologian Rienhold Niebuhr, and Ward’s own faith journey.

If the last episode of The Ground Game with Rick Wilson was the barnburner, this one’s barnbuilder. Give a watch or a listen, I hope you find it useful and interesting.

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Show Notes

• Why Carter and Kennedy and the 1980 Democratic primary?

• The seminal story of Carter chasing (an apparently drunk) Kennedy on the convention stage in 1980.

• Even all these years later, many of Kennedy’s folks still didn’t want to talk about that race.

• After the White House, Carter became a towering figure around the globe impacting millions of lives

• Reagan often gets much of the credit Carter should have gotten for the eventual decline in inflation and the massive increase in defense spending which ultimately ended the Cold War.

• Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has often said that Carter should get more credit for placing human rights at the center of American foreign policy, particularly w/r/t battling the Soviet Union.

• Is there a corollary with Biden and positive policies that Trump will likely reap the political benefit from?

• From a sheer policy standpoint, Biden never took immigration and the border seriously enough.

• “In the presidents’ club, Carter was the odd man out”

• Carter’s perceived weakness, his willingness to take unpopular stances, was really a true strength.

• What of the dual nature of Carter’s integrity and self-righteousness?

• Carter was raised effectively poor, on a farm a century ago, without electricity or even toilet paper.

• His father was an avowed segregationist who had Black sharecroppers working their farm, but Carter would come to represent the “New South”.

• Carter’s faith was “reignited and deepened” in 1966, when he was 42 years old, after a grueling loss.

• Carter went door to door in Boston that year, proselytizing with Baptist ministers looking to build a church there and talked about some of his strongest encounters with the Holy Spirit coming on that trip.

• On Carter’s adopting of Reinhold Niebuhr and the pragmatism of performing Christian services in the earthly realm

• Why some politicized Christians pursue power in spite of their faith, often fusing the two

• Handling power is a “very human dilemma”

• The “Left Behind” mentality of fundamentalists with the belief that entrance into heaven in the end times negates a need to help others on earth — the nihilism of this belief.

• The rise of hyperpartisans and with the eventual demise of party politics — starting in 1976 and the rise of the primary system to replace the backroom dealing of party conventions.

• What could change which would reduce the success of extreme partisans and the rise of more moderated and independent politicians?

• In researching the book Carter, “transformed in my mind from a soft-spoken, mealy-mouthed, weak guy in a sweater, to a steely-eyed, steel-backboned man of integrity and deep faith.”