Jimmy Carter and the confession of sins

No apologies for his racist 1970 Georgia gubernatorial campaign or his foolish Korea troop withdrawal policy

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was famous for his 1976 confession in a Playboy interview that he had sinned when he “looked on many women with lust” and, thus, “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

Having, like him, grown up immersed in the sin-soaked theology of the Southern Baptists – as a teenager, earnestly vowing in my nocturnal prayers to abstain from that very sin – I understand where he was coming from. It would be hard not to respect his ambition (he was a hugely ambitious man) to be a good person, in the eyes of God and man, and to be frank about his shortcomings.

But an accurate account of history requires noting that Carter, as a grown man in the era of the sexual revolution, was talking about the sin that Pope Gregory in 580 CE had authoritatively ranked as the least serious of the "seven deadly sins."

On the other hand, regarding what I for one consider a couple of much more serious sins that Carter committed in the course of his political career (neither of them, admittedly, on the traditional theologians' lists; they're sins by my defiinition), he offered little in the way of public acknowledgment – much less confession.

One such sin, unknown to most people alive today, was the uncharacteristically racist campaign that he ran in 1970 to become governor of Georgia.

The other was his stubborn attempt for three years as presidential candidate and White House occupant to remove U.S. troops from South Korea – despite near universal opposition from knowledgeable advisors, who told him truthfully that it could mean handing over the South to North Korea's Kim Il Sung.

Georgia politics

I know about the first case because of my own youthful involvement in Georgia politics. While studying at Emory Law School, I was introduced to Carter in the fall of 1964 at a meeting of a few Democrats in suburban Atlanta's Dekalb County. We were campaigning on behalf of a young lawyer who was running what would prove a losing first race for the Georgia House of Representatives.

Former naval officer Carter, who had returned to hometown Plains to take over the family peanut farm and gone on to become a pro-Kennedy, pro-civil rights state senator, was preparing to run for the governorship in 1966. He was busy building support by offering encouragement to other candidates such as ours.

I had just returned to my home state after doing my undergraduate studies elsewhere, and his name didn't ring a bell with me. What struck me immediately when he appeared among us was his barbering, and I said so to the person standing next to me: "Who ever heard of a Georgia politician with a Kennedy haircut?" (I couldn’t have imagined then that Teddy Kennedy would run against him in the Democratic presidential primary in 1980.)

Carter did run for governor in 1966 but failed. I had left Georgia again by then and lost track of him.

The next time I paid attention, in 1970, he was running again for governor. When I visited Atlanta during the campaign I heard from friends that Carter had undergone a partial makeover: While still seeking urban and black votes, he was injecting racist dog-whistle elements into his campaign to appeal to rural admirers of Alabama's segregationist George Wallace. Without presenting evidence, he also vaguely accused his opponent, the likewise pro-Kennedy, pro-civil rights former Governor Carl Sanders, of corruption.

My friends and I were revolted, having expected much better from Carter. But he won the election.

Confessions? He did apologize privately in a phone call to Sanders for the personal character slurs. "He is not proud of that election," Sanders said, "and he shouldn't be proud of it."

As for the racism, Carter didn't apologize – but he did immediately resume his former pro-civil rights persona. "The time for racial discrimination is over," he proclaimed in his inaugural speech.

A black politician forgave him. "I understand why he ran that kind of ultra-conservative campaign," said state Senator Leroy Johnson. "I don't believe you can win this state without being a racist."

Korea and the Deep State

During an otherwise routine presidential campaign appearance in June 1976, Carter criticized the human rights record of South Korea's president and pledged, if elected, to bring all American troops home from South Korea.

Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship had achieved impressive economic development but many South Koreans had been left behind, for the time being. Park’s government kept a very tight rein on protest and was growing increasingly unpopular both at home and among human-rights advocates in the United States.

Carter's plan, especially after he began withdrawing some units, was music to the ears of North Korean ruler Kim Il Sung.

In the then-current atmosphere characterized by "post-Vietnam syndrome," Kim could calculate that, unless American troops were among the first casualties, the American public might very well veto any proposal to go to war to defend dictator-ruled South Korea from a second attack by dictator-ruled North Korea. The huge differences between the merely authoritarian Seoul regime and the quite totalitarian Pyongyang regime – modeled on Stalin's – were lost on many Americans.

Soon congressional and other American critics forced Carter to water down his plan for unilateral withdrawal – but he refused to abandon it.

New intelligence figures ranked the North's Korean People's Army as the fifth largest military in the world, in a country whose population was only 17 million. The timing of the news, right when critics in the Pentagon needed ammunition to counter Carter's proposal, aroused some suspicions. But it was that finding that finally sank unilateral troop withdrawal.

Here's the way the New York Times told the story in a 2002 obituary for William H. Gleysteen, Jr., Carter-appointed ambassador to South Korea and the official who, in February 1979, finally talked Carter out of proceeding immediately with the withdrawal plan:

Richard Holbrooke, then assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, recalled in an interview how, after a difficult meeting with the South Korean leadership, President Carter drove back to the ambassador's residence accompanied by Mr. Gleysteen, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who also opposed troop withdrawal, and the national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who favored it.

''The limousine drew up at the front door and nobody got out,'' said Mr. Holbrooke. ''So we looked in through the window and saw Bill Gleysteen talking, talking, talking.''

The upshot of that prolonged argument in the presidential limousine was that President Carter reluctantly agreed to reconsider his withdrawal pledge.

Hearing the news of Carter's death on Sunday, I messaged independent historian Aaron Savage Brown to ask if I was correct in believing that no Carter regrets over the bad call he'd made earlier on that issue had been forthcoming during the nearly half-century since that meeting with Gleysteen and a subsequent press conference where he announced the change.

"I don't think Carter ever really acknowledged the futility of his Korea troop withdrawal plan," replied Brown, the author of a 2011 thesis entitled "The Pains of Withdrawal: Carter and Korea, 1976-1980."

"Upon perusing his White House Diary (in which he commented throughout on subsequent changes of opinion), it doesn't appear that he ever believed he was doing anything other than looking out for America's interests when he proposed the withdrawals," Brown told me.

The diary kept during Carter's presidential term was published in 2010 and included italicized updates on his thinking about selected issues.

Today and Trump

Interestingly, these two lapses on Carter's part correspond to stances taken by Donald Trump.

Having essentially begun his political career by espousing birtherism against Barack Obama, in 2024 Trump campaigned against immigration to what many observers considered a racist extreme. He won, and he has now publicly changed his position even before being sworn in again – siding with his tech bro buddy Elon Musk, a big fan of the H-1B visa for highly skilled workers.

As for South Korea, regardless of the views of the Deep State Trump has already resurrected the troop withdrawal policy he pushed during his own first term. This is likely to be a huge issue during his second term even though the arguments against the policy remain as compelling as they were during his first.

And South Korea isn't the only American ally affected by Trump's transactional approach, as Brown notes: "This is the kind of tactic Trump is fond of when dealing with our NATO partners."

But of course, unlike his Oval Office predecessor who worked so hard at being an upright man but sometimes failed to meet his own standard, Trump cares nothing for consistency, acknowledging errors or – especially – apologizing when he's in the wrong.

Bradley K. Martin covered the Carter administration's Korea policy for the Baltimore Sun.