WASHINGTON – Joe Biden was the first U.S. senator to endorse Jimmy Carter’s improbable presidential bid, seeing the progressive southerner and fiscal conservative as a necessary transitional figure in the Democratic Party, which was losing working-class voters.
Both shared a common vision. And both also knew what it was like to be underestimated.
That was the start of the intertwined and complex relationship between the man who became the longest-lived former president in history until his death and the nation’s oldest sitting president.
It was a friendship they maintained until the end, and which Biden will honor when – at Carter’s request – he will deliver the eulogy for the man he’s called “the spirit and the heart of the American people.”
“I think that what Jimmy Carter is an example of is just simple decency, simple decency,” Biden said Sunday. “And I think that’s what the rest of the world looks to America for.”
Biden said he was both an admirer and friend of Carter’s.
“I’ve been hanging out with Jimmy Carter for over 50 years,” he said.
A key to their relationship was the capacity both had to stay grounded despite the heights to which they rose, according to grandson Jason Carter.
“I think my grandparents feel a real connection to that ability to go through this sort of rigmarole of politics and stay who you are,” Carter told USA TODAY.
Still, they had their differences.
Biden was critical of Carter for not being able to pull off a transformation of the Democratic Party.
“He couldn’t overcome the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party, and he couldn’t overcome himself,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep” in which he faulted Carter’s governing style as too insular.
Biden, with his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” made his own attempt as president to stop the erosion of non-college-educated workers from the party’s base.
But just as the working-class “Reagan Democrats” helped turn Carter out of office, Donald Trump’s gains among non-college educated voters helped fuel his 2024 comeback.
When Biden defeated Trump in 2020, he’d vowed to “restore the soul of America,” something for which Carter had been an inspiration – even though Biden thought the deeply faithful former president had a “dangerous penchant for moralizing” when he was in office.
“You thump that Bible one more time,” Biden said he warned Carter during his presidency, “and you’re going to lose me, too.”
To know Carter’s core, Biden said − with admiration − on Sunday, was to “know he never stopped being a Sunday school teacher at that Baptist church in Plains, Georgia.”
Carter may have had his own doubts about how well suited Biden was for the nation’s highest office.
In 2019, when the 76-year-old Biden was campaigning for the office, Carter said he didn’t think he would’ve been able to handle the demands of the White House as a senior citizen. Carter was in his 50s when he served in the White House.
But Biden, in his memoir, said he learned from Carter’s administration the importance of experience.
“Jimmy Carter was a man of decency and a man of principle, but it wasn’t enough,” Biden wrote. “That’s the first time I realized that on-the-job training for a president can be a dangerous thing.”
Biden, a creature of Congress proud of his interpersonal skills, was critical of the standoffishness of Carter, a newcomer to Washington. Despite having campaigned for Carter in 30 states – Carter later wrote that Biden “had been my most effective supporter during the 1976 campaign” – Biden felt Carter acted as if he didn’t trust him. And, Biden resented that, in their brief one-on-one meetings, Carter kept a close eye on his watch.
As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Biden tried to smooth over rough patches between Carter and foreign leaders, particularly the prickly German chancellor. Helmut Schmidt was furious with Carter for unilaterally deciding to cancel the deployment of neutron bombs in Western Europe.
When Schmidt was about to meet with the Soviets as Carter was working on an arms limitation deal, the chancellor refused to talk to Carter or his secretary of state in advance. But he would talk to Biden. While expressing his outrage at Carter over the neutron bomb cancellation, Schmidt nonetheless told Biden he would not sell out the West.
On another of Carter’s major foreign policy forays, Biden helped defend his treaties transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian ownership. The Senate’s ratification of the treaties was a major victory for Carter.
Biden also tried, this time unsuccessfully, to help Carter win ratification of the SALT II nuclear arms treaty he’d negotiated with the Soviet Union.
Biden voted with Carter more often than average for a Senate Democrat in three of Carter’s four years in office, according to CQ Almanac.
But their relationship was strained over the issue of busing to integrate schools.
An opponent of court-ordered busing in his home state, Biden sought Carter’s support for legislation to limit the ability of judges to order the busing of white children to schools in Black neighborhoods and vice versa. Carter thought Biden’s proposal was unconstitutional, according to biographer Jonathan Alter.
That soured his relationship with Biden, who in September 1977 said of the president he had bet on: “Nixon had his enemies list, and President Carter has his friends list. I guess I’m on his friends list, and I don’t know which is worse,” Alter wrote in “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”
After Ted Kennedy declared he would challenge Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination, Biden considered trying to run as a compromise candidate. He opted out, he later wrote, because he wasn’t ready to answer the question of why he wanted to be president and what he would do if he won.
Biden didn’t have as important a role in Carter’s reelection campaign as he did in 1976. But he still made an effort.
“Joe Biden and twelve other senators met at lunchtime to decide how best to support me,” Carter wrote in his dairy on July 31, 1980. “They called a press conference afterward that was very lightly covered – predictably.”
When Biden agreed to be Barack Obama’s 2008 running mate, he did so in part because of a change Carter had made to the vice presidency. Instead of an also-ran, Vice President Walter Mondale was a real partner to Carter with a West Wing office, unprecedented access to meetings and private lunches with the president.
Mondale was the first person Biden consulted, outside of his own family, when deciding whether to team up with Obama.
“He told me his weekly lunch with President Jimmy Carter turned out to be the cornerstone of their working relationship,” Biden wrote in his 2017 book “Promise me, Dad.” “So, Barack and I decided to follow that advice as a way to make sure we had regular meetings where we could talk to each other privately, and with absolute honesty, about everything that was on our minds.”
When Biden secured the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, Carter called him “the right person for this moment in our nation’s history.”
“He understands that honesty and dignity are essential traits that determine not only our vision, but our actions,” Carter said in his Democratic National Convention endorsement of the man he said had been his loyal and dedicated friend for decades. “More than ever, that’s what we need.”
Carter was unable to attend Biden’s inauguration, the first presidential inauguration he’d missed since taking the oath of office in 1977.
In a call the night before to wish Biden well, Carter told the incoming president he’d be with him in spirit.
In Carter’s final months, Biden wrote on a relatively regular basis, letting Carter know he was thinking about him and praying for him.
It wasn’t so much a substantive discussion, Jason Carter said, as just “acknowledging this lifetime of friendship.”
Biden, on Sunday, said the world may never see Carter’s like again.
“We’d all do well to try to be a little more like Jimmy Carter,” he said. “Every time he was summoned, he stepped up.”
