As a young freelance journalist and photographer in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1970s, I covered Georgia Democrat Gov. Jimmy Carter’s successful campaign for the presidency in 1976.

I was on the press bus when he campaigned in the primaries in Washington, D.C. and Maryland. I had press credentials to attend the Democrat National Convention in New York City in July when his party nominated him, and I had credentials to cover his inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 1977.

During his one-term presidency, I reported from time to time on what he and his administration were doing.

This blog, written several hours after Carter passed away yesterday at his home at age 100, mainly focuses on the time (1976-’77) when I had the closest, most in-person view of him including as one of the “boys on the [campaign] bus.”

What I have never forgotten in the almost half-century since then is how the reality I observed of Carter, as he dispatched his more well-known opponents on his ascent to the presidency, differed substantially from the carefully crafted image that helped to get him elected.

As Time magazine reported yesterday:

“I am a farmer, an engineer, a businessman, a planner, a scientist, a governor, and a Christian,” Jimmy Carter introduced himself to elite journalists — and by extension their audiences — at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 1974, during the announcement speech launching his 1976 presidential campaign. Over the next five decades, the media, increasingly the primary power brokers under the new rules of U.S. politics, shaped Carter’s image.

As a thumbnail description of James Earl (Jimmy) Carter, Jr., as he was sold to the American public as the next president starting in 1974, truer words were never spoken.

In the wake of the takedown of President Richard Nixon in August 1974 as a result of the Watergate affair and the almost impossible tasks facing his successor, Gerald R. Ford, the prospects for the Republican Party in 1976 were dismal.

Most American voters wanted to “throw the bums out,” and Carter – a little-known Southern governor when he embarked on his campaign the same year that Nixon was ousted – took full advantage of his supposed outsider status.

In fact, however, Carter already had covert and deep roots on the inside, in particular as a carefully chosen member groomed by the Trilateral Commission, a shadowy group of globalist elitists organized by David Rockefeller in 1973. With their help, Carter already had a leg up with the mainstream mockingbird media. His shtick was to present himself as an aw-shucks Southern gentleman, but a man of the people, the “grinning Georgian” as I called him in a cover story I wrote in 1976 about California Gov. Jerry Brown. 

Brown was Carter’s last opponent left standing before “Mr. Jimmy,” as his peanut farm employees called him, secured his party’s nomination.

A valuable resource on Carter’s Trilateral connection is the book Trilaterals Over Washington by Anthony Sutton and Patrick Wood, published in 1978.

The covers of the major mainstream newsweeklies that were influential in the 1970s, like Time and Newsweek, always pictured Carter with a broad smile which he robotically turned on when the cameras were aimed at him. Television coverage on the three networks also portrayed him in that kind of positive light.

The “grinning Georgian” as he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, May 10, 1976.
Cover Credit: ALAN REINGOLD // fair use

The contrast that I observed between the meme that dominated the mainstream media and the Carter I witnessed closely on the campaign trail was night and day.

In personal appearances including press conferences, Carter was often surly, angry, and short-tempered. This is often the case with national politicians, Minnesota Democrat Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency multiple times, being another example that I witnessed close up.

But with Carter it was different, because his whole public image in 1976 rested on his supposedly down-to-earth geniality and simpering mien. “I will never lie to you,” was one of the main themes of his 1976 campaign. Another was the hubris reflected in the audacious title of the Carter campaign’s official biography, Why Not the Best?, supposedly written by Jimmy himself.

Meanwhile, it is little remembered now but Jerry Brown of all people, who didn’t enter the presidential race until late March 1976, stood out in positive contrast at that point to Carter in close encounters on the campaign trail.

During the primary races and at the New York City Democrat Convention in July, I took literally thousands of photos of Carter, his family, his VP choice Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale, and Carter’s top staff who were privately referred to by reporters who covered the campaign as “the Georgia Mafia.”

There was good reason for that designation. The group of newbie down-home media manipulators and political gurus Carter had assembled resembled political operatives such as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos who steered Bubba Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, acting like the arrogant good ol’ boy bullies that they were.

In terms of analyzing the big picture of Carter’s presidency, I defer to and highly recommend Andrea Widburg’s spot on analysis in her blog yesterday, “Former President Jimmy Carter dead at 100.”

As a two-shot illustration of how I recall Carter really appearing more often than not during the 1976 campaign, I offer below two photos that I took of him on different occasions in Washington, D.C. in 1976.

Candidate Jimmy Carter casting a typical worried glance during a press conference on Capitol Hill in May 1976.

Photo © by Peter Barry Chowka

Even in worry, Carter clearly thought of himself as the smartest man in the room and did not like to be questioned by the ink-stained wretches of the press.

Carter arriving at a meeting with a major labor union boss. 

Photo © by Peter Barry Chowka

Here, he cast a strange look that was not atypical of him, unless you watched only the mainstream media coverage which was mostly all that was available to the American public in the 1970s.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran investigative journalist who has been working for six decades in a variety of media, both mainstream and alternative. On Dec. 23, 2024, Peter was a guest on the BBC World Service program Weekend, debating the question “Does Trump plan to prosecute journalists?” Audio of the segment is here.