It was half a century ago when Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter met in Atlanta, at a time when Biden was just beginning his political career as a freshman U.S. senator and Carter was about to climb to his prime.
Biden was in town to give a speech, and Carter – then governor of Georgia – invited Biden to his home.
“He wasn’t a national figure, but he confided in me that he was thinking about running for president,” Biden relates this meeting in his book “Promises to Keep.” “He saw a lot of big Democrats talking about running in 1976 and he wasn’t impressed. He actually asked me for advice on running a long-term campaign.
» READ MORE: Jimmy Carter, a tireless humanitarian who was admired as an exemplary former president, has died at the age of 100
Biden would ultimately be the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter, quickly becoming perhaps his most important political ally at a time when many viewed Carter’s presidential ambitions as a joke. The young senator was the first major political figure outside Georgia to support Carter, and during the 1976 election he campaigned for him in 30 states.
It was the beginning of a decades-long friendship and political partnership in which both men clearly saw something of themselves in each other. However, they also sometimes offered harsh assessments of what they considered perceived failures.
“If you’re a friend of Joe Biden, you know friendship is important, and that’s what he had with Carter,” said former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser. “They talked to each other very honestly. When they talked, they were able to bring up not only the things that were bothering them, but also the things that they thought were going great. That’s one of the reasons why Carter always wanted to help him.
On Sunday, after hearing of the 39th president’s death, Biden and his wife Jill released a statement about Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, saying, “We will miss them greatly” and holding him up as an example of what a public servant should be.
Biden also addressed reporters in St. Croix, where he spent the summer with his family, speaking of his ongoing admiration for Carter. Some of his comments seemed intended to contrast with what Biden has said in the past about President-elect Donald Trump, although he did not mention him by name.
“In today’s world, some may look at Jimmy Carter and see a man from a bygone era — one of integrity and character, faith and humility,” Biden said. “But I don’t think it’s a bygone era. I see a man not only of our time, but of all times. Someone who embodies the most basic human values that we can never allow to get out of control. … We may never see the like of him again. But it would be good if we tried to be a little more like Jimmy Carter.
Both Biden and Carter will be single-term presidents — in fact, Biden, who dropped his re-election bid, is the first single-term Democrat since Carter. History has been kind to Carter since then, and Biden can hope to favor his own presidency in the years to come.
“I say this from the bottom of my heart,” he said. “So much negativity in society. I know you’re tired of hearing what I’ve been saying for the last four years. But, people, there is nothing beyond our capabilities, nothing beyond our abilities, if we do it together.
Apart from a personal relationship that Biden’s advisers say has endured more than 40 years after Carter left office, their two presidencies have run on somewhat parallel tracks.
Carter, who won the 1976 election, succeeded Gerald Ford, Richard M. Nixon’s vice president, who resigned under threat of impeachment over the Watergate scandal, in which he apparently violated numerous laws by attacking political opponents. Carter promised to restore integrity and normality to the Oval Office and be a leader Americans can trust.
Biden defeated Donald Trump, who spent four years gutting the norms of the presidency, spreading baseless conspiracy theories and inciting an insurrection shortly before Biden’s inauguration. Biden kept his promise to “restore the soul of America” and maintain democracy.
“Carter is an outsider with little experience in Washington. Biden is the opposite of that. But both were moderates in the party and had a certain national appeal and were able to frame their campaigns around criticisms of their predecessors,” said Robert Strong, a politics professor at Washington and Lee University.
Both also took office amid economic difficulties and struggled with high energy prices and persistent inflation. Carter had to deal with the gas crisis, fueled in part by the Iranian revolution; Biden had to try to lower gas prices after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Biden was a robust ally of Carter’s when he was in the White House, but he has learned arduous lessons from his presidency, according to people familiar with his thinking. Biden, for example, was frustrated that Carter was unable or unwilling to delegate tasks to staff and that decisions on key policies took too long. Biden also believed that Carter had staffers in his inner circle who needed to be replaced.
Still, the two men maintained their friendship after Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. Biden finally saw qualities in Carter that he later saw in himself.
“At the time, I viewed Carter as a necessary transition figure in a Democratic Party that was losing working middle-class Americans,” Biden wrote. “I thought Carter could fill the gaps in the party. He was a Southerner who was racially progressive. He talked about balanced budgets. He was committed to the ideals of the war on poverty without being blind to the welfare state.”
But Biden also said he was unimpressed with Carter as a president who had few friends in Washington as he sought to unite the fractious factions of his party. Biden believed that differences with leading Democrats that fueled Carter’s bid for the presidency threatened his ability to govern.
Just before the inauguration, Carter was invited to speak before the Senate Democratic caucus, and Biden, his strongest ally, was asked to introduce him.
“As the president-elect and I stood outside in the hall, waiting together to enter, I was struck by how nervous he was,” Biden wrote. “He was anxiously bent at the waist and his hands were shaking.”
On their wedding day, he reminded Biden of his father-in-law.
“His behavior that day was understandable; that was sad too,” Biden wrote. “Carter found it difficult to forgive and forget, and this reverberated throughout his White House staff. They trusted few people in Washington.
Biden felt he was a link between Carter and members of Congress, but his patience was running out. Nine months into Carter’s presidency, Biden spoke before the Delaware Chamber of Commerce and addressed his so-called political ally with sharp sarcasm.
“Nixon had a list of enemies, and President Carter has a list of friends. I think I’m on his friends list and I don’t know which is worse,” he said in October 1977, according to the Wilmington News Journal.
“They got to Washington and didn’t know how Washington worked,” he said of Carter’s team. “The president is learning, but not fast enough.”
Shortly thereafter, Carter attended a fundraiser for Biden in Delaware. Referring to the friction, he called Biden “independent almost to a fault.”
Biden later wrote that Carter had managed to make him feel like he couldn’t be trusted and wasn’t meeting his needs, even though he was threatened by his early support. “When I went to the White House for the meeting, I was lucky to get ten minutes,” Biden recalled. “And during meetings I saw him twist his arm (he wore a watch with a dial on the bottom), tug on his sweater and check the time.”
He stated that Carter was not good at taking advice and stuck to a small circle of friends, not caring about new relationships.
“Jimmy Carter was a decent and principled man, but that wasn’t enough,” Biden wrote in a biting conclusion. “It was the first time I realized that on-the-job training for the president could be dangerous.”
However, according to Carter’s diaries published in 2010, Biden met with Carter at the White House.
Biden told him his staff needed to spend more time with members of Congress. He said the Jewish community deeply distrusted him because of his Baptist faith. He then warned him that Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy was secretly planning a primary campaign against him.
“Joe’s report turned out to be quite exact,” Carter wrote. “That was the first clue I had about Kennedy’s presidential plans, but they soon became more apparent as he mounted opposition to many of my proposals.”
A group of allies also reached out to Biden and urged him to consider running. They argued that Carter and Kennedy would harm each other so much in the primaries that Biden could emerge as a compromise candidate. He wasn’t done running away.
