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In the days leading up to Jimmy Carter’s centennial birthday celebration, Atlanta is rolling out the red carpet to honor the nation’s oldest living president.
The Fox Theatre will offer an eclectic musical tribute, featuring the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus, Bebe Winans, Carlene Carter, Chuck Leavall, and the Drive-By Truckers, among others, for the “Rock & Roll President.” And, the Carter Center plans an all-day film festival, featuring movies Carter screened in the White House, and another birthday mosaic, featuring Hollywood A-listers alongside everyday Americans.
Such glitz may seem at odds with a former president who has endeared himself to so many with his humble work for Habitat for Humanity. But in fact, such events reflect the growing connection between popular entertainment and politics that happened over the course of his lifetime, and that elevated him to the White House in 1976.
Jimmy Carter was born at a hospital in Plains, Ga., in 1924, the same year that presidential hopeful Calvin Coolidge listened to the advice of his public relations advisor Edward Bernays, and invited a group of famous Hollywood and vaudeville actors and musicians, including Al Jolson, John Drew, the Dolly Sisters, Charlotte Greenwood and Ray Miller’s Jazz Band, to a campaign breakfast. Before a crowd of reporters and cameras gathered on the White House lawn, the Hollywood celebrities entertained guests and belted out the campaign song, “Keep Coolidge,” and news of the star-studded endorsement appeared in the nation’s paper of record. Though we most frequently associate Coolidge with the first presidential State of the Union broadcast, he also appeared in film in his short campaign biography, “Visitin’ Around in Coolidge Corner,” which as historian Kathryn Brownell has noted, celebrated his small-town roots as an average, hardworking, and thrifty New Englander.
Over the next 50 years, these connections between show business and Washington only deepened. By 1952, for example, Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized the importance of listening to Madison Avenue executives and Hollywood stars, such as Bruce Barton and Robert Montgomery, who recommended that Eisenhower embrace new media (television) to speak to mass audiences and helped him popularize his memorable “I like Ike” campaign slogan.
By decade’s end, enlisting Madison Avenue techniques and Hollywood’s star system in political campaigns had become the winning logic of presidential politics—a lesson that Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon learned the hard way as his party’s nominee and opposite of the rising star of the Democratic party on the presidential debate stage. John F. Kennedy, heeding the advice of his father and former Hollywood mogul Joseph, allowed himself to be sold to the American public like a box of laundry soap and entreated his friend Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack to offer the star power he needed to win votes. Nixon eschewed these strategies in 1960, but knew better in 1968—presenting himself to the press and the American public as the “new Nixon” in carefully scripted, staged performances.
With his eye on the Democratic nomination in 1976, Carter sought to present himself as an honest, authentic everyman—an antidote to the polished showbiz campaigns of the recent past that masked political corruption surrounding Vietnam and Watergate. Carter’s campaign staff, in particular advertising guru Gerald Rafshoon, advised against slick jingles and instead encouraged a modification of showbiz politics, including the use of in vogue cinema vérité techniques in political advertisements.
Though Carter’s showbiz tactics certainly weren’t new, they were notable as a realistic Hollywood adaption—for how they enlisted regional-turned-national celebrities, including the Allman Brothers, Willie Nelson, and Atlanta Braves home-run king Hank Aaron, alongside Hollywood and rock ‘n’ roll legends, such as Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Paul Newman, and Bob Dylan, in Carter’s showbiz presidential campaign. Many of these A-list celebrities were a part of the “Cecil B. DeMille mob scene” that accompanied Rolling Stone’s celebratory bash in honor of Carter’s party nomination that even left famed gonzo reporter Hunter S. Thompson for a moment on the outside looking in and later appeared or performed in his inaugural special.
Though long overshadowed now by the fame of his successor Ronald Reagan, in the fall of 1976 Carter possessed something of a political mystique that perhaps could only be properly documented by the likes of New Journalist Noman Mailer or pop artist Andy Warhol.
TIME’s 1976 “miracle man [of the year]” struggled to exploit showbiz politics as a governing tool though he tried through frequent White House lawn concerts and his largely failed “People’s Program.” One of his greatest early showbiz flops might have been his appearance on the March 1977 CBS Special “Ask President Carter,” moderated by trusted anchor Walter Cronkite. The noble effort to offer Americans direct access to the president was widely spoofed, most memorably by SNL lead Dan Aykroyd.
Amid images of cardigan-clad Fireside chats or references to his “failed” one-term presidency, Carter’s celebrity side—largely overshadowed by Reagan’s more memorable showbiz performance—faded from memory until it was recently retrieved from the recesses of our national archive and otherwise celebrated in popular documentaries.
And this is fitting for a president who wanted not to be remembered for the stars who he broke bread with, but for the lives that he touched through his global initiatives to enhance freedom, prevent disease, and alleviate human suffering with the Carter Center and his personal outreach through his church and non-profits, such as Habitat for Humanity.
Now, at 100, Carter won’t spend his birthday rubbing elbows with the stars, but enjoying the company of his family and counting down the days until he can engage in another act of service to his country, voting in the upcoming presidential election.
