Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday, is the first presidential candidate I remember publicly expressing an opinion of. As it turned out, Carter would also be the first (and only) president to publicly express an opinion of me.
During Carter’s presidency he was criticized and lampooned, but during his life he was more often hailed for his public service and broad, renaissance mind. Personally, I will always think of him as a man with a dry wit and a sharp tongue. If you’ve ever wondered why Carter was always smiling, it may be because he was a pretty funny guy.
My first interaction with the former president was in the spring of 1987. I was the editor-in-chief of the Emory Spoke, the student-run humor magazine at Emory University in Georgia. We published three issues annually, generally blowing our budget on the one published fall semester, a full-color parody of a “real” magazine — “Playspoke” one year, “Spokelights for Children” another.
Shortly before my tenure, a copy of a previous editorial team’s “Peeple Spokely” made its way to Time-Life’s corporate counsel. They quickly forbade us from ever again encroaching on one of their titles. It felt as if hellfire, damnation and personal legal ruin would rain down on any student foolish enough to violate their orders.
My choice was clear. That fall’s issue would parody Time magazine.
“How will we avoid hellfire and damnation?” our managing editor asked.
It came to me in a flash. “We’ll put Carter on the cover. ‘Man of the Year’! If they come for us, the publicity will kill ’em.”
Because Emory was home to the Carter Center and his presidential library, I leaned hard on every connection I could to make an interview happen. Months after our entreaties began, I was called into the office of the dean who had appeared on the cover of “Rolling Spoke” with a parking cone on his head. The reverence of our irreverence had paid off — we would be granted 30 minutes with Carter, and nothing was off limits.
I’ll chalk it up to nerve and not any innate Republican tendencies, but about a month later, on the day of the interview, when Carter walked in the room, I tossed him a T-shirt featuring the Spoke’s logo and told him to put it on for the cover photo. He gamely complied.
The interview was sublime — Carter talked about Domino’s deliveries to the White House, Willie Nelson playing on the South Lawn, installing a hi-fi in the Oval Office so he could listen to his friends the Allman Brothers. He shared his biggest presidential regret — not sending a second helicopter on the failed hostage rescue in Iran.
We asked what he wanted to say about President Reagan behind his back: “That he is incapable of telling the truth.” When we asked what he’d say to Reagan’s face, he replied, “The same thing.” That got picked up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
When lobbying for the interview, we’d been clear about our satirical bent and forwarded past Spoke issues. During the discussion we restated our provenance as a humor magazine. “I haven’t heard anything funny, yet,” Carter deadpanned. We asked about his patience with journalists, if he ever wanted to haul off and hit a reporter. “Yes,” he said, “and this is one of those times.”
After the issue was published, Carter sent me a letter that included the line, “I’m glad my humorous responses more than made up for the lack of that quality in your questions.”
Sometimes I still impress myself, remembering that I once traded barbs with a former president. Other days, I’m overwhelmed by the thought that a future Nobel Prize winner called me out on the one thing I thought I was good at.
Our paths crossed a few more times, and each time, Carter’s humor was what stood out. At a formal dinner, he dared me to eat the dessert’s floral garnish. Before I could move, he popped it into his mouth.
He could have planned that joke to use on anyone who was at the table. But I like to think it was personal, and others who met Carter more than once have told me they also felt a stupefied humility that the onetime leader of the free world remembered them by name.
A few years later, I was working on my MBA, again at Emory and Carter visited as a distinguished lecturer.
He marched to the lectern and scanned our power-suited crowd. Then he turned to his assistant and said, “You didn’t tell me Binney would be here.”
He looked at me, eyebrows raised, and said, politely, “Try to keep up.”
My classmates were bewildered. Some in shock, some in awe. How had I pissed off a president?
I hadn’t, of course. It was just a perfect opportunity for a man with a sly sense of humor, a good memory and a microphone. A man who made meaningful connections with the people he met, whether on the world stage or a college campus.
Robert J. Binney is a screenwriter in Seattle.
