Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep his hands still. As he began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 15, 1979, one hand lay on top of another on the Resolute Desk. But soon he was pumping his fist, chopping the air in front of his chest. He had a confession of sorts to make: He had been planning something else, yet another speech about the energy crisis, his fifth, when he realized that he just couldn’t do it.

Jimmy Carter told me to stop worrying about Donald Trump.
When Carter invited me to meet with him in his Atlanta office, just a few weeks after the world-shocking 2016 U.S. presidential election, I assumed the topic would be Donald Trump. After all, I was a vocal evangelical-Christian critic of Trump, and now the religious right was gathering steam for revenge. Some Trump-supporting evangelicals wanted me to be fired or the religious organization I was working for at the time to be defunded.

His four years in office were fraught, bedeviled from the start by double-digit inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate bad mood. His fractious staff was dominated by the inexperienced “Georgia Mafia” from his home state. His micromanagement of the White House tennis court drew widespread derision, and his toothy, smiling campaign promise that he would “never lie” to the country somehow curdled into disappointment and defeat after one rocky term.
Yet James Earl Carter Jr.

Before written language,
before helmets of blood, I was wind-carved
in the world. We walked through Obsidian
Valley, my son’s moon-smooth  
face upturned toward the night sky.
We held time and nothingness
in our eyes. I sang out beyond the sea
of stars. I bore his body of shining stone,
a revision of bone.  
Mountains came before us, mothers
and aunts, long before our eyes knew starlight,
before eyes.  
Beyond Earth we look up, we stargazers.

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