An Active-Positive Character

In his famous book The Presidential Character (Prentice-Hall, $10), Duke University Political Scientist James David Barber classifies Chief Executives starting with William Howard Toft according to the energy they put into the job (passive or active) and their feelings about their presidential experience (negative or positive). Based on that, according to Barber, they fit into one of four categories: passive-negative (Coolidge, Eisenhower); passive-positive (Harding, Taft); active-negative (Wilson, Hoover, Johnson, Nixon); and active-positive (F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy, Ford). TIME asked Barber, who has closely and critically studied Jimmy Carter for three years, to analyze the character of the President-elect. His report:

Mr. Carter comes to Washington full of high expectations at a time of low hopes. Some see a Daniel delivered over to the lions of the capital city, crouched to devour his plainness. Some quake before their own image of a Confederate Cromwell, brassy with power, bent on razing their comfortable habitations down to zero, as the Yankees razed Atlanta in the war. And many beyond the Washington swirl have been convinced that whatever else he is, Jimmy Carter is a man of mystery who will continue to engage the political dramatists for years to come.

I believe Mr. Carter is less mysterious than he is made out to be. The Johnson-Nixon experience so shriveled our confidence in presidential simplicity that we have become a nation of uneasy skeptics, sure only that Presidents are seldom what they seem and attuned to hear in every little psychological discord the dirge of neurosis. Gerald Ford should have taught us better: that a President can be wrong in important ways without in the least being sick. Jimmy Carter may turn out wrong--is bound to in some ways--but I for one will be surprised if his major troubles grow out of his character.

Fragments of evidence from his early home times confirm Carter's memories of love and challenge, of parents who were "there" in fact and in caring insistence that there were works to be done. By age twelve, Son Jimmy had learned to list among "healthy mental habits" this first one: "the habit of expecting to accomplish what you attempt." By 52, he and his folks were finding running for President--with all its frustrations--"the most gratifying, exciting thing we've ever done." Like F.D.R. and H.S.T. and J.F.K., Carter discovered, as child and man, that he could count on sustaining memories as he reached beyond his experience to test his possibilities--and enjoy himself the while.

Carter's transition from child to man is already well documented. His basic political world view probably was gathering itself in those years. A somewhat abstract appreciation of humankind, of the heroism of the everyday life, a little from Tolstoy, a little from Dylan Thomas. A growing sense that history could be nudged--even shoved--with some hardheaded planning and trying, as his own history showed. A slowly smoldering burn against a social order in which blacks had to take white meanness as a given. But in those days he did not say much of what he thought.

As President Harry Truman was saved from haberdashing by failure, Jimmy Carter was saved from peanut farming by success. Angels of ambition --Admiral Rickover's "Why not the best?", a Baptist preacher's contempt for spare-time religion, his engineer's want to shape things so they are right, a touch of anger at the neighborhood's black-baiters--wrestled him out of the warehouse and into wider fields.

His 1962 race for the state senate and what he did when he won it set Carter's political style. Issues counted little; he came on as the outsider who would do better than the bigwigs on the inside. When they cheated him of victory and threatened his life if he kicked about it, he kicked and won, noticing along the way that he could count on "the people" against their delinquent public servants. He excelled at his homework. Having promised to read every bill brought up before the state senate, he ran into 2,300 of them. So he took a speed-reading course and read them all, in the process learning a great deal about government machinery--and the risk of making promises. An early Carter speech was about doing the right things for blacks who wanted to vote.

Thus Jimmy Carter was a politician with special ways about him before he woke up to Christ. That came late in life, in the dark of defeat, in spite of all his energy and competence, which lay like ashes in his mouth. There is no evidence that his religion has warped his politics. More likely, from the history of it, Carter's rise out of his spiritual slough made him a better democrat: he let go of pride, discovered the resource of prayer, knew the thrill of God's presence in his fumbling first tries at simple charity. Above all, he came to believe in and espouse those counsels of perfection that lend life its gallantry, and he learned to forgive himself when he failed.

Trying to make the presidency work these days is, as they say down South, like trying to sew buttons on a custard pie. Faith and forgiveness--and a politician's savvy--may yet see him through.

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