‘King Hell Bastard of a Speech’: Hunter S. Thompson, Bob Dylan, and Carter’s Legacy
In May 1974, Gov. Jimmy Carter delivered a blistering Law Day address at the University of Georgia to a distinguished audience of lawyers and public officials, along with members of the press corps. Quietly preparing to run for the presidency two years hence, Carter decided to shake things up, forsaking the usual honorifics in favor of some startling remarks about the oppressive unfairness of American criminal justice. He forthrightly denounced a rigged and racist system that patently served the interests of the affluent and powerful at the expense of everyone else, especially the poor. His voice rising in anger, Carter called to account “everyone in this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form,” himself included.
Nearly as unorthodox as Carter’s denunciation were his remarks crediting two writers with shaping his thoughts on “what’s right and wrong in this society,” both surprising names for a conventional politician to mention. One was the renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose Christian realist theology had strong political implications, at odds with naïve liberal do-goodism and equally naïve conservative narrowness about the one true faith. The other influence, Carter said, was “a great poet named Bob Dylan,” whom he called a friend. (The two had met three months earlier when Carter invited Dylan, then on tour with the Band in Atlanta, to the governor’s mansion.) As he cited Niebuhr on establishing redemptive justice in a sinful world, so he cited Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and more, on the same theme and on “the dynamism of change in a modern society.”
Out in the audience, the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson could scarcely believe his ears. Thompson was covering Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s own incipient presidential campaign for Rolling Stone; the senator had addressed the Law Day assembly the day before and remained for the rest of the proceedings, so Thompson did too. “What the hell did I just hear?” he asked a Kennedy aide, who, smirking, replied that Gov. Carter had just announced that “his two top advisers are Bob Dylan and Reinhold Niebuhr.” That did it: Thompson leapt to his feet, ran to his car to retrieve a tape recorder, and captured the rest of what he would later call Carter’s “king hell bastard of a speech.” Thompson then decided to write a Rolling Stone cover profile of Carter that helped establish the governor as a serious contender for the White House.
After Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination two years later, Thompson would complain that the candidate was no longer speaking as he had on Law Day, although Thompson acknowledged that if Carter did so he would probably destroy his campaign. But in that first encounter, the renegade reporter detected something of a renegade in Carter, too, or at least something different. It was not just Carter’s affinity for genuine ideas and unlikely heroes (unlikely, anyway, for a Georgia governor in 1974) that struck Thompson. It was also Carter’s willingness to talk passionately and honestly about some of the nation’s worst ills, aiming to discomfit his imposing listeners.
HARD-NOSED POLITICS are indispensable to democracy, and Jimmy Carter was nothing if not a shrewd and calculating professional politician. Yet there was more than a touch of the prophet to Carter as well, born of his profound Baptist faith. When Dylan sang, in “Hattie Carroll,” of the self-evident lie “that the ladder of the law has no top and no bottom,” it goaded Carter to do his Christian duty, bear witness, and help bring justice to the oppressed, always cognizant of how all God’s children are sinners, the persecuted and those who would protect them no less than their persecutors.
While his deep faith was singular, Carter was also the first president whose politics were forged in the turbulence of the 1960s. When he ran successfully for the Georgia governorship in 1970, he by necessity courted segregationist supporters of George Wallace, and looked like he might be, at best, little more than a run-of-the-mill, conservative-leaning Southern Democrat, not above race-baiting to win. But those who were either repelled or comforted by Carter’s campaign overlooked his previous record and were in for a surprise. Carter had resisted, albeit cautiously, the White Citizens’ Council in his hometown of Plains, and as a state senator he had strongly backed voting rights legislation banning literacy tests. At his inauguration as governor, he proclaimed to his fellow Georgians that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” He went on to embrace leaders of the Civil Rights struggle, including Barbara Jordan, John Lewis, and Andrew Young.
A successful activist governor, notably on civil rights and public education, but ineligible for reelection due to Georgia’s term limits, Carter began exploring the possibilities of running for president. Those ambitions took shape, though, at a confusing moment. Richard M. Nixon’s rise to the presidency in 1968 and his resounding reelection four years later marked a decisive turn to the right in American politics, the latter building on the voters’ repudiation of the anti-war Democratic Sen. George McGovern. But the Watergate scandals leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974 suddenly changed everything, and augured, many thought, a thoroughgoing Democratic revival. The Democrats, however, remained badly divided from the battles over the Vietnam War and Civil Rights. Cold War hawks, old-style New Dealers, anti-war reformers (many of them attracted to Kennedy), and even former segregationists left over from the party’s Jim Crow days all jostled for power inside the party and reached for the Democratic nomination in 1976.
Carter, a fresh face on the national scene, also emerged as a distinctive voice, a tribune of a progressive New South that had supposedly been transformed by the Civil Rights revolution. With a keen awareness of the travails of Southern politics, Carter understood how those dynamics might play out nationally. No Southern-born candidate had won the presidency since Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (and Wilson, after serving as president of Princeton University, had gone on to win election as governor of New Jersey). In the wake of the convulsive 1960s, however, followed by Nixon’s downfall, Carter saw room for a new kind Southerner, one who, having renounced the old segregationist order, could lead the nation away from racial backlash and toward a progressive healing and redemption.
Nixon had won the White House by following what became known as the “Southern strategy,” commandeering the Southern white vote while appealing to racial resentments over law and order, education, and housing in the North. Once he had finally decided to run, Carter had a Southern strategy of his own for the Democratic nomination, based on winning the African American vote in the primaries, a constituency that had been made possible by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “I could not stand here today as a candidate for president of the United States,” he told Black voters, “had it not been for Martin Luther King Jr.”
The results bore him out. Black voters gave Carter pivotal victories over the arch-segregationist George Wallace in the Florida and North Carolina Democratic primaries. Those victories, the death knell of the old Jim Crow Southern Democratic Party, instantly turned Carter into a major contender for the nomination and provided him with the momentum he needed to win. Then, in the general election against the incumbent Gerald Ford, Black votes secured for Carter every Southern and border state except Virginia — and thereby narrowly elected him president.
ONCE IN THE WHITE HOUSE, Carter pressed to protect affirmative action, expand business and educational opportunities for Blacks, and secure and expand voting rights for all, including a proposal to universalize Election Day registration. Vowing to uphold the Civil Rights advances of the 1960s, he appointed Drew S. Days III, formerly a lawyer with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and to enforce those laws vigorously. Carter also appointed the first Black U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, and the first Black female member of the Cabinet, Patricia Roberts Harris. He named more African Americans, women, and Latinos to the federal judiciary than all previous presidential administrations combined.
Carter’s civil rights policies were of a piece with his larger reform agenda. In the face of the recurring oil and energy crises that had begun in 1973, he launched a pioneering and comprehensive energy policy. He signed, among other environmental measures, the Superfund Act, designed to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous chemicals. Despite the nation’s economic difficulties, meanwhile, 10.3 million new American jobs were created during Carter’s four years in office, an auspicious record. And it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker as head of the Federal Reserve, the man whose policies would break the back of stagflation and set the stage for the subsequent economic growth during Ronald Reagan’s administration, though Carter would not receive the credit.
It is somewhat ironic, then, that the New South civil rights president will probably be remembered most for his efforts in foreign policy. Carter’s accomplishments abroad included, above all, masterminding the historic Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978 which opened the way for potential progress in resolving the Middle East conflict; signing the Panama Canal treaties in 1977 which completed the long overdue remanding of control of and responsibility of the canal to the Panamanian government; negotiating an arms control treaty with the Soviets; and formalizing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. All of these achievements, though, should be understood against the backdrop of Carter’s larger goal, which also grew from his prophetic self: to shift core American policy away from anti-communism alone and toward the vindication of human rights and the rule of international law, in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and China but also throughout the world.
The concept was an old one, and had been codified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, in the wake of the horrors of Nazi genocide and World War II, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — the first global enunciation of the inherent rights and freedoms due every human being. For Carter, in the aftermath of Vietnam, the United States finally had to face up to how, in combating the ambitions of the Soviets and the Chinese, the nation had supported corrupt and repressive regimes that defied the very values it was fighting for. And so, dramatically, he would redirect the objectives of American power toward protecting and advancing human rights — a goal to be pressed not simply on our Cold War adversaries but on our allies as well.
“Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere,” Carter declared in his inaugural address. “Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.” Soon thereafter, he replied to a letter from the great Soviet dissident, the physicist Andrei Sakharov, with a handwritten letter of his own expressing solidarity in the struggle for human rights and affirming that “human rights is the central concern of my administration.” (Sakharov presented the letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who responded by naming Sakharov an enemy of the state and sending him to internal exile at Gorki.) Soon, administration officials were speaking out against the brutal regime of Idi Amin in Uganda. In time, Carter’s human rights efforts also singled out abuses by U.S. allies including South Korea, Argentina, South Africa, and Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe.)
Carter’s turn to human rights generated criticism from across the political spectrum. He was also sometimes caught between his idealistic pronouncements and the harsh realities of international affairs, provoking charges of hypocrisy, nowhere with graver consequences than in Iran. Carter’s glaring and finally tragic inconsistencies with regard to the Shah Reza Pahlavi — a pro-Western modernizer but also a ruthless despot — created the conditions that led to the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Shah, which then led to the hostage crisis in Tehran that helped overwhelm Carter’s presidency.
Yet more than anyone could have realized at the time, Carter’s emphasis on human rights had momentous positive results, especially vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Carter’s predecessor, President Gerald Ford, had begun the shift by signing the famous Helsinki Accords in 1975 which, while recognizing Eastern bloc borders, also included assurances of civil and human rights. (For his pains, Ford earned condemnation from the right wing of his own party, notably the ascendant Ronald Reagan, as a witless and gutless appeaser.) The Helsinki human rights provisions led, in turn, to the formation of independent organizations, beginning with the Moscow Helsinki Group, to monitor abuses behind the Iron Curtain.
With the Helsinki agreement in force, Carter made his breakthrough. Altering the central axioms of American foreign policy by elevating human rights placed pressure on the Soviets at their most vulnerable point. Beyond engaging Sakharov, Carter directly encouraged dissident political currents in Central and Eastern Europe, most notably the Charter 77 group in Czechoslovakia, and raised powerful objections when they were repressed. Under Carter’s banner of human rights, these movements would thrive in the 1980s, and eventually lead to the toppling of the Soviet empire. President Reagan, remembered correctly in many ways as Carter’s political polar opposite, receives credit for ending the Cold War, or at least for helping to end it in tandem with Mikhail Gorbachev. But it was Jimmy Carter who prepared the way with his insistent emphasis on “an abiding respect for individual human rights.”
EVENTS CONSPIRED TO defeat Carter in 1980. His margin of victory four years earlier had been extremely slim, even against Nixon’s chosen successor, and the conservative political reaction seemingly suspended as a result of the Watergate scandal gained momentum again, now redoubled under Reagan, who replaced Nixon’s scowl with his own sunny image. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the continuing energy crisis, renewed resentments and divisions inside the Democratic Party, all created havoc for the Carter White House. His heartfelt effort to reason philosophically with the American people — as in his famous speech addressing what he called the nation’s “crisis of confidence” (never, despite myth, using the word “malaise”) — failed to reverse his political crisis.
Yet though Carter was defeated, he was not disgraced, and his extraordinary post-presidency — at nearly 44 years, the longest by far in American history — affirmed how much he was, if anything, a moral leader and visionary ahead of his time. The eulogies to come will list some of the multitude of his notable contributions after he departed the White House, from his early, humble carpenter’s work supporting Habitat for Humanity to his exceptional efforts, often coordinated through the Carter Center in Atlanta, on everything from the virtual eradication of Guinea worm disease in Africa and Asia to pursuing conflict resolution and peace negotiations from Ethiopia to Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Korean peninsula. According to the center, since 1989, its representatives have observed 125 elections in 40 countries and three Native American nations, to help secure and strengthen democracy. I imagine that few and maybe none of these efforts was more satisfying to Carter than his personal monitoring, in 1990, of the elections that brought the peaceful accession of a democratic opposition in war-torn Nicaragua — a democratic outcome that lasted until 2007 when the resurgent ex-revolutionary Daniel Ortega began to impose his own updated repressive rule.
In large measure, history has not moved in the direction that Jimmy Carter would have wanted. At home, the conservative wave that cut short his presidency was staunched by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama but hardly ended; indeed it became radicalized, in a direct line from the nihilist Reaganism of House Speaker Newt Gingrich to the lawless, plutocratic right-wing populism of President Donald Trump. In 2013, a reactionary Supreme Court majority reached the point of gutting the Voting Rights Act on which Carter wagered so much of his own political future and the nation’s; and since then, the court has become a menace to long-settled rights, not least in overturning Roe v. Wade, as well as to the rule of law itself, notably with its dreadful presidential immunity decision in July 2024. The criminal justice system that Carter railed against in 1974 has become a behemoth of mass incarceration, chiefly at the state level, as racially skewed and unfair now as it was then, if not more so. Abroad, in the Middle East, as elsewhere, the scale and the intensity of cruelty, terror, and suffering — indeed, of barbarism — has grown.
Yet across the globe, the cause of human rights that Carter proclaimed has also become the great cause of the oppressed and suffering, cutting through political ideologies, religious fanaticism, and dictatorships. If, today, governments and regimes are judged — and tyrannies challenged — according to the criteria of simple human rights, from Kyiv to Lhasa, then Jimmy Carter deserves a lion’s share of the credit. He did not rest easy on his achievements or turn bitter at his defeats. He was as goaded and restive at the age of 100 as he was 50 years ago, when he gave the “king hell bastard of a speech” citing Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan that so impressed Hunter Thompson. Hardly anyone present that day could have divined it, but Carter’s audacious remarks would prove but a starting point; and the Georgia politician with a touch of the prophet would help redeem, for all humanity, universal standards of freedom and decency. An inspiration for a brighter future when Carter pronounced them, those standards endure as a rallying point in darkening times.
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