Americans bid their final farewells to former President Jimmy Carter as funeral services concluded this week. The 39th president died at age 100 on December 29th, 2024. Services that followed, from Georgia to Washington, highlighted Carter’s life, his presidency and what he accomplished after it alongside the former First Lady, the late Rosalynn Carter.
Also remembering Carter is the president's former Chief of Protocol, Evan Dobelle. Dobelle is a former mayor of Pittsfield and Westfield State University president, who spoke with WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief James Paleologopoulos about his time at the White House, Carter’s legacy and how the public’s perception of the Carter years has changed.
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Evan Dobelle: Jimmy Carter's character is extraordinary. He is a person who always tried to figure out how to do the right thing, not the political thing, and sometimes it took longer, sometimes it invoked criticism that things were going in a difficult way.
But, it was the making of - without unnecessary compromise - a great record, whether it be the Camp David Peace Accords with Israel and Egypt … whether it be the Panama Canal Treaties, which avoided a Vietnam in South America for us, whether it be deregulating airlines, where now you can fly to places [via] JetBlue and Spirit - we never had those plane companies available - whether it be doubling the size of the landmass of our federal parks we can visit around the country, whether it was appointing more African Americans and people of color and women to the federal judgeships, including putting Ruth Ginsburg in a position to be under the Supreme Court - he never had a Supreme Court nominee available, creating the Department of Education, because he felt, if everybody talks about it as the most important issue, why isn't it [at] the cabinet level, the Department of Energy, where he used prescient and put solar panels on the roof of the White House that, regrettably, his successor took down.
I just think in all those worlds of enterprise that the president had - that a lot different results would be for education and energy in our country.
And most importantly, he left a balanced budget! Whoever heard of a balanced budget? He did a line item budget, which meant he read every line of the budget. People said he was too serious a student. Well, he was President of the United States and he was careful, and in a book afterwards, the new head of the Office of Management and Budget for President Reagan, in his book, Jim Stockman said he couldn't believe how much money was available, which unfortunately was given away in tax cuts for millionaires.
So, the point is, he had strong character. He was a serious, tough president - I know the big smile, and that was him too; he was warm and genuine. But when you got into an office with him and had a conversation, there was no small talk. It was, “Let's get to these issues and tell me why you think what you think.”
So, to me, he was a perfect president, but quite honestly, in our Northeast, which in those years, without the internet, without cable television, major networks and major newspapers were very skeptical of Jimmy Carter.
He had the wrong accent, came from the wrong region of the country, wrong religion, and they never, somehow, could accept a Southern voice talking about serious government issues and I think that was a complication for the president, who ended in losing the presidency, because what people say was the treason of the Governor of Texas.
John Conley and his lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, who admitted last year, at the age of 86, that he wanted to get off his chest, that they met with representatives of the Iranian government, met with [William] Casey, the head of the CIA under Reagan, and said that it would be much better for Iran if they didn't give the hostages back until President Carter was out of office.
Pretty shocking revelation, but it was a one-day story today, 44 years later.
WAMC: Evan, could you walk me through how you came to work in the Carter White House? What is the role of the Chief of Protocol of the United States?
Evan Dobelle: Well, the President surprised me, quite honestly.
I endorsed him when I was mayor of Pittsfield. I thought he was a great balance for a ticket that, in those times, we were talking about Hubert Humphrey or Scoop Jackson being the nominee, but I wanted to have him on the ticket and it was one of those great, grassroots campaigns where it just came to be that following Nixon, people were looking for a person of character and faith, and Jimmy Carter got elected.
I helped out in the convention - I was a sitting mayor, so I had responsibilities at home, but took some weekends and campaigned with him and found him to always be steady and sure and never over-promising, but just said “We can we can do better - why not the best?” is what his line was. But today, because of NPR and other stalwart parts of journalism, people are learning about the enormous success of President Carter.
He made me Chief of Protocol, which is really the person who sort of is the liaison to the diplomatic corps in Washington, so I not only saw the foreign ambassadors, but also traveled around the world for the President, and then with the President, meeting kings and queens and prime ministers, and for me, it was a seat to history - I was not a participant in the making of foreign policy, but certainly, gave my opinion after I listened to a conversation of what I thought from being a local guy, what I thought of the person who he was talking to.
So, to us, it was a thrill, and then my wife got to succeed me as Chief for Protocol and when I became a treasurer of the Democratic Party, to do penance, Carter said, because I must have had a good time being Chief of Protocol, and then they made me chairman of the 1980 campaign, and then came home - many of us came home.
We're not Washingtonian people, we're not interested in that kind of culture - our interest was being home with friends and going to local bar on Thursday nights with some guys.
So, we had a normal life after that and I went back to school, got graduate work done and became a college president for 27 years.
WAMC: Your wife, Edith, also served as Chief of Protocol and Chief of Staff to the First Lady - not many households are involved in her presidency to that extent ...
Evan Dobelle: We were honored to have his trust. Her given name was Edith - her name is Kit, who everyone calls her, including - that her ambassadorial rank, it's under Kit.
Rosalynn loved her and made her Chief of Staff, and that meant she was a counselor to the president, so, she got to know a lot more than I did, and wouldn't talk about it, because you don't talk about things outside the White House, at least we don't.
We certainly had opportunities and people reached out to us to write a book and I said, “Why would we write a book?” and they would say “We can give you six figures” and I said, “I'm not going to write a book about what I learned from a President of the United States, who gave me a position of trust – I’m not going to talk about that.”
And so, I never have, but one of the things that interests me is - it's been 44 years since he's been president. 44 years. When I first voted, in the late 1960s, this would be like talking about, “What do you think of Woodrow Wilson?” “What do you think about Teddy Roosevelt?” That's how long it's been.
So, people in this country, half the people in this country weren't born when Jimmy Carter left the presidency, so all they know about is what he accomplished since, so with people being critical, purposely, people would say, “Well, he was a great ex-president, but not a great president.”
Well, that's because no one ever talked about his presidency again, they just talked about what he's accomplished with Habitat for Humanity and river blindness in Africa and the elimination the Guinea worm and all those kinds of things and how many missions he went to for other presidents who would send him to places like Haiti or South Korea.
But, he was a formidable president who never got the credit while he was president, and got really known by America now as a former president, but I hope people will understand he was an extremely consequential president.
Quite honestly, in my opinion, as was Joe Biden ... Joe Biden was the first United States senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for President in 1973 - they're very similar. They're low-key, they have humility, they get things done and don't take credit for it, and so people don't give them the credit/
WAMC: Regarding the 1980 campaign - for you personally, as well as the former president, what were the biggest takeaways from that experience?
Evan Dobelle: Well, the takeaway was it was complicated for us because we were the obvious nominee, but it's important to recognize that when Gerald Ford became President because of Richard Nixon's having to step down, who made Gerald Ford Vice President [after Nixon] asked Spiro Agnew to resign – I mean, it was a very difficult time in America with Watergate and other things - Gerald Ford served more than two years of the presidency of Richard Nixon … his election in 1976 against Jimmy Carter would have been his last term, and Ted Kennedy would then try to run in 1980, but Jimmy Carter got in the way.
And when Jimmy Carter became President and Walter Mondale was Vice President, I assume Ted Kennedy - late Senator Kennedy - who was a great lion of the senate, but also extraordinarily ambitious, which is not unusual, but he didn't want to wait until 1984 because he thought Mondale would beat him, and Carter, at that time, was looked upon as vulnerable, and so he challenged him and when you do that, it stops the political process to run against the Republicans, and you have to defend your record.
Carter was a centrist, and yet his ideas, today, would be considered very progressive, but Senator Kennedy chose to run and run to his left, if you will, but he was crushed in Iowa, he was crushed in New Hampshire. I personally went to Puerto Rico and became friends with Jackie Kennedy, who was representing Senator Kennedy in Puerto Rico, as I was representing the President - great friends, different kind of style of politics, and we defeated him in Puerto Rico.
But then it was clear that Jimmy Carter was going to be the nominee again... in those days, once you committed to a candidate for the nomination and were elected as a delegate, you were committed on the first ballot, so there was no way to go all the way to the convention, but [Kennedy] went all the way to the convention, and at the convention, he had a great speech about liberalism in the future, but it hurt us in the way of raising money and getting people organized and dealing with the various groups that normally endorse candidates, like the National Education Association or the AFL-CIO, so we were late to the game.
And then, what people are saying is the treason of the Iranian hostage situation - we lost that election going into the final weekend. Since 1948, if you were [an] undecided voter, in this case, Carter versus Reagan, you generally would stay with the incumbent, two-to-one. You just didn't want to change, you couldn't make up your mind, so you stay with the incumbent.
It was the one-year anniversary of the taking of the hostages. They knew what they were doing in Iran, and all you saw on television, particularly that weekend, was coverage of the hostage taking, including about 300 days of Ted Koppel and ABC News at 11:30 every night, did a half-hour on America held hostage.
Well, what happened? Independent voters broke nine-to-one against Carter; nine-to-one, instead of two-to-one the other way, and we lost, hugely in the electoral college, but President Reagan, who I admire - genial, a little more conservative on issues than perhaps I am - but he just barely won 50 percent of the vote.
John Anderson, a very liberal Republican congressman, also was a third-party candidate and got about seven or eight percent of the vote, directly benefiting, obviously, President Reagan, otherwise those voters most likely would have voted for Carter.
Jimmy Carter then went on to the Carter Center and all the good that he's done around the world, so a consequential president who never had an easy day. Again, wrong accent, wrong region, wrong religion and the Northeast ruled in those days - the mainstream media, print media, mostly, some radio and he became a former president.
But I don't know any president in the history of this country who has only had one term who has the record that Jimmy Carter had, because he took on difficult, second term issues in his first term.
In other words, the Panama Canal, for instance - Kennedy wanted to do it, wouldn't do it. Johnson said he wanted to do it, wouldn't do it. Nixon said he wanted to do it, didn't do it. Ford said he wanted to do it, he didn't do it. Carter did it … but it cost Jimmy Carter an enormous hit with the American people, who thought, somehow, that we should own it forever, when we really [owned] it - in international law - kind of illegally, and controlled it.
And if you went to Panama in those years, as I did, you could see the Panama Canal zone, which was like a manicured golf course, and across the street was a Third World and we would have ended up in a in a guerrilla war, started by sinking one ship in the Panama Canal - all you needed to do is sink one ship, and you learned you were going to be in a war.
WAMC: Evan, one last question I want to ask - what do you make of the modern perception of the Carter presidency? One could argue over the last decade or so, there's been somewhat of a softening, the Iranian Hostage Crisis still comes up, for example, but so do stories like the solar panels installed on the White House. What have you seen, and what do you make of it?
Evan Dobelle: Well, I think people are just recognizing a lot has happened in 44 years. I mean, we had Ronald Reagan for two terms, we had H.W. Bush for a term, you had Bill Clinton for eight years, you had W. Bush President for eight years, Barack Obama President for eight years. You had … Trump President for four years, you had Joe Biden President for four years - i's been a long time that [Carter’s] not been president, and so therefore, even journalists who I talked to said, “You know, I really never knew what Jimmy Carter ever did.”
Because how much would I have known, if I were a journalist in 1968, what the issues were in the first term of Woodrow Wilson? Or his fight to hold onto the presidency, or Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party in 1912? That's the distance in years we're talking about.
So, I think it's been a rediscovery by young journalists who are saying, "Look, he was a great president,” and I think it's not a softening, I think it's a recognition of a an extraordinary four years that he accomplished as a consequential president, and I think that's what's happening.
And for young people, I mean, 50 years since he got elected in 1976, who was alive 50 years ago? And even then, if you were, you would have been thinking about this as an historical kind of election.
With other people, if somebody asked the journalists “What kind of president was Woodrow Wilson,” they wouldn't know right away, and they don't know now, but now with social media and cable television and constant, 24/7 coverage of the Carter years because of his death, they're discovering that this was one of the great presidents of the United States. He's not going on Mount Rushmore, but he's going to go to that top ten of presidents in the United States.
WAMC: Evan, thank you so much for your time.
Evan Dobelle: My pleasure.
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Evan Dobelle is a former mayor of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He served as Chief of Protocol during the Carter administration and later served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, among other roles. Following the Carter presidency, Dobelle would serve as president at several colleges and universities, including Trinity College and Westfield State University. He spoke with WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief James Paleologopoulos a week following the 39th president’s death.
