“The press people are afraid I’m going to eat a fish bone and choke on it,” remarked Jimmy Carter to his brother-in-law Walter Spann. “They’re afraid they won’t have a picture when it happens.” The then 51-year-old governor of Georgia was running for president—and learning to grow accustomed to the national spotlight. Carter had wandered up to the porch at a fish fry in his hometown of Plains, where visiting journalists outnumbered locals by four to one.
Of course, it was Carter’s team who’d invited the entire press corps, according to Robert Scheer, who observed the conversation while reporting for Playboy. In fact, Scheer suspected such down-home photo ops were contrived for the media’s behalf. The campaign’s spin doctors exploited such “rural Southern exotica” to both fascinate and confound reporters, he wrote in an essay that accompanied his 1976 interview with the candidate. “The ambiguity that one feels about Carter can be maddening. Is he one of the most packaged and manipulative candidates in our time or a Lincolnesque barefoot boy who swooped out of nowhere at a time when we needed him?”
Looking back 40 years later, it’s obvious he was both.
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