Carter Playboy interview 24 September 1976

On Wednesday morning, a man in Atlanta, Georgia, walked into a lift in a office building, saw one of the firm's secretaries standing beside him and said, 'You look particularly nice today! Very nice indeed!' And she said, 'Well, you know what Jimmy Carter says – it's OK as long as you keep it in your heart.'

Well for those who haven’t a clue to what I'm talking about – for, that is, the people who don't read newspapers or are very pure in heart – maybe I'd better begin at the beginning while hastening to assure the rest of you that I'm not going to follow this latest Jimmy Carter episode step by step. One step might be funny or fascinating. To take it a step at a time would be about as tedious as putting on a display of every single step on file with the Ministry of Silly Walks. 

All right then. In the current issue of Playboy – which was the first of the gamey magazines that now make the news-stands of the western world so bulge with bosoms and buttocks as to be mistaken by the short-sighted for fruit stalls tottering with melons – in the current issue of Playboy there is a long, 8,000-word interview with the Democratic presidential candidate, Mr Jimmy Carter. In this interview, Mr Carter says many interesting and even thoughtful things about the range of issues, domestic and foreign, that confront this country and its allies. Being Mr Carter, he also talks about himself in a way that we have come to recognise as the musing of a man to whom his religion is an ever-present part of his life. 

My father used to tell me that Mr Gladstone chewed every morsel of his food 32 times before swallowing. Mr Carter told us the other day that he prays 34 times a day. Mr Carter is a Baptist and is so insistent in public about the tenets of his faith that he may help to coin a new idiom. Until now most of us, I think, save the adjective 'devout' for Catholics. Mr Carter may become known everywhere as a devout Baptist. 

Well, the issue of Playboy containing the interview had been on the stands for some time before a sharp-eyed news agency man spotted one peculiar passage in it. I don't think any newspaper has bothered to pick up what is politically interesting about the interview and it's a sign of the times, perhaps of any time, that what most newspapers are looking for is not a careful discussion of the complexities of modern life, but some, simple, juicy, preferably indiscreet remark which merely be being isolated from its context can be made to appear scandalous. 

Now I may be accused, and rightly, of following this mischievous habit by quoting you nothing but the scandalous passage but I'm not, at the moment, going into the views of Mr Carter and Mr Ford on the political issues that face America – we've all had a long glimpse of them in Thursday night's first television debate – I'm reporting one remark of Mr Carter in a magazine interview because that remark has echoed round the country. It may come to be all that many people will ever remember about Mr Carter and there's already no doubt that, one way or another, it may have the most dramatic effect on the voters in November. Not even Mr Carter's closest advisers will say that it could win him the election. Mr Ford's advisers are bucked by the thought that it might lose Carter the election. 

All right, all right, Cooke! So what did he say? Well, out of the blue, Mr Carter said, 'I've looked on a lot of women with lust, I've committed adultery in my heart many times.' But he went on to assure the interviewer that he knew (how?) that God had forgiven him and then said he would not condemn a man, quote, 'who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock' and – I'm still quoting – 'Christ says don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy, ' and there I have to stop the quote, even on this programme there are limits to what you might call 'family slang,' because one guy sleeps, shall we say, quote, 'with a whole lot of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife.' 

Now I don't think anybody who has even the most casual acquaintance with the New Testament would deny that this is sound Christian doctrine though it may embarrass some pious people to hear so. If Mr Carter had said it another... a gentler way, the passage would never have been plucked from the interview but what amazed even bloodshot politicians who are capable of much rougher language in private was the crudity of Mr Carter's phrasing in talking about sex. If it had been a private slip in the mouth of a politician in his cups, it still would have done harm to his public image but Mr Carter has never been known to be in his cups. In public, he's always appeared to be a man of such earnest, grinding rectitude, with never a flicker of humour, that many ardent Democrats have prayed for him to 'unbend' a little and talk a little more lightly, more folksily from time to time. But, on this occasion, he didn't unbend, he verbally unbuttoned. 

The first thing that happened was to have reporters get hold of Mrs Carter and ask her how she felt. She got out of it with great grace saying that she'd always had good cause to trust her husband implicitly and explicitly. Next they interviewed Mr Carter's 78-year-old mother. She paused and thought a moment and said, 'In a way I was surprised but it didn't shock me. Do you know, I'm so broad-minded, and he just gave an honest answer.' 

Then they went after Mr Carter's vice-presidential running mate, Senator Mondale – we're getting a little closer to the general mood with him a running mate must never, ever question the wisdom and goodness of the man he might one day succeed. Senator Mondale came through gamely. He said he didn't believe the religious beliefs and moral opinions of the candidates should or will become an issue in the campaign and bearing up bravely, he went on to say that in fact Mr Carter had a characteristic rarely found in politicians. It is a, he said, a refreshing candour which – quote – 'might prove quite helpful in the long run.' 

Well, after that, the reporters (newspaper, magazine, radio, TV) fanned out across the country and they had a hard time finding many people who echoed Senator Mondale's belief or hope that this whole incident would prove quite helpful. The Republicans, of course, are tickled pink and are, for the most part, keeping their joy to themselves. But Vice President Rockefeller couldn't help grinning before an audience in Cleveland and saying, 'I never thought I'd see the day when Christ's teachings were discussed in Playboy and I'm a Baptist, ladies and gentlemen!' 

From all over the place it was possible to sense a trend of ordinary people being more dazed than anything else. While women's libbers thought it a typical masculine attitude, most men and women interviewed felt it was a puzzling thing to bring up in a presidential election. An old lady in Louisiana said, 'It's not the kind of thing a president ought to be talking about.' And a professor of art in Atlanta, where the girl in the lift said, 'It's OK if you keep it in your heart', I think he put his finger on what is likely to be, to look at it cold-bloodedly, Mr Carter's big, tactical mistake. This man said, 'It was not very smart to do publicly and I also thought, oh Lord, now the president is going to start preaching about "lust in your heart".' 

Well, I think it unlikely that Mr Ford will follow suit. He and his advisers, with the memory of Watergate and the gangster language of the tapes still green, are concerned to see that, however dull Mr Ford may sound at times, he's never going to sound less than presidential. And that, I believe, is the main thing. 

The chairman of the Democratic party in Mr Carter's native state of Georgia cut through the well-disguised embarrassment of most Democratic politicians and said, 'The general reaction? Bad. Bad, bad. I've been everywhere today and the reaction is uniformly negative'. By the way, I don't think I've seen a single quote from anybody famous or obscure to confess that they were disgusted or even shocked and let's say, for argument's sake, that public taste or acceptable morality, if you like, has changed so drastically in the past ten or twenty years that nobody today is shocked' let's say that. But between the shedding of an old moral attitude and the taking on of a new one, there must surely be an uncomfortable period when you're not absolutely certain that the new attitude is right, or better than the old. Most Americans then, I'd guess, are more baffled than anything else. 

The incident can only deepen what has become Mr Carter's main disability, which is his power to puzzle people, not as a debater but as a personality. An old and highly intelligent friend of mine wrote to me from California. He wrote, 'I never thought I'd come to voting for Ford. I look on him as an honest oaf. But Carter turns more and more into a country slicker and a puzzling one and I'd rather have the honest oaf every time.' 

Lots of people must feel this way but you no sooner pin a label on Mr Carter than he strips it off. Before Playboy he might have been to many people a country slicker. After Playboy, he comes on more as a honest Elmer Gantry, an old-time, brooding Evangelist – a strange, sincere man but with something of the... of the tortured quality of the Reverend Mr Davidson in Somerset Maugham's tale about Sadie Thompson. 

The polls now show Carter slipping markedly and offering us a prospect we never expected three months ago – the prospect of a very close race. In three states that the Republicans were resigned to losing, to being clobbered in, in New York, Illinois and California, the polls show Carter and Ford now neck and neck. I suspect that if Mr Ford can go on reinforcing his convention image as a downright, decent man, an understandable, ordinary man, he could win handsomely. Adlai Stevenson's wit was thought, during his campaign, to be a great asset, but in the post-mortems it was seen to be a liability. 

And if wit is off-putting in a national candidate, there's something worse. Strangeness. The uncomfortable and growing feeling that we don't quite know who Carter is or what he's really up to.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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