What If Other Presidents Lived As Long As Jimmy Carter?

Let’s imagine that Franklin D. Roosevelt had possessed the same gift for longevity as Jimmy Carter and lived until he was 100. He would have died in1982, in Ronald Reagan’s second year in office.

Most likely FDR would then reside in my consciousness in roughly same way Carter does for my children, who are in their twenties. Remember that time he was at our same gate at the airport and we thought about trying to talk with him but decided that might be weird? In other words, FDR would seem like a somewhat fuzzy figure but not an impossibly distant one — not a sort of marble statue from a whole other era.

It is eye-opening to play this same game with others. John F. Kennedy, who was killed just a couple of weeks after I was born, would have been eulogized by President Donald Trump in 2017. Abraham Lincoln would have lived until 1909, after the dawn of aviation. Theodore Roosevelt, who as a small boy watched Lincoln’s funeral procession from his family’s New York apartment, would have lived to see nuclear weapons and the early days of the space race before expiring in 1958. If Bill Clinton reaches the century mark, in 2046, he will have an ex-presidency even longer than Carter’s, which lasted 43 years and 344 days and is the current record.

Is there a point to this historical arithmetic, beyond the obvious that Carter lived a really, really long time — 40 percent of the total time the United States has existed since independence? Yes, there may be, though perhaps one needs to rummage around a bit to find it.

The season of national remembrance and appreciation for Carter has lasted nearly two years — almost half the time he was actually in office — ever since his office announced he was in hospice care and then kept living on and on. Since he was sentient for most of this time, according to confidants, Carter read many of the tributes and historical reappraisals that first began appearing in the spring of 2023. He was the first president to replicate the experience of two fabled American literary characters, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, who snuck into their own funerals after being presumed drowned in the Mississippi.

The reports of Carter’s death may have been greatly exaggerated at first, but they came true in the waning hours of 2024. While there may not be much more to say that hasn’t been said already about his astonishingly productive life, this morning’s official funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral nonetheless will offer an arresting tableau. The president who lived the longest will be eulogized by President Joe Biden, 82, who was older on his first day as president than the next-oldest, Ronald Reagan, was on his last. In the audience will be President-elect Trump, who if he serves a full term will break Biden’s record on Aug. 14, 2028.

Old presidents indirectly underline an important point about this country: The United States remains a young nation, in which even events that seem long ago are really just one or two degrees of separation from contemporary lives.

When Biden first entered the U.S. Senate in 1973, shortly after turning 30, he served with a half-dozen senators who were born in the late 1800s. In 2020, he was one of just 13 of that group who were still living. As he leaves office, he is one of just three. (Bob Dole and Walter Mondale were among those who died during his presidency; Sam Nunn of Georgia is still living at 86, as is J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana at age 92.)

Carter’s own life makes the point vividly. Following his birth in Plains, Georgia, in 1924, Carter’s life took him through the Great Depression, World War II, the atomic bomb, the Vietnam War, the Apollo moonshot (probably the historical milestone most likely to shine brightly, say, 500 years from now), the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, the Watergate scandal, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise of the internet, the Sept. 11 attacks, the legalization of gay marriage, the warming of the earth and the radical polarization of American politics in a new media age exemplified by the Trump movement and the bitter arguments it has sown.

That is a lot of history in one life, and it is notable that Biden and Trump themselves are shaped by contemporaneous memories of all these events but the first two.

There are different ways to perceive the implications. In one light, it is a reminder — at a moment when many people live with a mood of high agitation and imminent catastrophe — that the country has surmounted lots of problems, and time always finds a way to move on. In a different light, it is a reminder of the fragility of all human arrangements. Ideas, institutions, movements, even countries — they all rise and fall. Just because time moves on doesn’t mean it will do so to our advantage.

From a personal perspective, on a day when the 39th president will be lowered into earth, it is a reminder of how many perceptions turn out to be optical illusion. I had childhood memories of both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, but Carter’s was the first I actually followed and tried to understand as it was unfolding.

He seemed to illustrate the way national life was shrinking. As an adolescent in the late 1970s, I had a sense that real history had somehow happened just before me — the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., the Beatles, the counterculture. Carter, with his flat speaking style, his preachiness, his cardigan sweaters and double-knit slacks and, as his political travails worsened, his inability to project a sense of command seemed to exemplify the exhaustion of the decade.

I could not have imagined that I was witnessing someone who counted as one of the more interesting and searching figures to occupy the presidency. As his most compelling biographer, Jonathan Alter, made clear in his 2020 history, “His Very Best,” the familiar line that Carter was a weak president but great ex-president does not do justice to the capaciousness of ambition, intelligence and conviction that shaped his whole life. That includes his astonishingly disciplined and foresighted rise from obscurity to the White House and the underappreciated creativity he showed once there. The great theme of Carter’s political life — in both the winning campaign of 1976 and the losing campaign of 1980 — was how believers in activist government must reckon with an electorate filled with mistrust of politics and establishment institutions of all sorts. This is precisely the question facing Democrats now.

As Carter’s life shows, sometimes history’s lessons aren’t so easy to perceive in real time.