Political cartoons reveal the evolution of Jimmy Carter’s legacy

It was the summer of 2015 when former president Jimmy Carter revealed a dire diagnosis: melanoma had spread to his liver and brain. As he made peace with the news, receiving treatment at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University in Atlanta, a nearby artist responded from the heart.

Mike Luckovich, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, immediately knew he wanted to create art for the next day as an expression of support. Luckovich recalls telling his editor: “We’ve got to do something on Carter because he’s been so important to Georgia, to Atlanta, and he’s such an amazing person.” But evening deadline was looming. The editor’s response: Draw quickly.

Luckovich drew a married couple hammering a sign onto their front lawn. In the style of a campaign poster, it read: “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor.” And soon after the artwork was published, a person from Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, asked permission to make actual campaign signs like the one pictured. Sure thing, the artist said.

Several days later, as Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were driven home, they came upon hundreds of these signs lining the street. As Luckovich recounts, Carter — despite everything he’d just been through — got out of his vehicle, took a photo and sent it to Luckovich with words of appreciation.

Political cartooning is “sort of a negative art, but sometimes you can do a [positive] cartoon and you never know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to be received,” Luckovich said in an interview before Carter’s death (while noting that Carter once blurbed a book the cartoonist wrote).

“I was so glad to do it for him and Rosalynn. They’ve both been such humble, beautiful human beings. It’s going to be difficult” when he dies, continued Luckovich, pausing as he became choked up. “He’s just been so important to this country.”

Luckovich’s recollections point to an evolution in how Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was portrayed by editorial cartoonists. During his presidency, Carter was routinely lampooned over issues such as inflation, the energy crisis and geopolitics, including the Iranian hostage crisis and mostly excluding the Camp David peace accords. Yet eventually during Carter’s long post-presidency, as his reputation as a humanitarian and a diplomat grew, the cartoons became more glowing.

“Herblock and many other editorial cartoonists characterized Carter as an honest but ineffective leader during his presidency,” said Sara Duke, curator of graphic art in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. “As he started to run for reelection in 1979 and 1980, many cartoonists placed in him in the shadow of Sen. Ted Kennedy.”

Early in Carter’s presidency, many cartoonists focused on exaggerating his toothy smile. At least one cartoon even depicted the president metaphorically disappearing, till all that was left was a Cheshire cat grin. (I even caricatured that signature smile in the ’90s; Carter soon sent a note of appreciation about the illustration depicting him as a baseball player, which was put in the collection at the Carter Center.)

Yet by the end of his one term, as the energy and hostage crises worsened, Duke said, cartoonists had changed that expression: “It was a grimace.”

Herblock, the legendary Washington Post cartoonist, was fond of finding metaphors to render Carter’s leadership as lacking. In a cartoon from 1978, Carter is dressed as a Scout unsuccessfully trying to spark a campfire amid a frigid winter scene — a work that mocks the president’s efforts as an “energy leader.” And in a cartoon from 1979, Carter holds a visitors’ guide to Washington as he bellows at an empty Oval Office chair, “Who’s in charge here?”

Among other works in the Library of Congress’s collection, a 1978 cartoon by Patrick Oliphant, the retired Pulitzer winner, pictures Carter kneeling in prayer as he tries to repair an overloaded truck labeled, “State of the Union.” In another Oliphant work, from 1980, Carter is attempting to debate candidate Ronald Reagan while tethered to an Iranian hostage.

Yet the work of such political artists as Jim Borgman, the former Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, reflects the shift in perception as Carter became an elder statesman.

“I was just beginning my political cartooning career as Jimmy Carter came into office, so it’s hard to separate my own immaturity as a commentator from his legacy in office,” Borgman told The Post. “In lockstep with the mainstream media, I lampooned his idea of linking foreign policy to human rights — an idea I would now heartily support.

“Like most others at the time, I made a big deal of the minor foibles of some of his administration’s players that history eventually blows away with the wind,” Borgman continued while citing such then-White House figures as budget director Bert Lance, press secretary Jody Powell and aide Hamilton Jordan. But only later did Borgman fully consider how Carter helped stabilize the White House so soon after the Watergate downfall of President Richard M. Nixon, who was pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford: “I certainly didn’t appreciate all he did to bring honesty, decency and transparency back to the presidency, which, in perspective, was his greatest accomplishment.”

Today, Borgman values the lens of a longer view: “With the benefit of that perspective, I now see that I could have — should have — supported many of his ideas. I regret that I didn’t more often turn my pen on his opponents. That toothy smile we all joked about was, in hindsight, an antidote to Nixon’s toxic scowl.”

Jack Ohman, a cartoonist and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, once drove a press bus in a Carter motorcade in 1978, while a 17-year-old political aide. In that era, he was also avidly tracking the barbs of the late cartooning great Jeff MacNelly, of whose work Ohman said: “I can assure you those cartoons stung Carter and may have even hurt him politically, which is an almost unheard-of influence in cartooning now.”

Ohman, who thinks Carter was “vastly underrated” as a president, drew a 2015 cartoon that pithily summarizes Carter’s life of public service and calls him a “good man” and “great ex-president.”

“I tried to make my drawings of Carter reflect his rather world-weary but resolute faith in humanity,” said Joel Pett, a Pulitzer-winning syndicated cartoonist. “It annoyed and angered me that many cartoonists drew him as hapless or weak — an image that apparently much of the country [once] shared.”

Matt Wuerker, Politico’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, cut his journalistic teeth on Carter while drawing for his school newspaper, the Pioneer Log, at Lewis and Clark College in the ’70s. And his cartoons portrayed Carter in a negative light as recently as 2012, when he drew the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees trying to cast each other as Carter and Nixon.

“I have some guilt looking back at this,” Wuerker said. “It’s sadly emblematic of a facile take on Carter that set in right away, something many cartoonists perpetuated. He became a symbol of a failed presidency, which, taking the longer view, was truly unfair.”

The Politico cartoonist considers this in retrospect: “Carter deserved better.”

“We were unkind to a principled man who, on both a political and personal level, had a level of integrity and wisdom that is rarely found in our political leaders,” Wuerker said.

Since Carter’s death, the tribute cartoons have begun to stream in — in stark contrast to the frequent tone of more than four decades ago. “The point of an editorial cartoon, of course, is not to look back generously, but to offer an opinion at a moment in time, and persuade others to one’s point of view,” said Duke, the art curator. “Editorial cartoonists look back generously when they create an obituary cartoon.”

After Carter went into hospice in early 2023, Luckovich prepared an obituary cartoon: Carter arrives at the pearly gates welcomed by tool-bearing angels who present him with the “Habitat for Jimmy” home they’ve built for him. (The nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, which was founded in Georgia during Carter’s ascent to the White House, has long partnered with the Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project.)

But after Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023, Luckovich created a different cartoon, the first one he released this week: She greets him at those gates, running into his arms and shouting, simply, “Jimmy!”

“What amazing human beings these two were,” Luckovich said in a video accompanying the cartoon, “and we’re so lucky to have them in our lives.”

By Michael Cavna via The Washington Post