I used to hate Jimmy Carter more than anything else in this world.
Let me explain.
It’s November 1979 in Oak Harbor, Washington, and I’m counting days. 24, 23, 22. I’m in the eighth grade. After school, I fold and then deliver the Seattle Times on Whidbey Island, the second largest island in the continental United States as our teachers like to remind us. I am counting days until I fly from Seattle to Honolulu to meet my dad, Commander Peter Rodrick, and ride back to San Diego with him on the USS Kitty Hawk.
The voyage will take six days, longer than I’ve ever spent alone with him. Finally, there will be time. I can come clean about faking sick so I could watch the Red Sox-Yankees one-game playoff last October. The Sox are Dad’s team. He’ll understand. Finally, I can learn what my father does. I know he flies jets off carriers, but how? Finally, I can ask him why things seem so hard all the time.
He is counting days, too, his letters to mom always mark the days left of his six-month deployment as skipper of VAQ-135, The Black Ravens. He asks her to hold on a little longer, she’s taking care of me and my two sisters alone and I can be a pain in the ass. (“I know Steve is probably getting excited and driving you crazy but 10 December will be here soon and you’ll have some peace and quiet.”)
I’m a nerd who can’t hit a baseball, but I can tell you the Electoral College breakdown of the 1976 Carter-Ford election. I read the paper closely as I fold and rubber band them into my carrier bag. I begin to see photographs on the front page of American hostages in Tehran, blindfolded and terrified. But I don’t connect all the dots. At school, I spend my newspaper money on five ice cream sandwiches for lunch and taunt David Tapia about how I’m heading to Hawaii and he’s not. I turn thirteen and receive a note from Dad: “Happy 13th, Welcome To Being A Teenager — Yuck!”
The Kitty Hawk is just running out the clock. The carrier is in Subic Bay in the Philippines where ordinance is loaded off and empty ammunition stores are filled with recently purchased stereo equipment, wooden plates for the wives, and black-market Adidas bags for the kids. Dad writes a letter on the back of a Naval Air Station Cubi Point menu — “I’m broke–” giving Mom advice about welcome home parties for the squadron.
And then, it all changes. I’m cuddled up in bed with some purloined Chip Ahoy cookies, listening to Larry King’s overnight radio show when Mom walks into my room. She is crying.
“Dad needs to talk to you.”
I’m half asleep and he is shouting through a bad connection from the Officers Club bar at Cubi Point. All I get out of the conversation is the trip is off. He won’t be home any time soon. On The Kitty Hawk, the stereo equipment is thrown overboard and the bombs are reloaded.
I read more the next day. President Jimmy Carter has ordered the Kitty Hawk to head for the Straits of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. The Midway is already there. Carter and the Joint Chiefs believe that two carriers camped off the Iranian coast might persuade Ayatollah Khomeini to let the hostages go or at least convince him there will be a stiff price to pay if they come to harm.
Things go back to a dreary level of normal. A week passes and we spend Thanksgiving with other families at the Navy mess on base. On November 28, my classmates and I take a short bus ride to the Roller Barn where the other kids make fun of me for not being able to skate backwards. And then my teacher taps me on the shoulder and points toward the lobby. There, my dad’s best friend sits in his dress uniform. He pats me on the knee.
“Your dad has been in an accident.”
I return home and there is a black sedan outside our house. A few hours later, we get the official news: My father and three fellow aviators have been killed when their EA-6B Prowler crashes into the Indian Ocean near Diego Garcia on a low-level training mission meant to simulate an attack on Tehran.
Dad is 36.
And I blame it all on Jimmy Carter.
I KNOW IT isn’t rational, but I base it on some facts. Not only did Carter send my father into harm’s way, but on October 29, 1979, he allowed the despotic and deposed Shah of Iran into the United States for cancer treatment. That is the immediate cause for Iranian students, at Khomeini’s behest, to storm the embassy and take the hostages a week later.
And I know my dad and his fellow pilots didn’t like the man, even though he went to the Naval Academy just like many of them. I remember them sitting around our house the summer before drinking Coors and declaring his presidency a disaster. They see Carter as something of a joke and cringe when he delivers a speech saying a malaise and a crisis of confidence has spread across the country they were sworn to defend. Carter is the first Democratic president after the Vietnam debacle and they see the Georgian, a former submarine officer, as weak, not willing to defend America’s interests overseas with force. (The irony that it was the previously unseen military muscle of Carter and his hawkish Middle East policy that led to my father’s death won’t hit me until much later.)
I wish I could say the feeling passes after a mourning period, but it does not. I dance around like a mad man in an end zone celebration when Carter loses to Ronald Reagan the next year. By then, we have moved to Flint, Michigan, to be closer to family. I attend Catholic high school, because that’s what Dad would have wanted. At school, I form with another kid, whose estranged father happens to also be a Navy pilot, the Conservative Liberation Organization, a cringy ad hoc of weirdo kids — Stephen Miller definitely would have joined — intent on stamping out the Democratic Party and its commie liberal policies. I am the one kid in class who will write a full defense of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative for the school paper. Occasionally, Carter appears on our television. I curse and ball my fists together in rage.
The phase does not pass quickly. I go away to college and mock students who are protesting student aid cuts as Reagan jacks up the military budget. I sneer and shout at them, “We all have to make sacrifices for our country.”
I go into therapy and, sure, it’s a lot about Mom and the loss of my dad, but Carter comes up a lot. He is the one who ruined my life, he is the one who caused Mom to be left alone and broken. The therapist tries to reason with me, but I do not hear.
Then something happens, not connected to my father or Carter. I move to Chicago and I see the poverty in the rows and rows of high-rise public housing tenements lining the South Side. And I remember thinking that my father would have wept at all of this urban despair. And I remember that, yes, he was a hot-shot Navy pilot, but he also was a man of God who went to Mass every day. After his crash, the priest on the Kitty Hawk writes to my mother to say that somehow, despite his 100-hour weeks doing the job he worked all his life to attain, he also found time to counsel sailors in crisis on the ship.
My heart begins to unfreeze.
Somewhere, I catch a TV news story of Carter building a house for the less fortunate with his wife, Rosalynn. And I see in their relationship a reflection of my parents’ marriage, a love that could survive crisis, separation, and even death. I learn that Carter is devout, a Baptist like my mother, and teaches Sunday School, something my father wanted to do once he left the Navy. And then I talk with my mother. “I don’t blame Carter,” she tells me. “Your dad knew the risks; he knew this could happen. He wouldn’t want you to hate him.”
I AM A REPORTER and it is not impossible that my paths could crossed with Carter at some point. In fact, I write a book about my father and Navy pilots and initially want to talk with Carter about the burden of sending Americans into harm’s way. Eventually, I embed with my father’s old squadron and deploy with them. I even get up in a Prowler, my dad’s old plane, and fly over Whidbey and look down on my old paper route. My son is born on November 28, 2013, 34 years to the day after my dad’s crash. I name him after his grandfather. But I never reach out to Carter.
Why? I think I knew I would have broken down in the kind old man’s arms. I would have said I was sorry for hating him. And that I forgave him for simply fulfilling the hardest part of a president’s job. And I know he would have said he understood. Maybe he would have shed a tear of his own. But I never did it.
I guess I am doing it now. President Carter, rest in peace.
