Opinion – Al Cross: The political life of late President Jimmy Carter – and his connections to Kentucky

The political life of Jimmy Carter had several threads in Kentucky, which in turn influenced the state’s political and economic life.

Perhaps the first major law Carter signed as president, and one that hasn’t been mentioned in any of his many obituaries I’ve read, was the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. It ended the state-by-state patchwork of laws on strip mining, a business with much to gain or lose at the hands of politically influenced state regulators. Republican President Gerald Ford had vetoed two previous versions, and when Carter campaigned in Kentucky the week before its 1976 Democratic primary he said he favored “strict, uniform, nationwide strip-mine laws.”

The law greatly changed the coal industry, greatly reducing the ranks of small operators, who tended to be less obedient of regulators, and requiring that stripped land be restored to its approximate original contour – with one big exception. It allowed the tops of mountains to be pushed into the heads of hollows, creating flat land that coal companies said could be developed. But little of it was because of low demand and distance from infrastructure. Only in the last year or two, after the disastrous southeastern Kentucky floods of 2022, are some old strip jobs being turned into badly needed housing outside the floodplains.

Al Cross is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Kentucky. He was the longest-serving political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal (1989-2004) and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02. He joined the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2010. The NKyTribune is the home for his commentary which is offered to other publications with appropriate credit.

Still, the law reduced the environmental damage of coal mining, which was probably worse in Kentucky than anywhere else, and included a severance tax that financed the reclamation of abandoned strip mines, which covered 70,000 acres in Eastern Kentucky alone. The abandoned-mine-land law is also being used to finance water projects in areas of Kentucky affected by coal mining.

A greater landmark of Carter’s term was ratification of the treaty giving the Panama Canal to Panama. Kentucky’s U.S. senators, both Democrats, split on ratification; Wendell Ford voted against it, while Dee Huddleston voted for it. More than anything else, that 1978 vote cast Huddleston as a national Democrat and was a key factor in his 1984 loss to Republican Mitch McConnell, who is still in the Senate.

Carter, governor of Georgia from 1971 through 1974, never really got along with Ford, who was Kentucky governor at about the same time. Ford called him “a lightweight” and favored Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington for the 1976 presidential nomination. Ford’s successor as governor, Julian Carroll, said any Democrat he endorsed would have to support a constitutional amendment banning court-ordered busing for school desegregation, the biggest issue in the Louisville area at the time. That pointed to George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who had won 18 percent of Kentucky’s vote as an independent in 1968 – but only 1 percent in the state’s 1972 Democratic caucuses, making him a non-viable choice for Carroll.

Into this vacuum stepped two men from Western Kentucky: Bill Cox of Madisonville, a former state representative who was a legislative aide to Carroll, and Dale Sights, a Henderson businessman who was looking for a speaker for his Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner. State Sen. William Sullivan and John Stanley Hoffman, who had been Ford’s natural-resources secretary, had heard Carter speak and suggested him. He agreed, and turned the January 1975 trip into his first true campaign swing in any state; Sullivan, a pilot, flew him around Kentucky, including a stop at Frankfort to see Carroll.

A year later, after Carter won the Iowa caucuses, Sights and Cox called an organizational meeting for him in Louisville, where Mayor Harvey Sloane was about to endorse Carter, following Lexington Mayor Foster Petit. As Carter won a string of primaries, his Kentucky bandwagon grew and Carroll finally got on board in mid-April. Carter won Kentucky’s first-ever presidential primary with 59% of the vote, and 53% against Ford.

(In the Republican primary, Ford narrowly upset Ronald Reagan, raising the stock of Ford’s Kentucky campaign manager, Hal Rogers, who went to Congress from the 5th District four years later and is still there. In 1980, Reagan won Kentucky as the GOP nominee against Carter, and his Kentucky manager, Larry Forgy, figured in the next four races for governor.)

Cox’s work for Carter and his background in the trucking industry earned him appointment as federal highway administrator, which boosted some Kentucky road projects; he started the process of making the Jefferson (now Gene Snyder) Freeway part of the interstate highway system.

Sights told me he was offered “a wonderful ambassadorial appointment,” a typical political plum that presidents hand out, “and there were a lot of opportunities beyond political opportunities,” but he said his wife, Margaret Ann Sights, “was really adamant about us raising the kids” in Henderson, and they stayed there.

But in matters of federal patronage, large and small, Sights was the man to see in Kentucky. When former Gov. and Sen. Earle Clements couldn’t get a signed photograph of Carter to go with those of five previous presidents his daughter and son-in-law, Bess and Tyler Abell, came to see Sights. Carter, who disliked many such traditional practices, had curtailed this one. But an autographed picture soon arrived, and in 1980 Clements attended a rally with Carter at Sights’ home.

Sights told me he drank too much during those political days, leading him into treatment for alcoholism, and he has been involved in construction of recovery housing in Henderson and Bowling Green, and “I do interventions around the country as a volunteer.” Next week, he will be at Carter’s state funeral.

Carter’s most noted Kentucky appearance was in Bardstown on July 31, 1979. It was a make-good for an appearance he missed during a Louisville-area meeting of the National Governors Association, headed by Carroll, because he was sequestered at Camp David in conferences about the energy crisis and other problems – an episode that led to his televised speech about “a crisis of confidence” in the nation, which Frank Clines of The New York Times later dubbed “the ‘malaise’ speech.”

There was no malaise in Bardstown that day, as the Nelson County seat gave Carter a rousing welcome before and during a “town meeting” with citizens. I was a citizen of Bardstown then, as a regional reporter for The Courier-Journal, and gained admission to the general audience so I could write a better story and maybe ask a question of then president, but a Carroll aide spotted me and ordered me to the press section.

I long thought that had been my last chance to meet Carter – until 2008, when I was returning from a trip to South Africa. The Boeing 747 was ready to leave Johannesburg for Atlanta when there was a commotion up front. Down the aisle came Carter, fresh from a meeting with Nelson Mandela, shaking every hand he could, including mine. His humanitarian work had made him an international celebrity, so he was playing that role, but also that of a politician – one who had won the nation’s top job by running as an outsider, never quite adjusted to the ways of Washington, was removed from it by the voters, and still had a hunger for public regard. I don’t begrudge him that; he earned it.