When Carter Went to The Bronx, When Trump Goes Back to The Supremes Trying to Collect
Good morning. Today, on a national day of mourning for former President Jimmy Carter, we’ll look at Carter’s relationship to New York. We’ll also get details on the decision by the city’s Board of Elections not to fire its executive director after investigators found that he had harassed two female-employees
employees. 
The New York Times
President Jimmy Carter flew to New York in October 1977 to tell the United Nations General Assembly that he was “willing” to shrink the United States’ nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union matched the reductions. The next day, he did something unannounced, unexpected and unrelated to foreign policy.
He went to the South Bronx.
It was a symbolic side trip to show that he was willing to face urban problems. Leaders like Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League had already begun to talk about dashed expectations: “We expected Carter to be working as hard to meet the needs of the poor as he did to get our votes,” Jordan had said a couple of months earlier. “But so far, we have been disappointed.”
Carter, a Democrat, wasn’t satisfied with driving through neighborhoods dominated by desolation and despair. “Let me walk about a block,” he told the Secret Service agents accompanying him, and he got out of the limousine.
That morning in the South Bronx became an enduring memory of his presidency. But there are other New York memories to remember today, a national day of mourning for Carter, who died on Dec. 29.
There was the high of his nomination in 1976, at the first national political convention held in Manhattan since the Roaring Twenties.
There was also the not-so-high of his nomination in the same place four years later, when haplessness seemed to reign: The teleprompter malfunctioned during his acceptance speech. He flubbed a line about former Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, calling him “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.” The balloons didn’t tumble from the ceiling when they were supposed to. And his long feud with Senator Edward Kennedy simmered on.
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Another New York memory now seems as improbable as Carter’s candidacy had once been: a high-kicking photo op with the Radio City Rockettes in 1973. Carter, then a Georgia governor who had taught Sunday school, hammed it up with dancers who showed a lot of leg. (The governor, joining the kick line in his crisp suit, did not.)
Carter was an ambitious Navy lieutenant turned peanut farmer turned politician, and he understood what New York could do for him. The Carter biographer Jonathan Alter wrote that the publicity stunt with the Rockettes helped bring him name recognition, as did a full-page ad in Variety that showed him in a director’s chair. The ad, and that trip to New York, promoted a push to lure filmmaking to Georgia.
By the time Carter went to the South Bronx, 10 months into his presidency, New York was struggling to pull out of its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” abyss. But whatever hope Carter seemed to bring soon faded: A week later, during a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, the sportscaster Howard Cosell supposedly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”
“Somehow that sentence entered the language, though he never said that, or exactly that,” Ian Frazier explained in his book “Paradise Bronx.” “In any case, it’s what people remember.”
People yelled “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” as Carter went by. On one ruined block, “he stood looking around, his expression blank and dazed,” Frazier wrote. “For a president to allow himself to be seen when he appears so overwhelmed required self-sacrifice and moral fortitude.”
With him was Mayor Abraham Beame, a lame duck — but not Representative Ed Koch, who had defeated Beame in the Democratic primary and would be elected mayor in November. The president and the mayor-in-waiting were feuding over Middle East policy.
Back at his hotel, Carter called it “a very sobering trip.” And as Frazier noted, the drive-by made America look at “this place that most had been looking away from.”
Politicians stopped looking away: The stretch of Charlotte Street that he visited became a stop on campaign after campaign. “Reagan went there in 1980 to try to show up Carter,” Alter said. But the policy Carter pushed for in response to the poverty he saw — changes that effectively forced banks to provide home loans in low-income neighborhoods — worked, Alter said. “It just took a while.”
A few years later, there were more than 100 suburban-style houses in the neighborhood Carter walked through. Today the houses are worth roughly $750,000 apiece, according to the real estate website Trulia.
“He cared about people — he wanted to help people,” Alter said. “Jimmy Carter was a rural Georgian, but he had a lot of empathy for New Yorkers who needed a break.”
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