ABSTRACT
Jimmy Carter was bareiy a blip on the national political horizon when, in September 1974, US News and World Report surveyed the 1976 Presidential scene. He arrived in Wise Sanitorium on October 1, 1924, as President Calvin Coolidge was trying to rouse himself to stave off the challenge of John W. Davis. Jimmy Carter graduated from high school at sixteen, spent a year in a nearby junior college and another year at Georgia Tech, and was off to Annapolis in 1943. Like Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Carter in 1976 had run against Washington, indignantly charging the national powers with evil as well as error. The Carter assaults on the manners of Washington concerned big and little matters. The climate of expectations—and Carter's try at changing that—defined even deeper layers of constraint and possibility. Carter got to be President in significant part because he expressed the moral theme people wanted to hear in 1976.
