‘The Weirdo Factor’: How Jimmy Carter’s Playboy Interview Impacted the Election of 1976

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When Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1976, people started to pay attention to him because he was a really religious Southern Baptist. He decided to talk about sex and sin when he did an interview with Playboy Magazine. But when people heard what he said, they didn’t understand why Jimmy Carter wanted to talk about those things and only wanted to focus on the words “lust” and “adultery” that were used in the interview.

Robert Scheer, an interviewer, still thinks the way Jimmy Carter was treated nearly 50 years ago was not fair. He remembers Carter as a sincere and earnest person but it seemed like his real intentions got lost among all the hustle of a campaign’s final weeks. Now, at 98 years old, Carter is receiving hospice care in the same Georgia home he used to talk with Playboy journalists.

“Jimmy Carter was a really smart man,” Mr. Scheer said to Big Big News. The story about him became so big that it stayed in the news for a long time.

Unfortunately, this caused some issues for his wife, Rosalynn Carter. People were asking her if she trusted her husband and this may have almost stopped Jimmy from winning the election!

Jimmy Carter had a long conversation with Playboy that lasted for more than five hours over many months. He spoke about different topics such as military matters, racism and civil rights issues, news journalism, and his own image. The questions he answered in this chat were 12,000 words long and the interviewer added even more to it after that. According to the interviewer, they were only focused on presenting important information and not just focussing on non-sensical pieces of coverage.

Hugh Hefner’s magazine was read by more than 20 million people each month, showing pictures of women without clothes. But this magazine also talked about American culture and interviewed influential people like Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Malcom X, and the famous journalist Walter Cronkite. Jimmy Carter was accepted among them despite not being perfect, according to Scheer.

At the end of their final session with Carter, Golson asked if his strong faith might stop him from representing all Americans. Carter answered with a long speech about how humans are never perfect, why we shouldn’t be too prideful and that God will forgive us anyway. He also explained he believes churches and governments should stay separate and his faith is based on being humble instead of judging others.

Carter said that according to Jesus Christ, it’s the same as doing something bad if you just think about it. So he wouldn’t be able to judge someone who hangs out with a lot of different women and has slept with them because Carter himself had looked at many women and desired them in his mind or “in his heart” – which is like cheating in Jesus’ eyes.

Scheer thought Carter’s words showed his Baptist faith, saying he was not a “perfect guy”. Also, Playboy found that Carter shared shocking things about people in politics – both Democrats and Republicans like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He claimed they had all lied, cheated and tried to hide the truth.

The magazine wanted to give the same information to 1,000 people in late September instead of waiting until October. This was so they could have enough time to read and understand the news before the election happened.

People made fun of then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter when they found out he talked about having “lust in his heart” in an interview with Playboy Magazine. ‘Saturday Night Live’, a comedy show, even created skits that showed him wanting the Statue Of Liberty. Later on, Mr. Carter shared with NPR in 1993 that this one interview ended up overtaking his entire campaign. He wrote in a book back in 2015 that all he was trying to do was explain Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount!

Jimmy Carter was liked by people who believed in religion and liked tradition, making it hard for the Republicans to say Democrats weren’t popular. On the flip side, young people and people from cities didn’t like him because they thought he was old-fashioned.

Hamilton Jordan, who helped Jimmy Carter during his election campaign, referred to Carter’s faith as the “weirdo factor”. Amber Roessner, a professor from the University of Tennessee who wrote about Carter explained that this was their way of proving to people that he wasn’t uptight. Bob Scheer, who traveled with Carter and reported what he did, said that when Playboy released some text about him which caused so much interest among reporters. They were asking Bob questions such as “What is this?”.

At first, the media was talking about Carter’s bad remarks against Johnson who had died in 1973. This made a lot of people interested because Carter was planning to visit Texas with Johnson’s wife.

Carter said that they twisted his words but Scheer ran back to get the recording which proved that he lied from what he promised – never to say something false.

Johnson’s wife skipped all of Carter’s events and he even called her up to apologize for making those comments.

When his comments about adultery got more attention than it should have, Jimmy Carter said that he hadn’t meant for them to be taken seriously – he had just been joking around with Scheer and Golson before they left. Scheer told the Associated Press that the microphone the people heard Jimmy was still wearing. Roessner added that this ended up making him seem like a bad person. Mrs. Carter had something to say too: she believed that even though Jimmy tends to talk a lot, people know he’s honest and knows how to take questions – and no, she wasn’t worried about him being unfaithful!

She wrote in 1984 about how people kept pestering her to ask if she did anything wrong, like having an affair. When a reporter asked whether she ever cheated on her partner, her self-control weakened and she said “No comment”.

Ford was behind Carter in the polls, but he quickly used the interview to his advantage. President Ford, who belonged to the Episcopal Church, was not a very public person when it came to religion, but he still invited some of the top Christian pastors from around the United States to come to the White House one day after the interview aired, such as Reverend W. S. Criswell from Dallas First Baptist Church.

Pastor Criswell asked President Ford what he would do if Playboy magazine asked for an interview. Ford said no to the magazine, and a lot of people in the church cheered.

The two most famous religious leaders in the US, Rev. Billy Graham and Rev. Jerry Falwell attacked President Carter for his comments made on Playboy magazine. National newspapers shared what other Christian pastors had to say about him as well. Roessner’s father was a minister of a Protestant church, and according to her, it was an awkward situation but ministers should have understood its context better.

She remembered how mad Carter was when she interviewed him in 2014. Although he had done a lot of work helping people all over the world, and gotten a great reputation from it, he still seemed angry. He believed that journalists hadn’t treated him fairly or given him enough attention even though it had been almost 40 years since the incident he was talking about.

After President Nixon’s resignation in 1976, many journalists had a disbelief of politicians, especially one who was seemingly showing off his religion. The same news organizations disregarded what the future president said about them according to Roessner.

President Carter once said there were no journalists on his plane who would ask him any policy questions. However, one man named Scheer did and afterwards President Carter won the election by a tiny margin.

Scheer said that whatever they had said, he thought it did the job they were aiming for. He also added that even though it worked, they were still worried about it.