Jimmy Carter already had drawn months of media scrutiny as a devout Southern Baptist running for president. Then the 1976 Democratic nominee brought up sex and sin as he explained his religious faith to Playboy magazine.
Carter was not misquoted. But he was certainly misunderstood, as his thoughts in the wide-ranging interview were reduced in the popular imagination to utterances about “lust” and “adultery.”
Carter spent five-plus hours with Playboy across several months - “more time with you than with Time, Newsweek and all the others combined,” the nominee told Scheer. Scheer called it a “sensible statement,” reflecting Carter’s Baptist tradition: “He was saying, look, I’m not going to be some fanatic. … I’m not this perfect guy.”
Headline writers, satirists and late-night television pounced anyway, labeling it Carter’s “lust in my heart” interview. “Saturday Night Live,” then a fledgling NBC sketch comedy show, had a field day. One political cartoonist depicted Carter lusting after the Statue of Liberty. Carter initially told reporters he was taken out of context. Scheer “ran back to the plane to get the tapes,” and effectively caught the nominee violating his pledge never to make a “misleading statement.”When his commentary on adultery ballooned, Carter insisted the exchange had been off-the-record, throwaway banter as Scheer and Golson prepared to leave.The way the story morphed “ended up making Carter seem like a creep,” Roessner said.
Roessner, the daughter of a Protestant pastor, said Carter’s Playboy comments were clumsy, “but if anyone should have understood the context … it should have been the ministers.”
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