On an unusually warm Washington winter afternoon, Gerald Rafshoon, spry and trim at 90, stood and watched as I carefully leafed through the pages of a three-ring black binder at the dining-room table in the home of his granddaughter, Jaclyn Rothenberg. The paper was tissue-thin and its color a light mustard.

A day earlier, on December 29, Rafshoon’s friend of 58 years, President Jimmy Carter, had died at his home in Plains, Georgia. Rafshoon was still processing the news and keeping busy, fielding a call from Peter Baker of The New York Times and putting on a tie for a CNN appearance in an hour.

Jaclyn had suggested he pull out some of the documents he had stored away in his files from his years inside the Carter White House, where Rafshoon served as Carter’s communications director and his trusted media guru.

As I peered down, I saw “EYES ONLY” typed out across the top of a memo Rafshoon had written to Carter on June 30, 1978. The moment was a crossroads in Carter’s presidency, coming ahead of the midterm elections and just after Carter’s polling numbers had plummeted to their lowest mark since he took office due to widespread unhappiness with the economy.

Rafshoon had joined the White House weeks earlier after spending much of 1977 and early 1978 tending to his advertising agency in Atlanta. He had grown frustrated as he watched Carter struggle to adjust to the presidency and to Washington, where many in the power structure—the lawmakers, the lawyers, the journalists—viewed him as a sort of pious alien.

On page 12, Rafshoon urged the embattled president to revive the outsider spirit of Carter’s thrilling 1976 campaign, where Rafshoon had been image-molder in chief, and of his January 20, 1977, inauguration, where Carter famously strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue holding hands with his daughter, Amy, and his wife, Rosalynn, as thousands cheered.

“Since that time,” Rafshoon wrote, “the image has steadily blurred. There have been too many signals, and they have too often been in conflict. There has been a sense of uncertainty. It is that perception that we have to overcome.”

I glanced at the right margin. There, in neat black cursive, was Carter’s handwritten reply.

“True,” he wrote.

Rafshoon smiled as I turned the pages and pointed out Carter’s unmistakable scribbles, including the loopy, swan-like J well known from his signature.

Rafshoon’s 43-page memo went on to detail recommendations for how Carter could jump-start his fortunes ahead of what would be a brutal 1980 reelection race.

“So far the American people have mostly seen you attacking oil companies, Congress, Doctors, and Lawyers. They have seen very little of your non-controversial human side,” Rafshoon wrote on page 20. “I am not suggesting that we contrive activity to convey a false impression—merely that we let the American people see both sides of your character.”

Rafshoon added, “I cannot stress too strongly the need for more public activity that conveys the image of a competent and compassionate leader and less public ceremonial activity and public stroking of Congress.”

“I agree,” Carter wrote in pen.

Carter’s responses were not always head-nodders. His scrawl could be terse and headstrong, such as when he vented on page 16 of the June 30, 1978, memo that “too much of our planned ‘success’ is in the hands of Congress.”

Decades later, as Jaclyn’s dogs circled his legs, Rafshoon told me Carter’s brilliance and complexity were most revealed when he was in private, digesting memos like those on the table and brooding over the reality of his hard-won power.

Even though Carter was what biographer Jonathan Alter calls a “world-class autodidact,” Rafshoon said Carter understood that he needed more than his obvious intelligence, skill, and the halo of his sterling character to achieve his ambitions. He recognized, Rafshoon said, that he also needed to sell the idea of Jimmy Carter to a nation that didn’t quite get him.

Rafshoon, now one of the few surviving members of Carter’s inner circle, wistfully said he was there for the entire sales campaign, watching up close as this pensive peanut seller willed himself first to the governor’s mansion in Georgia, then to the presidency, and then, ultimately, to the world.

Others were close if not closer to Carter at various junctures in his political ascent—including his late aides Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, in particular, as well as the late onetime wunderkind, the consultant Pat Caddell. There was the banker Bert Lance, his fellow Georgian. But Rafshoon occupied a singular space in the Carter orbit: He was a New York–born Jewish strategist and confidant who instinctively understood the potency of Jimmy Carter as a political project long before most people took Carter seriously. Carter trusted him because he was there near the start and never left.

And for Rafshoon, the sale never really ended. Up until Carter’s final years, he was the former president’s informal sherpa with the national press, bringing columnists and reporters and authors down to Plains to see Carter teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church, where the shaggy green carpet seemed to be straight out of the time when Carter was president.

“You’ve gotta get to Plains,” he’d say. “You’ve got to see what it’s all about, the whole thing.”

First, the State House

They first met in 1966. Rafshoon was a young, talkative businessman, vibrating ambition and seeking big-fish clients in the South. He was fresh off a stint with Twentieth Century Fox, which gave his small shop a sheen of Hollywood glamor. He loved to tell tales about his time working on advertising for Cleopatra, the 1963 film starring Elizabeth Taylor.

Carter was a young state senator and retired naval officer from south Georgia, also vibrating ambition but politically stalled as he sought the Democratic nomination for governor, running in a field that included Lester Maddox. Maddox, a segregationist, had risen to infamy in 1964 when he violated the recently passed Civil Rights Act and refused to serve Black students at his restaurant. He routinely threatened violence with an ax handle.

Rafshoon had been following the........

© New Republic