Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is a recurring but intermittently present figure in Andy Warhol’s diary: a president glimpsed through invitations, a personal letter, a political fundraiser, and the social arrangements surrounding his family and staff. These fragments offer little account of policy or private life. Instead, they record how Carter’s public image reached Warhol’s world—through the symbolic honor of being named a court painter, the rituals of presidential access, and the uneasy mix of entertainment and controversy at a fundraising event.

A president encountered at a distance

The diary first places Carter in view through the people and occasions around him. At a December 1976 lunch hosted by Jamie Wyeth, Warhol learned that Wyeth was now Carter’s court painter and had recently spent a week in Plains. Carter was not at the lunch; his presence arrived as news about Wyeth’s new position. The detail made the presidency part of an art-world conversation, while the phrase court painter lent an old-fashioned, almost ceremonial cast to a contemporary political appointment.

That indirect introduction was followed by a formal invitation to the inauguration. Warhol noted that it was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Andy Warhol.” His amusement turned on the unexpected assumption of a married couple, but the envelope also marked a change in scale: a relationship to the presidency that had initially surfaced through Wyeth’s work now extended to Warhol himself as an invited guest. The diary records the invitation, not whether he attended the inauguration, so its significance lies in the access it represented rather than in an unrecorded appearance.

A personal impression and a White House letter

By March 1977, Warhol had received a letter at his office from the White House, identified in the entry as being from Carter. The note prompted a candid admission: Warhol wished he had spoken more when he met Carter the previous month, but had been too nervous. He nevertheless described the president as really nice. The entry holds together two different kinds of response—hesitation in the presence of the office and a favorable judgment of the person Warhol recalled meeting.

The letter made that brief meeting feel less remote without turning it into a developed relationship. Warhol gives no account of what they had discussed, what Carter wrote, or how the correspondence continued. What remains is the small but telling sequence: an encounter that left Warhol wishing he had said more, followed by a White House letter that brought the president back into his working day. In this diary, personal recognition is registered in precisely such practical fragments, alongside the day’s work and appointments.

The Waldorf fundraiser: ceremony and controversy

A later presidential fundraiser at the Waldorf brought Carter into a densely staged public scene. Warhol went with Jamie Wyeth after speaking with him about arriving late. Outside, picketers made the event seem, in Warhol’s words, like a bad movie. Their protest was divided into sections for gay rights and abortion, and he singled out a garbage can containing what were presented as abortions. The entry does not explain the demonstrators’ organization or the fundraiser’s policy agenda; it records the disturbing spectacle at the entrance before turning to the event inside.

From the balcony, Warhol watched Carter enter and shake the hand of every person in the room. The greeting took a few hours, making presidential access a matter of prolonged physical contact and patient ceremony. Once the speeches began, Warhol judged the jokes effective and credited the president with having a good writer. That observation keeps the diary’s attention on performance as well as politics: Carter’s appearance was experienced through the timing of a speech, its prepared humor, and the labor of meeting an entire audience one person at a time.

The event’s political tone emerged especially clearly in Carter’s joke about his vice-president. He said the vice-president should be active and invited guests to write with questions about “abortion, gay rights, downtown parking, Northern Ireland, the Concorde.” Warhol noticed that the list placed gay rights alongside both national controversies and a municipal inconvenience. He then wondered whether Carter was the first president to say the word “gay,” linking the moment to Anita Bryant. The diary offers that as Warhol’s question, not as a verified historical claim. Its importance here is the way the entry records the word itself becoming conspicuous in a presidential setting, amid protests that had already made gay rights visible outside.

Family and staff at the edges of the portrait

Carter also appears through the social orbit of his family. At a Waldorf dinner honoring Miz Lillian Carter, his mother was delighted to see Warhol and praised the pictures he had made of her. She invited him to the party in her room afterward and told him where she would be staying. The dinner honored her, not the president, but her warmth toward Warhol and her prominent place at the gathering gave his name a personal route into Carter’s family world.

During the dinner, Miz Lillian Carter remarked, “I’ve never met so many Jews in my life. I must tell Jimmy.” The line drew startled laughter, as the diary recounts, and turned the president into the absent recipient of a story from his mother. The account also situates the occasion within a formal evening of speeches, songs, and ceremonial dining; Warhol describes the food as resembling airplane food and notes that the event went on for hours. Carter himself is not reported to have attended. His presence is instead invoked in the mother’s promise to tell him what she had seen.

The diary’s final relevant glimpse is logistical rather than personal. On a trip to see the New York Cosmos play, White House staff members Tom Beard and Joel McCleary were taking a limousine from Rockefeller Center and invited Warhol to join them. Carter’s unmarried son was supposed to come, which explained the limousine, but he did not appear. Carter is not reported to have been expected at the game. The episode extends the portrait from presidential ceremony to the practical arrangements of a family outing, while preserving the diary’s characteristic distinction between the important person who structures an occasion and the person who actually shows up.

Taken together, these entries make Carter less a fully rendered political protagonist than a figure of intermittent access. He is encountered directly enough for Warhol to remember him as nice, and publicly enough to be watched greeting a room and making a joke about contested subjects. Elsewhere, his name travels by letter, invitation, appointment, and family anecdote. That pattern gives the portrait its shape: the presidency is present, but always through a particular social scene and Warhol’s sharply observed details within it.