Jimmy Carter and Playboy: How ‘the weirdo factor’ rocked ’76

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.”

Nearly a half-century later, as Carter was receiving hospice care in the same south Georgia home where he once spoke with Playboy journalists, his interviewer Robert Scheer still believed Carter was treated unfairly. He recalled the former president as a “real” and “serious” figure whose intent was smothered by the intensity of a campaign’s closing stretch.