Give Me Reagan’s “Ave Maria” Over Jimmy Carter’s “Imagine”

It generally isn’t charitable to say unkind things about people at their death. For me, that rule was especially challenging with the death of President Jimmy Carter a few weeks back. As a presidential historian who does much punditry, I dreaded Carter’s death because I knew I couldn’t avoid stating the obvious, namely, that he was the worst president the country ever had—though admittedly, Joe Biden has emerged as a legitimate challenger. 

Jimmy Carter was a decent man but an awful president. 

Carter’s biggest flaw was his shocking naivete, especially in foreign policy. When we released my 2010 book, Dupes, it was fitting that we put Jimmy Carter on the cover smooching Soviet despot Leonid Brezhnev at the Vienna Summit in June 1979. That was six months before Carter’s kissing Kremlin pal ordered his Red Army to invade Afghanistan—the start of the long destruction of that tragic country, and the worst thing to happen there until Joe Biden returned it to the Taliban in August 2021.

But another flaw of Jimmy Carter was that he was just a weird guy. He did the oddest, dumbest things—like confess to a Playboy reporter about his personal lusts for women other than his wife, which a female student of mine once summed up as simply, “gross.” Indeed. And that’s just one gross example of hundreds I could cite on Carter, but I need to get to my point in this column.

A fitting capstone to Carter’s weirdness was the funeral service for the failed 39th president at the stately National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., which has increasingly evolved into a mausoleum-like place of ceremony for deceased heads of state rather than a gathering place for vibrant faith. What I and many others found weird was the performance at the ceremony of what was apparently Jimmy Carter’s favorite hymn. 

Hmm. Pause. Jimmy Carter’s favorite hymn? What might that be? One would think that for the famous Bible-believing Baptist, this man who helped popularize the term “born-again” in the wretched 1970s, that hymn might have been something like “Amazing Grace” or “Ole Time Religion.”

Right? Of course. But if you thought that, you would be wrong. Very wrong. You could bet every peanut in Plains, Georgia, and not guess what Carter selected.

Evidently, Jimmy Carter’s favorite was John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Yes, Lennon’s “Imagine.” Can you even begin to imagine how that would be the Georgia Bible man’s requiem, which he personally requested, oddly sung at his funeral service by a country duo, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood? No, I can’t imagine either. 

Then again, Jimmy Carter was, well, weird. 

I need not revisit the disturbing lyrics for this readership. Most Crisis readers, attuned to the perversities of the culture, unfortunately know the song’s words all too well. (See the piece by Msgr. Antall earlier this week as well as the column by Francis Sempa at The American Spectator.)

To be fully candid, I’ve never known quite what to think of Lennon’s lyrics. It’s often hard to know when these “artists” are expressing something they personally advocate or are just trying to be provocative or pretending to be onto something “deep, dude, really deep.” Too often, they’re merely dishing a bunch of idiotic pabulum and relativistic gobbledygook. A lot of the juvenile drivel that we hummed and tapped our toes to from that era is mindless twaddle. Go ahead and try to ascribe higher intellectual meaning if you’d like, but you’ll probably only embarrass yourself.

As for John Lennon’s personal spiritual beliefs, in 1971 he certainly wasn’t a Bible-toting preacher man. However, I can relate that the John Lennon at the end of the decade, so tragically assassinated outside his New York Upper West Side apartment building on December 8, 1980, was on the verge of being a born-again evangelical.

Yes, it’s true. My good friend Mark Joseph, who produced our Reagan movie, has written eloquently about this. Lennon, in his last days, was tuning in to televangelists like Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham, and considering converting to Christianity (and voting for Ronald Reagan). The destructive force stopping him from being saved was—who else?—the hideous Yoko Ono.

That’s John Lennon—and an edifying thought on him at the end of his life. 

What isn’t quite so edifying was Jimmy Carter picking Lennon’s strange 1971 song as his requiem. Weird, Jimmy, just weird. Of course, the born-again Baptist imagined lots of weird things. “I believe that Jesus would approve of gay marriage,” said Carter, with a bizarre biblical interpretation.

Imagine that.

I’d like to seize this moment to draw a contrast with the man who crushed Carter in November 1980, winning 44 of 50 states and the Electoral College 489-49. That man was Ronald Reagan. And what Reagan chose for his hymn at his National Cathedral funeral ceremony is quite the opposite of Carter. It’s inspiring, even if somewhat of a mystery for the Protestant president.

The music for Reagan’s June 11, 2004, service was gorgeous: Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, and more. And then, the great Irish tenor Ronan Tynan stepped to the altar and launched into a breathtaking rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” (He also did “Amazing Grace.”)

Bill Clark, a close, dear friend of Ronald Reagan and myself (I was Clark’s biographer) was there. A devout Catholic, Clark was floored by the unexpected “Ave Maria.” He immediately called me after the service. “You know, Paul, I held it together pretty well throughout the service,” he told me, “but when Tynan belted out ‘Ave Maria,’ I just lost it.”

Clark and I resolved to find out who was responsible for that musical choice. We asked everyone we could. After giving her time to mourn and some distance, I even asked Nancy Reagan. I asked her several times in the years ahead. We learned, significantly, that Ronald Reagan himself had chosen the piece, before he slipped into the throes of Alzheimer’s disease. 

As to why Reagan made the choice, Nancy never had a good answer, shrugging simply, “I just don’t know.” Her close aide Joanne Drake told me: “Mrs. Reagan said simply that it was one of her husband’s favorite songs.” 

As for the reasons, I can at least say that Ronald Reagan was close to many Catholics, from his Irish Catholic father and brother to intimate friends and staff and even Pope John Paul II. As Michael Reagan (himself Catholic) said to me when I asked him about the choice of “Ave Maria:” “All I can say is that my dad always showed great respect for other beliefs and he was surrounded by Catholics.” Joanne Drake added that Reagan had “great respect” for the Church’s rituals, hymns, and ceremony. As I’ve written about here, Reagan was even intrigued by Our Lady of Fatima.

I tracked down Ronan Tynan to see if he had any insight. “I also was surprised about the ‘Ave Maria’ considering he was Protestant,” Tynan told me. “Mrs. Reagan said to me one of President Reagan’s requests was that they would have an Irish tenor who would fill the walls of the Washington Cathedral. I was aware he had a devotion to the Blessed Mother.”

A devotion to the Blessed Mother? When Tynan first told me that, I was taken aback. But by the time I published my book A Pope and a President, which we released on the 100th anniversary of Fatima, May 13, 2017, I was no longer surprised. And if devotion is perhaps too strong of a word to describe the Gipper’s feelings about the Blessed Mother, it would not be a stretch to say he held her in very high esteem. So much so that he wanted her hailed at his funeral service at the National Cathedral.

So, picking up with my theme of the weird: Ronald Reagan’s choosing “Ave Maria” likewise might seem a bit weird, but only because it was odd, or out of character—or denomination—for the Protestant president. It was strange in a good way. 

As for Jimmy Carter and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” well, that’s just plain weird.

I’ll take Ronald Reagan’s “Ave Maria.”