Former Congressman Nick Rahall Remembers Working With President Carter

In November 1976, Nick Rahall was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives the same night as Jimmy Carter won the White House. Carter died in December at age 100, and Thursday is a national day of mourning for the 39th president. 

Curtis Tate spoke with Rahall about his interactions with Carter during and after his presidency. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tate: What’s an issue you worked on with President Carter during your first term?

Rahall: In my first term in Congress, it was early April 1977, devastating floods hit southern West Virginia. Just about the entire southern part of the state was inundated with once-in-100-year type of flooding. Homes were destroyed, businesses were destroyed. I was able to get in via canoe into some of those deep southern counties and view the destruction and help shovel out mud. It took a while before federal and state assistance was even able to get in, much less provide the monies and rebuilding that was necessary. I received, needless to say, hundreds of letters from constituents pleading for help. 

I sought a meeting with President Carter. He granted that meeting in the Oval Office, and I took those letters, and I had pictures of me laying them out on his desk and showing him how people were in desperate need of help. Small businesses that had been crushed, and in those days, interest rates were exorbitantly high. They were close to 20%, if not higher. So I introduced a bill and told President Carter about it to lower the Small Business Disaster Loan rates to 3%. I believe it was maybe 2%. Anyway, he pledged to get behind it, help me on it, and we got that passed in the Congress. And I have pictures of him signing into law with me standing behind him. Numerous disaster declarations, the delivery of FEMA money to the people of southern West Virginia enabled the southern part to rebuild after those devastating floods. 

Tate: You had a role in creating the 1977 mine reclamation law. Can you tell us about that? 

Rahall: That came out of the committee on which I served, which in those days was called Interior and Insular Affairs. Today it’s called Natural Resources, which I, in later years, became chairman of. But as a freshman member of Congress in 1977, then-Speaker Tip O’Neill appointed me as a conferee, which was unheard of in those days, for a freshman member of Congress to get on the conference committee that writes the final version of legislation. And I got on that conference committee. I had previously, early in that year, invited (Congressman) Mo Udall and several environmental people into southern West Virginia to see what an effective job our industry was doing at the time, reclaiming the land after strip mining. And so we enacted the federal Surface Mining Reclamation Control Act of 1977 that required operators to return the land to the approximate original contour and set up other environmentally sound mining practices. 

As a result, we did not outlaw strip mining completely, as many an environmental community wanted to do in those days. So we compromised. We reached a compromise, and when President Carter signed that bill into law in the Rose Garden in August of 1977, I was standing behind him, and on one side of me stood the Sierra Club and the environmental community, and on the other side of me stood the West Virginia mining industry. Both sides supported that federal surface mining law. That’s unheard of today to find the coal industry and the environmental community agreeing on the same piece of legislation. 

Tate: Before the New River Gorge became a national park, it was a national river. Again, you were involved.

Rahall: Yes, again, it was my legislation in 1977 to protect the New River, to make it a National River. President Carter signed that into law. That was the first step we did in what has been a long and certainly victorious journey ever since, leading to what today is called the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve that has really put southern West Virginia on the map, and has brought tourists from all over the country, all over the world, into southern West Virginia, and it has been a true success story. 

Tate: You said West Virginia was one of a few states to support President Carter’s re-election. Since then, have Democrats changed, or has West Virginia changed?

Rahall: Well, I would say Democrats were different back then. We were much more to the ground, should I say on, on the core values that West Virginians stand for, and that is protecting the rights of working men and women, providing for their benefit and for their families’ benefit when they’re laid off work through no fault of their own, protecting our coal miners health and safety. We were able to do that, in my opinion, as a Democratic Party to a much greater degree in those days than has been true today, and certainly the Democratic Party was in the forefront of those efforts back then. Today, the national Democratic Party has truly forgotten about some of those core worker values that our Democratic Party in West Virginia stands for.

Tate: President Carter came to the state many times. Were you with him on those visits?

Rahall: He would come into West Virginia and visit with our people. I was there to greet him at every stop we had at that time. Senator Robert Byrd was the majority leader in the United States Senate. Jennings Randolph was in the United States Senate, also later, of course, to be succeeded by Senator (Jay) Rockefeller. But we had a very strong Democratic delegation. We were all Democrats in the House of Representatives. In those days, West Virginia was a Democratic state, and Jimmy Carter always appreciated that, and he appreciated the fact that he knew the struggles, the dreams, the work value of small town America, of rural communities that struggle each day to feed their families and that have a real work ethic at the core of themselves, that are moral, decent, upstanding people, and that’s what Jimmy Carter represented, his moral, his decency, his work ethic, were above reproach. 

Tate: Is there any other memory you’d like to share?

Rahall: I do recall Thanksgiving weekend of 1979, it would have been leading up to the 1980 primaries, getting a call in my home in Beckley from Senator Ted Kennedy. He was about to announce that he was going to challenge President Carter in the primaries, Democratic primaries coming up in 1980. He reminisced about all that West Virginia meant to the Kennedy family. It helped to elect his brother, John F. Kennedy, to the White House. I listened to him for a while, and I said, ‘I salute you and the Kennedy family for what you’ve done for West Virginia, but I have to tell you, Senator, I’m going to stick with President Carter in the primaries next year.’

There was silence for a while, then he came back on and said, ‘Wow, Nick. I got to thank you.’ And I was a little stunned, and I said, ‘Sir?’ And he said, ‘I got to thank you for your honesty. There’s not many people to be as honest as you are and tell me exactly where you stand.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s it, Senator, I have to support President Carter.’ And I did. Carter somehow found out about that, and never forgot it, and had me down to the White House quite often for personal visits, including watching movies in the White House and and, yeah, we became pretty good friends.