One evening in May 2005, a group of us found ourselves on board the Sequoia, the fabled US presidential yacht, which at this point in its history was moored on the Potomac and available for hire.
The occasion was an improbable cocktail party to celebrate the upcoming heavyweight boxing fight in Washington between Mike Tyson and his Irish challenger, the amiable Clones giant Kevin McBride, who plied his trade in Boston.
The invitation had been wangled through the late George Kimball, the venerable boxing writer and bon vivant. And although Kimball had kept company with Hunter Thompson in his younger days, even he was tickled to find himself strolling through this gorgeous relic of presidential downtime.
This was the yacht on which John F Kennedy had spent his final birthday night, where Roosevelt had hosted Churchill (reputedly decommissioning it from its wartime military status so the pair could enjoy a drink) and where Richard Nixon, in a cinematic flourish, reportedly spent the night before he resigned, sitting at the piano with a bottle of whiskey close at hand.
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LBJ liked the boat so much he had the shower floor lowered to accommodate his 6ft4in frame – and had the bar installed. The interior was just as the photos suggest: dark mahogany and reeking of WASP finesse and secrets. The blingy boxing crowd that night was permitted to look into what had been the presidential bedroom – but not to enter.
The Sequoia was referenced this week during the reflections and celebrations of the long, epic life of Jimmy Carter. When he won the presidency in 1976, he took it upon himself to run all aspects of the White House with the thrift of someone whose adolescence had coincided with the depression and dust bowl decades of the 1930s.
During the inflation crisis of 1977, he decided the yacht was a symbol of opulence neither suited to nor required by the president and had it auctioned for $286,000 – in the process saving the annual running costs, which were three times that figure.
In the decades afterwards, the yacht moved through private ownership and operated as a commercial entity for many years after McBride had enjoyed the night of his boxing life by ending Tyson’s heavyweight career in Washington.
But by 2015, it had been pulled from the Potomac, the subject of an intense legal battle over ownership and requiring urgent and expensive repair.
In a Delaware courtroom, the judge summed up the sad state of the vessel: “The Sequoia, an elderly and vulnerable wooden yacht, is sitting on an inadequate cradle on an undersized marine railway in a moribund boatyard on the western shore of the Chesapeake, deteriorating and, lately, home to raccoons.”
Its ownership issues have been resolved and in its next iteration, the Sequoia will take pride of place in the Maritime Museum in Maryland. Restoration work, currently taking place at a specialist shipyard in Belfast, Maine, could take years.
In an interview with the JFK library in 2011, Carter struck a note of regret when speaking about his efforts to strip the presidency of its luxuries and baubles.
“People thought that I was not being reverent enough to the office I was holding, that I was too much of a peanut farmer, not enough of an aristocrat, or something like that. So, I think that shows that the American people want something of, an element of, an image of monarchy in the White House.”
Given the turn US politics has taken, the sentiment holds an eerie prescience.
In the Rotunda on Tuesday evening, vice-president Kamala Harris gave a warm eulogy in front of Carter’s family, members of Congress and diplomats. She recalled how Carter stayed in the family homes of campaign workers and supporters during his barnstorming presidential campaign of 1976 “to share a meal with them at their table and to listen to what was on their minds”.
Yes, but also to save money. In that same 2011 interview, Carter, when asked about how to overcome the partisan politics that had come to dominate Washington, identified “the unwarranted infusion of money”.
“When I ran for office, all we had was the $2-per-person check-off that president Ford and I divided, and then we had the same thing four years later when then-governor Reagan and I divided. And we didn’t get any other contributions for our general election. It all came from the taxpayers. And we didn’t have enough money to spend it on negative advertising.
“Now there’s a tremendous influx of money that pours in, in the hundreds of millions of dollars per presidential candidate. And the supreme court made the most stupid decision they’ve ever made 18 months ago by ruling that corporations were people.
“So now American corporations, some of them owned, partially at least, by foreigners, can give an unlimited amount of money to candidates, and you don’t ever know where the money came from. So, this is going to greatly exacerbate an already bad situation.
“Now, as you know, in almost every campaign, for governor, for Congress, for president, a large part of the advertising budget, which is almost unlimited, is spent to tear down the reputation of your opponent, to destroy his character in the public mind. And both of them do it. And the American people say, ‘We don’t like negative advertisements’, but it works.”
There could be no neater summation of the 2024 election, during which the Harris campaign raised a jaw-dropping $1 billion over 100 days and the Trump ticket was backed by the richest person on the planet.
So, it felt like Washington was saying goodbye to a political epoch as well as a unique president this week. Meanwhile, the Sequoia will emulate Jimmy Carter next year, by reaching its centenary.