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Carter's resort to undeaconlike idiom was perhaps best explained in a subsequent Sunday New York Times Magazine article by Norman Mailer—in which Carter used a still raunchier expression. Quoting Carter as saying, "I don't care if people say " Mailer wrote, "And he actually said the famous four-letter word that the Times has not printed in the 125 years of its publishing life." (For what else the Times and other papers did not publish, see PRESS.) Analyzed Mailer: "It was said from duty, from the quiet decent demands of duty, as if he, too, had to present his credentials to that part of the 20th century personified by his interviewer."
A more serious question—why Carter felt obliged to bare more than anyone needs to know about what goes on in his mind and heart—puzzled even his supporters. So did the fact that he spent more time with Scheer, a former editor of the left-leaning Ramparts magazine (who had previously done a Playboy interview with California Governor Jerry Brown that had impressed the Carter camp) than with any other journalist. As Columnist Mary McGrory suggested, the conversation "should have been off the record with God, not one taped with Playboy."
Reaction was swift and varied —from both Carter backers, who were dismayed despite efforts to rationalize what he had done, and foes. Observed Georgia Democratic Chairwoman Marjorie Thurman, a Carter opponent in state politics: "Bad, bad, bad." South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings expressed hope that "when he becomes President, he'll quit talking about adultery."
Dr. William Wolf of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said, "It sounds to me like good theology and good honest human experience brought together." The candidate's own pastor, the Rev. Bruce Edwards of Plains (Ga.) Baptist Church, noted, "I have no particular objections to it ... but I would have used other words to describe the same thing."
Editor Gerard Sherry of San Francisco's Catholic Monitor said, "I think he was trying to explain Christian ideas on promiscuity. If anything, he showed himself much less arrogant than Ford. Ford said [in a Ladies' Home Journal interview] his daughter would never have an affair. That was pretty dumb. Carter was being truthful with all due humility." The reaction that most intrigued California Pollster Mervin Field was expressed by his 16-year-old daughter Melanie as she watched television news accounts with her father. When the Carter-Playboy story was concluded, Melanie asked: "Dad, is Jimmy Carter a weirdo?"
"There was nothing to be gained," said Senate Acting Democratic Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia, pondering why Carter granted the interview in the first place. Commented Robert Bailey, 47, a bakery operator from Freemont, Calif.: "I'm a Baptist myself, and for a Bible-totin' Baptist to say those things—well, they were crude. I don't see why he had to reveal all his deep, inner thoughts—to make a national confession. It certainly doesn't make you a great man to do it."