Jody Powell: Jimmy Carter's Sancho Panza

"Okay, trivia from this morning," the 33-year-old press secretary with a Georgia accent announced at the beginning of his first White House briefing on January 21, 1977. "The president, in his words, 'slept late.' He got up at 7:00, read two or three newspapers. He couldn't find his news summary. We'll try to get it for him in the morning."

Jody Powell – once that fledgling press secretary with a caustic wit, a self-deprecating style, and a fierce loyalty to his president Jimmy Carter – died suddenly Monday afternoon of a presumed heart attack at 65 at a hospital near his home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Powell's death and the equally premature demise of former White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan last year brought to an end the saga of the Georgians, who helped vault Carter, a little-known former governor, into the White House and then endured a tumultuous one-term presidency.

No press secretary in modern political history was as close to the president he served as Powell was to Carter. As Jordan put it in an interview during their White House days, "Jody's been with Carter for so long that he can give you the president's probable reaction on almost anything." The bond between the future president and his closest aide was formed in 1969 when Powell – who had been expelled from the Air Force Academy for cheating and was working on a Ph.D. in political science at Emory University – signed on as a driver and go-fer for Carter's gubernatorial campaign. For the next decade, Powell never left Carter's side. "During the campaigns, Carter spent more time with Jody than he did with Rosalynn," Jordan said. "And when you've been through a campaign together, it's a little like going through a war together. It's permanent for the rest of your life."

As White House press secretary, Powell was probably more successful in shaping the coverage of Carter through background chats with reporters than in repeating talking points during the daily briefings. Powell could be withering with his scorn, reacting to an attack on Carter during the 1976 campaign from the segregationist former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox by snapping, "Being called a liar by Lester Maddox is like being called ugly by a frog." But he was often more candid with reporters than the 21^st century norm, confiding to an Associated Press reporter in 1979 that the president had been menaced by a "killer rabbit" during a fishing trip in Georgia. The picture of the Leader of the Free World being attacked by Bugs Bunny with fangs did nothing to improve Carter's political image.

After leaving the White House with Carter in 1981, Powell remained in Washington and soon teamed up with Nancy Reagan's former press secretary Sheila Tate to form the successful public relations agency Powell Tate, which advised business clients. Sometimes the firm's choice of clients departed from Democratic Party orthodoxy, such as representing the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and working with the pharmaceutical industry in its battle against the Bill Clinton health-care plan. But even though Powell shrugged off liberal criticism by saying, "This is business," he never fully embodied the cynicism of many lobbyists.

For Jody Powell always seemed less a Washington insider than a small-town Georgia boy who prospered beyond his expectations and never lost his gratitude to fate and Jimmy Carter.