Jonathan Alter
Appearances
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So he was kind of caught in the middle of that as a businessman and a state senator. And then he nudged Georgia forward as governor. And then the key moment, I think, came in the 1976 presidential campaign when he came out of nowhere to be the Democratic nominee and then got elected president. The key primary that year was the Florida primary.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And winning there set him on the path to the presidency or made it quite likely that he would be president. But more important, he beat George Wallace in that primary. And Wallace was the representative of the American segregationists. And he had been governor of Alabama.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And by beating Wallace and driving George Wallace out of politics in that 1976 Florida Democratic primary, Jimmy Carter eliminated what had been the segregationist, racist wing of the Democratic Party, which went back to the founding of the American Republic. Remember that the South was solidly Democratic.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Until the 1970s, the Democrats were the party of segregation and secession and the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. By the way, Jimmy Carter's mother was the only person in the county who ever had anything nice to say about Abraham Lincoln when he was growing up.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So by ending the racist wing of the Democratic Party, Carter, before he became president, had done something very historic. And today, if you have those views, you're not a Democrat. There's no room in the party for that. And that's been true since Jimmy Carter.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He was only governor for one term. He was not allowed to run for reelection by state law. But he changed so much and offended so many of the segregationists. As he told me in one of our many interviews, if he had been allowed to run for governor again, he would have lost.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I think some people considered him arrogant. He could be a little bit intellectually arrogant, showing that he was the smartest guy in the room, which he usually was, but that can be politically unhelpful. He didn't have an arrogant demeanor when you met him. And certainly in public, he was far from arrogant. There was none of that from the podium.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
In fact, you could argue that he wasn't commanding enough and that his de-pomping of the presidency was very harmful to him politically. But in private, he could be snappish and prickly. And so he often had trouble getting along with other politicians. He got along with the average people that he met extraordinarily well. And he was a brilliant retail politician.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And that was why he succeeded so well in Iowa and New Hampshire in those caucuses and primaries where meeting voters is what really counts. It wasn't great on TV, but I think where a number of analysts and historians and journalists have gone wrong is they thought that his prickly qualities, which were unappealing on Capitol Hill, that that meant that he didn't get much done.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And actually, that's at odds with the historical record. He got a tremendous amount done as president. So he was a political failure, but a substantive success in many ways.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yes, but those were instruments for his personal ambition. He was already running for president at that point. And he actually did not do very much to remake the Democratic Party in his image, in a more moderate image. And that was why he was challenged by Ted Kennedy for the nomination in 1980.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And when I asked him at one point what his great regrets were, the first one was that his failure to win a second term meant that he couldn't provide a two-state solution in the Middle East, which he was deeply concerned about, what he called the Holy Land. You know, he had completed the Camp David Accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, which we can talk about.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But he really regretted that he didn't get the Palestinian state that he was the first to advocate. But his second biggest regret was that by his description, he mishandled his relationships inside the Democratic Party. And he was not able to have a unified Democratic Party behind him when he ran for reelection.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yes. And I don't think he could have been president without Watergate. So he was the perfect antidote to Watergate, this honest, moral politician from the outside without any of the stench of Washington, hadn't served in Congress. And he promised that he would never lie and that he would bring a government as good as its people, is the way he put it.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And it was a very fresh, different kind of message. And he understood from the get-go that without even having to mention Watergate, he could be a figure of healing for the country. And he was.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But in the same way that he was made by Watergate, he was also unmade by Watergate, because when he became president, Watergate had been turned into, or the gate part of Watergate had been turned into a suffix on any little flap that happened. Any little, you know, story of the week would be called something gate. So he had an aide
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
His budget director and friend from Georgia had some banking problems well before the presidency. His name was Burt Lance, and a New York Times columnist won a Pulitzer Prize for what was called Lancegate. And Carter's brother, Billy, ran into some problems that are a little bit like Hunter Biden's, except not as bad. And that was called Billy Gate.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
You multiply that by 20 and you get a sense of how besieged he was by the media, which assumed before any honeymoon, like in the first few days of his presidency. They just assumed he would be another corrupt president like Nixon. And that was the way people in my business, and I'm a journalist, that's the way we rolled. I was a little young for it.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I wasn't out of college yet, but I could sense then that the whole game in Washington was let's rip down the president. And he was subjected to that after Watergate.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Exactly. So I described Jimmy Carter as a visionary who wasn't really a leader. So, you know, a guy who would go charging up the right hills, But turn around and there was nobody behind him. And part of this was that he wasn't a very good politician. He was a very good candidate. And even in 1980, he wasn't a bad candidate. He knew how to run for office.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But he wasn't an especially skillful politician. His wife, Rosalyn, was much shrewder when it came to the politics of the presidency. And a successful president has to be a good politician. Carter thought that if he could get to the right solution, which he usually did, that the American people would recognize that and they would go along with him.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He sometimes failed to understand that the president, when you boil it all down, only has one power. This was described by one of my mentors when I was at Harvard, a great political scientist and historian named Richard Neustadt. And he wrote a book that was very influential with JFK, who made Neustadt his transition director.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And the book was called Presidential Power, and it said that the president only has one power. That's the power to persuade. And if the president can't persuade, he can't govern effectively.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Carter defied that in some ways because he had an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and he was good at winning Republican votes on important bills like the Panama Canal Treaties and a number of other important laws that he got approved. So he wasn't by any means a failure on Capitol Hill, but he was more broadly a political failure.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
When he got at odds with the American people and his support started slipping away, even when there was a rally around the flag quality in his last year when the hostages were seized in Iran, he had lost his deeper connection to the American people pretty early in the presidency.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
It was some combination. He had visited Israel when he was governor and he had always been interested in the issues there. And then when he was running for president, he went on something called the Trilateral Commission and really educated himself on foreign policy and became deeply steeped in it.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Great to meet you, Don. Glad to be here.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But then there were these opportunities that really came out of Anwar Sadat's decision to visit Jerusalem, which was historic and transformed things, but by itself was not enough to bring peace between those two countries. And that took Jimmy Carter as both Sadat, who became a very close friend of Carter, and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
They both readily attested that deal would never have happened without Jimmy Carter's just almost obsessive interest and his attention to detail, which he was much criticized for. But
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
In this case, and in the Alaska lands bill, which doubled the size of the national park system in the United States, and the Panama Canal treaties that prevented a long war in Central America, and on other issues, normalization with China, which became the foundation of the global economy, these huge foreign policy wins were partly the product of Carter's obsession with
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
getting the details right, which I think comes out of his engineering background and his faith.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah, there's a play. Richard Thomas played Jimmy Carter. And I think Ben Kingsley was in one of the stage productions as Sadat. So, you know, there's a play about Camp David. But you're right that it would make a great movie.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And to be totally honest with you, I've been trying a little bit to get Carter's life covered more by Hollywood, because I think it's very dramatic and has been underappreciated over the years.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah, and some of them you'd put in the column of mistakes, like boycotting the Olympics and the grain embargo that Carter imposed. It was very popular before it was very unpopular. So, you know, it won overwhelmingly in Congress, and then pretty much everybody agreed that it didn't really do much to alter Soviet behavior and took it out on the athletes and was probably not such a great idea.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But you're right that there were these major events, and then these were all playing out against the backdrop of a terrible economy.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Correct. And actually, the improvement of the economy should go on Carter's record. Because what happened was, so I think your listeners know, the president doesn't really determine the economy. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Now we've had some chairwomen.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So in 1979, Jimmy Carter was facing this horrible inflation, which, as you correctly say, mostly came out of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. which was not on Carter's watch, and then was worsened by the Iranian revolution, which, contrary to what Henry Kissinger and some others maintain, and I argued with Kissinger about this, I think, fairly successfully.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I think it had a central role in Jimmy Carter's life, more so than another person, in part because he always called Plains, Georgia home. This is a tiny community of 650 people in rural southwest Georgia. Traveling there is like traveling to a totally different country than most people connect with the United States. Pretty much everything about it is different.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
There really is not any evidence that Jimmy Carter could have prevented the Iranian revolution. But these things, these external events, cause this ruinous inflation, double-digit inflation. And Carter appoints Volcker to be chair of the Federal Reserve. Volcker jacks up interest rates. At one point, they go as high as 19%. Try getting reelected. when you have 19% interest rates.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And this is very, very harsh medicine that Volcker, who told me at the end of his life that he was a big admirer of Jimmy Carter, So he applies this really harsh medicine. It doesn't start working until Reagan is president. So what do we have?
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
We have, because of these interest rates and other policies at the Fed, you have a short, extremely steep recession in 1982 when Reagan is in the second year of his presidency. And then after that recession ends, no inflation until 2020. It had been completely wrung out of the economy. And Reagan goes on to get reelected thanks to Volcker's policy.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I asked Volcker, you know, people say that you cost Jimmy Carter the presidency and you elected Reagan twice. And he said, you know, I've heard that. And he said, I met Carter at a fishing lodge after his presidency. We were both into fly fishing. And I went up to him and I said, President Carter, you know, I'm sorry if some of my policies cost you the presidency.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And he looked at me and he smiled. And I could tell that it was actually one of Carter's genuine smiles, not one of his fake ones. And he said, Paul, there were many factors. And I think Carter was right about that.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Well, first, it was a decision that Carter made, which was arguably the worst of his presidency, that precipitated the seizing of the hostages. Just days before, Carter had agreed to let the Shah of Iran, who had left the peacock throne and was being treated for cancer in Mexico, to come into the United States. And what happened was
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
the Rockefellers who were very close to the Shah pulled the wool over the eyes of the State Department. It's a really quite fascinating story that I tell in my book. They convinced the State Department that the Shah could not be treated
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
adequately in mexico which was not true but carter in a kind of humanitarian moment agreed to let the shah in in november of 1979 and shortly thereafter these student militants in tehran seized the embassy if they hadn't had that as a pretext it wouldn't have happened And the Shah didn't stay in the United States for very long for his treatment. And he died the next year in Egypt.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He was in several countries after he left the throne. But it was a mistake to let him in. And then the way Carter handled it was probably not wise politically. Not probably. It was very unwise politically, as his mother and wife told him repeatedly. And he knew, and he and I discussed this, that if he had taken military action, he very likely would have been reelected if he had bombed Tehran.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But he thought the hostages would be killed, so he didn't do that. He did try to stage a hostage rescue mission in April of 1980, and it failed miserably.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah. And he took total responsibility for it, which is unlike what some of his successors would do in a similar situation. It basically ended any opportunity to get the hostages out before the election, although they came close. And then there may have been, you know, what they call the October surprise. I've been writing about this lately.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
You know, there's increasing evidence that there was an effort by the Reagan campaign to delay the release of the hostages. But then eventually Carter did get them out just moments before he left office.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
down to the fact that you can spot a Confederate flag down there just across the street from where the Carters lived. And this connection to the land and where he was from was complicated because Sumter County, Georgia, which is where Plains is located, was one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South. And as I think people know, Jim Crow was... white terrorism.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah. So basically, first he revolutionized the vice presidency by giving Walter Mondale stuff to do, which almost none of his predecessors had. Then he revolutionizes the office of first lady or the position of first lady by empowering Rosalind Carter. And then after leaving office, he revolutionizes the post presidency.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And there's this myth that he got more done as a former president than as president. That's completely wrong. You don't have the levers of power when you're not in office. So the Carter Center did wonderful work in essentially eradicating getting worm disease, making great progress against river blindness.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He did get some political prisoners released in monitored elections in more than 100 countries. In 1994, he was very involved in preventing wars in Haiti and arguably in North Korea. But mostly he became a symbol. that you can keep on serving, keep on helping other people, keep on inspiring other people to do their best on behalf of not just themselves, but others.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And the Carters did this in literally hundreds of ways after leaving office. And we could talk all day about the smaller things that they did as he tried to show that you don't have to just play golf and serve on corporate boards and take big speaking gigs when you're a former president.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I think it's some combination. What happened was both he and Rosalind Carter were depressed after he was shellacked by Ronald Reagan. And she wanted him to try to make a comeback. And he brushed that aside. But then in the middle of the night, it occurred to him, why can't I do what I did at Camp David in Atlanta?
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And so first in association with Emory is called the Carter Center, which is a terrific organization. They began to hold conferences and then that evolved into other projects. Not all of them worked. But they created an institution that is now outliving him.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
It's chaired by his grandson, Jason, and they continue to do terrific work all around the world on many different important, mostly health-related issues.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Well, I interviewed him a dozen times, and I had met him when I was a columnist for Newsweek magazine in 2000. I interviewed him on a Habitat for Humanity site, and then I helped the Carters build a house in Memphis in 2015. I traveled with him up to Annapolis for his 75th reunion, 75 years after he graduated from the Naval Academy.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So I did spend quite a bit of time with him and his family, and I just came to have immense respect for his decency and his drive. He really was the only president with the exception of Thomas Jefferson. who could be fairly called a Renaissance man. And so in addition to doing all of these other humanitarian things, you know, he wrote a book of poetry. Some of the poems are not bad.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He built all the furniture in his house, and it's beautiful. The woodworking book that he wrote is beautiful. It's very high quality. And he wrote a novel, which is less good. So not all of the things that he taught himself to do were equally successful, but he was an engineer with the soul of a humanist.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And he used his engineering skills to solve all kinds of problems, including the problem of how do you learn to write a poem?
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I'm not sure that he was so much of a work in progress, because I think because of the grounding of his faith and his value structure, that there really wasn't that much change, although he did move to the left after he left office. But I think that it was more his many works in progress, and he knew an immense amount about a huge variety of subjects.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
This is what we were talking about. And this is what Jimmy Carter was faced with when he was a young man just back from the Navy, assuming his late father's business and civic responsibilities. And so he came back just before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which desegregated schools in the United States, or was intended to, but was met with what was called massive resistance.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And you could have a fascinating conversation with him on just about anything, music, art. He turned himself into a decent painter as well. And not just culture, but science, history. His mind was such an active and interesting place. And that was something that is very hard to see when you're looking at him from afar. And so I felt like I had to
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
really spent as much time as I could with him in order to get at the deeper questions of what drove this very complex individual.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
The only thing I want to say to your audience, Don, because I know that many of the people listening really know a lot about history, is that as a Dutch historian, Van Eyck once wrote, history is an argument without end. And I am interested in opening an argument about Jimmy Carter's presidency and true legacy. I'm not expecting to win it on every particular, but
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I do think that he has been badly misjudged and underestimated. And while nobody would nominate him for Mount Rushmore, I think it's a mistake to try to depict him as a saint or try to apologize for his many mistakes. Notwithstanding that, historians have a different mission than journalists. As a journalist, I judge politicians in some cases by
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
how popular they are, how successful are they at bringing the American people along with them. But historians have a different mission. We need to look at presidents by how they changed the country and the world. And if you look at something like normalization with China, Deng Xiaoping leaves after meeting with Carter in 1979. He goes home, he legalizes private property.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And China goes from a country with a GDP like that of a sub-Saharan African nation to the greatest, fastest growth in human history. None of that is possible without this bilateral relationship that Carter and Deng Xiaoping initiated. So Carter thinks that will be the most long-lasting accomplishment of his presidency. My point is that you have to look at what changed.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
What were the downstream effects? And that's a complicated historical... project. So just to take one other small example that I think people can relate to, before Carter, you couldn't drink craft beer. The brewery industry was under these ancient regulations. If you wanted to fly from New York to LA, it would cost you $1,300 or $1,400.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
In today's dollars, when Carter deregulated the airline industry, that changed. There are so many things that not just Carter, but that any president does or doesn't do that look different later, that we need to resist superficial judgments like, Mediocre president, great former president.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And just look in a little bit more of a sophisticated way at how a complex, decent man governed in what you accurately described as very complicated, fraught times in the 1970s.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
A lot of racial strife broke out when Carter was around 30 years old, and he had to deal with all of that. And his family connections made it even more complicated. His father had been a white supremacist, very much in league with what other businessmen in the area believed. His mother, however...
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Lillian Carter was a nurse who took care of black patients for free, as well as delivering Rosalind Carter.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah. So Jimmy and Rosalind Carter knew each other for 96 years. That's amazing. You can imagine. They were married for 77 years. which is longer than all but a thousand couples in the United States.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So this life in rural Georgia, which I spent a lot of time unpacking and researching, it shaped him, but he sided more with his mother and with a illiterate black woman sharecropper named Rachel Clark, who is He thought of as a third parent. His mother was often gone nursing, and his father was busy.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And this woman, Rachel Clark, gave him his great love of nature, which led him to be one of the greatest environmental presidents in American history. He signed 15 major pieces of environmental legislation. He was the first leader anywhere in the world who recognized the problem of global warming.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Strong ties to the land and was an outdoorsman. And then she also gave him his faith. And he was arguably the most devout man ever to be president of the United States. So this background there was central to who he became. But just one more quick point on this. He ducked the civil rights movement.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
You know, we tend to think of him as some kind of secular saint or Mahatma Gandhi figure, but he didn't say anything racist. But he was a bystander, and he later regretted that. And I argue in my book that he spent the second half of his life after age 50 making up for what he did not do in the first half of his life, which was to stand up for civil rights.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And so he never bothered to meet Martin Luther King Jr. He later became very close to Daddy King, Dr. King's father, and to Coretta King, Dr. King's widow. But before 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, Jimmy Carter, you know, wasn't safe for him in business or politics to have anything to do with him. And so this is what makes for a very complicated figure.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And then, of course, after having ducked the civil rights movement, what does he do when he becomes president? He internationalizes the civil rights movement with his human rights policy, which did so much to shift dozens of countries. from autocracies to democracies. Now, we're worried about all these authoritarian regimes now, but there are fewer than when Jimmy Carter was president.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And one of the reasons there are fewer is because Carter had this enormous commitment to human rights, which he took from his presidency into his post-presidency.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yes. His youth, it might as well have been in the 19th century. They had no running water, no electricity, no mechanized farm equipment, but they were not poor. And Carter was the only person in his high school class to go to a four-year college. But from a very young age, he aspired to be in the Navy like his uncle, his mother's brother. And not just an enlisted man, he wanted to be an officer.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And he wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy. And after a lot of effort, he finally went and began to achieve what he thought was his life ambition, which was to become an admiral and eventually chief of naval operations. But in between, he met a man named Hyman Rickover, an admiral who was the father of the nuclear navy, nuclear-powered submarines.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
People don't realize this, but they put a nuclear power plant on the back and bottom of a submarine. before they had them on land. And nuclear power, nuclear powered submarines, this was the most exciting tech project of the middle part of the 20th century. Highly classified, extremely elite and exciting. And Carter was in this.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And at one point between service on conventionally powered submarines and after service on those submarines. There was a meltdown at an experimental nuclear reactor in Canada and Carter had to run into this melted down nuclear reactor. It was only for 90 seconds because they thought he would be killed. They knew so little about it. It was a very dangerous mission in any event.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And they prevented this reactor at Chalk River, Ontario from flooding into the river and causing untold harm. They didn't know much about nuclear power, nuclear reactors in 1952.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yes, it was. But not long after that, his father died and he quit the Navy. Otherwise, the peanut warehouse business that his father was running would have gone bankrupt. It almost went bankrupt anyway when Carter and Rosalind returned to Georgia.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But that experience in the Navy, especially with Admiral Rickover, who was his role model, was instrumental in making the Jimmy Carter that we're all familiar with.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He actually wasn't at the very top of his class at the Naval Academy. My book is called His Very Best. And Jimmy Carter's first very short campaign autobiography that he published just before he ran for president the first time is called Why Not the Best? And that's because when he was being interviewed by Admiral Rickover, Rickover said, where did you stand in your class?
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And Carter said, I was 39th, you know, in a class of, I don't know, 600 and something. And he thought that was pretty good. And Rickover said, did you do your best? And Carter answered, honestly, he said, no, I didn't. And Rickover said, why not your best? And he turned around, the interview was over.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And Carter thought that he would not be admitted to the nuclear Navy, which was his dream job, but he was. And I argue that from that day in 1952 until the day he died, whatever he did, he was all in. He was giving his utmost.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And for a man of that immense intelligence, and he was one of the most intelligent men ever to be president of the United States, and he had some pretty stiff competition, that made him enormously formidable. And as his son Jeff said to me when I asked him to use one word to describe him, that word was intense. So people tend to remember Jimmy Carter as this kindly grandfather with a benign smile.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
There was nothing laid back about him. And there was nothing humble about him. This is important to understand. There's no politician that's humble. He was very, very ambitious, but he was ambitious for more than just himself. He was ambitious to help people and to make the world better and to use his power to leverage change in the lives of ordinary people. all over the world.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And he worked at that. He worked at that every day. Even when he was relaxing, he was doing it in a very intense way. He was fishing in Siberia when he was 93 years old, that kind of thing.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yes. He had unusually enlightened views on race for somebody from his part of the country. And that came from his mother and Rachel Clark, as I mentioned earlier. So he did try to do that. But then later, it was almost like dissidents in the old Soviet Union. He and Rosalind and their family were the only ones who wanted to allow black people to
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
It wasn't that they were trying to get membership in the Plains Baptist Church just to be able to cross the threshold and enter the church. And Carter tried to make that happen, and he lost. But then when he was in the state Senate and first running for governor, he didn't want to advertise that because— As he said to me at one point when I was interviewing him, he said, I had a choice.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
I could either be part of the civil rights movement or I could be governor of Georgia. And I chose to be governor of Georgia. But what he did, which was so remarkable, is that just moments after taking the oath of office as governor in early 1971, he said the time for racial discrimination is over. Now,
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
in a lot of the rest of the country or in other parts of the world, it was long past time for it to be over. These were revolutionary words in Georgia. And he went on to integrate state government in Georgia and appoint black judges and other black folks to high office. And of course, did the same as president when he took the United States government from
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
tokenism to genuine diversity and began to become the Jimmy Carter that we know. But this was a process. And I think there's a lesson here, which Jimmy Carter himself, after the murder of George Floyd, he reflected on this, you know, that silence is death and that we do need to speak up, but also better late than never. It's never too late to join the cause of justice.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And that's part of what his life represents.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Well, first he got involved in education. So his father had been on the school board and he decided to go on the school board as well. And even though there was nothing he could do. even as chair of the county school board, to integrate the schools. He could do things to improve the black schools, which at the time he went on the school board didn't even have any school buses.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So they got the hand-me-down buses. In any event, he became interested in education, and he realized that he couldn't really do much unless he went into politics. He ran for the Georgia State Senate in 1962, and the guy he was running against literally, no exaggeration, stuffed the ballot boxes.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And at first, it looked like Carter would have the election stolen from him, but he went to court and was able to get his seat. And then in 1966, he ran unsuccessfully for governor, and then he had a kind of a spiritual crisis and
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
went in the north door to door for Jesus and had some unusual experiences there, including coming upon a brothel at one point and trying to convert the madam unsuccessfully. And then he decides he's going to run again and is elected in 1970 as governor.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So he was the first real representative of what they called the New South, the post-segregationist South. But it didn't really, well, it impacted them in that their son, Chip, as he described at Rosalind Carter's funeral, was beaten up for wearing a Lyndon Johnson button in the 1964 election. Johnson was for civil rights. And the rest of the family was hassled as well.