In this special episode, Don Wildman is joined by experts Jonathan Alter and Jefferson Cowie to delve into the remarkable life of the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100.Carter, who served in office from 1977 to 1981, is the longest-lived president.From his early days in rural Georgia, to a hostage crisis which cost him his second term, and his extensive humanitarian efforts post-presidency; hear about the pivotal moments and challenges in Carter's life.Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What was Jimmy Carter's impact as the longest-lived president?
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.
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.
It's pretty astonishing when you look at this young guy's resume, how he might have envisioned this to happen. Because, I mean, you come from those kinds of beginnings. He's out there in the rural country, yet seeing himself doing what he does. I guess World War II had a lot to do with it. It made that story for a lot of young men back then, including my own father.
But it launches him into a much bigger vision of life, which he had to have had himself. We didn't even mention some fact I've got on a sheet here. When he was 13, he bought five houses in Plains, which he then put on the market at bottom prices because of the Depression and all that, but then rented them out. I mean, this was a savvy kid.
This is a very smart individual who was, you know, at the top of his class.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Jimmy Carter's Southern upbringing influence his presidency?
I don't want to gloss over this stuff. I mean, you're talking about my early teenage years here. I want to really identify the fact that something major was happening. We had an America that was really soaring, certainly after World War II. It was kind of what my parents expected it to be. They were FDR Democrats. And the right people were in power as far as we were concerned.
Maybe Nixon tilted it the wrong way for them. But it was a very hopeful time that I had an early life in. When things go wrong, we get presidential commissions on TV, the rise of the press. We have an enormous amount of information coming to us that we never had before. And it starts to infiltrate the American consciousness that we've been, as you said, lied to.
And this government is not to be trusted. And in some way, if I may editorialize for a moment, in some ways that was correct as well. Like that was a confirmation of the fact that we lived in a world where we could not trust the government. But then it started to go sour and it gets really, really sort of just a negative.
And that's where Carter comes in, because he's able to sort of address this with this honest small town farmer guy. It's just ironic that he was from the South, right? I mean, he's a completely outsider as far as the North's concerned.
He's a complete outsider, and that's what's refreshing about him. It's not just that he's from the South. He's just completely outside the beltway, right? He just has no connections, which ends up becoming one of his failures, is that he doesn't really know how to run Washington.
Carter runs just when George Wallace, who is this kind of, you know, this segregationist, snarling governor of Alabama, getting tremendous traction in 68 and 72. And so the South becomes really important. There's this sort of political churn there, and Carter emerges as somebody who could win the South as a racial progressive.
That's a really important dimension of who he was, because a lot of people were really worried about the direction of the South, which was a core part of the Democratic Party at that time. And we forget that. You know, it's lost to the Democratic Party now. But at the time, the Democratic Party completely depended upon the South and was losing it after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
He's more of an insider than we give him credit for, though. He's the Democratic machinery. I mean, he's the head of the Democratic Party, right, before he becomes president?
To say he's an insider, I think, I mean, we're talking about who he is as a candidate, right? He shows up in Iowa. Nobody really knows. You know, the famous line is Jimmy who? The Atlanta paper, I think, said, Jimmy who is running for president of what? He's not Muskie. He's not Humphrey. He's not any of these people who had absolute complete name recognition.
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