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All Of It with Alison Stewart
A Presidential Historian Remembers Jimmy Carter
00:51:50
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died in his hometown of Plains, Georgia on December 29, 2024 at the age of 100.
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- [00:04]
Jonathan Alter
Listener support.
- [00:05]
Alison Stewart
WNYC Studios.
- [00:19]
Stephen Hiltner
This is Alison Stewart from wnyc. Thank you for being with us today. Coming up, later on today's show, we'll be talking about some of the top Travel destinations for 2025 to help you plan your yearly getaways. New York Times travel editor Stephen Hiltner will join us for that. We'll also hear from the editor of a blog called the Points Guy, which explains how to use airline miles and hospitality points to help pay for your vacations. But this hour, we're starting with a look back at the life and work of the late President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on December 29th at the age of 100. As you've been hearing in the news, there was a funeral service held this morning at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. and Jimmy Carter is expected to be interred at his home in Plains, Georgia later today. In honor of his life and his work, we're going to be revisiting a 781 page biography of Jimmy Carter that challenges what the author considers to be unfair oversimplifications of Carter's presidency. The book is called his very Best Jimmy Carter A Life by award winning author and filmmaker Jonathan Alter. The book is the full first length independent biography of Carter. When it came out in 2020, Jonathan Alter joined me to discuss it for our full bio series. Alter interviewed Carter about a dozen times before he died. He got to watch him teach Sunday school and read love letters. Between him and his late wife Rosalynn, we learned Carter was a man who had a flinty edge, masked by a toothy grin and plain ways. Alter argues that Carter is one of the smartest men to hold the office of the presidency and that he had a moral compass that was stronger than his political instincts, which may have cost him a second term. So let's start at the beginning. Jimmy Carter was born on October 1, 1924, the eldest of four children to a nurse named Lillian Gordy and a strict father slash businessman called James Earl Carter. Like many things about Carter, where he grew up hasn't been accurately reported. Until he went to college, he lived on a farm in Archery, Georgia, not Plains, as his Wikipedia page and many other sources claim. In fact, one of the reasons Alter set out to write this book was to correct the record about many incorrect assumptions about Jimmy Carter. I asked him why he thought the conventional wisdom around Carter's story needed myth busting.
- [02:48]
Jonathan Alter
Well, there's a what I would call a conventional wisdom about Jimmy Carter, which is unsuccessful president, great, inspiring former president. And I just thought that was way oversimplified. And that actually as president, he was a political failure, but a substantive and far sighted success. And as a former president, he has been inspirational. But as I think we're going to find out with Donald Trump, former presidents don't have any power. They don't really have that much leverage. And so he actually has gotten less accomplished as a former president. And I also think there was this misconception of him that he was kind of this weak guy, maybe because people remember him in that Mr. Rogers sweater, which was actually very popular at the time. There's nothing weak about Jimmy Carter. He is a tough guy, sometimes an sob, and this is a huge misconception about him. There's actually a tremendous amount of complexity there. So what really surprised me was the layered quality of his life and career. And that kept me fascinated throughout my research.
- [04:14]
Unknown Speaker
He was actually from Archery, Georgia, not planes. That's. That's good for a Jeopardy question in the future. Uh, and he, he grew up on a farm.
- [04:23]
Stephen Hiltner
He had the nickname Hot from Hotshot.
- [04:25]
Unknown Speaker
Given to him by his father. So, so why was this a. A plus for young Jimmy Carter to be considered a hot shot by his father? And why was it a minus?
- [04:36]
Jonathan Alter
Um, so Jimmy's father, Earl Carter, was a white supremacist and very tough disciplinarian. His mother, Ms. Lillian, who later went on Johnny Carson when he was president because she was so amusing. She took care of black patients for free. But his father was tough. And when he called him Hot or hotshot, it was simultaneously, you know, because he was bound for success, good at pretty much everything he tried to do, but it also had a little bit of a putting him in his place quality. Hey, Hotshot. And that double edged quality to that, I think always reminded him that he wasn't getting his father's approval, although he desperately wanted it.
- [05:37]
Unknown Speaker
You mentioned his mother, Ms. Lillian, was a nurse. A nurse who actually delivered Rosalind. We'll talk about that in a minute. And you know, she became a character for this sort of straight talking, one liner, delivering firecracker of a lady. How did she mother Jimmy and her other children?
- [05:56]
Jonathan Alter
Well, she believed that parents coddled their children too much, so she was often off working as a nurse to the point where there was a table in their front hall. And Jimmy and his two sisters, his brother Billy Carter wasn't born yet. He's 13 years younger. They called the table mother. And yet he also respected the work that she did. And I think his later interest in global health, which has been such an Important part of his post presidency he got from watching his mother as a nurse. She was also just an eccentric character, like out of a Eudora Welty novel. And, you know, the eccentricities in this family were pretty fascinating. At one point in 1975, Billy Carter, who loved doing interviews with reporters, said, my mother went into the Peace Corps at age 68. I got one sister who's a Holy Roller, Ruth, and another one who rides with the Hell's Angels. That's Gloria. Said, my brother thinks he's going to be President of the United States. I'm the only normal one in the whole family.
- [07:24]
Unknown Speaker
What part of Jimmy Carter's upbringing on this farm shaped his political Persona? What was useful about this life for him as he got into politics?
- [07:38]
Jonathan Alter
Well, first of all, he didn't want to be in politics when he was a boy. I mean, his first ambition was to be the best farmer that he could be and to please his father. And then he developed a fixation on going to the U.S. naval Academy, which he did. But he became almost preternaturally competent at whatever he undertook. And if you're going to be a successful farmer, you have to be a jack of all trades. You have to be able to do a lot of things well and figure out a problem like why are these crops not growing? And then a solution to the problem. And Carter eventually became an engineer. But even that interest in engineering and problem solving that he took into the presidency, where he would turn even peace between Israel and Egypt into essentially an engineering project that really started on the farm and he became a world class problem solver.
- [08:39]
Unknown Speaker
My guest, Jonathan Alter, the name of his book is His Very Best, Jimmy Carter A Life. It becomes clear early on in the book that while his birth parents were present, he had other adults who shaped his character and really, you know, came to define him. I want to define him. I want to ask you about a few. Two of the most influential people in his young life were black Bishop William Decker Johnson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Rachel Clark. He only knew the bishop when he was young, but he was struck by his success and his education. Why was this stunning to a young Jimmy Carter? Why would it make such an impression at the time?
- [09:19]
Jonathan Alter
Well, nobody in Jimmy Carter's family had ever gone to college. And so suddenly, when he's a young boy, a big event in archery, Georgia, population 25, would be when this bishop, big shot in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, came to town. And this bishop was highly educated and had been actually a child prodigy, traveled all over the world. There was a photograph of him at the Eiffel Tower. That just stunned young Jimmy, the idea that somebody could go abroad. And so the first truly successful person in his life was black. But because he was black, he wasn't allowed into the Carter home except from the back door, which he would too dignified and proud to ever use. So when Jimmy's father wanted to talk to the Bishop and he had respect for him, they would do so from the Bishop's car or under a tree outside the Carter farmhouse and sort of meet on neutral territory so that they could abide by the Jim Crow segregationist customs that prevented him from going through the front door. When Bishop Johnson died, there were Packards and Cadillacs from all over the country lined up for his funeral. And it was the biggest event of Jimmy's childhood when he was about 11 years old. And in any event, Bishop Johnson success, that somebody from such a small community could be that successful and travel around the world, that fired Jimmy's imagination.
- [11:18]
Unknown Speaker
Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter have been married for how many years now, as of January 2021?
- [11:26]
Jonathan Alter
74 years.
- [11:28]
Stephen Hiltner
74 years.
- [11:29]
Unknown Speaker
They've known each other longer than that. Ms. Lillian delivered Rosalynn as part of this book. You were privy to letters that he wrote to her while he was in the Navy. What did you glean from those letters about their relationship?
- [11:46]
Jonathan Alter
Well, first of all, I have to tell you that I was stunned to get those letters from Mrs. Carter. They are the most steamy, intimate love letters exchanged between a future President and First lady in American history. They make John Adams letters to Abigail look pretty tame by comparison. So the letters that he wrote from the Navy when he was at sea are a window into his emotions. And at one point in one of my more than a dozen interviews with Jimmy Carter, he said to me, you know, I don't really express my feelings very much outside of my poetry. I have a hard time expressing my feelings. And so that's one of the reasons you turn to poetry as a former president. But in those letters, they're full of feeling, full of not just longing for his wife, but real emotion. And you glimpse even when they're quarreling a little bit in the letters, you glimpse the intensity of their now 75 year love affairs. And she became the most influential first lady in history at that time. Now, you could argue that maybe after her, maybe Hillary Clinton was more influential, but she had many more responsibilities, for instance, in the White House than Eleanor Roosevelt did. And she was much closer to her husband than Eleanor Roosevelt was to Franklin. And she was responsible for a considerable amount of policy on mental health and age discrimination and vaccination of school children and other issues. But it's mostly that connection which, when I interviewed them together, I could see it was that even when he would sometimes snap at his wife, which wasn't very nice of him, he there, his eyes would light up when she came into the room. And their connection across all these years is. It's just an astonishing love story. And then in the post presidency, she's accompanied him to more than a hundred countries, and she takes notes and is his partner, you know, in all of his meetings with foreign leaders. And she often takes a leadership role in their activities overseas. And, of course, she works with him on Habitat for Humanity projects. I built a house with them in Memphis and was, you know, a little bit afraid of Carter because he would come over and instruct me in how to drive a nail more properly. But, you know, Rosalind, I could see, was really adept. I mean, she built many houses by that point, but, you know, so she's right in there doing everything with him. They didn't actually start going out until he was in the Navy, but they met three days after she was born in 1927, because Ms. Lilly and Jimmy's mother delivered her. And then three days later, she brought her two and a half year old over to see the new baby. And Rosalind then became friends with Jimmy's sister Ruth, and kind of pined away for Jimmy when. From afar, when he was in the Navy, then on vacation, they started going out. And one thing that I think of many things that people don't know about this enormously formidable woman is that she had and has much better political judgment than her husband. And if he had listened to her political advice more. And this is something that is confirmed by all of his aides who admire the former First Lady. And that's not always or even often the case. Normally, aides consider the spouse to be intrusive. That was not the case here. When they would be trying to deliver a message to the president, they would often use Rosalind to say, you know, don't do this. It's politically unpopular. Wait for a second term. And he was pretty often too stubborn to listen to their advice. And at one point, I asked Mrs. Carter, you know, is. Is your husband stubborn? And she just laughed. Everybody knows how stubborn he is.
- [17:05]
Stephen Hiltner
You've been hearing Jonathan Alter discuss his book, his Very best, Jimmy Carter A Life. When we come back, we'll hear about Carter's foreign policies. That's Coming up after a break on this week's ON the media, how the map of the US we grew up with has never shown us our true selves.
- [17:24]
Jonathan Alter
If you looked up at the end of 1945 and you saw a US flag flying overhead, it was more likely that you were living in a colony or occupied zone than on the US Mainland empire.
- [17:35]
Stephen Hiltner
On this week's ON THE Media from wnyc. Find on the Media wherever you get your podcasts. This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. This hour, we're remembering the life of President Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100. We've been speaking with filmmaker and writer Jonathan Alter about his book, the first full length independent biography of Carter called his very best Jimmy Carter a Life. Alter joined me on the show in 2020 when the book came out. Since President Carter's funeral is today, we thought it would be a good time to revisit it. So now onto Jimmy Carter's foreign policy. There were historic highs. In 1978, the Camp David Accords were secretly negotiated over 12 days. Carter did the mediating between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem beginning. But a year later, In November of 1979, protesters took 52American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran, Iran. The event was sparked in part by Carter allowing the deposed Shah of Iran into the US for cancer treatment. Carter okayed a secret rescue mission that failed. The two events define Carter's foreign policy legacy, but they were not the totality of it. And this is where we pick up with Jonathan Alter. He wrote that Carter wanted to send a message the US Would no longer turn a blind eye to dictatorship or global injustices. I asked Jonathan Alter to explain that a little more deeply.
- [19:27]
Jonathan Alter
It was in the tradition of our highest ideals. However, often we fell short of them. And Carter himself fell short in that sense. The human rights policy was hypocritical at times. You know, he supported the Shah of Iran, he supported Marcos in the Philippines. But overall, it was not only one of his most important accomplishments, but one of the most important accomplishments of any president in the 20th century. And there's a Harvard professor named Carl Deutsche, very distinguished professor of international relations, who ran into Carter at Emory in Atlanta after Carter was defeated. And Carter was kind of depressed. And this professor said to him, you know, President Carter, 1,000 years from now, very few American presidents will be remembered, but yours will be one of them because you were the first leader anywhere in the world who set a global standard for how other governments should treat their own people. Before that, it was basically nobody's business. And so even where he fell short, he set this standard which endures to this day. Even if Carter, for instance, established Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, who was this wonderful woman named Pat Derrian who terrified dictators. And, you know, even though Trump didn't even fill that position and has reneged on all sorts of human rights commitments, that standard is still there. And what was interesting to me was looking at what conservatives said after Carter left the White House, conservatives who had thought Carter's human rights policy was naive, and they, you know, they thought it was hurting us in the Cold War. They found out from people like Boskov Havel and others, it actually helped us immensely in the Cold War because soft power is so important. So people like Vaskov Havel, who was in prison in Czechoslovakia, or Lech Walesa in Poland, they took enormous encouragement from the idea that there was this human rights policy in the United States. And then Sakharov and Sharansky in the Soviet Union. In his first days in office, Carter is challenging the Soviet government on the way they treat dissidents and getting dissidents freed. And then Latin America, his standing up to dictators there and telling them that they were jeopardizing support that they got from the United States led over a period of 10 to 15 years to a dramatic transformation from dictatorship to democracy in almost every Latin American country. And does Carter alone deserve all the credit for that? No. But if you look at somebody like Kim Dae Jong in South Korea, who was in prison when Carter was president, when he was elected president of South Korea some years later, and Carter's Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, Patricia Darien, went to his swearing in, and. And the new president of South Korea said, if it wasn't for you and President Carter, I'd be dead. Not to mention not president of South Korea. And so even though Carter himself felt like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and other issues in the last two years of his presidency made his policy disappointing, I think in later years he recognized that human rights was central to his legacy. And they're really. I mean, I'm hoping that other historians look into this because there's been surprisingly little scholarship on it, but it stands up very well to scrutiny. And I think over time, appreciation of what Carter did on human rights is growing.
- [24:15]
Unknown Speaker
Transparency and honesty were very important to President Carter, but he did make choices about what should be concealed. And you're right that the two biggest secrets of his administration were Establishing diplomatic relations with China and the B2 stealth bomber, what determined to him whether or not something should be held, held in secret?
- [24:36]
Jonathan Alter
Well, I think he realized that diplomacy is really hard to do in public. So a lot of reporters had their noses out of joint when he barred them from Camp David when he was pulling off this miraculous peace deal between Israel and Egypt in 1978. And he felt the same way about normalizing relations with China. There was such opposition to that among conservatives. He felt if word had leaked out that we were changing this policy and that we were going to basically abandon what had been this completely unworkable to China policy, where we had relations with both mainland China and Taiwan, well, we still have relations with both, but that we could manage that kind of two China policy was untenable. And as he moved away from that and established this relationship with Deng Xiaoping that basically is the foundation of today's global economy, the bilateral relationship between the United States and China, that a lot of it had to be done in secret in the same way that Nixon first opened the door to China in secret and in 1971 and 72. So by 78 and 79, it was still necessary to operate in secret. And he used Big Brzezinski, his national security advisor, to begin those negotiations. Although Carter himself was deeply involved in the secret talks that led to the full diplomatic relations, you have to remember that at that time, China had a GDP that of a sub Saharan African country. And after normalization, Carter, one night was awakened in the middle of the night by a call from China, and his science advisor was there. And Carter thought, why are they bugging me in the middle of the night? Is there some sort of volcano like Mount St. Helens or something? You know? And he, as he told the story to me, you know, his science advisor, Frank Press, says, well, I'm sitting here with Deng Xiaoping, who is one of the most important leaders in the history of China, and he wants to send 10,000 students to the United States. At that time, I think they sent about 50. And Carter is annoyed. He says, tell him he could send 100,000 for all I care. He's being kind of facetious. He gets off the phone. Well, Today there are 250,000 Chinese students who study in the United States. They're keeping a number of American colleges afloat. And there's so many other things like that that are the product of this bilateral relationship, as troublesome as it has been in recent years. So sometimes these tectonic plates are shifting and they seem like they're A One Day Story. Okay. Deng Xiaoping's visiting the United States. They're having cultural exchanges. And it's only decades later that you realize this changed the world. Carter believes that that will be his most lasting influence as president, is establishing the most significant bilateral relationship in the world.
- [28:28]
Unknown Speaker
My guest is Jonathan Alter. The name of the book is his very best. Jimmy Carter A Life. We could take a week to discuss each Egypt and Israel and the Camp David Accords, and a week to discuss Iran. So I'm going to try to boil it down to one or two questions about each. And I think from reading your description of what happened at Camp David, it really reads like a thriller. It's about. The talks are about to end. The two sides are fighting. They're not talking. Jimmy Carter is literally physically running back and forth between Menaka Begum and Anwar Sadat. By the time I finished that section, I thought, this section is about relationships and Jimmy Carter's relationships with these two men. He had a very close relationship with Sadat, not so as close with Begin. When was a moment when Carter's relationship with Monaca Begin had a real impact on the negotiations, for better or for worse.
- [29:25]
Jonathan Alter
So I think you're so right, Allison, that it's always about the human, human element. And Bean was being very difficult and in part because he was giving up a lot. You know, giving up the Sinai. Israeli soldiers had died for what he was giving up. And it looked like the talks were finished and they were going to end in failure. On three prior occasions, one or the other side had packed their bags and gotten ready to leave. And it was Carter's persistence, his doggedness. Remember, no president had ever done this before, ever gotten down into the weeds this way. I had thought that Theodore Roosevelt had when he settled the Russo Japanese War. But it turned out he actually never went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the talks were being held. Carter couldn't have Begin and Sadat in the same room at the same time. He found out after the second day of 13, so he had to shuttle between them. And it was really a virtuoso performance, but it seemed like it had ended in failure. And then his secretary, a woman named Susan Clow, was asked by somebody in the Israeli delegation to for some photographs. And she got the idea, why don't I have Carter inscribe these photographs to Begin's grandchildren and then have him walk the photographs over to Begin's cabin at Camp David. So Carter did that, and he got there and Begin saw the photographs with the inscription and he started thinking about his granddaughters, and he started crying. And that didn't, you know, end the problems right away, but it opened Begin's heart to one last try for peace. And so then in the. In the 24 hours after that, they were able to come to an agreement. Begin retreated from the agreement after Camp David, and Carter had to go to the Middle east six months later and patch the whole thing together with chewing gum and masking tape. But they got it done. And I think that human moment with the photographs tells you a lot about the way these things are often resolved. It does become a human thing. And in that sense, Carter is often asked why, as a former president, he, you know, he talks to dictators, thugs, really terrible people, and he says, well, you know, you have to look for something in them, some shred of humanity, and maybe if you can find it, you can stop the shooting. So it was always about stopping the shooting with Iran.
- [32:41]
Unknown Speaker
After reading the section again, it's very, very detailed. One of the takeaways I had was that Carter was failed by his people. His intelligence failed him, and the disagreements between Secretary of State Cy Vance, who leaned towards diplomacy and a peaceful approach, versus National Security Adviser Zbekniew Brzezinski, who was more conflict adjacent, really caused problems. How was he failed by his people when it came to Iran?
- [33:18]
Jonathan Alter
Well, I think you're right that there was that disagreement, but it's also true that Carter, who was often criticized for his attention to detail. Oh, he's down in the weeds. He's so obsessed with detail. Well, on China, on the Middle east, on the Alaska lands Bill, that attention to detail is actually what brought him success. And tragically, he was distracted by a lot of other things that were going on at the time of the Iranian revolution in early 1929, including the Middle East. And he didn't apply his normal obsession with detail to. To that crisis. So he was hurt by getting conflicting advice and not reconciling that advice into a coherent policy. But I think what really hurt him was, ironically enough, his humanity. Because his instincts told him, don't let the Shah of Iran, the deposed Shah of Iran, into the United States for, you know, asylum. And he knew that something bad would happen if he did that. But then what? And he's getting all this pressure from Henry Kissinger and, you know, all these pillars of the foreign policy establishment, you know, David Rockefeller, they're all friends with the Shah, and they're telling, let him in. Let him in to the U.S. he was our ally, and we owe him this. And Carter is, no, no. At one point, he actually says, f the Shah. But he didn't say, f, don't think that way. Right. But he did. So his instincts are telling him, don't let the Shah in. Bad things will happen. Then it comes out that the Shah has cancer. And. And then Rockefeller's people hoodwink Carter and the State Department into thinking that he cannot be treated in Mexico, where he was living at the time, and can only be treated in the United States. So on humanitarian grounds, he agrees to let the cha veron into New York Hospital. Right. And so for a short time, he's in the United States. Then he goes to Panama, but in that short time, he's in the United States. Within days after he's admitted to the United States, student radicals seize hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran. And that has a lot to do with destroying Jimmy Carter's presidency.
- [35:52]
Stephen Hiltner
You're listening to my conversation with Jonathan Alter about his biography, his very best, Jimmy Carter A Life. Up next. We conclude with a look at how Carter's legacy shaped the presidencies of his successors and at his life after leaving office, including his work with Habitat for Humanity. Stick around. We will be right back.
- [36:11]
Jonathan Alter
I've always kind of looked at our.
- [36:12]
Unknown Speaker
Story as something bigger.
- [36:14]
Jonathan Alter
On Radiolab, two strangers are matched for a bone marrow transplant.
- [36:19]
Stephen Hiltner
I just broke.
- [36:20]
Unknown Speaker
I wept like a little baby and.
- [36:21]
Jonathan Alter
Discovered that's about all they had in common.
- [36:24]
Unknown Speaker
Maybe this guy's like a real piece of crap.
- [36:26]
Jonathan Alter
She's thinking. I just saved a Christian magician from Texas life.
- [36:31]
Unknown Speaker
So I guess we'll talk about that later.
- [36:33]
Jonathan Alter
A match made in marrow from Radiolab. Listen where you get podcasts or on the WNYC app.
- [36:54]
Stephen Hiltner
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. This hour, we're remembering the life of Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100. We've been speaking with filmmaker and writer Jonathan Alter about his book, the first full length independent biography of Carter, his very best, Jimmy Carter A Life. We started today's presentation by learning about a boy from Archery, Georgia, whose stern, disciplined and bigoted father called him hotshot in office. Carter was a president whose independent ways made it possible for him to mediate a framework for peace in the Middle east, but also led him to miss all the signs that an embassy in Tehran was in danger of being overrun. Which brings us to Jimmy Carter. After his presidency, he changed what it meant to be a former President of the United States. He did not collect large speaking fees or book Advances, he turned to philanthropy and good works, living his deep faith. He also did some freelance diplomatic work after leaving office, to the chagrin of some of the sitting presidents who succeeded him. So to start off the last part of our conversation about his very best Jimmy Carter A Life, I asked historian Jonathan alter why, with 40 odd years of hindsight, he thought Carter lost his reelection campaign in 1980.
- [38:14]
Jonathan Alter
I think it's that American history is cyclical, and Jimmy Carter was kind of a speed bump on the transition from left to right that was going on in the 1980s, 70s and 80s. And so he sort of put a band aid on the Democratic Party, right, and he was able to carry the south in 1976 because he was a Southerner. But by 1980, the transition of the south from Democratic to Republican was proceeding apace. And we were on this road to a post New Deal world in American politics. And at that time, you know, we, we didn't really know it. We knew that the 1978 midterms had, you know, had, had been shown that there was this conservative ascendancy in places like California with Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes in California. And there were other signs of evangelicals deserting Carter and being politicized and part of the conservative coalition. But we didn't really know that yet then how important evangelicals would be to the American right, how much of a backlash there would be against the civil rights movement, that that would lead many Americans to become lifelong Republicans. And so there were these sort of tectonic plates of history that were shifting that we didn't really understand. And we thought in 1980, Carter lost because, you know, of the hostages and the bad economy and the fact that he was up against a great communicator. But there were larger forces at work.
- [40:18]
Unknown Speaker
There's a funny line about Carter being the only person to use the White House as a stepping stone, given how much work that he's done since the presidency. What were some of the things that he wanted to accomplish and has been able to accomplish that really would not have been possible in his position as President of the United States?
- [40:38]
Jonathan Alter
Well, first of all, you have to realize that he revolutionized three things. He revolutionized the role of Vice President. Walter Mondale was given many more responsibilities than any of his predecessors changed that permanently. He revolutionized the role of the First Lady. And Rosalynn Carter was hugely influential. And then after leaving the White House, he revolutionized the post presidency. Before that, you know, you'd go on corporate boards, you'd give speeches, you play golf and Carter felt like he wanted his library to be more than just, you know, a place to collect his papers and have a museum. And in the middle of the night he woke up a couple years after he left the White House and he said, you know, I'm going to build like a mini Camp David where we can have conferences and try to make peace. And it actually hasn't really been such a mini Camp David, although they've had a lot of conferences. But it's turned into this wonderful non governmental organization. And they have been especially effective in three areas. Global health, basically guinea worm disease afflicted more than 3 million people a year, basically ruining their lives across many parts of Africa in particular. And now I think there are 30 cases worldwide. And that's as a result of the Carter Center. And then they've monitored elections in more than 100 countries and done important democracy promotion. And then he did have some big peacekeeping successes, especially in 1994 when he arguably prevented wars in Haiti and North Korea. So they have been very effective and they have changed the expectations for what a former president can do. But having said that, he doesn't have any official power and doesn't have the levers of power that he had when he was president. President. And so this idea that, oh, he's gotten so much more accomplished as a, as a former president than he did as president is just not factually true. And it's a sign of a kind of a easy minded assessment of Jimmy Carter that I'm trying to get beyond in my book. And I think that one of the reasons I called the book his very best is that this determination, this persistence, this idea of never leaving anything on the field, basically never going on Miller time, even when he's in his 90s, that this is inspirational. And I think this is what is a model not just for other presidents, but for, for all of us, that we can do better and if we can do get up every day and we're not going to all be able to change the world the way Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have, but we can all do a little bit more. And that's what Amy Carter told me. I think it was only the second interview she's ever granted. If you can believe it. She's 53 years old now. That's what she said was her parents greatest legacy, that we can all do a little more for other people. And you can, you can advance yourself and Carter was always ambitious, but also advance the lives of others. And that's a pretty, pretty good legacy to have.
- [44:43]
Unknown Speaker
Amy Carter borrowed my history book and never gave it back in college.
- [44:50]
Jonathan Alter
Brown. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:52]
Unknown Speaker
Can I borrow that? Sure.
- [44:56]
Jonathan Alter
Yeah. She didn't finish Brown. She got very active in the anti apartheid movement and she was arrested a couple of times when she was at Brown, I remember, and she. She did not. She stopped going to class and I.
- [45:14]
Stephen Hiltner
Want to get my book back.
- [45:16]
Jonathan Alter
She ended up going to art school, and she now teaches art to elementary school students in Atlanta.
- [45:25]
Unknown Speaker
After reading this book, Jimmy Carter just seems like such a complex person because on one hand, he's waging peace, he's fighting. Fighting disease, he's building hope. You know, he has. But he's had all these problems in his own family. His children have many issues, substance abuse problems within the family. Some people think he, as you said early on earlier this week, that he could be a real sob. He could kind of be a little bit look his nose down on people. He's taking the moral high ground, yet.
- [45:58]
Stephen Hiltner
He'S done so much good in the.
- [46:00]
Unknown Speaker
World, and he really operated from a place of trying to do what he thinks thought was right. What do you make of this split? This idea of just. Maybe it isn't a split. Maybe it's just he's a human and we need to think about him that way.
- [46:15]
Jonathan Alter
Well, that's it, Alison. Look, you know, I agree with what Stephen Colbert says about Trump, that he's fundamentally boring. And by that he means that there's nothing really to learn about him. We know who he is, and in some ways he's entirely predictable. Jimmy CARTER Is the U.N. tRUMP, not just because he's a person of decency, honesty, accountability, integrity, but because he is enormously complicated and there is a layered corporation quality to him that I found fascinating when I was working on the book over the last five years and that I hope readers find compelling. You know, his aides, Bigny Brzezinski once said that he had three smiles. He had the big one in public, which was sometimes, you know, a little bit artificial, put on to charm people and win votes and make peace, whatever he was after. Then he had a tight lipped, angry smile in private where he would glare at you with what his aides called the icy blues. And then beneath that would be a genuine warm smile if he or somebody else got off a rye amusing remark or something else amused him. And. And he. So to me, that's just one frame on a really complicated and fascinating person who has led an epic American life.
- [48:10]
Unknown Speaker
Jimmy Carter is held in much higher esteem today than he was 30 years ago, certainly 40 years ago. What do you think changed?
- [48:20]
Jonathan Alter
Well, I think that the success of what he did as a former president eventually wore down people's, you know, in some cases, contempt for him. And he, he. He was stigmatized by the Republicans as a kind of, you know, shorthand for failure. And they were pretty good at driving that message the way Democrats were with Herbert Hoover, another engineer, very intelligent engineer who was president. And the Democrats used Hoover as a punching bag. For a long time, Republicans used Carter as a punching bag. But eventually, his determination, his pursuit, his ability to figure out new ways to save and change lives, it wore people down. And I think that, you know, the consensus on him moved from respect for his integrity to admiration for his good deeds, to what I think now is love, as a younger generation sees him as a beloved figure. And I was really intrigued that Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, they all made pilgrimages to Plains in 2020 seeking his blessing. And he said that he wanted a younger president. He's very happy, obviously, that Biden won, but he wanted somebody younger. And I've noticed that a lot of younger Americans are very interested in his career, especially in the age of Trump, that somebody can be good and do great things at the same time. And also the scope, the reach, the arc of his life is extraordinary. Extraordinary and I think, beginning to be recognized as such. So I think of him as the only. Only eminent American who effectively lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924, but it might as well have been the 19th century because they had no running water, no electricity, no mechanized farm equipment. And then, of course, he, you know, was president and involved in many of the great social movements of the 20th century. And as a former president, he's involved in democracy promotion, dispute resolution, global health, the cutting edge issues of the 21st century. So it's hard to think of anybody else who you could say that of. And I think if you live long enough, people come around to the right assessment of you in the same way. It took Harry Truman about the same amount of time, about 30 or 40 years after he left office, before his contributions were more fully appreciated. And I think that revisionism of Carter is underway. And a. I can be a small part of it. I'm really happy about that.
- [51:51]
Stephen Hiltner
That was my conversation with historian and filmmaker Jonathan Alter, author of the biography His Very Best, Jimmy Carter A Life. We'll leave you with a recording of the U.S. air Force Band performing Going Home. President Carter will be laid to rest today after passing away last month at the age of 100, best wishes and condolences to all of President Carter's loved ones. There'll be more all of it, after the news.
- [52:58]
Alison Stewart
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- [53:29]
Unknown Speaker
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