Jimmy Carter at "His Very Best"

Note: Text has been edited and may not match audio exactly.

Christina Harcar: Hello, I'm Christina Harcar, Audible's history editor and, more importantly, a fan of the presidential scholar and best-selling author, Jonathan Alter, who joins me today. His latest work, the first full-length biography of former President Jimmy Carter, entitled His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, was performed by Michael Boatman in audio, and in my opinion is a high water mark for immersive biography, both comprehensive and also novelistic in its choice of detail. Welcome, Jonathan Alter, and thank you for making the time to speak with me today.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Christina. Thanks for having me on, and I want to, at the outset, thank Michael Boatman for an outstanding performance on the Audible audiobook. It's first-rate. I should note that President Carter suffered a fall late last year and did not fully recover, and he lost much of his eyesight. And so he has been listening—I just heard this quite recently—he's been listening on Audible to Michael Boatman's performance of my book and enjoying it.

CH: Wow, that is a wonderful thing to know, actually. I'm glad that he is enjoying your work and Michael's on Audible. I wanted to talk about how the book came into being, because you interviewed more than 200 people in President Carter's life, in his circle, and thousands upon thousands of hours of interviews. And I wanted to ask you, what was it like to find those stories and to hear those stories, and to go through to put this great biography together, and that President Carter is now hearing his life reflected back to him from other sources?

JA: While I heard he's enjoying it, he and his wife, Rosalynn—who's been his full life partner. And they first met each other 93 years ago, a couple of days after Rosalynn was born and she was delivered by Jimmy's mother, who was a nurse—I don't want you to think that they love every word, because this is an independent biography. It's warts and all, so I know that some of it might be a little bit uncomfortable for them. There's a lot about their family, and as you indicated, his life is kind of novelistic. It has its ups and downs, including some of the ups and downs in their long and very, very successful marriage.

So, what was it like? Well, this was the first biography I've written. I wrote a book about Franklin Roosevelt, but that was mostly focused on 1932 and 1933, when he became president. And I wrote two books about Barack Obama, and the first one was on his first year of his presidency, and the second one on his first term and his reelection campaign. Biographies are different because they're kind of overwhelming. When you go to a presidential library, in this case the Carter Library is in Atlanta, and you realize that there are literally millions of documents and that you're never going to be able to turn every page, as Robert Caro recommends. Even he couldn't turn every page in the LBJ Library and he's been working there for 40 years.

You have to figure out how to pick your shots. In terms of the archival research, go for newly declassified documents. In my case I decided to go for oral histories, because the more than 250 interviews I was doing, including a dozen with President Carter and a lot with Vice President Walter Mondale, and Mrs. Carter, and the surviving members of his Cabinet and aides, these are 40 years later and they're useful. But I needed to supplement them, particularly with oral histories that were done much closer to the real events and also with diaries and letters, and a certain number of memos, particularly in the national security area. Those were important.

"…When we haven't done our very best we can, in this case our very best to speak out about racial injustice, we can make up for it."

And there are moments of frustration and moments of exhilaration. And I'd say the greatest moment of exhilaration in my research process was, early on Mrs. Carter told me that she had saved Jimmy's love letters from the Navy and that she was considering letting me see them. Not only had no historian ever seen them, nobody, even in their circle, knew about them. Only Amy Carter knew about them because she knew that her mother had carried these love letters with her on every move that they made over their now 74-year marriage. But I didn't really know for sure that she would let me use them until later in the process. And then when I got them and read them, Christina, they're steamy. They are steamy letters and they make John and Abigail Adams look like nothing. And they're easily the steamiest letters between a president and first lady. So when I saw those I went, "Wow, this is really, really interesting."

I mean, one that sticks in my mind is, I was interviewing Amy Carter, and it was only the second interview she had ever granted. She did it. She's a shy person. Teaches art in Atlanta to elementary school students. She's 53 years old now. She did not want to talk to me, and only did because her parents suggested that she do so. And we were having a long lunch as part of my interviewing her and we were talking about her Aunt Gloria, Jimmy's sister, one of his sisters. And before I tell you about what Amy told me, I need to refer to a quote from Billy Carter. I think everybody remembers who he was. He died in the '80s. Jimmy's only brother and he had Billy Beer, which was very famous at the time. He didn't actually like Billy Beer. He'd pour the contents in the toilet and fill the beer can up with vodka and drink it. He became a rather severe alcoholic.

When Jimmy was first running for president, Billy said, "I got a mother who went into the Peace Corps when she was 68." That's Lillian Carter, Jimmy's mother. "I got one sister who's a Holy Roller." That's his sister Ruth, who became an evangelist. "I got another sister, Gloria, who rides with the Hell's Angels," which is true, he has. "She Rides in Harley Heaven Now" is on her tombstone. And then Billy said, "And I got a brother who thinks he's going to be president of the United States. I'm the only normal one in the family." So I knew that he had this very colorful family and I'm talking to Amy about her aunts and uncle. And she said, "Well, you know, Gloria, she was so eccentric that she had a tattoo on her back." And I said, "Yeah, that was a little unusual at the time." And she said, "You want to know what the tattoo was of?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "Tweety Bird pushing a lawnmower." I don't know why, but I just found that really amusing.

CH: I have to just tell you, Jonathan… First I have to thank you for a second and tell you that somehow you have rocked everything I ever wanted to know when I asked that question. As you and I had discussed briefly before this started, I have such a warm personal connection to the Carter family, as millions of children did in the '70s, just from watching them. I'm a couple of years behind Amy in school and I always wondered what her life was like when she was in the White House. I was fascinated by the personal lives of the Carters and what you just said about steamy love letters and Tweety Bird with a lawnmower has gratified the 10-year-old me.

On a serious note, I do have to mention for our listeners that you are now highlighting one of the great strengths of this book. I'm so glad that you mentioned John Adams and that these letters were steamier, because when I was listening to the audio I also thought that for presidential biographies, this really gives an illumination into the man behind the policies and the events. It's very comprehensive. You touched on some main things, but there's also his Navy career and his postpresidential career, and there's a wealth of service in his life of service. But I do think that you have conveyed the texture of the person in a way that we haven't seen before. 

To that point, I wanted to talk about the hostage crisis a little bit. I remember Nightline starting and President Carter staying up all night and the light from his office pouring onto the lawn because he was up worrying. He remains for me the high watermark of what a caring president should be. You tell the story of what happened when the hostage crisis got resolved 10 minutes after he left office January 20, 1981. And my question is, what do we learn now about President Carter as a leader and a man when we look at him through the lens of resolving that crisis?

JA: Just to refer to your point about it being resolved shortly after he left office, it's important to understand that he resolved it. He spent the night before the Reagan inauguration sleeping on the couch in the Oval Office and had actually been up for 48 hours before putting the final touches on a very complex deal involving Algeria as the intermediary between Iran and the United States. And it related to unfreezing Iranian assets that Carter had frozen shortly after the hostages were taken. And the Iranians, apparently, wanted to wait until just after Reagan took office to not give Carter the satisfaction of having still been in office when they were returned safely to the United States, all 52 of them unharmed. They were a little beat up from their time in captivity, not so much literally beat up. Captivity was not easy, but they were safe. 

I dug up this interesting account from a Swiss intermediary, who just came forward and I interviewed him, and he had been in charge of the actual transfer of the hostages out of Iran. And he says that the delay actually was not ordered by the Iranian government, that it was a logistical delay. He was in charge of the logistics and it was basically on him that it was shortly after noon Washington, DC, time that the plane took off and left Iranian airspace. And that if he hadn't been making sure that all the hostages were aboard, making sure all the hostages were who they said they were and other logistical details, that they would have actually left Iranian airspace shortly before Reagan took office. 

This is one of these historical matters that will never be resolved. We do not have any account from a senior Iranian official telling them to delay, so that would be the piece of evidence that you would need to completely nail that case historically. But a number of people suggest that that's the likeliest sequence of events. It's a little bit like the "October surprise," whether the Iranians met with officials of the Reagan campaign and agreed to delay the release of the hostages until after the election so that Ronald Reagan would win. There's quite a bit of suggestive evidence, but no final proof on that. And I go through that. I try not devote too much time to either of these things because I want to keep the narrative moving. 

Overall, I think there were other parts of Carter's record on foreign affairs that far exceed what he did on the hostages. Camp David Accords, his human rights policy, which changed the world, the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China, which established the global economy as we know it today. The Panama Canal treaties, which prevented an open-ended major war in Central America that the Joint Chiefs of Staff said would require 100,000 troops if Carter hadn't gotten those ratified. But having said that, he did bring the hostages home safely and he achieved his objective. And for him, peace was preeminent. Saving lives was preeminent. So even though, arguably, the Iranians humiliated him just before he left office, Carter was happy. He was thrilled because they were home safely. What he had been working on for 444 days had come to reality. And he had prayed for their safety. He had told their families that he would keep them safe.

Having done so, I don't think he did anything to dishonor the United States by not attacking, and there was a lot of right wing talk about that, but he did allow himself to be held "hostage." And the special editions of Nightline, that you referred to—before it was called Nightline it was called America Held Hostage—and you could make a pretty good argument that Carter let himself be, in some ways, manipulated by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who realized that the only way he would lose would be if he released the hostages, because Carter at one point said he couldn't speak to what would happen after the hostages were released. So if the president of the United States is saying that, Iran has no incentive to release them.

And it wasn't until Iran needed the money to fight Iraq in the very bitter, very costly, very long Iran-Iraq War, which it started in the fall of 1980, it wasn't until then that Iran really had an incentive to release those hostages. Which is one other story that is, I think, quite new in my book and there's a lot of details on all of this that have not been published before. But the one that I find most resonant is that, as some of your listeners know, the seizure of the hostages on November 4, 1979 was exactly one year before the presidential election, to the day. And the exact same day that Ted Kennedy essentially blew up his campaign by not being able to answer a question from Roger Mudd, of NBC News, about why he wanted to run for president.

CH: That's a wonderful part of the audio and your retelling makes me want to run back to it. Because we are speaking right now in November 2020 and I listened to your audio the week it came out, which I think was September 29. It feels like a lifetime ago. And what I could not see listening on my own, but now I find thrilling, is that context you just made of the timeline. I mean, now I have a much more granular understanding of what exactly one year before a presidential election is. It feels very concrete. Which brings me to my next question. So how lucky is it that I am chatting with a student of presidential times during a week when we are watching a presidential transition very, very closely? And I wanted to ask you, what wisdom from His Very Best do you hope our listeners find at this moment right now for what we're going through?

JA: I would say, Christina, that Joe Biden's campaign and Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976, when he was first elected, they have a lot in common. And Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter, interestingly, spoke about healing. And he's coming off of this terrible Trump era. And Jimmy Carter spoke about healing and telling a lie, and restoring integrity to government after Watergate. So he was elected just two years after Nixon resigned. He was running against Gerald Ford, Nixon's vice president, and Gerald Ford was an honorable man, but the stench of Watergate was still there. And Carter's response to it is what made him president, what took him in this miraculous campaign from zero percent in the polls. He is an obscure former governor of a Southern state. The South hadn't had a president since 1848, so this was a very long shot, but it was what has been described to me as a moral ideology.

"…What I'm most trying to do is end this easy shorthand, "weak president, great former president." My whole book is a rebuke to that idea."

Carter was not a classic progressive. He was a mix of liberal—very liberal on the environment, very farsighted on the environment, was going to address climate change if he'd been reelected, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation—but a little more conservative on some other things, like balancing the budget, say. That kind of thing. But what really powered was this moral ideology. And I think that's powering Biden now too, not just to election but through this very perilous transition, which Carter didn't have. So when Carter was elected, the margin was much narrower. Ford came much closer to Carter than Trump did to Biden. Just a few thousand votes in Ohio and Hawaii, and the election would have gone to incumbent President Gerald Ford. But the next morning Gerald Ford conceded. He had laryngitis, so he had Dick Cheney, who was his chief of staff and wasn't the Dick Cheney who we know, actually on the phone congratulating Carter on his victory.

And Bob Dole, who was the vice presidential candidate, the next day he said, "We lost." And the press said, "Well, how did you feel last night?" And Dole, who was famous for his wit, said, "Well, I slept like a baby: got up every four hours and cried." But Ford and Dole actually respected our Constitution, unlike Trump. They respected our democracy. They conceded the following day. When Carter, four years later, lost to Reagan, he conceded at 9 p.m. Eastern. This is a very different way of approaching a transition. And Ford was enormously cooperative with Carter and the two became good friends in the postpresidency. And then four years later, even as Carter is learning and suspecting that some pretty awful things happened before the election, in terms of an October surprise, he does everything he can to cooperate with Ronald Reagan.

And Reagan appreciates it. In his inaugural address, before he starts speaking on January, 20, 1981, he thanks Jimmy Carter, the outgoing president, for his cooperation and for a peaceful transfer of power, which Reagan describes as the glory of our system. And here we are, 40 years later, and Reagan's heirs, the people who say, "Ronald Reagan, he was my favorite president," they cannot bring themselves, these—I'm sorry—antidemocratic, pathetic, and, in some cases, disgraceful Republicans who can't even take a lead from Ronald Reagan, their hero, and respect our tradition of a peaceful and respectful transfer of power. The contrast is to me what is so striking, not the similarities.

One of the reasons that I wrote the book and what gave me great comfort through the whole process was it was an escape to research Carter. And I hope reading about Carter is an escape from the toxicity of Trump, and I hope that his example kind of lights our way back to a better place.

And with Joe Biden as president, we have an opportunity to do a lot of what Carter did, looking to the future. But the good thing is that Joe Biden is a better politician than Jimmy Carter, has much better relations on Capitol Hill than Jimmy Carter did. So he is not destined to have the political problems that Carter did, but he, I think, will inhabit that integrity, accountability, and honesty that we desperately need right now.

CH: That leads me to, where is your curiosity going to lead you next? Do you know what the next thing is that you're going to work on? I can hear in the way you answered my question, and I thank you for the wonderful answer, that you are already putting a weathering eye on what's going on now. And so I'm wondering, do you know what your next book length work will be?

JA: I actually do not. I signed a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, and I already wrote two books because I cut 100,000 words out of this one to make it more readable. So my contract is TBD. And every week I have a different idea and I kind of wrestle with whether I want to do it. When you write a book you're living with it and you want it to be something that you enjoy living with. The one thing I know, Christina, is I'm not writing a book about Donald Trump. I don't want him squatting in my brain anymore. But I'm not sure what it'll be. I had another "Jimmy" project over the last five years with a couple of other friends from Montclair, New Jersey. We coproduced and codirected a film called Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, about the great journalists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, and it's available on HBO. It won the 2020 Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary.

The first thing that I'm going to do before I start on my next book is, we're making another film, another historical film, and I can't say what it's about, but that's going to take some time. And then I expect early in 2021 I'll settle on a topic for my next book.

CH: Congratulations on the Emmy. I want to dive back in one second to Michael Boatman. You said wonderful things about his performance on His Very Best, which I completely agree with. I was wondering, what was the experience like for you to have him bring your words to life in audio? 

JA: I have to say that Michael Boatman was my choice. In my prior two books I read the audiobook. And I'd like to think that I did a pretty good job, but I'm not a professional. And also, on this particular book I really wanted it read by a Black performer, for a lot of different reasons. Not the least of which is that the N word is used on several occasions in my book and it's a quotation, but it nonetheless is there. And it has to be there because it's very important to convey the viciousness of the Jim Crow South that he grew up in. But that is just a small part of the reason why I wanted not just a Black performer, but a top-notch Black performer like Michael Boatman, who I think many of you have seen on television shows.

This is something that we haven't talked about, Christina: race is a big theme in this book. Jimmy Carter's father was a White supremacist and his mother was a nurse who took care of Black patients for free and brought Jimmy to Black churches. But even though she was the only person in the whole county who had anything nice to say about Abraham Lincoln, she, by today's standards, was not a liberal, only by the standards of the time. Then later in life she became a liberal. But she was often gone doing her nursing and just kind of distant as a parent. And they actually called this black table in the hall “Mother,” because she would leave them notes on what to do.

After Lillian Carter, Jimmy's mother, died, Jimmy said publicly, and said to me in our conversations, that he considered a woman named Rachel Clark to have been more of a mother to him than his own mother. And Rachel Clark was a Black farmhand famous for her cotton picking ability. She could pick more cotton than anybody, who signed her name with an X, and did as much to shape Jimmy Carter as his parents. She taught him about spirituality—and, of course, we know that he was probably the most religious American president—and about nature, and he grew up to be, arguably, our greatest environmentalist.

But this sense of being a steward of nature really came from Rachel Clark, this illiterate Black woman farmhand. And this is what I meant, and I think what you meant about this being a novelistic story. He grows up and he's an integrationist when he's in the Navy. He protects the first Black midshipmen at the Naval Academy from hazing. And when you're reading the book you're thinking, “Wow, this is going to be a straight line.” But then what happens is, his father dies, he goes home, he takes over the family business warehouse, and he ducks the civil rights movement—he ducks it. He even, when he's running the second time for governor, makes some dog whistle appeals, nothing racist, but dog whistle appeals to racists.

And then when he becomes governor, within minutes, within literally one minute of taking the oath as governor, he says, "The time for racial discrimination is over." Now you might say, well, big whoop, but this was a huge deal in Georgia in 1971. And many of the White voters who had just voted for him felt betrayed, and the Black voters, many of whom had not voted for him, said, "He said what?" They couldn't believe it. And then he went on to be the Jimmy Carter that we know. He integrated Georgia state government. As president he took the United States from tokenism to genuine diversity, and not just with way more Black judges than ever before, but five times as many women judges as all of his predecessors combined, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who he put on US District Court of Appeals. But this wasn't so much enlightenment, because he'd always been good on race personally, but he didn't speak, he was silent.

So one of the things that was so fascinating to me recently is, after the George Floyd killing he issued a statement saying among other things that, "Rosalynn and I have traveled the world and one of the things we've learned is that silence equals violence." And he, in some ways, he spent the second half of his life essentially atoning for what he didn't do, didn't speak out in the first half of his. And now, of course, he's a hero in Africa, and Black voters, they were basically the only constituency that stayed loyal to Carter throughout. But he's a model for us. We all can't be Jimmy Carter, global humanitarians, but we can all try to make up for the fact that we were too silent about racial injustice and police brutality before. And so now, what are we going to do in the department of better late than never?

And I think Carter's life is, among many other lessons in this long, now 96 years and counting, life, is that when we haven't done our very best we can, in this case our very best to speak out about racial injustice, we can make up for it. And through our actions we can do things to try to repair the world, and whether it's eradicating diseases or making peace, or supervising elections, all the things he's done in his postpresidency, plus the many underrated things that he did in his presidency.

At the end of the day, Christina, I think what I most object to, what I'm most trying to do is end this easy shorthand, "weak president, great former president." My whole book is a rebuke to that idea. And that's warts and all. There's a lot where Carter did wrong, it's in the book, but he was actually a political failure but a substantive, farsighted success as president and an inspirational former president, but not able to exceed what he accomplished as president because he had much less power as a former president. I'm trying to kind of correct the historical record here and also explain that for all of his shortcomings, his core decency can maybe light our way back to a better place in this country and in the world.

CH: This listener would like to tell you that I absolutely got a portrait from your work of a president and a man who was a paragon of strength. And as you were speaking just now, I was reminded of my favorite President Carter quote from the book, which is when he was saying to someone, and I'm paraphrasing, "Every man can be a success in the eyes of God. Every person can be a success in the eyes of God," which is what you're talking about.

JA: Yeah.

CH: And we all have a chance to do that. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving me and our listeners some presidential inspiration and light for the road ahead.

JA: Let me just add one thing. Shortly before the book came out, Barack Obama finally got back to me on my request for an interview and gave me an interview about Jimmy Carter, which is in the audiobook. It's just a couple of paragraphs toward the very end of the audiobook. It is not in the print book because it was after the deadline for the first printing. It's going to go into a second printing and it'll be in that. However, there are quite a number of funny, informative, slightly tangential footnotes at the bottom of the page, which are in the print book and not in the audiobook. For instance, just to give you one example, Carter spoke at an 11th grade level and in a footnote I say, "Donald Trump spoke at a fifth grade level, according to the people who analyze these sorts of things." So that's the sort of thing that I didn't want to put in the body of the book, but it's a little bit of extra stuff.

CH: That's great to know. Thank you. I really am a huge fan of the president and your work in this one. I really appreciate it and I enjoyed this immensely.

JA: I enjoyed it too. And thanks to you and to Audible for just a wonderful Audible audiobook. I couldn't be happier with it.

CH: Thank you.