Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-presidency
It is the last Sunday of October 2024 making it time for another President, which means this weeks book is Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-presidency by Peter G. Bourne.
James Earl Carter Jr was born October 1, 1924 in Plains, GA to James Earl Carter Sr, aka Earl, and Bessie Lillian Carter, aka Lillian. He was the couples first child and he would eventually be joined by Gloria, Ruth, and William, who in a sad note, would all die in their fifties of Pancreatic cancer….now isn’t that weird. Just to round out that weirdness, there was no causal link found between the three contracting pancreatic cancer.
Anyways, Carter had a fairly idyllic childhood, like Leave it to Beaver idyllic, but this instilled good qualities of hard work and diligence. His mother was an outlier for Plains, GA in the 1920’s and 30’s, being that she was actually an anti-racist, she was a trained nurse and worked with EVERYONE, regardless of class or skin color. This was indulged as an idiosyncrasy, no doubt aided by the fact that Earl was a fairly prominent business man, he made smart business calls, and while Earl WAS a racist, he also loved his wife and didn’t argue with her civilized tendencies.
It was interesting to read about Carter’s childhood and you really see that he was a crossroads product of his time. So, his father wanted him to learn about hard work and the value of that work, so he gave Carter an acre of the peanut farm to farm and tend to himself, which Carter did, using the proceeds from the sale of his peanuts to buy some shacks and turn them into rental property. I think he was like 12 years old. This would later try to be used against him, claiming he was a slum lord…this obviously came to nothing. During the depression, Earl took advantage of ALL the FDR programs to further the family fortunes. Which…look, I don’t fault him for that. This is what smart people do, they use what the government offers to their advantage.
WWII hit as Carter was entering high school and he knew he wanted to join the Navy, so he worked very hard, and was only beat out for Valedictorian by I think it was shenanigans he got into while in school. Didn’t matter, the Valedictorian came with a scholarship to a local school and he had his sites set on the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He did do a few years at a local college before transferring to Annapolis, where he more or less kept to himself, kept his head down and I believe graduated like 59th in his class of 820, which is no mean feat.
While on break from Annapolis, Carter was visiting his family and met his sister Ruth’s friend Rosalynn. It was an instant match, and they both knew that they would marry when each had finished school, and they did, pretty much right after Carter finished his degree in 1946, they married July 6, 1946, and would stay married until her death on November 19, 2023. They would have four children, three boys and one girl, the girl being a surprise baby, Amy, born in 1967.
Carter would serve seven years in the US Navy, and Rosalynn loved the quasi-nomadic lifestyle of a military spouse, so much so that when Earl died and Carter felt he had to return to Plains to take over the family business, and Rosalynn was PISSED. Which I totally get. I mean…she’d made it. She’d escaped small town Plains and seen the bigger world. To suddenly be expected to return to that, to small town gossip and weekly bridge games. I felt a kinship with her when I read about her irritation.
Anyways, this was 1953, so the couple packed up their three boys and returned to Plains, GA. Where Carter experienced a bit of family drama as his younger brother Billy, who thought he would be inheriting the family business, was very angry as he found himself shunted to the side. Now, to be fair, Billy was only 16. It was unlikely a 16 year old could take over a peanut empire. Regardless, Billy felt shunned and as soon as he could, he left and joined the Marines because he was so mad about the family business.
The business, while successful, was not actually all that, as prior to his death Earl had forgiven a lot of the debts that were owed to the business, leaving Carter to rebuild it practically from the ground up, which he set about doing and managed quite capably. Look, whether you love or hate him as a president, I don’t think anyone could argue that he was a fully capable human being. I mean, he set himself a task and with rare exception, accomplished it. He knew he needed to build up the family business. So he did.
So, he was a farmer and business man for 10 years, and Rosalynn found her place in the business as a book keeper, and took classes to that effect, with the support of Carter. During this time, civil rights received massive boosts under the Eisenhower administration and the courts who determined separate but equal was not a thing and a very failed social experiment. However, Carter, as a closeted non-racist living in deep South Georgia, pretty much kept his opinions to himself. On one hand, I get it. Putting your neck on the line with racial tensions running high, especially with a wife and three young kids…fucking terrifying. But I gotta wonder what the “Silence is violence” crowd would make of that.
In 1962, Carter decided that one way to affect some change was to get involved politically. Which…I mean, he’s not wrong. So he decided to run for state Senator to the Georgia legislature. Politics were a lot looser in the 1960’s and Carter announced his candidacy 15 days before the election. Initial returns showed he had lost; however, this was due to very fraudulent voting, which was proven, and Carter was eventually seated as a Senator with Georgia, which role he would hold until 1966 when he decided to run for Georgia governor. He lost the 1966 election, but immediately started campaigning for the 1970 governors election.
Now, when he was sworn in, Carter immediately annoyed his constituency, who had voted for him basically expecting more of the same, and instead he called for an end to racial divide. And he set about integrating the government offices of Georgia. I don’t know if this is good or bad. Like, I’m all for put the best possible person into a job, but forcing integration is what led to the tensions in the south during the prior two decades. Regardless, he went ahead and did it. Hard to say if it was good or bad, because the author never really discussed any potential fall out from this. That’s actually one of the many frustrating aspects of this book, nothing is ever Carter’s fault.
Sometime around 1972, while he was still governor of Georgia, Carter decided to run for president in 1976. And began to campaign. Life a four year marathon campaign. This was actually the part of the book that sucked the most. Like SUCKED. Because the author went into excruciating, extremely boring detail, about the four year campaign trail. Which ended with Carter winning the White House from President Ford in 1976, and being sworn in on January 20, 1977.
Now, the presidency, was a clusterfuck. I mean, the author tried very hard to, for lack of a better phrasing, polish this turd. And this was also very frustrating. So let me explain. Rather than looking at the totality of the presidency, the author cherry picked specific moments of Carter’s time in the White House that he thought reflected well on Carter, and only mentioned almost in passing, some of the problems.
Among the problems, in fact probably the biggest problem, is the fact that Carter had no connections to the national political scene. None. He didn’t even have connections to the Senators and Representatives to congress from Georgia. This made it very hard to work with Congress. Now, John Tyler and Andrew Johnson are probably the only other presidents I’ve read to date that had this much trouble working with Congress, but for very different reasons. Tyler’s problem was that he refused to sign legislation that was unconstitutional. Johnson’s problem was that he would veto lawful legislation because he just didn’t like it. Carter had no mechanism in place to work with congress on any legislation. And so he ruled by fiat, basically. This was part and parcel of his “spokes of the wheel” style of leadership. This means, for the first two years of his presidency, he did not have a chief of staff. Because he wanted all of his staffers to have unfettered access to him. Chaos ensued, where basically no one knew what was going on…or at least, not that was described in the book, and each staffer created their own little fiefdoms of expertise. Carter did appoint I believe it was Hamilton Jordan he appointed as a liaison to Congress, which was catastrophic as he was, as described by the author, a bit of shit. Like, no one got along with Jordan EXCEPT for Carter, and so Congress refused to play ball with Jordan, hence Carter. When Carter, two years into his administration, was finally convinced he needed chief of staff…he appointed Jordan.
Carter was inordinately proud of the peace talks he managed to shoehorn through with Israel and Egypt, peace talks which ultimately accomplished nothing because the people of these two countries were not willing to follow the suggestions of their leaders who brokered the deal. The author places all the blame for this on primarily Menachem Begin, who was Israel’s representative, because Carter got along extremely well with Anwar Sadat from Egypt.
And this was a recurring theme throughout the book. Nothing was ever Carter’s fault. It was always this other persons fault. Or, and this is my favorite, Carter was a victim of circumstance. The recession was not Carter’s fault, it was circumstances beyond his control. The fuel shortages was not his fault, it was beyond his control. Oh, except for the price controls he implemented on energy, which…well, any qualified economist could have told him when you control prices, you create scarcity, because people are then going to hoard what they have. Hell, an amateur economist, Henry Hazlitt, could undoubtedly have told Carter that he was laying the ground work for an energy crises.
On his first day in office, Carter pardoned all draft dodgers, to the absolute outrage of veterans across the nation, basically guaranteeing the loss of that voting block in 1980. But that was not Carter’s fault….it was the right thing to do.
He created the Department of Education, and America’s education rates have been in free fall ever since. He created the Department of Energy…and immediately had an energy crises. But none of this was Carter’s fault.
Carter’s big wins as outlined in this book, were appointing a large number of women and minorities to positions of power. So we can pinpoint that horrifying trend to Carter’s administration. Not that women and minorities are not qualified, but that it became a trophy to appoint them, regardless of actual qualifications.
Almost as soon as he took office, he crapped all over the very carefully crafted treaties that Nixon and Ford had worked on with the Soviet Union to disarm. Carter didn’t think it was enough and rather than letting it be and showing America could be trusted to keep her word, he crapped all over the near decade of work of his predecessors, which caused USSR to think America was faithless, which led to the USSR sending 85,000 troops to Afghanistan. Which we then sent the CIA into Afghanistan, where we trained one Usama bin Laden, which, 20-odd years down the road led to 9/11, and a two decade war on terror. And you have to wonder, if Carter had just…let it be…had just let the treaty as already signed be for a few years, so that the new relationship with USSR could blossom into genuine trust….would the catastrophic troop withdrawal of August 2021 not have happened? Would 9/11 not have happened? Where would the world be if Carter had not felt the need to prove that only peace as brokered by him was worth having?
Cause and effect is a very real thing, but none of this was ever Carter’s fault, according to the author. The author, BTW, HATED Reagan, even hinting that Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer’s while running for president in 1980. Can’t comment on that yet, haven’t read the Reagan book, but the author seriously disliked Reagan, and blames Reagan for Carter’s losing in 1980, rather than Carter for having failed to build any of the necessary electoral infrastructure to ensure his own triumph. He says Reagan won by asking one simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Well, for most American’s the answer was a resounding no. And Carter lost the 1980 election, stepping down on January 21, 1981.
Now, post-presidency, Carter has absolutely managed some remarkable things. He early jumped into Habitat for Humanity, and not just a financial contributor, he actually goes out and swings a hammer himself, helping to build houses for the poor. He spearheaded the Carter Center in Georgia, which has kind of become a neutral territory for political enemies to talk it out. He has been responsible for making sure many third world countries got fair and open elections, and his reputation is such that there was at least one election that was canceled outright when he said that the country was so corrupt, nothing he could do would ensure those. He’s helped to build wells all over Africa and has genuinely tried to assist nations that are struggling to find a path forward. And I do believe his own, carefully cultivated reputation for integrity and fair dealing has assisted him with this. Hell, his post-presidential philanthropy has made him far more interesting as a person than the presidency ever did. However, without having been president, he likely would not have been in a position to be so philanthropic.
The author spends a lot of time comparing Carter to Jesus. During the chapters on the presidential campaign, he even calls the army of volunteers Carter’s disciples, which I personally found distasteful, but everyone has their cult to join, the author’s just happened to be the cult of personality that surrounds Jimmy Carter. If you believe that actions talk and bullshit walks, then Carter is undoubtedly a genuinely good person. His actions show that. Being a good person does not make for a qualified president. Which probably says something genuinely horrifying about our political process and politicians in general.
But given the fallout from the Carter presidency… the energy crisis, the Russian troops in Afghanistan, the hostages in Iran, which were not released until Reagan was sworn in, which the author hints was due to VP George Bush using his former CIA contacts to negotiate with the Ayatollah to make Carter look bad, rather than any part of Carter’s diplomatic skills. Because seriously, if the Ayatollah had any regard for Carter, why wouldn’t he have worked to have the hostages released while Carter still had a shot in hell of winning? Maybe…just spit balling here, just throwing out my own conspiracy….maybe because of Carter’s sudden change of heart with the USSR, and his nosing in on affairs in the middle east, and Iran was already real tired of US Nation Building efforts…I’ve always heard, and of course this could just be political bias, that the hostages were released on inauguration day, because Iran was real worried about what Reagan would do if the hostages were not released.
And suddenly I’m back to realizing Woodrow Wilson was seriously the worst president we’ve ever had. If he had just kept his 1916 campaign promise to keep us out of the war in Europe. If he’d kept to George Washington’s mandate to avoid entangling alliances, then the United States would have never entered the nation building we did in the early 20th century. Which led to a whole lot of evil. If you remember from the book Wilson’s War, evil up to and including the rise of Hitler and Stalin…Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and yes, Usama bin Laden. It’s simultaneously fascinating and horrifying to wonder how the world would turn, if America would just mind her own business. And deeply ironic to be outraged at Russian interference in America’s elections, when we’ve been doing the same globally for a century.
So Carter. Other than the ripple effects across time that emanated from his presidency, I am unimpressed. And those ripple effects have left me morbidly impressed.
This book was…eh. The author was part of Carter’s campaign, and I probably would have gotten deeper insights from someone less involved, who wrote from more of a historians perspective, than an insiders perspective. He absolutely could have cut 100 pages, easily, by removing the minutia of the campaign trail. This book was released in 1997. Jimmy Carter is still alive and kicking, having just celebrated his 100th birthday, making him the first former president to reach the century mark. And that’s it for this week. Election day this year is November 5, 2024, vote early…vote often…vote smart…but VOTE.
