Jimmy Carter reflects at 90
In "A Full Life," the former president presents a portrait both detailed and restrained.
A Full Life
nolead begins Reflections at Ninety nolead ends
nolead begins By Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster. 239pp. $28
nolead ends nolead begins
Reviewed by Paul Jablow
nolead ends Jimmy Carter has sometimes been called "one of our great ex-presidents," which may be both a backhanded slap at his tenure in the Oval Office and admiration for his accomplishments since he left there in 1981.
But, as A Full Life makes plain, there have been continuities in his life.
One is decency, starting with his gritty resistance to the ingrained racism in his native Georgia and stretching into the good works he has done at home and abroad through the Carter Center.
Another - and we're being speculative here - has been his inability to connect with the public on a gut level, an inability that helped make him a sitting duck for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.
The book's back jacket blurb talks of the "detail and emotion" within. There is, indeed, much fascinating detail but far less emotion.
We learn, for example, that he was the first president born in a hospital. We learn that his eighth-grade Future Farmers of America project was building a model of the White House.
And we learn about his job-interview-from-hell with Capt. Hyman Rickover to enter the Navy's nuclear submarine program.
Rickover not only cross-examined applicants in the most contentious way possible but even sawed off the front legs of the interviewee chair to make its occupants uneasy.
Carter, of course, passed muster with Rickover and seemed well on his way to an outstanding Navy career. Then, in 1953, his father died and Carter decided to return to the family farm in Georgia.
It was perhaps the most important decision of his life and it made his wife, Rosalynn, so furious that she gave him the silent treatment for a while.
But why did he go back? We never really get an answer.
Carter had been on reasonably good terms with his father, but there was enough distance between them that he didn't realize until the last deathbed conversations with him that the elder Carter had served on the local school board and hospital authority.
More significant, perhaps, was the fact that Carter knew almost nothing about farming and the peanut warehousing business and came close to failing at it.
He also fails to explain why he made his decision to enter politics, running for state Senate, without consulting Rosalynn, although in this case his choice greatly pleased her.
And it might be impossible to explain what inside him made him break away from the racial attitudes of the South at that time.
Carter Sr. was not only a segregationist - he thought it was biblically ordained - but also a libertarian philosophically opposed to the New Deal.
Yet the son stood firm when "about a dozen of my best customers came to my warehouse office, reminded me that they had been close to my father, and offered to pay my annual membership dues in the White Citizens' Council."
They told him that he was the only white man in the community who had not joined. A racially inflammatory sign was put on his office door and many of the customers deserted him, although most later returned.
Only a small section of the book is devoted to Carter's 1976 presidential campaign and his single term in the White House, but it suffices to show how different politics was four decades ago.
When his term as governor of Georgia ended in 1975 and he started his campaign to replace Gerald Ford, he writes, "few people were even thinking about the presidential election, which was still 18 months in the future."
He and Ford campaigned with public funds in a PAC-free atmosphere so devoid of rancor as to seem almost quaint.
The book also shows us another side of Carter, poetry he wrote over the years, including a tender piece dedicated to Rosalynn, and fairly accomplished sketches of her and others close to him.