Observations from The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird, Crown Publishing Group, 2022.
James Earl Carter, Jr. was born Oct 1, 1924 and grew up in a small town with fewer than 500 people. His father, who held segregationist beliefs, was a farmer, “growing peanuts, corn, and cotton and drawing ‘rents’ from his Black tenants.” The family lived in “a three-bedroom single-story house assembled from a Sears, Roebuck kit. The structure lacked electricity and insulation and had no running water until 1935, when Carter’s father bought a small windmill to pump water from the backyard well into a water tank.” And: “Although electricity came to Atlanta in 1884, it took more than a half century to reach [the small town of] Archery in 1938.”
At age 21, he graduated from the Naval Academy and married Rosalynn Smith.
Carter, though “a southern white man,” was “the first president to feel entirely comfortable worshipping and speaking in a Black church.”
“Many in the Washington pundit class ridiculed his soft Georgian twang and peanut farmer persona.”
“He personally disapproved of abortion, but he always defended a woman’s right to choose and lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. He criticized busing as a tool of integration but ardently supported affirmative action.”
“…he was willing to sacrifice some social programs—but not the defense budget—in an effort to control what he thought were inflationary budget deficits. … Liberals complained that he could have spent more on social programs to stimulate job creation and less on a defense budget still premised on Cold War assumptions.”
“His self-confidence bordered on arrogance. As a Southern Baptist he was painfully self-aware that his pride was the deepest of sins.”
“He put solar panels on the roof of the White House before they were economical. He talked about climate change before it was ever fashionable.”
“As a white boy growing up in South Georgia, Jimmy Carter lived a childhood steeped in segregation and a culture of white supremacy. And yet his childhood playmates were mostly African Americans. His only neighbors were Black tenants. He experienced from the ground the great chasm between America’s beliefs about itself and the reality of inequality, poverty, and racism.”
In 1955,
“a dozen of Carter’s peanut warehouse customers paid him a visit and suggested that he join the White Citizens’ council—basically the Klan in business suits. When he politely declined, they offered to pay on his behalf the $5 annual membership fee. At this, Carter lost patience, angrily took out his own $5 bill, and announced that he’d sooner ‘flush it down the toilet’ than give it to the White Citizens’ Council.”
As governor of Georgia, Carter worked to reform the judiciary and prisons, but “reluctantly signed a bill that reinstated the death penalty” (which his wife opposed); “no one was executed during his four-year tenure.” He appointed liberal judges, “including the first Jewish judge to the Georgia Court of Appeals.”
Books that influenced him
"He read books by theologians and philosophers, including Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, and the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. He took to quoting Tillich on how ‘religion is a search.’ From Karl Barth he accepted the notion that the Bible could not be read literally. He read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In 1965, his good friend William Gunter lent him a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics—essays that ratified what he already believed: that he could be both a successful politician and a good Christian. ... ‘One of my greatest regrets,’ Carter later said, ‘was not meeting Niebuhr before he died [in 1971].’"
"...when [James] Fallows had first met Carter in August 1976, the presidential candidate had made a point of saying that he had read Fallows’s 1971 book The Water Lords, a Nader study-group report on water pollution in Savannah."
More than four decades later, a secret revealed: How a prominent Texas politician says he unwittingly joined a mission to sabotage Jimmy Carter's 1980 campaign by urging the Iranians to hold 52 American hostages until after the election. https://t.co/VHhYt0iD0A
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) March 18, 2023
My god, read this and weep for the country we might live in now, what world we might live in, if this fool had come clean 43 years ago, if the hostages had been freed (imagine bargaining to keep them imprisoned), if Carter had won? https://t.co/sFENAVWtYV
— THE UNDERTOW, by Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) March 18, 2023
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