From one of America’s most-respected journalists and modern historians comes the first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize–winning humanitarian. Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the … paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure—ridiculed and later revered—with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people.
Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first.
Drawing on fresh archival material and five years of extensive access to Carter and his entire family, Alter traces how he evolved from a timid, bookish child—raised mostly by a black woman farmhand—into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights, and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties.
This engrossing, monumental biography will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.
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Too long.
A very good read that reminds one of how far sighted the former President was!
Few of America’s Presidents can say they led unimportant lives. That’s certainly true of Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer turned Georgia politician who came into the White House with high hopes, had a lackluster presidency, but found a redemption arc as America’s longest-living former leader. Or so goes the ‘traditional’ narrative (if there is such a thing) of Carter, yet that version of history might not be entirely accurate, as Jonathan Alter explores in his new book on Carter’s life and times.
At 800 pages, it would be easy to imagine that Alter might have produced a dry and dusty account of Carter’s journey from rural Georgia boyhood to the White House and beyond. Drawing on a wealth of material, including newly declassified documents and interviews with 18 members of the Carter family, this is anything but an academic tome. Alter has created an account as dynamic and varied as his subject.
And what a portrait he paints in words. Carter’s story is a quintessentially American one: a boy from a small town growing up to be President, changing the world in ways big and small. But beneath that story is a complex man, certainly more so than many would think of when his name comes up. A southerner both proud of and at odds with the traditions of the region of his birth. A man of deep faith, allowing it to influence his decisions while also pushing for the separation of church and state. A politician who ran a gubernatorial campaign full of “dog-whistling,” whose first speech upon taking office called for the end of racial discrimination. A president who operated with immense foresight and laser-like focus yet was eventually driven from office by events he failed to anticipate. A Cold Warrior whose accomplishments, hidden behind secrecy, allowed his successor to take much of the credit unduly. As Atler comes back to time and again in the 670 odd pages that make up the major portion of the book, Carter and his time as a public servant (and since) don’t easily lend themselves to easy analysis. Something that, thankfully, the book helps to rectify.
Alter, though, is also not above pointing out Carter’s flaws. With the complexities of his personality and his lifetime, they are on display time and again. In Alter’s prose, Carter becomes a man who can be hard to know and judge, good on details, capable of great warmth yet capable of biting wit, and the ability to overlook important but illogical pieces of the puzzle. Things that explain his first significant political loss, running for Georgia governor in 1966, and how he let Senator Edward Kennedy nearly usurp him as the Democrat’s nominee in the 1980 election. Or explains the sometimes conflicted relationships with his children, friends, and members of his administration. Not to mention so focused on details as to share too much, be it personal details (which nearly wrecked his 1976 White House bid) or in matters of policy. Alter, to his credit, lays out the best and worst of Carter’s incredible life, stretched out over nearly a century, a time Carter has spent, in the author’s words, in “ceaseless effort.”
His Very Best is, despite possible expectations due to its length, anything but a dry account of the life and times of an overlooked American president. Alter offers up a rich tapestry that separates the man from the myths and misconceptions around Carter and his time as the nation’s commander in chief. That it is an immensely readable and enjoyable read is all the more to the credit of both the author and the remarkable life that he documents. Perhaps Carter wasn’t the President that America wanted in 1980, but he was very likely the one that it needed.