Jimmy Carter

I would not tell a lie. I would not mislead the American people. And I would not betray your trust.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil, but no matter how necessary, It is always evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

Well, I would say as far as public service is concerned... I was a champion of peace and human rights. I've sought to carve out for myself a productive and I hope useful and certainly a gratifying life. I've been very lucky.

They mark the commitment of the United States to the belief that fairness and not force

It was a very serious mistake for me to make. I was actually in the backyard of a friend in North Carolina, and I was asked, are you a born-again Christian? And I answered truthfully, yes, I am. I had always assumed that that phrase was completely acceptable, at least among Christians. And there were news reporters there.

It was kind of late in the 76 campaign, and it was reported, and the reaction was very severe and negative. because the people who were not familiar with that phrase assumed that I was claiming to have some special endowment from God in visions, and that I also tended to elevate myself above all other human beings in my moral standards, which was not the case at all.

Being a born-again Christian had been a phrase I used since I was probably three or four years old, as used regularly in Christian churches in my area. So it was a very negative reaction to what I had to say. And I was very careful from then on to separate openly and ostentatiously my religious faith from any responsibilities that I assumed when I became president.

Well, I think it's been a rare thing in history to have a president who was a published poet. I imagine a lot of folks who have been in the White House have written a poem or two.

Yes. There was one issue in particular that was a very serious problem for me, and that was abortion. I have never believed that Jesus Christ, whom I worship, would approve abortions unless the mother's health or life was threatened, or perhaps if the pregnancy was from rape or incest. This is hard for me to accept.

And at the same time, I was sworn by oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court had ruled that abortions in the first semester of pregnancy were completely acceptable. So I tried to do everything I could within the bounds of the law to minimize and discourage abortions.

One of the easily understood principles is that two-thirds of the women who have abortions claim that the reason is that they cannot financially support another child. So I developed what's known as a Women Infant Children's Program, WIC program, to give special benefits to pregnant women and infant children.

Also, I promoted the proposition that adoption should be easier, and I tried to promulgate training in high school on ways to avoid unwanted pregnancy. But I had to uphold the law. So that particular one was troublesome for me.

And hid them, yes, or shared them with maybe a wife on Mother's Day or something of that kind. But I think to write poetry seriously is probably considered to be incompatible with being a politician who's been in the White House.

Another that was legally troublesome for me that didn't really ever come into effect was the Supreme Court's ruling shortly before I became president that authorized a death penalty. But when the Supreme Court ruled, luckily, I went through my entire term as governor and my entire term as president, and no one was executed under my administrations.

And I have never felt that Jesus Christ, again, would approve the death penalty as it's presently supported so strongly by some of the conservative Christians and others in this country. Those are the two issues.

Well, it's just not something that's been done in the past except a couple of times in ancient history. And my own background, of course, is in engineering and nuclear physics and not in literature. But I've been a poetry lover all my life, and I'm kind of an expert on some things.

Well, what's changed is what I described earlier. That is the rise of fundamentalism has affected both politics, including national policy in domestic and foreign affairs, and also has affected the religious community much more than it ever did when I was in politics. And the two have now merged. So there is an ostentatious and very aggressive effort

Among the, you might say, the religious right leaders, and I don't criticize them because of their beliefs, publicly to align themselves with the Republican Party. provided the Republican Party members whom they support are adequately conservative.

So that marriage has been a radical departure, in my opinion, from the ancient values of our country, as espoused most clearly by Thomas Jefferson, who advocated a wall between church and state.

Well, in our Endangered Values book, I describe my feelings about this quite thoroughly. I studied nuclear physics when I was a young man. I was one of the originators of a nuclear submarine program. I worked on Admiral Hyman Rickover. At the same time, as you've already mentioned, I'm a devout Christian. I don't see any incompatibility at all between the two.

My belief is that God created the universe. My belief is that God permits us to understand the new developments that we can witness in universal matters. When the Bible was written, we didn't have the Hubble telescope. We didn't have microscopes so we could look at small items. We didn't have a way to test the age of rocks and so forth. And now we have these scientific capabilities.

And so I think that science is just a revelation of God's creation. And so the two are completely separate, and we can't prove the existence of things in our faith. As a matter of fact, the definition of faith in the Bible is that we know things that cannot be proven. Well, we don't have to have faith to believe that the moon is out there. That's something that we can see for ourselves.

And we can't have science prove the existence of God or all of the things that we know about Jesus Christ as a Christian. So the two are separate. I don't believe there's any place in a scientific classroom to try to prove to the students that God exists. I think the two ought to be completely separate. So I believe in both of them, the science and religion, the two are completely separate.

poets' works, I think the general reaction would be, well, they'll be extremely amateurish or they'll just be frivolous.

One should not be imposed on the other.

I think so. In this particular book, I put together about 45 poems and tried to make them as diverse as I could in their character.

Well, this was a hero of a lot of stories that I told my children beginning maybe 40, 45 years ago. And this is a monster, but a young one, but still very large and extremely ugly. And he comes out of the ocean on occasion to become involved in adventures with little children who were about the same age as my children when I told them the stories.

And he interrelates in a very exciting and dramatic way to help resolve some of their problems or to deal with crises that affect their lives. And so the little baby Snugglefleet is always fearsome to all the other kids. And usually in the stories, the hero of that particular story, the little child, is the only one who can relate to the little baby Snugglefleet.

Because he is so ugly and formidable looking, he's a very lonely little creature. And he's always searching for friends, but rarely finds any. Spends his time underneath the ocean, underneath the waters, but he can come up. to the top on occasion, and amazingly, he's able to speak different languages. In this particular case, he speaks English.

Well, I think so. Actually, I probably began telling these stories when I was still on a surface ship, but I always had submarines in the back of my mind, and one of the submarines I was on was a killer submarine designed exclusively to hunt and destroy Soviet submarines if we should have gone to war before they could hear us. It was extremely quiet and very small. and specially designed.

So we would stay submerged for sometimes days at the time and listen to the sound of shrimp and whales and dolphins on our very elaborate sonar equipment. And I think there's no doubt that having an undersea creature become a startling hero came from my experiences underneath the water for sometimes days or even months at a time.

I've written most of these poems in the last five years. And what I've done ordinarily is revise each poem maybe a dozen or 20 times, trying to simplify them, make sure we had the right word and that the words were juxtaposed properly and that... The lines either rhymed or didn't rhyme. In this particular poem, there are kind of slant rhymes. They're not direct rhymes.

Well, I had been through a horrible experience writing a book together with my wife a few years ago called Everything to Gain. It almost destroyed a marriage of 48 years because it was about a traumatic experience in our life, having been defeated for re-election as president, having lost all our money, having gone back home to an empty house with all our kids gone.

And the book was advice on how other people might deal with these unexpected and difficult events. Rosa and I could agree on 97% of the text, but the 3% became paramount. And we had a horrible experience. Literally, I'm not exaggerating. We could only communicate by writing ugly messages back and forth on our word processors.

And it was only a very enlightened editor who saved our book and saved our marriage by finally taking those 3% of paragraphs and dividing them half and half. Half of Jimmy's, half of Rosalind's. And you can put a J on your paragraphs. Rosen doesn't have to agree. And she can put an R on her paragraphs. And you don't have to agree. So we saved our book.

So I went into this event with Amy with that as a historical background. This time, though, Amy was off at graduate school. I was in Plains. And I felt that it was my story and my image of a snuggle fleasher. And Amy just had to fill in the gaps. But it turned out that Amy has an artist temperament.

When she decides on how something should look, how it should be presented, there's very little opportunity to change her mind. And I think not only did I discover this, but the Art Editor at Times Books found this out.

Another thing was that Amy had been very active in demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa.

This one is a poem about my father's last days. I was a submarine officer working under Admiral Rickover, developing the second nuclear submarine in history. And my father, I discovered, I found, I learned was dying. And I went home to be with him. And I've tried to put myself in the position of someone who is in his or her last days on a deathbed and how they might react to the world around them.

And she had already been arrested or detained three times before that. She was very active in college as a leader in that respect. But at the same time, I think a very withdrawn and, if Amy will excuse my saying, the word shy person. She didn't want to be confronting TV cameras and news reporters, but she felt very deeply about these kinds of things.

I think never enough. You know, this is something that you always find to be startling when you look back and maybe tabulate how many hours you actually spend with your... sons or daughter whom you really love, and then you can go a year or so and all of a sudden realize, gee, I haven't spent but two or three days actually with my kids.

Nowadays, we have a fixed habit of going off for at least a week with the whole family together. There are 18 of us. And we do that every year so that we can kind of get to know each other better and And become acquainted. But this is a particularly exciting and unpredictable experience in my life, spending a few days with Amy on, you know, talking about this book.

Because I don't think I've ever had a real partnership before, even with my three sons. So I have approached it with some degree of trepidation.

Well, I'll let Amy answer that, too. But I stayed in the Oval Office and worked pretty hard. And we had three grown sons and Rosalind, who were out a lot, who would meet with elderly people, meet with those who were interested in abortions, meet with those who were interested in education and health and welfare and so forth. And Amy was going to a public school in Washington.

So around our dinner tables and so forth, supper tables, we had these intense discussions of what's going on in the world, what's going on out in the world. public school system or in the welfare lines and it was a very wonderful education for me. Amy went to school the first morning as a nine-year-old child and she was inundated with TV cameras and radio microphones being thrust in her face

And that evening on the television, they show this little child struggling up the walkway with a large sack of books, abused really by dozens of eager reporters. All the reporters... They were at the White House at that time. I think they wanted 1,200 then. They're more now. Got together after seeing this television display and pledged to one another they would leave Amy alone. So for the...

rest of the four years we were in the white house she led a kind of a protected life and and she would bring her classmates to the white house to go swimming or to watch movies and and so i think she had a fairly normal life as a child within the bounds of you know living in the white house maybe amy would disagree with me but that was my impression

Almost every night. The only exception was when we had a state banquet and some king or president would come from a foreign country To have an official banquet. On a few occasions, Amy went to the official banquets. And she was severely criticized.

The name of this poem is Off My Father's Cancer and His Dreams. with those who love him near his bed seldom speaking anymore he lies too weak to raise his head but dreams from time to time in one he says he sees his wife so proud in her white uniform with other nurses trooping by Their girlish voices aimed to charm the young men lounging there. Then her eyes met his and hold.

For reading at the table.

That was when she was married to one of the Allman brothers, right?

And they both came.

I remember when King Hussein came to the White House the first or second time with his sons, and we had, I think Rosen had briefed Amy, you know, very carefully about, you know, your Royal Highness and so forth.

Well, we're sending a message of a peaceful Christmas, a Christmas filled with love, wishing for harmony among friends, people in families who have different faiths. So I think this year is more of a wish for peace and love than it is for happiness or merriment.

One of the things that I have described in Christmas in Plains is how we have to accommodate those times of sadness or distress or sometimes maybe even fear or sorrow when we've lost a loved one right before Christmas. We can't be expecting happiness or merriment or celebration except a celebration of things, as I said earlier in the program, that never change, that are precious to us.

One of the things that Rose and I do nowadays, since we've got, I think, 23 members in our family, is to try to bring together all the members of our family at least once a year. So over a period of years, as I describe in the book, we've carved out for ourselves the week after Christmas.

A country courtship has begun. They've been together 30 years. Now she watches over him as she tries to hide her tears. All his children are at home but wonder what they ought to say or do either when he is awake or when he seems to fade away. They can't always be on guard, and sometimes if his mind is clear, he can grasp a whispered phrase never meant for him to hear.

So on the 27th of December each year, we gather our whole family together and we go somewhere that's attractive enough to bring the grandkids along with us. And our children and grandchildren who have jobs save up their vacation time for those few days, and we all go to some interesting place. Rosa and I generally try to pay all the bills.

We save up our frequent flower miles to pay the transportation, and we just get reacquainted. So I think in that respect, no matter what the outside world is doing, the Carter Center still preserves the essence of Christmas.

You'd be amazed at how many frequent flyer miles.

Yes.

Well, we actually buy tickets of tourist class, but Delta Airlines is nice enough to me and Rosen so that when they have a vacant seat, two vacant seats, they don't have first class, they have business class. They sometimes, most of the time, elevate us to a higher status. But one of the things that I have done ever since I left the White House is every time I get on a plane...

to travel anywhere, a commercial plane. As you know, I don't have an Air Force One anymore. I go back and shake hands with everybody on the plane before we take off. And it's a very pleasant thing for me. And I meet a lot of old friends there and people that share experiences with me. And the flights that I took immediately after the September 11th tragedy,

When I did this, there were four rounds of applause that I did it. I think at first, when I told Rosalyn about it, she said, I thought that they were just glad to see me. And she said, Jimmy, what they were glad to see was a Secret Service on the plane with you. But I enjoyed doing that. And I think that kind of brings out maybe something of the spirit of Christmas.

He just seems weak all the time. I don't know what else to cook. He can't keep down anything. He hears a knocking on the door, voices of his friends, who bring a special cake or fresh-killed quail. They mumble out some words of love. try to learn how he might feel, and then go back to spread the word. They say he may have faded some.

He'll soon give in to the rising pain and crave the needle that will numb his knowledge of a passing world and bring the consummating sleep he knows will come.

All my family are dead. I read it to Rosalind.

But my father and my mother and both my sisters and my brother have all died with cancer. And so I don't have anyone to read it to except my wife, who's a very good editor and who is familiar with all these poems.

Of separate but equal, of discrimination against African-American neighbors. although he wouldn't have put it in those terms. He would not have thought it was discrimination.

Well, those were times. My daddy died in 1953.

Well, I was in the Navy, and I remember once I came home from a submarine cruise, and I was bragging on the fact that we had been to Jamaica, and the governor general of Jamaica had invited our submarine crew to come to a ball or party where young Jamaican women would be there. And then he discovered that one of our crew members was black.

And the governor general sent word back that everyone could come except that one crew member. And the crew took great pride in telling the governor general to go to hell. And when I came home and told my father that story with some pride, he was embarrassed by it. And my mother said that I shouldn't discuss race issues with my daddy.

But those were times, it's hard to remember now historically, when there was really not much question in the South of the advisability of a totally separate but equal society. And I don't think it's proper to condemn my father in ancient history because he complied with the mores of the time.

All right.

All right.

This is really what precipitated my getting serious about writing poems. Some famous poems came down to Plains to do a reading, along with a country music singer, Tom T. Hall. One of these poets was Miller Williams, who wrote the textbook used in most colleges called How Does a Poem Mean?

I do. I have two CDs by her, and I was very pleased when she won one of the top Grammy Awards this past year.

I'm very pleased with Lucinda. I'm glad you know that. But Miller Williams has been a lot of help to me. But this is a poem about their coming to Plains. It's called Itinerant Songsters Visit Our Village. When some poets came to Plains one night, two with guitars, their poems taught us how to look and maybe laugh at what we were and felt and thought.

After that, I rushed to write in fumbling lines why we should care about a distant starving child. I asked how we might love the fear and death of war, rejecting peace as weakness. how a poet can dare to bring forth out of memory the troubled visions buried there, and why we barely comprehend what happens out in space. I found my words would seldom flow.

And then I turned to closer, simpler themes. A pony, mama as a nurse, the sight of geese, the songs of whales, a pasture gate, a racist curse, a possum hunt, a battle prayer. I learned from poetry that art is best derived from artless things, that mysteries might be explored and understood from that which springs most freely from my mind and heart.

Well, I was fumbling around trying to say great things and try to emulate famous poets, and I was having a lot of difficulty. The poems didn't quite come together, and then kind of a breakthrough occurred, and I found, as I said in a poem, that my words would seldom flow, and then I turned to simpler things about matters that really meant a lot to me.

One of the poems that's my favorite is this sighting of a flock of geese that flew over the White House when I was living there, and how in a submerged submarine we would hear the song of whales on our sonar, and how a visit to a pasture gate behind our barn was a turning point in my life on the race issue.

Those simple things that meant so much to me, it became possible for me to express perhaps profound ideas and feelings and thoughts using a simple theme as a vehicle rather than a complicated theme.

Yes, he did. Most of my poems are factual, and Miller used to kind of make fun of me because I would be factual in my poems. He said, forget about exactness. It's the words and the thought that means more. But he used to tease me because the poems about myself are pretty well factual.

Well, I did, and I have to say that I've approached it fairly tentatively. I didn't just all of a sudden decide I'm going to write a book of poems. I wrote a few poems, and then I submitted them to magazines and to quarterlies around the country.

Well, I would put Jay Carter on them, and I would ask the publishers not to reveal the fact that they came from a former president, not to mention that at all. And then there were very helpful, critical reviews, most of them, by the way, favorable, I have to say.

And so I increased in my confidence with experience, and finally I decided to take about 45 of my poems and to put them together in this book.

Yes, a few.

Not really, because I didn't expect very much at the beginning. I expected to be rejected, and when I did get an acceptance, it was a very pleasant surprise. I submitted a few poems to some of the more prominent magazines. And the first time I sent a few poems to my present publisher, he said that he didn't think that a poetry book was appropriate for me.

And I took one of the poems out of the New Yorker magazine that I could not comprehend at all. And I sent it to him, Peter Osnos. He says he has it on his wall in his office. But it's a totally incomprehensible, ugly collection of words that has no meaning to me, no rhythm, no rhyme. The words are not even good. But it was published in the New Yorker magazine.

And I don't understand that kind of poetry. So, you know, I went through a laborious process of finally saying, okay, I'm going to publish the poems that I like. I'm going to let them be truly expressive of my inner feelings, and if people like them, fine. If they don't, okay. So far, the reviews have been quite favorable.

Okay. It's a very brief poem. That's the title of Difficult Times. I try to understand. I've seen you draw away and show the pain. It's hard to know what I can say to turn things right again, to have the coolness melt, to share once more the warmth we've felt.

Yes, when we were having some difficult times. And that first version of the poem is not this one. I rewrote it several times to simplify it and to abbreviate it. But I think we all go through those things, and there's a reaching out to someone else that can be expressed in poetry that couldn't be expressed, at least by me, in prose or verbally.

Yes.

Well, we got along all right.

We're now approaching our 49th wedding anniversary, so yes, it did.

Yes.

Also, we knew... that an accident had occurred and that one of the helicopters had flown into an airplane and that eight people had died. And I had to notify those families during the night that their loved ones had perished in a secret operation. There's no way that anything else that happened during the four years could equal that as a time of discouragement and despair.

Well, I didn't realize that. I had not been to bed for three days and had negotiated in the most meticulous detail the release of the hostages. Everything was all agreed, and the hostages were in the airplane ready to take off.

at ten o'clock that morning Washington time so we were just waiting to get word that they had cleared Iranian airspace and when I went to the reviewing stand when I relinquished the presidency to Reagan and he made his inaugural speech before I left the reviewing stand I was informed that the plane had indeed taken off and the hostages were all safe and free

I have to say that I didn't even think about the fact that it happened a few minutes after midnight, I mean after noontime. I just knew that they were free, and that was one of the most glorious moments. and happy moments of my entire life.

Well, to me, I didn't even think about it, but obviously that became the major story among the news media, that it happened about 20 minutes after I was no longer president. To me, that was insignificant, but it has still prevailed. Even your question indicates that it was a historically important

fact that it happened a few minutes after I left the White House as a president rather than while I was still in office. I didn't even consider that as a major factor then. It was the news media, I think, that made that a major factor.

Well, I'm cordial and open. The only thing I have to offer is my own integrity and an element of objectivity. I don't have any ax to grind. My ax to grind is to try to bring peace and an end to human rights abuses. But it doesn't mean that I go in ignorant of past crimes. And I have to just realize that these people have committed crimes.

And in most cases, crimes have been committed on both sides. They may be much more onerous on one side than the other. But quite often it's the scorned person or the despised person or the unsavory people in international judgment that will need someone to listen to their position, as was the case with Kim Il-sung and with the provisional government in Haiti and as with the Bosnian Serbs.

No, I tried. Through every possible means, official and unofficial means, I tried to negotiate with or to communicate with Ayatollah Khomeini. But he issued orders in his autocratic way that no Iranian was authorized to speak to anyone who represented the U.S. government in the hostage thing. So we tried to get all kinds of people to open up some sort of discussion with...

with the Iranian officials to get our hostages out, and it was fruitless until the last few days of my presidency. The last three days that I was president, I never went to bed at all. I never even went over to the White House. I stayed in the Oval Office to negotiate with the Iranians indirectly through the Algerians.

And it was that negotiation that finally brought about the release of the hostages. From 10 o'clock that morning Until noon, when I went out of office, they sat in an airplane at the end of the runway in Tehran Airport. And as soon as President Reagan was sworn in, the plane took off. But that was a result of a last-minute negotiation through the Algerians.

Well, I've got more time now to devote to my church and my duties as a Christian in a non-political fashion. I just don't have any ambitions or interest in ever seeking another public office. And the Carter Center's work in which Rosa and I devote almost all of our time, is strictly bipartisan in nature.

So now I'm able to teach Sunday school every Sunday that I'm in Plains, which is about two out of three Sundays. Last year I taught 36 times. And some other aspects of our life are directly related to Christianity. But I don't want to imply... That when I was present, that I abandoned my faith or found a basic inconsistency between what I believe.

In religion and what I did as a politician, I think almost always, they were compatible. There were a few times when they were not completely compatible, but I took an oath of office before God to support the Constitution and laws of my nation, and I did. And if I disagreed with some of the laws or felt that they were not completely compatible with my religious faith, I just obeyed the law.

Well, I had come home from the Navy, having been 11 years a full-time naval officer, a submarine officer. started a small business, and had never run for elective office. I was a chairman of the Sumter County School Board in the heat of the integration years. I was concerned about the closing down or the subversion of our public school system.

Two or three aspects. One is that I believe in the separation of church and state. So I was very careful not to have religious services in the White House or to have religious meetings in the White House. I went to church on Sunday when I was in Washington at the First Baptist Church at Camp David. We had a private religious service.

And there were very few times when I felt any discrepancy at all. But I had to interpret the Constitution as the Supreme Court ruled it to be at that particular moment. There were two issues, for instance, I'll just give you an example, where I felt that, well, I just couldn't believe that Jesus Christ would favor abortions. And I also can't believe that he would favor the death penalty.

And fortunately, all the time I was governor, all the time I was president, there was never a death penalty imposed. On abortion, the Supreme Court had ruled that Roe v. Wade was applicable, and I obviously, as president, enforced that interpretation of the Constitution, but I did everything I could to reduce the need for abortions. So that was the main thing that came to mind.

Well, that was obvious to me because the number one news story of the entire 1976 campaign was an interview that I gave with Playboy magazine. And all I did was quote part of the Sermon on the Mount, and it became an issue that almost cost me the election. The Playboy interviewer turned off his tape recorder, started to leave my home, and he said, you claim to be a born-again Christian.

You claim to be perfect. American citizens are imperfect. How can you claim to be willing to govern them fairly? And I said, well, you've completely misinterpreted my religion. Our religion teaches us that all of us have sinned, come short of the glory of God, that we should not judge other people. And Jesus taught us not to try to distinguish between degrees of sinfulness if we

hate our brother, we should not criticize someone who commits murder. If we have lust in our heart for a woman, we should not criticize a person who commits adultery. And, of course, the next question was inevitable. He said, have you committed adultery? And I answered that question. He said, well, have you ever had lust in your heart? And I said, sure.

When I was a high school kid, when I was in college, before I married Rosen, Quite often I would look at a beautiful girl and I would want to have sex with her. And he said, well, thanks a lot. So he left. And two or three weeks later, Playboy magazine came out. It was the biggest selling issue of Playboy in history. And my public opinion poll dropped 15% in 10 days.

So that was those innocent days 20 years ago, just because I said that I had lust, as I thought every man did. But then the news reporters went all over the country asking famous preachers and TV evangelists. about the issue, and they all said, no, no, I've never lusted after any woman except my wife.

And I was disgusted in a way with the slow pace of the civil rights changes in the South. And then along came the bright halcyon days of the... one-man, one-vote ruling where the Democratic white rural primary was going to be stricken down. I thought it was a new day in Georgia and the United States where the democracy would prevail and honesty would be there and equality would be ensured.

So it made me look, you know, both sinful and also, I would guess, equivocating on an important issue.

Well, I worshipped as I would if I had not been in public life at all. I went to Sunday services at the First Baptist Church in Washington, which was the nearest Baptist church to the White House. Most of the weekends we tried to go to Camp David. We had a chaplain from a nearby army base come and preach a sermon. We sang hymns together.

And as far as my personal prayer life was concerned, I would say it was much more frequent and maybe on the average more heartfelt than any other time in my life because I felt that the decisions I made were affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. I never prayed for popularity. I never prayed to be reelected, things of that kind. I prayed that I could keep my nation at peace.

I prayed that I could extend the advantages of peace to other people, say, between Egypt and Israel at Camp David. When the hostage crisis came along, the prayer that I made was that all the hostages would come back home safe and free, that I would not betray the principles of my nation or do anything to embarrass it. And I think in all those cases, my prayers were answered.

I think God always answers our prayers. Quite often, God's answer is no. We don't get what we ask for. And then the obligation, if we have faith, is to find out within ourselves why. Are we asking for selfish things? Are we asking for things that are unjustified? Are our prayers in accordance with God's will? Those are the kind of things that I've learned over a long lifetime, as you know.

And those are the things I try to describe in Living Faith.

Well, when I was a child, say when I reached the age of 10 or teenage life, I had some very serious doubts about what I heard in church, what I heard in Sunday school, what I heard my own father teaching. But I wouldn't express my doubts to anybody. And I thought I was very sinful not to have absolute and total faith. Now my faith is stronger.

I can see the various aspects of a deep Christian faith. I realize that as I was at the age of 15, I'm still searching. I'm still trying to learn. I'm still trying to stretch my heart, stretch my mind. I learned two or three times in my life that my faith could sustain total doubt in God. I rejected God a few times. I felt that God had betrayed me, that I could not depend on my faith at all.

And so I decided I would run for the state senate. And the only request I would make and did finally make was to be on the education committee. And I entered this little community over in the western part of Georgia, Georgetown, Georgia, And I found shocking fraud, corruption, stuffing ballot boxes, abuse of citizens. That was incredible to me.

And I had to go through a very difficult and unpleasant healing process. I've learned over a period of a long lifetime, 50 years of marriage with Rosalyn, how sadly mistaken I was in dealing with her. When we first got married, I was an arrogant, young Naval Academy graduate. Rosa was a very shy, timid, younger person from Plains, Georgia. I totally dominated her.

I didn't show any sensitivity when she was distressed. I was just impatient. When decisions were to be made about our family's life, I didn't consult with her. I just made a decision and informed her of what we were going to do. That was in my formative stage as a mature human being. I've learned to correct some of those mistakes.

So prayer life for me has paralleled in awareness and growth and in significant my evolution as a human being. And I hope that I'll continue to improve in the remaining years that I have.

One of the most distressing times was in 1966. I had been a state senator two terms. I thought after prayer that I should run for governor of Georgia. I had mounted a massive campaign all over the state frantically, shaking hands, asking people to support me. My opponent was a racist.

named lester maddox whose symbol was a pick handle that he used to beat african-americans over the head if they tried to come into his restaurant and buy some fried chicken when the results came in lester maddox had won and i had lost and i couldn't believe that the georgia people preferred him i couldn't believe that god would let this happen so i had a complete renunciation of of um

of my faith. And my sister, who lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was a very famous evangelist. My mother called her and told her that I had this attitude. So Ruth came down to Plains, and we went out in the woods. And Ruth tried to console me, which was impossible.

And Ruth quoted a couple of verses from the second chapter of James, which was a foundation of Ruth's ministry, which was a very happy ministry. Anyway, James says, according to God, that no matter how horrible a mistake we made or how total our failure might be,

or how abject our despair or how great our loss, that if we have, first of all, courage, and then if we have patience, and then if we are wise enough to seek wisdom from God, any catastrophe can be changed into a blessing. I told Ruth that this was a complete baloney. That wasn't the word I used. That it was ridiculous. And Ruth said, Jimmy, you have to have faith that this is true.

She said, why don't you just forget about politics for a while and just respond to any opportunities you have. So just a few weeks later, I was asked to go as a lay witness to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. A group of volunteer Baptists from State College, which is where Penn State University is, had called every family in the phone book.

And they had identified 100 families, none of whom had any religious faith. And I was asked to go and visit them. those families so I knocked on the door some received us with open arms some wouldn't open the door and at the end of a week I had experienced for the first time in my life a genuine presence of God a sense that the Holy Spirit was with us we had 48 people who accepted Christian faith

And that was a turning point in my life. I then began to see that no matter if I was elected to any future office or not, that there were other things in life. When we do have a setback in politics or in business or whatever, we need to have faith that we can find an alternative that would give us much more significant priorities in life.

Well, I was ahead in the election going into this little tiny county on the Chattahoochee River, just across the river from Alabama. There was a political boss in the county named Joe Hurst. He was chairman of the only political organization, the Democratic Committee. He was a state legislator. His wife was a welfare director.

Well, it was after I left the White House that we found Rosalind. that we would be confronting each other in the same house all day long and not have a job outside, although we do a lot of things now outside that we didn't anticipate then.

Also, when I lost the election in 1980, I discovered to my horror that a very successful business that I had put into a blind trust when I went to the White House was now a million dollars in debt. We had moved back to Plains, Georgia, a town that had a population of 600. Our last child was leaving home. We didn't have a job. We didn't know what in the world we were going to do.

And so Rosa and I have evolved our lifestyle over, after some difficulty, I might admit, in adjusting to each other so that we respect each other's privacy. We know now, after a number of years, what times of day we get together. But during the work periods, when we're writing a book, for instance, books, that's how we make our living now, writing books, we respect each other's privacy.

And we don't encroach on it.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I wrote about that in the book. My father, my mother, both my sisters and my brother all died from the same illness, and that is cancer. They all smoked cigarettes, and they died, most of them prematurely. I've never smoked, and that's one reason I have better health, I think.

But when my family members approached death, all of them, for some reason, approached it with great equanimity. My sister, Ruth, was a famous evangelist, Ruth Carter Stapleton, My brother and my mother were great humorists, and they were still telling jokes and kidding back and forth with the family members around their bedside when they were approaching death the last few hours.

My oldest sister, Gloria, was an avid biker. She had a home, you might say, for motorcyclists who were on the way down to Daytona to race, and they would spend two or three days with Gloria while she fed them and took care of them and repaired their jackets and so forth. When Gloria was on her deathbed in the hospital, we all knew she was going to die with pancreatic cancer.

Georgetown was the only post office in the United States, for instance, where all the welfare checks came to the same post office box. And he and his wife would personally deliver the welfare checks to families that they decided should be on welfare. One of the prerequisites for getting welfare payment was to vote the way George Hearst told them.

She had two bikers moved into planes, and two motorcyclists were at Gloria's hospital deathbed. room, door, 24 hours a day. And when Gloria finally died, her funeral procession was a hearse, and in front of the hearse were 37 Harley-Davidson motorcycles. And carved on Gloria's tombstone in Plains is She Rides in Harley Heaven.

So you can see that death in our family has not been a sordid, morbid...

psychologically wrenching experience we all know we're going to pass on some time and we've tried to approach it in a reasonable way and to get back finally to your question, Rosen and I both have living wills we want to pass away the same way my family members have without tubes and without an artificial extension of our life that's very costly so we have ordained already legally that we die a natural death

In my book, I give some simple advice on what everybody should do. One fact that we can avoid is that all of us in the United States have a major heir, the same one, and that's the U.S. government. If we don't plan our estate, then a major portion of it, maybe sometimes almost all of it, will go to the U.S. government instead of the people about whom we care most.

or the other projects or the entities about which we are concerned. So we finally agreed that we would... Rose and I did, that we would have all our children come down home for one Thanksgiving weekend, for instance, and we discussed with them, very frankly, everything that we owned. And we took them around and showed them the boundary lines of our land.

We discussed with them, what do you want us to leave to you? Would you rather us skip you with some of our estate and give it directly to your children, that is, mine and Rose's grandchildren? And Rosa and I have decided with counsel from estate planners how much of our estate to leave to the Carter Center.

The point is that no matter who we are, we ought to make some plans about what kind of legacy we want.

Everyone who voted in my election in that little town voted on an open table in front of Joe Hearst and one of his henchmen, whose name was Doc Hammond. Joe Hearst watched them vote.

I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. You had some good questions.

They put their ballots in a large whiskey box, a pasteboard box with a five-inch hole in the top, and quite often I watched Joe Hearst reach in, pull out the ballots, examine them, even change them when he wanted to, and put in ballots of his own. It was literally incredible. And he was so powerful... that he was impervious to criticism he didn't even care if i saw him cheating

He had control of a district attorney. He had control of a trial judge. He had been indicted eight times on felony charges, convicted four times, but never served a day in jail or paid $1 in fine. He was so powerful, it was unbelievable to me. And so I had that to challenge, and many of the people in that little county were intimidated by Hearst.

The crucial base of his operation was the county unit system. One vote in Georgetown... was equal to 99 votes in Atlanta. And this was all legal. It was perfectly legal until the one-man, one-vote ruling came down.

Well, I think a lot of publicity had accrued. I couldn't get any publicity at all at first. The local newspapers, even in Columbus, Georgia, which is a fairly good-sized town, were kind of in bed with Joe Hearst, or they had seen him do this so long that they thought it was maybe acceptable or wasn't really a newsworthy item until there was one very

heroic reporter from the Atlanta Journal named John Pennington, who came down quite skeptical at first about my allegations. And he, on his own initiative, went into Quitman County, got some old records, interviewed Joe Hurst and all the other people, and found out that my accusations were true.

And in a few days, this story about my election was a top headline news on the front page of the Atlanta newspapers. Joe Hearst eventually went to prison for vote fraud and also for dealing in illegal liquor.

And when I finally got to the Georgia Senate, one of the things that I wanted to do, although I'm not a lawyer, was to revise the Georgia election code to correct some of the patent mistakes that had been deliberately maintained over decades or generations in Georgia to permit this kind of thing.

And as we were debating the new election code, one of the interesting amendments that was put forward by a state senator from the town of Enigma, Georgia—an interesting name— was that no one in Georgia could vote in a primary election or a general election who had been dead more than three years.

Yeah, but there was a very interesting debate about it, too. People maintained that even though, say, a husband died, There was a certain period of time after his death when the wife and children could accurately cast his vote the way he would have voted if he had lived. And so how long after somebody's death, the circumstances change so much that you can't really predict how he would have voted.

You know, one of the nice things about our country is you can call me anything you want to. Jimmy suits me okay. There is a custom in our nation that if you are a have been a governor or an ambassador or a judge or president, then you can still retain the title. So if you want to call me president, you can. If you want to call me Jimmy, that's fine.

You know, when I go through Georgia, small towns, and somebody is an old friend of mine, I know it immediately when they say, hi, governor. They call it whatever their most intimate relationship is. And the little kids around Plains, when I ride a bicycle or jog by, if they are very... or if their families go to church every Sunday, they call me Brother Jimmy. Hello, Brother Jimmy.

And a lot of them just call me, Hello, Jimmy Carter. But it doesn't matter to me. I never was much dependent on the pomp and ceremony of the White House, even when I was there. And so Jimmy suits me fine.

I didn't know. I didn't anticipate being retired four years early. Fairly quickly, I decided to teach, and I've been a so-called distinguished professor at Emory University now. This is my 11th year, and I've enjoyed that professorship. I make most of my income on my books. All of them have been very good sellers.

But when I left the White House, I didn't really know what I had to do except to build a presidential library, which was almost an impossible task for a defeated Democrat who didn't intend to run for office anymore. And I wanted to write a presidential memoir called Keeping Faith, which I did, because I was deeply in debt.

And the proceeds from selling off all my business and from the writing of that first book let me pay off my debts. So the evolution of the Carter Center and the different things in which I've been now involved along with Rosalind have been really developments that we did not anticipate when we left Washington.

Yeah, in a way there was. I didn't anticipate or understand at all then the tremendous crying out around the world for someone that has been president of the United States to help with issues. Let me just give you one quick example. At the Carter Center now, we monitor all the conflicts in the world. We do this every day. There are a few more than 30 major wars on Earth.

Almost all of them are civil wars with horrible devastation. Somalia is just a highly publicized one. They're just as bad in Sudan or Mozambique and other places. The problem is that those civil wars cannot be addressed except on the very rare occasions by the United Nations. or the U.S. government. It's totally inappropriate for any representative of the U.N.

to communicate with a revolutionary group that's trying to overthrow or change a government that's a member of the U.N. So most of these civil wars go unaddressed or even unrecognized by the American or industrialized world. And so we go into those areas. I don't have any restraint on me.

Because I have been president, I'm famous enough and welcome enough to go to an African nation to meet with the ruling leaders, for instance, and also to meet with the revolutionaries and see if they are tired of war or convinced that they cannot win on the battlefield, would they agree to let us mediate and try to bring about a ceasefire, at least long enough to orchestrate an election.

They may not be willing to sit down in the same room or to acknowledge one another through a direct negotiation. But as you may know, I'm sure you do, the science of politics is self-delusion.

Everyone who is running for office, for mayor or for president, whatever, believes that if the election is honest and if the people know me and know all these other jokers running against me, surely I will win.

So if we can convince both sides or let them convince themselves that they can win if the election is honest and that I can help guarantee that the election will be honest, they see a way to become president of that nation without continuing the war on the battlefield. So that is the kind of thing that I see very clearly now, which I did not understand at all, even when I was president.

Well, I don't remember any low points. The high point obviously was was assuming the role of president of the greatest nation on earth and trying to keep a secret. We had planned a few days ahead of time to get out of the limousine for the first time in history and walk down Pennsylvania Avenue as just one of a people.

And that secret was kept, one of the few secrets, by the way, that we kept while I was president. And it was a glorious reception. The weather was cold. I remember... that my mother, who always knew how to take the starch out of people's sails and bring people back down to earth, I was very full of myself.

And when we left the reviewing stand and started to walk to the White House for the first time, really, the news media gathered around us. And my press secretary, Judy Powell, said, don't anybody talk to the news media. Everybody wants to have an interview. And I complied with Jody's request, but typically my mother said, Jody, you can go to hell, I'll talk to whom I choose.

And the TV folks and everybody got around, and they said, Miss Lillian, aren't you proud of your son? And I waited with great pleasure to hear my mother's response, and Mama said, which one? So she took the wind out of my sails. That's one of the things I remember about Inauguration Day.

The aura of the White House and the humility that you feel occupying the same quarters as those great men was overwhelming. Also, what do you do the next day? I had pretty well gotten my cabinet firmed up quite early after the election, and what do you do the next day to deal with a multitude of issues? I had a very fine agenda. I couldn't get much support.

originally from the Congress, although finally my batting average was about the same as Lyndon Johnson's or John Kennedy. I have to say, though, as a bottom line, that I was quite confident of myself. I wasn't plagued with trepidation that I was inadequate for the job. That may be presumptuous, but anybody who decides, I want to be president of this great country has to be somewhat presumptuous.

So I wasn't plagued with an inferiority complex. I felt that no matter what came up, or that I could handle it as well as anyone.

Well, you know, about 2 o'clock in the morning in April when we tried the rescue operation and we couldn't succeed, that was perhaps the high point of despair in my presidency. And I knew that I had to get up early the next morning, about 6 o'clock, and prepare to go on all the morning talk shows and explain to the American people that the rescue operation had failed. That was a very dismal point.

Good evening. Crises in the United States during the first three months of 1979 went up at an annual rate of 13%.

I can't get gas. This is baloney. Carter doesn't get my vote next year.

When we first arrived at Camp David, the first thing upon which we agreed was to pray that our negotiations would be successful. Those prayers have been answered far beyond expectations.

I see an America poised not only at the beginning of a new century.

I see an America that is turned away from scandals and corruption. I see an American president who governs with vigor and with vision. and affirmative leadership.

Late yesterday, I canceled a carefully planned operation to position our rescue team for a later withdrawal of American hostages. And that failed. Equipment failure in the rescue helicopters made it necessary to end the mission. Eight of the crewmen of the two aircraft which collided were killed. and several other Americans were hurt in the accident.

We will seek to continue, along with other nations and with the officials of Iran, a prompt resolution of the crisis without any loss of life and through peaceful and diplomatic means. Thank you very much.

This is my vision of America.

Do you have the voter ID cards here?

Well, we have five minutes to go here on voting, and at this particular place, the turnout has been 83%, which is quite good.

Members of a Nobel committee from Norway, it is with a deep sense of gratitude that I accept this prize.

The scope and character of our sinner's activities are perhaps unique. But in many other ways, they are typical of the work being done by hundreds of non-governmental organizations that strive for human rights and peace.

God gives us a capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace.

We can make these changes. And we must. Thank you.

I'll never make a misleading statement.

I prayed more when I was in the Oval Office than any other time in my life. I never did pray that I would be popular or that I would be reelected. I prayed that I could keep my country at peace, that I could find peace for others, that I could have patience and an adequate element of wisdom, judgment. Paul said these are the only things that are important.

Justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love. Those are the things that make a great life.

I'll report to you from time to time about our government, both our problems and our achievements.

must learn to waste less energy. Basically telling people how they can conserve energy. We simply must balance our demand for energy... with our rapidly shrinking resources. Small sacrifices they can make. If we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors, then we can find ways to adjust. Ways they can be more responsible.

Mr. President, recent polls show that job rating is dropping and continues to drop.

It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.

of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

And I want to share with you what I've heard. First of all, I got a lot of personal advice. Let me quote a few of the typical comments that I wrote down. Very self-critical. Mr. President, you're not leading this nation. You're just managing the government.

Working together with our common faith, we cannot fail Thank you, and good night.

It takes you 30 days to come out, and it destroys muscle tissue and leaves you a cripple.

Oh, horrible pain, almost indescribable pain, yeah.

Three countries in Asia and 17 countries in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. We found guinea worm in 23,600 villages, and we had 3.5 million cases.

542.

From 3.5 million. Right. And 521 of those cases were in South Sudan. This year, so far, we've just had seven cases. All of them in South Sudan. Unbelievable.

No medicine will prevent it. No medicine will cure it. For 10,000s of years, they wrapped the guinea worm when it came out around a stick and put some tension on it so it would come out in 20 days instead of 30 days. So you had to suffer three weeks instead of four weeks. And so we found that if you pour the water through a filter cloth,

the kind that won't rot in the tropics, and we provided that. Then it screens out the guinea worm eggs, and then you can drink your filthy water without the guinea worm eggs, and you don't have the guinea worm. So that's what we've done.

Some of them were, because the medicine men were making a lot of money treating it by putting it on a stick and twisting it. Sure. And also, they thought that the pond was sacred, If it hadn't been for the pond, their ancestors wouldn't live, their village wouldn't be there. So we were insinuating that the disease came out of our sacred pond.

So then if you hold up the glass and have a magnifying glass, you can see the little things swimming around in there. So we convinced them that these were alien people, alien things in their pond, so they let us provide the filter cloths. But we had to go to every single village on Earth that had the disease.

So we feel that we have prevented about 80 million cases of guinea worms since we first started.

DuPont gave us a special filter that wouldn't rot in the tropics.

And it had to be woven by people that make parachutes. Wow. Where it's woven together tightly.

Well, we don't rag it because we get a lot of money from the Bill Gates Foundation.

Are there other things you want to do? Some of the same people. We go out in the jungle and in the desert areas where nobody else wants to go. They call these neglected diseases because nobody... They really didn't like the people.

One of the worst cases that comes from filthy eyes, where flies gather around your eyes, is called trachoma. It's the number one cause of preventable blindness. Cataracts are called more, but trachoma is worse. And when you go into a Maasai village or a Dinka village and you see little children at a distance, you think they're wearing eyeglasses.

And then you get close, it's a ring of flies that stay on their eyes all the time.

So the eye gets infected, and the upper eyelid turns inward, and every time you blink your eyes, it slices a cornea. But how do you prevent flies from... you have to get rid of the flies. And so we teach the kids how to wash their faces, first of all, which they've never tried before. So we have to teach them.

And we also have found out that in certain parts of Africa, a woman is absolutely prevented by taboos from relieving herself in the daytime. So they have to hide and urinate or defecate. So we decided to try an experiment in Ethiopia. So we taught them how to build a latrine, an outdoor toilet. It only costs about a dollar. If they do the work themselves. Oh, wow.

So we thought we might have 100 or 1,000. We've just finished 2,300,000 latrines in Africa. Oh, my god. Wow. That's incredible. So I've become famous as the number one latrine builder in the world. I'm not famous for peace between Israel and Egypt, but, you know. Maybe they'll change the name from the John to the Jimmy.

Guinea worm, if you drink water out of a filthy water hole, which fills up during the rainy season and then stays dry, it doesn't have any fresh water. Then you drink the guinea worm eggs, and in a year's time, it grows to a worm about 30 inches long. And then it stings the inside of your skin, epidermis, and then it creates a sore, a big sore, and then it emerges.

Right.

Right.

Hello, sir.

That's lovely. Absolutely. And I hope everybody in America will buy that for the Mother's Day. It's so great. That's why I did it. to help people like you, you know, make a decision.

Well, I really think my mother exemplifies the finest aspects of what American motherhood should be. She was innovative. She was spirited. She was indomitable. She was... very courageous. She would tackle the most difficult problems in the totality of society and try to change it. I lived on a farm and I didn't have any white neighbors. My mother never acknowledged the impact

of racial segregation in the Deep South. She was probably the only one in our county that didn't. And so she continued this protection of black and poor and deprived people all of her life when she was 70 years old. She was still, she was in India. She joined the Peace Corps, right, at 70? She was in India in the Peace Corps, yeah.

And she was still dealing with poor people who were black and deprived. She was, in effect, an untouchable. She dealt with human fluids, which made her unacceptable in society. So she did that all the way through, and she implanted in me a decision not to let public criticism deter me from what I thought was right. In fact, when she was 70 years old,

She wrote in her diary, and I quote it in the book, that if I had one wish for my children, it was for them to do what they think is right, what's adventurous and challenging and unpredictable and gratifying, and not give a damn what anybody says about them. So that's one of the things I learned from her.

your son and she said which one yes exactly that was right after i walked down pennsylvania avenue i was so proud of myself and uh so she when she the reporters asked her aren't you proud of your son i thought this is finally my mom was going to say something good about me and she said which one and she always thought billy was the most brilliant child in the family

And she would remind you about that. Absolutely, and I can't dispute that. I think Billy was probably the most brilliant. And your sister as well, right? I had two sisters. All of them and my father died with pancreatic cancer. My mother died with cancer, too. So I had a good, solid, wonderful upbringing.

No, I don't think so. In the first place, I didn't have any money and I was a very poor campaigner. But the way I won was sneaky. Really.

I would have been a good president afterwards. But what happened was that I didn't have any money. We never stayed in a motel. We never stayed in a hotel. We couldn't afford it. But every Monday morning, I and my wife and three sons and my mother would go out on the campaign trail. Never campaigned together. So mother would go to different parts of the country from where I was.

And with her speaking ability and her exuberance and so forth, she gathered enough votes to help put me in the White House. And this was a foregone conclusion. I had one hour in New Hampshire and Florida before the other candidates woke up to the fact that I had a remarkable mother.

So she gets credit for the presidency as well. Sure, because I won by that much, and if it hadn't been for my mother, I wouldn't have been president. And I imagine she mentioned that to you as well. Oh, she never failed to. All right.

All right. Thank you for that.

It's a very small segment.

Well, I told the truth. And this book has now been out about six weeks. Nobody's found anything wrong with it. It points out, I think, in very vivid terms... It's still on sale. Um... That, um...

Absolutely. And there have been dramatic and unprecedented basic changes in America's policies that are deeply concerning to me. It's not Democratic versus Republican. It's not liberal versus conservative. These are radical changes compared to what was done in all previous administrations, including George Bush Sr. and Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

and all democratic presidents as well. These are radical changes, and that's what I thought I'd devote my time to. It's my first book that's been about political issues.

That's true, in religion and in politics. And lately, what's been of great concern, in addition to what I've already said, is the merger of the two, the merger of religion and politics. Because I happen to be a Christian, and I think that my religion teaches me that you should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, unto God the things that are God's.

And Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers, said that we should build a wall between the church and state. That wall is being deliberately and ostentatiously, not secretly, broken down. So there's been an increasing merger in this country of fundamentalism on the religious side, fundamentalism on the political side, and the two have come together.

Well, as a matter of fact, in the year 2000, I think the Democrats won. So it did reflect that. Yeah. And in 2004, the results of election were predictably distorted because about 9 or 10 percent of the American people will tell you today that they vote for the incumbent president even if they don't agree with him or his policies.

Sir.

as long as he is the commander-in-chief of our young men and women overseas with their lives in danger. So there's a tremendous effect of patriotism in this country. And I think that patriotic inclination was strongly savaged, but also very greatly utilized by the Republicans. And that changes the politics of it.

Paramount Podcasts.

Well, one reason is that although I have been governor of Georgia, I have been president of the United States, I have won a Nobel Peace Prize. I have 11 grandchildren, and they don't think I'll be a success in life until I've been on The Daily Show. And if I was president, I couldn't be here.

But the net income of the average dairy farm family in Wisconsin is less than $7,000 a year. As a farmer myself, I think that's disgraceful. And as president, I'm going to change it.

If we could just have a government, as I've said a thousand times, as good as our people are, that's all we can hope for, and that's all we can expect, and that's enough. We're going to have a great government, a great nation, and it's because of you, not me.

The people of the United States have made their choice. And of course, I accept that decision. But I have to admit, not with the same enthusiasm that I accepted the decision four years ago.

I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.

We've built almost 5,000 houses now. It's been one of the most gratifying years.

We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem? It's clear. that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as president, I need your help.

I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.

All of us must learn to waste less energy simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night. we could save half the current shortage of natural gas.

It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.

This is not a message of happiness or reassurance. But it is the truth, and it is a warning. These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy. We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet. until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively, and we will. But there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.

I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our nation's problems when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight and I will enforce fairness in our struggle and I will ensure honesty and above all, I will act.

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now.

With God's help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit, working together with our common faith We cannot fail. Thank you and good night.

So together, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best.