Jimmy Carter
speaker
288 appearances
16 recordings
12 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 1 May
Jimmy Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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.
Showing 161–180 of 288 · page 9 of 15
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