Jonathan Alter
speaker
108 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jonathan Alter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Great to meet you, Don. Glad to be here.
I think it had a central role in Jimmy Carter's life, more so than another person, in part because he always called Plains, Georgia home. This is a tiny community of 650 people in rural southwest Georgia. Traveling there is like traveling to a totally different country than most people connect with the United States. Pretty much everything about it is different.
down to the fact that you can spot a Confederate flag down there just across the street from where the Carters lived. And this connection to the land and where he was from was complicated because Sumter County, Georgia, which is where Plains is located, was one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South. And as I think people know, Jim Crow was... white terrorism.
This is what we were talking about. And this is what Jimmy Carter was faced with when he was a young man just back from the Navy, assuming his late father's business and civic responsibilities. And so he came back just before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which desegregated schools in the United States, or was intended to, but was met with what was called massive resistance.
A lot of racial strife broke out when Carter was around 30 years old, and he had to deal with all of that. And his family connections made it even more complicated. His father had been a white supremacist, very much in league with what other businessmen in the area believed. His mother, however...
Lillian Carter was a nurse who took care of black patients for free, as well as delivering Rosalind Carter.
Yeah. So Jimmy and Rosalind Carter knew each other for 96 years. That's amazing. You can imagine. They were married for 77 years. which is longer than all but a thousand couples in the United States.
So this life in rural Georgia, which I spent a lot of time unpacking and researching, it shaped him, but he sided more with his mother and with a illiterate black woman sharecropper named Rachel Clark, who is He thought of as a third parent. His mother was often gone nursing, and his father was busy.
And this woman, Rachel Clark, gave him his great love of nature, which led him to be one of the greatest environmental presidents in American history. He signed 15 major pieces of environmental legislation. He was the first leader anywhere in the world who recognized the problem of global warming.
Strong ties to the land and was an outdoorsman. And then she also gave him his faith. And he was arguably the most devout man ever to be president of the United States. So this background there was central to who he became. But just one more quick point on this. He ducked the civil rights movement.
You know, we tend to think of him as some kind of secular saint or Mahatma Gandhi figure, but he didn't say anything racist. But he was a bystander, and he later regretted that. And I argue in my book that he spent the second half of his life after age 50 making up for what he did not do in the first half of his life, which was to stand up for civil rights.
And so he never bothered to meet Martin Luther King Jr. He later became very close to Daddy King, Dr. King's father, and to Coretta King, Dr. King's widow. But before 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, Jimmy Carter, you know, wasn't safe for him in business or politics to have anything to do with him. And so this is what makes for a very complicated figure.
And then, of course, after having ducked the civil rights movement, what does he do when he becomes president? He internationalizes the civil rights movement with his human rights policy, which did so much to shift dozens of countries. from autocracies to democracies. Now, we're worried about all these authoritarian regimes now, but there are fewer than when Jimmy Carter was president.
And one of the reasons there are fewer is because Carter had this enormous commitment to human rights, which he took from his presidency into his post-presidency.
Yes. His youth, it might as well have been in the 19th century. They had no running water, no electricity, no mechanized farm equipment, but they were not poor. And Carter was the only person in his high school class to go to a four-year college. But from a very young age, he aspired to be in the Navy like his uncle, his mother's brother. And not just an enlisted man, he wanted to be an officer.
And he wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy. And after a lot of effort, he finally went and began to achieve what he thought was his life ambition, which was to become an admiral and eventually chief of naval operations. But in between, he met a man named Hyman Rickover, an admiral who was the father of the nuclear navy, nuclear-powered submarines.
People don't realize this, but they put a nuclear power plant on the back and bottom of a submarine. before they had them on land. And nuclear power, nuclear powered submarines, this was the most exciting tech project of the middle part of the 20th century. Highly classified, extremely elite and exciting. And Carter was in this.
And at one point between service on conventionally powered submarines and after service on those submarines. There was a meltdown at an experimental nuclear reactor in Canada and Carter had to run into this melted down nuclear reactor. It was only for 90 seconds because they thought he would be killed. They knew so little about it. It was a very dangerous mission in any event.
And they prevented this reactor at Chalk River, Ontario from flooding into the river and causing untold harm. They didn't know much about nuclear power, nuclear reactors in 1952.
Yes, it was. But not long after that, his father died and he quit the Navy. Otherwise, the peanut warehouse business that his father was running would have gone bankrupt. It almost went bankrupt anyway when Carter and Rosalind returned to Georgia.
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