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
But that experience in the Navy, especially with Admiral Rickover, who was his role model, was instrumental in making the Jimmy Carter that we're all familiar with.
He actually wasn't at the very top of his class at the Naval Academy. My book is called His Very Best. And Jimmy Carter's first very short campaign autobiography that he published just before he ran for president the first time is called Why Not the Best? And that's because when he was being interviewed by Admiral Rickover, Rickover said, where did you stand in your class?
And Carter said, I was 39th, you know, in a class of, I don't know, 600 and something. And he thought that was pretty good. And Rickover said, did you do your best? And Carter answered, honestly, he said, no, I didn't. And Rickover said, why not your best? And he turned around, the interview was over.
And Carter thought that he would not be admitted to the nuclear Navy, which was his dream job, but he was. And I argue that from that day in 1952 until the day he died, whatever he did, he was all in. He was giving his utmost.
And for a man of that immense intelligence, and he was one of the most intelligent men ever to be president of the United States, and he had some pretty stiff competition, that made him enormously formidable. And as his son Jeff said to me when I asked him to use one word to describe him, that word was intense. So people tend to remember Jimmy Carter as this kindly grandfather with a benign smile.
There was nothing laid back about him. And there was nothing humble about him. This is important to understand. There's no politician that's humble. He was very, very ambitious, but he was ambitious for more than just himself. He was ambitious to help people and to make the world better and to use his power to leverage change in the lives of ordinary people. all over the world.
And he worked at that. He worked at that every day. Even when he was relaxing, he was doing it in a very intense way. He was fishing in Siberia when he was 93 years old, that kind of thing.
Yes. He had unusually enlightened views on race for somebody from his part of the country. And that came from his mother and Rachel Clark, as I mentioned earlier. So he did try to do that. But then later, it was almost like dissidents in the old Soviet Union. He and Rosalind and their family were the only ones who wanted to allow black people to
It wasn't that they were trying to get membership in the Plains Baptist Church just to be able to cross the threshold and enter the church. And Carter tried to make that happen, and he lost. But then when he was in the state Senate and first running for governor, he didn't want to advertise that because— As he said to me at one point when I was interviewing him, he said, I had a choice.
I could either be part of the civil rights movement or I could be governor of Georgia. And I chose to be governor of Georgia. But what he did, which was so remarkable, is that just moments after taking the oath of office as governor in early 1971, he said the time for racial discrimination is over. Now,
in a lot of the rest of the country or in other parts of the world, it was long past time for it to be over. These were revolutionary words in Georgia. And he went on to integrate state government in Georgia and appoint black judges and other black folks to high office. And of course, did the same as president when he took the United States government from
tokenism to genuine diversity and began to become the Jimmy Carter that we know. But this was a process. And I think there's a lesson here, which Jimmy Carter himself, after the murder of George Floyd, he reflected on this, you know, that silence is death and that we do need to speak up, but also better late than never. It's never too late to join the cause of justice.
And that's part of what his life represents.
Well, first he got involved in education. So his father had been on the school board and he decided to go on the school board as well. And even though there was nothing he could do. even as chair of the county school board, to integrate the schools. He could do things to improve the black schools, which at the time he went on the school board didn't even have any school buses.
So they got the hand-me-down buses. In any event, he became interested in education, and he realized that he couldn't really do much unless he went into politics. He ran for the Georgia State Senate in 1962, and the guy he was running against literally, no exaggeration, stuffed the ballot boxes.
And at first, it looked like Carter would have the election stolen from him, but he went to court and was able to get his seat. And then in 1966, he ran unsuccessfully for governor, and then he had a kind of a spiritual crisis and
went in the north door to door for Jesus and had some unusual experiences there, including coming upon a brothel at one point and trying to convert the madam unsuccessfully. And then he decides he's going to run again and is elected in 1970 as governor.
So he was the first real representative of what they called the New South, the post-segregationist South. But it didn't really, well, it impacted them in that their son, Chip, as he described at Rosalind Carter's funeral, was beaten up for wearing a Lyndon Johnson button in the 1964 election. Johnson was for civil rights. And the rest of the family was hassled as well.
So he was kind of caught in the middle of that as a businessman and a state senator. And then he nudged Georgia forward as governor. And then the key moment, I think, came in the 1976 presidential campaign when he came out of nowhere to be the Democratic nominee and then got elected president. The key primary that year was the Florida primary.
And winning there set him on the path to the presidency or made it quite likely that he would be president. But more important, he beat George Wallace in that primary. And Wallace was the representative of the American segregationists. And he had been governor of Alabama.
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