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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
the Rockefellers who were very close to the Shah pulled the wool over the eyes of the State Department. It's a really quite fascinating story that I tell in my book. They convinced the State Department that the Shah could not be treated
adequately in mexico which was not true but carter in a kind of humanitarian moment agreed to let the shah in in november of 1979 and shortly thereafter these student militants in tehran seized the embassy if they hadn't had that as a pretext it wouldn't have happened And the Shah didn't stay in the United States for very long for his treatment. And he died the next year in Egypt.
He was in several countries after he left the throne. But it was a mistake to let him in. And then the way Carter handled it was probably not wise politically. Not probably. It was very unwise politically, as his mother and wife told him repeatedly. And he knew, and he and I discussed this, that if he had taken military action, he very likely would have been reelected if he had bombed Tehran.
But he thought the hostages would be killed, so he didn't do that. He did try to stage a hostage rescue mission in April of 1980, and it failed miserably.
Yeah. And he took total responsibility for it, which is unlike what some of his successors would do in a similar situation. It basically ended any opportunity to get the hostages out before the election, although they came close. And then there may have been, you know, what they call the October surprise. I've been writing about this lately.
You know, there's increasing evidence that there was an effort by the Reagan campaign to delay the release of the hostages. But then eventually Carter did get them out just moments before he left office.
Yeah. So basically, first he revolutionized the vice presidency by giving Walter Mondale stuff to do, which almost none of his predecessors had. Then he revolutionizes the office of first lady or the position of first lady by empowering Rosalind Carter. And then after leaving office, he revolutionizes the post presidency.
And there's this myth that he got more done as a former president than as president. That's completely wrong. You don't have the levers of power when you're not in office. So the Carter Center did wonderful work in essentially eradicating getting worm disease, making great progress against river blindness.
He did get some political prisoners released in monitored elections in more than 100 countries. In 1994, he was very involved in preventing wars in Haiti and arguably in North Korea. But mostly he became a symbol. that you can keep on serving, keep on helping other people, keep on inspiring other people to do their best on behalf of not just themselves, but others.
And the Carters did this in literally hundreds of ways after leaving office. And we could talk all day about the smaller things that they did as he tried to show that you don't have to just play golf and serve on corporate boards and take big speaking gigs when you're a former president.
I think it's some combination. What happened was both he and Rosalind Carter were depressed after he was shellacked by Ronald Reagan. And she wanted him to try to make a comeback. And he brushed that aside. But then in the middle of the night, it occurred to him, why can't I do what I did at Camp David in Atlanta?
And so first in association with Emory is called the Carter Center, which is a terrific organization. They began to hold conferences and then that evolved into other projects. Not all of them worked. But they created an institution that is now outliving him.
It's chaired by his grandson, Jason, and they continue to do terrific work all around the world on many different important, mostly health-related issues.
Well, I interviewed him a dozen times, and I had met him when I was a columnist for Newsweek magazine in 2000. I interviewed him on a Habitat for Humanity site, and then I helped the Carters build a house in Memphis in 2015. I traveled with him up to Annapolis for his 75th reunion, 75 years after he graduated from the Naval Academy.
So I did spend quite a bit of time with him and his family, and I just came to have immense respect for his decency and his drive. He really was the only president with the exception of Thomas Jefferson. who could be fairly called a Renaissance man. And so in addition to doing all of these other humanitarian things, you know, he wrote a book of poetry. Some of the poems are not bad.
He built all the furniture in his house, and it's beautiful. The woodworking book that he wrote is beautiful. It's very high quality. And he wrote a novel, which is less good. So not all of the things that he taught himself to do were equally successful, but he was an engineer with the soul of a humanist.
And he used his engineering skills to solve all kinds of problems, including the problem of how do you learn to write a poem?
I'm not sure that he was so much of a work in progress, because I think because of the grounding of his faith and his value structure, that there really wasn't that much change, although he did move to the left after he left office. But I think that it was more his many works in progress, and he knew an immense amount about a huge variety of subjects.
And you could have a fascinating conversation with him on just about anything, music, art. He turned himself into a decent painter as well. And not just culture, but science, history. His mind was such an active and interesting place. And that was something that is very hard to see when you're looking at him from afar. And so I felt like I had to
really spent as much time as I could with him in order to get at the deeper questions of what drove this very complex individual.
Showing 81–100 of 108 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →