After Jimmy Carter was defeated in the 1980 presidential election a reporter asked if he’d write a memoir. The reply was certain, “Yes … I intend to write more than one book, as a matter of fact.”
Carter — who died Sunday at the age of 100 — was, as always, a man of his word. Over the next four decades, Carter, without a ghostwriter, produced about 30 books, more than any other modern president. That output goes beyond memoirs to include books about aging, his mother, faith, peace, and good governance as well as a book of poetry, a historical novel and a children’s book.
“Jimmy Carter doesn’t factor in the rankings of most important presidents but as a presidential author he’s incredibly important and unique,” says Craig Ferhman, whose book “Author in Chief” looked at presidential writings. “The only person in terms of sheer output that you can compare to him is Teddy Roosevelt. But with Carter it’s also that he wrote about so many different subjects. Richard Nixon wrote a number of books but almost all are variations on the same theme: Nixon as an international wise man.”
Ferhman, who notes that Carter was one of the first serious American writers to use a word processor — “it was bigger than a microwave and each floppy disk could save only 30 pages” — spoke recently by video about Carter’s library and legacy.
Did Jimmy Carter write the sort of pre-campaign memoir, the way every presidential candidate now seems to?
His first book, “Why Not the Best?” is really important. It was a campaign book. There wasn’t a lot of interest, so he published it with a small religious press and it became a huge bestseller. It got republished as a mass market paperback and sold nearly a million copies.
It felt like a sales pitch but it was a sales pitch voters wanted to hear. It was a very optimistic, sunny book focused on old-fashioned things like duty and honor. In that cynical moment America was excited to meet an outsider who cared more about doing the right thing than the advantageous or profitable thing.
It does have some surprising and honest moments, talking about his father’s racial discomfort in Georgia and how he related to Black people and how he didn’t necessarily agree with his father.
What was he like as a writer?
When he was president, Carter went back and read every inaugural address asking, “What should the speech do, how can I contribute something to this tradition?”
And when you look at him as a writer you can also see what he was like as a human being — he was a very sincere and studious writer and when you look at his process you see his humility.
When he wrote his book of poetry, he asked some poets at the University of Arkansas “Will you tutor me?” Essentially, he had a graduate seminar in poetry.
He would really work hard and make himself a student of every genre. He would do the work and respect the work that came before him and really take his time. That is unique among former presidents, who are busy people and confident people. He cared a lot about reading and writing and did not want to rush out a product.
The process tells us as much about Jimmy Carter as the poems do.
That studious approach makes sense given his engineering background.
That’s an astute point. He took an analytical approach to writing. He thought in terms of genre and precedence, and he’d break something down to understand how it worked and that would help him build something. So the engineering parallel is extremely apt. I also imagine that’s why he liked the word processor.
Most post-presidency books are about people touting their successes and justifying things deemed mistakes. How honest was Carter compared to other presidents?
Asking how honest a presidential memoir was is a category error. They’re not historians. Yes, it’s a president’s spin but it’s interesting — Carter may have made the wrong choice but he had reasons, and hearing his account is fascinating and useful.
Carter said, “I’m going to write a very personal book.” But every president says that. And most memoirs are not personal — they’re usually dull and one-sided. They worry about being statesmanlike or about settling scores. It feels inherent to the kind of person who becomes president and survives four or eight years facing those attacks.
With Carter, a telling example is the story in his memoir about when the pope came to visit the White House. Rosalynn Carter’s memoir says that after the pope left they watched a Bo Derek movie. I love that detail — it makes me like the Carters more, not less — but his book doesn’t include that detail. He probably thought it wasn’t statesmanlike.
Was his “White House Diary” from 2010, so long after his presidency, any different?
That one is frustrating because he only includes about a quarter of his diary and it felt like a quarter of the book are his modern views on the diary. It’s “Here are selections from my diary and here’s my take on why I was right.”
We finally get to see what he thought as president, but then Jimmy Carter from 2010 can’t stop from grabbing the mic and chiming in, saying, “You need to know this, or here’s why I didn’t get a fair shake.”
People often talk about Carter’s humility but you don’t get to be president without a healthy ego. How much is that ego in his writings, or does he work to hide that because it is off brand?
The presidential memoir and “White House Diary” are the best places to see that ego. In “White House Diary” you see his arguments with Ted Kennedy and with Ronald Reagan, where Jimmy Carter clearly thinks he was right and he thinks those figures prevented him from doing things that he thought would have benefited America.
But more than most presidents, Carter was able to write books where he could set that ego aside and didn’t return to politics and score-settling and instead explained who he was and where he came from. Those are the most honest pictures of him as a person.
President Carter greets the crowd at a town meeting in 1979.
(Anonymous / Associated Press)
What’s your favorite of his books?
“An Hour Before Daylight” is a short memoir about him growing up in Georgia. It’s a beautiful book — I don’t mean it’s a beautiful book for a president to have written, it’s a beautiful book for any American author.
It captures the messiness of the South that he grew up in. It’s so detailed and simple and lyrical and honest that it’s also a good reminder of the America Jimmy Carter fell in love with when he was this long-shot outsider running for president. That personality doesn’t always come through in his other books.
If he could have written about the presidency with the honesty and intimacy he wrote about his childhood in “An Hour Before Daylight,” it would have been a book every American would have wanted to read. And it still should be read for a long time if people want to understand Jimmy Carter as a human being.
