RIP Jimmy Carter

That is wonderful prose.

 

Heard Eleanor Clift this morning on Sirius XM talking about how Carter fired the long-serving WH barber and replaced him with a native Spanish speaker because he wanted to practice Spanish...and he ordered all the trees on the WH grounds to be labeled with their genus and species name so he could learn about them while he walked around.

 

For those interested, this article for The Atlantic mentions three biographies that might serve your purposes. One was an autobiography, two were biographies. The article itself is very good, too.

An Unlucky President, and a Lucky Man

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual...

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

 

A friend of mine actually gave me a copy of that issue a few years ago for Christmas. Bought it on eBay, I guess. The issue is 258 pages, which is nuts.

 

Political prisoners share how Jimmy Carter saved their lives

 

See, Dems were doing DEI back then too!

 

It's difficult to find now even on streaming, but CNN did a documentary a few years ago called (I believe) Jimmy Carter: Rock n Roll President. I highly recommend it.

 

In typical Carter fashion, he wrote his WH memoirs without a ghostwriter, a rarity.

 

I watched that, it was great.

 

The Bitter Southerner has a great collection of Carter stories. And a book about his love of fly fishing.

https://bittersoutherner.com/

 

James Earl Carter.

He always possessed the character that Americans claim they want in their leaders.

I'm glad he lived long enough post-Presidency for people to see the true man that he was. He wasn't perfect and had flaws like anyone, but he rarely lost sight of his greater purpose and one that he was able to fulfill in his many years out of office.

In many ways he was too good to be President of this country.

 

He and Berry Gordy Jr. were cousins, related through Carter's grandfather.