Pres. Jimmy Carter’s Biographer: “He Was A Prophet in the Wilderness”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: With some more on the life, legacy, and presidency of Jimmy Carter, with Pulitzer Prize winning author Kai Bird. You’ll remember him from his Oppenheimer biography that was turned into a multi-Oscar winning film. But his book about Carter is called “The Outlier,” and follows his upbringing in the post-Civil War South, and how that shaped his views on race and politics. Bird discusses this with Walter Isaacson, and they talk about how Carter’s post-presidency legacy soared.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And, Kai Bird, welcome to the show.

KAI BIRD, AUTHOR, “THE OUTLIER”: Thank you, Walter, for having me.

ISAACSON: You know, President Jimmy Carter was born just two generations after the Civil War. And in his memoir, you know, he has this wonderful line. He says, I grew up in one of those families whose people could not forget that we had been conquered. In other words, the south had been conquered by the north. While most of our neighbors were black people whose grandparents had been liberated in that same conflict. How did that affect him?

BIRD: Oh, Walter, that’s a great question. And I know that comes right out of his childhood memoir. And it — that captures his whole life story in a sense, and that he really grew up in this southern culture that was drenched in the knowledge that his people had been defeated. They had known defeat and occupation. And so, he — as an adult southern white man, he was aware of America’s limits. He was aware that there could be defeat. And it made him very pragmatic and down to Earth. And, of course, you know, he grew up in archery, this little hamlet two miles down the road from Plains. And, indeed, he was virtually the only little white boy there, and all his playmates were African Americans. And that, too, gave him a different sensibility as an American. It made him a southern white liberal instinctively, and extremely comfortable in his own skin, around African Americans and in blacks, Southern Baptist churches. And so, that’s Jimmy Carter.

ISAACSON: And you look at his father had lots of land, had sharecroppers, black sharecroppers, but he was quite the white supremacist. How come that didn’t — how come Jimmy Carter didn’t end up that way?

BIRD: Ms. Lillian, his mother was the counterbalance to his very racist father, who is a very conventional white southern man in South Georgia. But Ms. Lillian just was a different sensibility. She was her own independent spirit. She became a nurse. Jimmy was born in a hospital in Plains, the first American president to be born in the hospital. And she was just the opposite of her husband. She was — she encouraged her son to play with African Americans. She allowed them in the house. She made house visits to African Americans. She was a Democrat. And later in life, you know, she went around planes shocking her neighbors by saying good things about Abraham Lincoln, just to be provocative. So, Jimmy grew up, you know, with this contrarian mother and it gave him a streak of independence.

ISAACSON: If he was so much of a liberal and progressive, especially on issues of race coming from his mother, how come he wasn’t involved in the civil rights movement of the ’60s?

BIRD: He was extremely clever and pragmatic, and he just — in those early years, he kept his head down. He didn’t — he could have had a chance to, for instance, meet Martin Luther King Jr., but he never did. He quietly went about his own business. And then, in 1962, decided suddenly, on the spur of the moment, to run for a state senator seat, won. He kept his head down even then.

ISAACSON: Why did he run for State Senate?

BIRD: I think he was bored with his business. He had turned the family peanut farm and warehouse, which was really sort of a small agrobusiness company, selling fertilizer and peanut seeds. And he turned it into quite a success, and he was bored. He — you know, Jimmy Carter was certainly one of the most intelligent and obviously one of the most decent men to occupy the White House. But he was very intelligent, well read. And I think —

ISAACSON: But wasn’t he both ambitious and had a driving religious faith? I mean, didn’t that help him get into public life?

BIRD: And that, too, is a contradiction. Because he was extremely ambitious. In 1966, you know, he ran for governor and lost to a segregationist, an ardent segregationist named Lester Maddox. And he was humiliated by that experience, and it led to sort of a crisis of faith. And it led to what he later described his born-again experience. But there was a contradiction there between his ambition and his faith. You know, as a Southern Baptist, you’re taught that the — really, the greatest sin is that of pride. And, well, Jimmy Carter had a lot of pride. He always knew he was the smartest boy in his class, smartest guy in the room, and he knew that that was a sin. He reconciled it by making the argument from Reinhold Niebuhr, borrowing from the — from a liberal northern Theologian, the notion that, you know, the world is full of sin and needs to be reformed and politics is necessary. And so, he told himself, you know, I will do whatever is necessary to get elected and then I will use that power to do the right thing.

ISAACSON: But you say he would do whatever he could to get elected. You know, I remember growing up in the south, and you talk about Jimmy Carter being humiliated by a loss for governor — to Lester Maddox, the segregationist. And when that happened in the south, people went one of two ways. George Wallace, that happened to him, and he said, I’ll never be — and then he used some slurs, and he decided to go — to be very segregationist. Jimmy Carter goes the other way, so do a few other people. What causes that fork in the road?

BIRD: Well, he was desperate to get elected, to be able to have access to power. And so, when he next ran for governor in 1970, he really did engage in some dog whistles. He would go and campaign in black churches, but he also went to small town small towns in Northern Georgia and defended the right of people to send their kids to private white academies. That was a dog whistle. And he won the election. And then turned around, having one power on his very first day in — when he was inaugurated, he turns around and he proclaims that the time for racial discrimination in the south is over. And people were shocked on the platform. There were — you know, they felt betrayed, some of his constituency. But he went on to do the same thing, I would argue, when he won the White House. His whole approach to politics inside the Oval Office was to figure out what the right thing to do, to educate himself as intelligently as he could. So, look at what he did with the Middle East. I think this is a really important point that is not often made. That, you know, Camp David was the scene of his greatest triumph. His personal diplomacy brought Egypt and Israel together. And yet, Carter also believed he’d gotten a wider peace settlement, an agreement from Israel’s Menachem Begin to go on and commit to a five-year freeze on the settlements, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And then, Begin turned around and reneged, within days, according to Carter. Carter always believed he’d had a larger agreement. And this is why for decades afterwards, during his presidency and afterwards, he very controversially did what he thought was the right thing to do and spoke out against the settlements, pointing out that they are going to be an obstacle to a two-state solution. And then, he went a step further when no one was listening to him, and he wrote a book in 2006 called “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Now, by using that word, apartheid, he knew he was being provocative, and he got a lot of criticism. People resigned from the Carter Center. It was, you know, very controversial. It took a lot of courage to do that. But I would argue, looking back, you know, all these many years later, look at what’s happened in the Middle East. Look at what’s happened to Israel. Carter is looking very prescient. Israel has gone down a path that is leading towards annexation and essentially an apartheid-like state. And Jimmy Carter, you know, predicted this. That’s a very tough thing to — for him to have done. And I think you can see him doing similar — taking similar stands on all sorts of issues, from race, to climate change, to the very difficult decision he made to appoint Paul Volcker to the Fed at a time when inflation was raging. And he knew that Paul Volcker was going to jack up interest rates and constrict the money supply and make it very difficult for his re-election campaign in 1980, but Carter did it. So, he’s an extraordinary politician. He’s really not a politician. He’s sort of, you know, a spiritual leader who came to apply his politics to the Oval Office. A very unusual presidency.

ISAACSON: You talk about that spiritual quality of him. Explain to him what we sometimes call the Malaise speech, even though I don’t think that word was used in it. It reads more like a sermon than it does a speech. Was he thinking he was in the pulpit?

BIRD: Absolutely. That’s what he was thinking. You know, it’s an extraordinary speech. I urge people to go and look it up. It’s very unusual. It’s very prescient to read it today. It’s talking about a crisis in America, in a spiritual sense. He was railing against what he called the culture of narcissism. He was railing against the notion that Americans too often thought that they could find happiness and wellbeing in self- indulgence and consumption. This is, you know, not the usual kind of thing that an American president will talk about. But what he’s really trying to get at in that speech is there’s a contradiction, you know, a conflict between the two essential principles in American life, our commitment to the freedom of the individual, which is very powerful in America historically. But also, our commitment to community. And Carter always believed in a very religious sense that, you know, you cannot have personal freedom without community. And he, I think, got this in part from his childhood growing up in archery in Plains, a small-town sensibility. And he thought that America in the ’70s was drifting away from its commitment to community. And that speech is really tough and I would argue is prophetic. He was often sort of a prophet in the wilderness. Again, not much of a politician. He ignored the politics. This was not a popular thing to say, although he got a nice bump in the polls for about 10 days. But, you know, read today, it’s actually quite astonishing to — particularly since we have Donald Trump who sort of embodies the notion of narcissism. Donald Trump is about to walk back into the Oval Office. And so, it’s an irony that narcissism has triumph. And Jimmy Carter would argue that this is something to regret.

ISAACSON: you say he was the most decent man to be in the Oval Office and there was both a decency and a sense of character, in some ways, the character sense was almost holier than now. I mean, but he was so dedicated to the idea that character counts, that you don’t lie. Could somebody like that be elected now, or is he — is that seen as such a weakness these days?

BIRD: We’re about to find out with the next four years with Donald Trump. But, you know, history works with a pendulum and maybe the pendulum will swing back after having a narcissist who really doesn’t care about the facts very often. Jimmy Carter, you know, campaigned in 1976 famously saying, I will never lie to you. And you know, skeptics were a little cynical about that. His own personal lawyer, Charlie Kerbo, turned to an aide when he heard that Carter had made this as part of his stump speech, I will never lie to you. Kerbo turned and said, well, there goes the liar vote. But Carter, you know, was a very decent man. He tried not to lie. He tried to do the right thing regardless of the political consequences. He had no sex scandals in his life. And certainly, not during the presidency. There was no financial corruption. It — and you know, he kept the peace. He didn’t send American troops into war. It’s an extraordinary record and a personal one, and his personal commitment to trying to do the right thing and to being decent I think is something that, you know, people will gravitate toward in the future. His reputation historically, I think, is going to rise. And you know, Americans are may someday realize that they would actually like to have in the Oval Office someone who rises at 5:30 in the morning, gets into the Oval Office by 6:30 and spends 12 hours working very hard trying to read 300 pages of memos every day to — and pay attention to the deals. We ought to have — we ought to value a president who works hard and is decent and never lies to us.

ISAACSON: Kai Bird, thank you so much for joining us.

BIRD: Thank you, Walter.