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We just had the news that Jimmy Carter has died. He was 100 years old. He was the 39th president of the United States. He was an extraordinary figure in so many ways, partly because of the times in which he was president back in the 1970s, but partly also because of the extraordinary post-presidential career that he had, both a long career and also a career in which he achieved a huge amount. I've been talking to
Jonathan Alter, who wrote the biography on The Man. It's called his very best Jimmy Carter a life. Here's our conversation.
Jonathan, hello. Hello, Justin. Let's start right back at the beginning and actually not necessarily with the man himself but with the place. He came from Georgia and it was a long time ago when he was born there. Tell us about the Georgia that he was born into.
Well, Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, which is where he lived until the end of his days. And Plains, Georgia is in Sumter County, Southwest Georgia. And to this day, visiting down there is like going to a different country.
And at the time of his birth in 1924, it was like being in a different century. So not only was it ruled by rigid Jim Crow segregation, but Carter, whose family was one of the most prosperous in the whole area, had no running water, no mechanized farm equipment, no electricity,
until he was 11 years old when he got a rudimentary plumbing system that his father put in where they were able to take a shower through a bucket with holes punched in it. He was barefoot for most of the year except when he went to school and was essentially raised on a farm where the sharecropper system was just one step removed from slavery.
And presumably, most babies born at that time were born at home, but he wasn't, was he? Was born in a hospital? He was, because in a very unusual circumstance, there was a hospital in the town of Plains, which had fewer than 600 people. It's a very small hospital, but Jimmy Carter's mother worked there.
And while she delivered most babies at home, including Rosalyn Smith, almost three years later, who would grow up to be Jimmy Carter's wife of 77 years, most of the babies she delivered at home. But since she worked in the hospital, another nurse and doctor delivered Jimmy Carter at that tiny hospital in Plains, Georgia.
So he became the first president of the United States ever born in a hospital. And what about academically as he grew up and as he went to school, what kind of a student are we looking at? He was an excellent student, which shouldn't be any surprise. He was the only student in his class to go to college.
and he was blessed by having a gifted school teacher and principal who went by Miss Julia Coleman. They used Miss and Mr. for, mostly for whites in the South when referring to them. So Miss Julia
was the only teacher ever referred to by name in an inaugural address by an American president, because she told him that she believed in adjusting to changing times, but holding fast to enduring principles. And that became kind of his informal motto as he moved forward in life. As my high school teacher, Mr. Judy Coleman, used to say, we must
adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles. Is it true that he was passed over for a best student award? Yes, there was a girl who got that particular prize, but Carter, by that point, had his heart set on going to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.
He had an uncle who was in the Navy and who wrote him from all over the world, and he didn't grow up wanting to be president, but he did want to be an admiral. Unfortunately for him, you only get appointed to West Point or Annapolis
by your congressman and his local congressman didn't think he was properly prepared academically. So he went for a year to Georgia, Southwestern State College in nearby Americas and then to Georgia Tech for a year, which is one of the best science and technology universities in the United States. And so he was very well prepared by the time he got to Annapolis in the early 1940s when
World War II had already broken out. So he was at Annapolis during the war, which meant that he went through in three years rather than four, like his classmates, because they were all expecting to take part in World War II, which they did want to join. When you talk about him as a child and as a young man, of course, and you've mentioned Jim Crow and the segregation that was very much part of Georgia life when he grew up, but also he would have been
aware of it in the Navy as well, wouldn't he? Did he talk much about the impact of him, of growing up in that world and what he thought of that work?
Yes, Jimmy Carter and I talked quite a bit about this and he's written about it. Carter's father was known as Mr. Earl. Earl Carter was a successful merchant and standard issue white supremacist who believed that after you reached a certain age, which Jimmy Carter's black playmates did when they reached
puberty, they were no longer allowed in the house. If a black person had to come into the Carter home for some purpose, it was through the back door only, no matter how prominent that black person was. So the Carter's knew a very eminent black bishop, but even he spoke to Mr. Earl outside the house.
But Jimmy Carter's mother, Ms. Lillian, was a liberal by the standards of the day. And she took care of Black patients for free. And he really had a third parent, a woman named Rachel Clark, who was an illiterate Black woman farmhand who gave him much of his love of nature. He became one of our greatest environmental presidents.
And when he got to Annapolis, he ended up defending the first black student at Annapolis in the 200 plus year history of the United States Naval Academy. There had never been a black midshipman, as they were called.
until the early 1940s. Carter, even though he was from Georgia and was hazed and harassed by Northerners for being from the Confederacy, the Civil War was only 80 years in the past.
He was quite unusual in defending this black mid-shipman from being even more seriously harassed by upperclassmen. And then that continued when he became a submariner in the US Navy aboard the submarine. He continued to defend his black crewmates, and it caused considerable tension in his relationship
with his father, and they were somewhat estranged toward the end of Earl Carter's life because of their differing views on race. And he goes back to Georgia, and he becomes a peanut farmer, and it goes well, doesn't it?
Well, he's quite a bit more than a peanut farmer. So when his father has taken ill and is dying of pancreatic cancer, which Carter's three siblings also died of years later, Carter makes a very important decision in his life to leave the Navy. And he had been part of the most exciting technological project anywhere in the world in the middle part of the 20th century, which was the establishment of a nuclear Navy.
His wife, Rosalyn, very excited to get out of Georgia and see the world. But when his father dies, he returns home to take up his father's responsibilities, not only as a peanut farmer, but as the owner of Carter's warehouse, which was an important agricultural supply company for the area. And then all of his father's many community commitments.
civic responsibilities. Carter, when he saw how much Earl Carter had done for the community, black and white, when he learned this, when Earl Carter was on his deathbed, it changed his view of his father and made him eager to try to live up and eventually surpass his father's accomplishments in their local community.
And then he, having witnessed the problems in education in the wake of the landmark Brown versus Board of Education decision by the United States Supreme Court desegregating American schools, but this caused a lot of problems in the South where it was not implemented.
And in order to address those problems, Carter in 1862 was elected to the Georgia State Senate, and that was the beginning of his political career. And as his political career went on, he used his background, didn't he, and the peanut farm as a tool. We've got an advertisement, or we can listen to an advertisement from the 1970 campaign. So this is his successful campaign to be the governor of Georgia.
Jimmy Carter knows what it's like to work for a living. He still puts in 12 hours a day in his shirt sleeves on the farm it planes during peanut harvest. All the Carter's work hard. Son's Chip and Jeff and his wife Rosalind, who helps run the warehouse. Jack Carter is away in the Navy. Can you imagine any of the other candidates for governor working in the hot, august sun?
No wonder Jimmy Carter has a special understanding of the problems facing everyone who works for a living. Georgia needs a man like that for governor. Vote for Jimmy Carter. Isn't it time somebody spoke up for you?
Georgians said yes, and they approved of that message, didn't they? And they approved of him. Yes, so in that campaign Carter was running to the right. His opponent was a former Georgia governor who had the Atlanta vote.
wrapped up, so Carter needed to appeal to the rural vote, and that ad we just heard was part of that message. And this is, I think, very significant. He also played the race card a bit in that campaign. He didn't say anything racist.
But he did say nice things about Governor George Wallace, who was a racist demagogue in Alabama next door. And he said some other nice things about local racists. And this was because he needed the racist vote in order to win.
When I questioned him about it years later, he said, I never claimed to be part of the civil rights movement. I couldn't have been an elected governor of Georgia, and it chose to be elected and to win. That shows that politics is partly the art of the possible. The question in that situation, which I think applies to politicians in any country,
is do you make good on your principles after you've said what you need to get elected? And in the case of Jimmy Carter, it took literally seconds before he did so. So when he was giving his inaugural address as governor of Georgia in early 1971, one of his first lines was the time for racial discrimination is over. No pool, roll,
Week or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.
And this was, it sounds like nothing nowadays, but this was shocking to the white politicians, some of them walked out of his inaugural address. And the black folks in attendance were saying to each other as they later recounted to me, he said, what? He said, what? They couldn't believe it.
And then he went on to desegregate Georgia State government, and when he became president in 1977, he moved the United States government from tokenism to its first real diversity. And take us on from those moments in Georgia.
to his run for the presidency. What is it that propels him into a position where he can run for the presidency and what is it that he suddenly believes about himself and about what needs to happen that puts him there?
Well, when he was governor in 1971-72, the potential candidates for the 1972 and then eventually the 1976 campaigns for president, they troop through Atlanta and they stay with him at the governor's mansion and he's not impressed with any of them, including Ted Kennedy.
And he thinks he, with some reason, that he's smarter than they are and knows more about the way government actually works because he's a governor and they are all senators. And so he gets it into his head that he could do this. At first, everybody thought it was ridiculous.
Even as one mother said, you're running for president of what? The university? And the hometown newspaper thought it was preposterous. But he was limited to one term in those days under the Georgia Constitution. So when he left office in early 1975, more than a year before the 1976 primaries began,
He had plenty of time to go to Iowa and New Hampshire, which are the two earliest states that determine who the nominees will be for the political parties. And his timing was excellent. He was running in the wake of the Watergate scandal when Richard Nixon had just been forced to resign, first president ever to resign.
And in those days, there was a revulsion against that corruption, and it was a perfect opening for somebody to come in from the outside, even though he ended up winning the election over Gerald Ford, who had assumed office after Nixon's resignation, by only a very small margin.
He really made use, didn't he, and his campaign made use of exactly, as you say, that outsider image, but also, as you also said, the fact that he wasn't desperately well-known. They really used it, didn't they, and they used it in their advertisements. Let's listen to one. Jimmy Carter. Jimmy who? I don't know who he is. Jimmy Carter's basketball player, isn't he? Well, I got nothing against him there. He looks at me, he's all right. You know what I mean? He's done the country, right? He's a people's man.
A picture like one of us. One of the working people, one of the comments. Yeah, someone like one of us. And they really used that, didn't they, and made a lot of it. We should listen as well to what he said about why he was running. So this is 1974. It's NBC's Meet the Press. I think we have a nation that is truly great, not that used to be great or someday will be great again, but one that has an innate character about it that's not adequately recognized.
a stability, a pride in its past, an economic strength that is presently not recognized adequately by the people in this country and around the world. Also, I think there's a lack of purpose in our country's government now, which is much more vulnerable than the people deserve. It's hard to detect what are our goals
What common purpose we work toward, what sort of sacrifices might be expected from the American people. And if I can exemplify the correction of some of the defects that have been brought in our government by politicians and not by the people and help to restore the greatness of this country, then I'd like to do it. And when it came to policies, Jonathan Alter, what did that mean?
Well, he would cut left and right sometimes simultaneously. And this ended up hurting him some politically because he became what I describe as a political failure, but a substantive and often visionary success. So on policy,
Carter was always looking at what will work. What do we need to do for the future on the environment and energy, on health, on education, on the structure of the civil service. And on the international side, it was a ceaseless effort at peace. It was really the first time that any government, major government, anywhere in the world
made the way other countries treat their own people part of our assessment of our relations with those countries. It just wasn't factored in before. It was all about power politics and a help contribute.
to the end of the Cold War and the transition from what were then authoritarian regimes, especially in South America and South Korea, into democracies. So with the threat that's posed today by autocratic regimes around the world, we forget that there are actually more democracies now in the world
many more than there were in the 1970s, and one of the reasons for that is the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Of course, the really famous thing that he did, trying to promote peace, was the Camp David Accords.
Yes, so the Camp David accords where Carter made peace between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Manakam Begin is the most enduring peace treaty anywhere in the world since the end of World War II, and arguably the most important
Because if you think about what's happened in the last 25 years in the Middle East as terrible as things have been since the failure of Bill Clinton's efforts to forge a comprehensive peace in a Palestinian state, if you think about how bad recent decades have been, and especially the last
year or so, a couple of years, they would have been so much worse if Israel and Egypt were fighting again. And that was a hugely significant moment. It was events in Iran, wasn't it, that undid him? Tell us about that and his efforts to overcome them and the way in which
It unraveled, in a sense, his presidency. And I suppose the image Americans had of him, if that's fair to say. Well, I mean, I think that is fair to say, his presidency was already in trouble before the hostages were seized at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which was a year to the day before the 1980 presidential election, November 4, 1979.
And the reason he was in trouble was because of the energy crisis. And we had long gas lines which made the American people rather cross to put it mildly. And so at the same time that we're undergoing that crisis,
literally the same period in the summer of 1979, Jimmy Carter is putting solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Ronald Reagan later took down, but they signaled his vision on our energy future, and they corresponded to the first legislative support for clean energy in American history.
And there's this famous moment, isn't there, in quite late on. So, July 1979, he goes to America, or he goes on the television, and he asks Americans to cut down on their oil usage. So, this is a speech from the Oval Office. Let's hear a bit. And I'm asking you, for your good and for your nation's security, to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can,
to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense. I tell you it is an act of patriotism.
How did it go down? Well, it's interesting. People think it went down really badly because we're a nation of shoppers and we don't like being told to sacrifice, but the initial reactions to the speech were very positive. It's also been misremembered as the malays speech, but he actually never used that word malays.
He did talk about a crisis of confidence in the United States, and that's really what that speech is even more known for than the conservation measures. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure.
And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight, everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes it the very heart and soul and spirit of our national world.
We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
At first, people liked it. He was almost summoning them as Churchill did, and it went over well. But then a couple of days after the speech, and I happened to be in the White House on that day, because the summer before that, I had been a college intern in the Carter speech writing office, and I went back to visit my friends, the speech writers, and they were very happy
about how the speech went over. But then Carter fired about close to half of his cabinet, and there was a shakeup that went badly and was very unpopular. And so his popularity plummeted again, and everybody kind of assumed it was that speech, but it was really the cabinet shakeup.
Then Ted Kennedy decided to run against him in the Democratic primaries, which was very damaging to him. The economy got worse and worse. We had double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates. Americans thought inflation was bad in the Biden administration.
It was so much worse in the 1970s under both Democratic and Republican presidents, but especially under Carter. So he goes into the election against Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan uses what you have just talked about and uses it in quite a devastating way. Let's listen to a bit of what he said during that campaign. Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?
Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe that we're as strong as we were four years ago?
And if you answer all of those questions, yes, why then I think your choice is very obvious to who you will vote for. Of course, we should remind ourselves that the Iran hostage crisis, this taking of American hostages was still a thing, wasn't it, during the course of the campaign? Yes. So first, that formulation, or you better off than you were four years ago, was very powerful politically for Reagan, who also said he was going to make America great again.
And, you know, just in the longer span of history, what Carter did to address those dire economic conditions, which the inflation was partly a result also of the Iranian Revolution because the Iranian oil fields came offline and that helped to contribute to an increase in global oil prices. So, there were many factors.
One of those, a very important one, was that there were 52 American hostages who were still being kept in Tehran at the time of the 1980 election, and Carter was working as hard as he could to get them out, and it looked shortly before the election, like they might come out, and they were not released until just moments after Reagan took the oath of office on January 20, 1981, a few months later.
And, of course, there's a lot of talk, and I write in my book about what was called the October Surprise, that it may have been, I think, quite likely was the case that officials from the Reagan campaign spoke to Iranian emissaries before the 1980 election, and they agreed to not release the hostages, which would have, of course, helped Jimmy Carter.
And this was a dastardly political act. It's never been proven definitively, but there is some new evidence that it took place. Let's listen to a bit of Jimmy Carter conceding on election night. I promised you... I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you, so I can't stay here at night and say it doesn't hurt.
The people of the United States have made a choice and of course I accept that decision but I have to admit not with the same enthusiasm that I accepted the decision four years ago. I might say I have a deep appreciation
of the system, however, that lets people make a free choice about who will lead them for the next four years." And he went on.
then to have this extraordinary second life, didn't he, really, after the presidency? And obviously a long one, but also an incredibly fulfilled one. Yes, as a college president, president of Emory University in Atlanta said to me and others, Jimmy Carter is the only president who ever used his office as a stepping stone.
And so he started something called the Carter Center, which is a very vital and important NGO. And he basically came very close Carter Center did to eradicating Guinea worm disease.
which has afflicted millions, mostly in Africa, tremendous progress on river blindness and other ailments. Carter visited more than 100 countries supervising monitoring, I should say, their elections as part of their democracy promotion efforts.
And while he wasn't able to achieve his fondest dream of a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, he tried. And in both Haiti and North Korea, he prevented hostilities between the United States and those countries.
So, there's a real record there in the year since he left office. He reinvented, reimagined, revolutionized the role of former president, and Bill Clinton has now taken a leap from him and tried to do good with his convening power and efforts, especially on AIDS.
Carter set a new standard for what a former president could do if they decided to do more than play golf and take big speaking fees. And it was a high standard, wasn't it? Because he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He also wrote a book of poetry. He wrote a book of poetry, and some of the poems are not half bad. As he told me at one point, he felt like he could only express his deepest feelings in poetry.
I like to think of him just as an engineer with a humanist trying to escape or a humanist with an engineer trying to escape. He tried to reach high in whatever he did, and that applied to recreation, diplomacy, book writing. He made his living by writing more than 30 books after he left office on everything from carpentry to fishing,
He wrote a novel. When he put his mind to it, he felt he could do almost anything. I called the book his very best because of a story that he liked to tell about when he was being interviewed by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the Nuclear Navy, that very elite program.
And Rickover was a famously crusty, disciplinarian who would never make it nowadays. And he would do things like he'd tell an applicant, you know, to go open the window and it would be nailed shut or he'd make him sit in a closet in the dark for half an hour without telling him why and wanted to see how they react.
And in Carter's case, he didn't do those two things. But at one point, in a very tough interview, he asked him, where did you stand in your class in Annapolis? And Carter said, well, I was 39th out of a class of 600. And Rickover says, did you do your best? And Carter says, no, I guess I didn't always do my best. And Rickover says, why not your best? And he swiveled in his chair. The interview was over.
And Carter thought he hadn't gotten in. Rick over respected his honesty and led him into the program. But Carter resolved that for the rest of his life, and he made good on this, whenever he did something, he would do his very best. And that made him a tremendously able person as well as one of great decency. And he had his flaws.
He wasn't a natural leader in many ways. He made plenty of mistakes, and I'm unsparing in chronicling them. But at bottom, there was a core decency and determination to save lives and make peace and tell the truth that he applied in both his presidency and all of his years after leaving office.
Jonathan Alter, thank you very much for talking to us. Thanks, Justin.
Just one final thought, and it's a thought from the man himself, and it's a thought about his long marriage to Roslyn. We didn't talk much about Roslyn with Jonathan Altar. It was about Carter, the president and the making of the president, etc. And she wasn't elected to any office. But my goodness, she was a hugely important part
of their duo, and they held each other in such high esteem for all of their long lives. And there's a rather wonderful moment. It's 2006. He's talking to CBS Sunday morning, and he's talking about his wife Rosalyn,
And it's a perfect last word from the man himself. Well, if we go until July, it'll be 60 years together as men and wife.
And we learned a long time ago how different we are from one another. And we also saw that despite the inevitable incompatibilities during the day, we resolved many years ago not to ever end a day without being reconciled. So you always kiss each other good night? Yes, at least. There are more questions I could ask about that.
Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space after yoga classes. I felt amazing.
But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.
World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry with the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations. You just get sucked in so gradually.
and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that
Whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network, I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice.
and further people to not be hurt for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets Season 6, the Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
