A really good discussion on Zoom tonight on the subject of President Jimmy Carter between Jonathan Alter and Walter Isaacson, hosted by Politics and Prose. The discussion was in celebration of Alter’s new book His Very Best: Jimmy Carter a Life.
Interesting takeaways: Carter not a great president, but he was a consequential president. He was the greatest conservation president, knew about global warming in the 1970s, and if he had been re-elected he would have begun a climate change policy in the 1980s that was on the same level as the Paris Climate Agreement. He was a political failure, but was good at everything else. A Renaissance president. He had famous musicians appear at his rallies. Rosalynn is more politically astute of the two. Jimmy met Rosalynn when she was just 3 months old and apparently they wrote really steamy love letters to each other.. And sadly due to a fall last year and a Subdural Hematoma (I believe they said) Jimmy has lost his sight, so he listens to books on tape – such as His Very Best. However, Rosalynn is reading the book.
The official blurb:
Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure–ridiculed and later revered–with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people.
Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first.
Jonathan Alter is an award-winning historian, columnist and documentary filmmaker. An MSNBC political analyst and former senior editor at Newsweek, he is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies; The Promise: President Obama, Year One; and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made.
