I was 14 when he was elected and not following politics much. My memories are of course dominated by the hostage crisis, I can remember waking up one morning to go to school and hearing about the failed raid to rescue them. I have read bios of a number of Presidents but not Carter. He is remembered as a failed President who is of couse now beloved. My very general impression based on other things I have read about that time is that his “failure” wasn’t his fault. The hostage crisis would have been impossible for any President to deal with, but as I recall the economy was bad, this was of course after the Nixon/Ford years, and the oil crisis, and the changing global economy, and the expansion of the US economy since WWII which could not go on forever etc etc.
I am looking for a balanced bio. I am a liberal/progressive (what is the preferred nomenclature these days? I think the latter (inside joke some of you will get)) But I don’t want a book written by a Howard Zinn or Paul Johnson type of historian.
Start off with Jimmy Carter’s own ‘White House Diary’. It was his own personal musings of his presidency as it unfolded in real time. He didn’t edit things out that weren’t too flattering (spoiler: he really didn’t get along with Ted Kennedy) but added annonations to provide some context and in hindsight what mistakes were made. Even small things. For example he didn’t like having “Hail to the Chief” played everytime he walked into a room for an event. Neither did Harry Truman and several others I’m sure. But Carter put a stop to it only for there to be a surprise backlash that it was diminishing the office. This wasn’t a regular diary and many logs are very brief, very dry, and a bit heavy in foreign policy rather than domestic issues. But what was recorded is still a fascinating publication into how a president worked in real time.
Stuart Eizenstat wrote a very long book too titled “President Carter: The White House Years”. Eizenstat worked for Carter as a policy advisor. He later worked for Bill Clinton as an ambassador. Eizenstat wrote his book by studying all his pages of notes he took during the Carter years, interviewing members of the administration, members of Congress of the time. It would be understandable to think as a staffer he may have written this to be favorable to his former boss but it’s actually very honest and not shy of criticism. What Eizenstat did though was lay out the case of a lot of things that have been forgotten or never really recognized that Carter did, or started off, or was ahead of his time in proposing and provided the evidence of it. For example today in 2020 same day voter registration is still far from a settled matter. Nearly half of the states allow it. There are rules to meet of course. Carter proposed this as an integral part of his national electoral reform plan rolled out in 1977.