 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to this virtual book talk with Jonathan Alter, author of his very best, Jimmy Carter, A Life. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, December 15th at 6.30 p.m., a special Bill of Rights program will look at the Bill of Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate. The National Archives and its partner, I Civics, will present a panel discussion examining the application of the Bill of Rights in schools. And on Thursday, December 17th at 1 p.m., we will welcome Allison M. Parker to discuss her latest book, Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell. Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell would become one of the most prominent activists of her time with a career bridging the late 19th century to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. I hope you can join us for these two programs later this month. Carter has been orphaned by biographers. He can boast of no Boswell, no library of must-read studies like those that exist for Reagan, Nixon, Johnson or Kennedy, writes David Greenberg in his New York Times review of his very best, Jimmy Carter, A Life. With this new biography, Jonathan Alter has set out to change that. Greensburg calls Alter's new work an important, fair-minded, highly readable contribution to this literature. Writing for NPR, Michael Schaub calls his very best a fascinating book. Alter tells Carter's life story beautifully and with admirable fairness. He treats Carter as a real person, as flawed as anyone else and not as a saint. In Glenn Altschuler's review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune declares, Alter scrupulously researched in judicious book depicts Carter as a man with a first-class intelligence and a second-class temperament. The significant portion of that scrupulous research was done in the records preserved in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, which is one of the 14 presidential libraries run by the National Archives and Records Administration. These libraries are an unparalleled resource for studying the lives and actions of our presidents from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama. It is gratifying to see the stories held in these records brought to light in a highly regarded biography like his very best. Jonathan Alter is an award-winning historian, columnist and documentary filmmaker. An MSNBC political analyst and former senior editor at Newsweek, he's the author of Three New York Times Best Sellers, 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. Alter currently hosts a radio show on Sirius Channel 102 called Alter Family Politics. Joining Jonathan Alter in conversation tonight is Michael Beschloss, an award-winning historian, best-selling author and Emmy winner. His newest book is Presidents of War, which tells the story of the American presidents who have helped wage our major wars. He's on the board of directors of the National Archives Foundation, a trustee of the White House Historical Association, and former trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Now let's turn to Jonathan Alter and Michael Beschloss. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you. Can everyone see and hear all right, John? I can indeed. Okay, okay, that's the important one. Thank you everyone for joining us tonight for this discussion of John's wonderful new book. You've seen it in every single venue. Everyone who writes anything about it is adoring in their praise uniformly. It doesn't often happen. In this case, it is 400 percent deserved. I thought I'd begin. I was going to pose, John, as this sort of prosecutorial person who has never met you and sort of give you a really rough interrogation about this book, but I think out of fairness and transparency, I should mention we've been friends for how many decades? A few. A few. I met John. I was a student at Williams College. John was looking at colleges. This was back in the 1970s. And I think I was sitting on a step hungover and a station wagon rolled up with this nice man and his nice son, which was John and his father. And he said, you know, could I show him around the college? I said, sure. So I took him around the college. And as I've said to John before, as a result of my stellar tour, John went to Harvard College and had nothing to do with Williams. So you see how effective I was, but we have known each other at least for a little while. And it's one reason why I'm so genuinely delighted to see this book not only come out, but see it get the reception that it's deserving. And I've read it now twice, cover to cover very closely. It's one of these. I could read it probably three more times. And each time I read it, I would get more nuance and discover more of the things that you're able to find. And I've tried to restrain myself. I've talked to John a little bit of the last couple of months. I've been sort of restraining myself from asking questions I wanted to ask tonight. So it'd be a little bit more spontaneous. So to begin with, where did you get the idea for doing Carter? Well, first of all, I want to thank the National Archives for doing this. And without the wonderful librarians at the Carter Library, who are all National Archives employees, it wouldn't have been possible for me to complete this book. And the Carter Library is one of the jewels in the system, don't you think? Yes, in Atlanta. And they have literally millions of documents there. And so without a lot of help, I would have been drowning. So I'm greatly appreciative of the efforts of the National Archives. And I'm grateful to you, Michael, for many decades of friendship and mentorship. And in truth, I didn't ask you, my father, I didn't ask you to take us around. You offered because... All right, okay. Well, you have a better memory than I do. But I probably was really hungover and it shows you how much there is to do in Williamstown Mass. So I'm glad we did. The beginning of your many years of generosity. So the origins of this project are that in early 2015, I'm in a book group in New York. And somebody in our group knew Jason Carter, who's now the head of the Carter Center on Jimmy's grandson. And we're reading a very good... And he's about how old now? He's in his 40s. He ran in 2014 for governor of Georgia. And ran a good campaign. He's really a terrific guy. Maybe 10 years too early. Maybe a little bit. But I think he might be back someday in Georgia politics. In any event, Jason and his grandfather came to our book group when we were reading 13 days in September by Lawrence Wright about Camp David. And I had been an intern in the Carter speech writing office in the summer of 1978. But then I had done something kind of stupid. In the White House? In the White House. Right. In the White House. I worked for Jim Fallows and Rick Hertzberg, two of the finest journalists, I think, of our... Thankfully still around and still operating? Yeah. So, but then two years later in 1980, I actually volunteered for a short time for Ted Kennedy's campaign, which was one of the stupider things, maybe not I've ever done, but it wasn't smart. But we're also from Chicago, both John and me. And I think didn't our mayor, Jane Byrne, support both of them? Yeah. Maybe both of them at the same time through Chicago fashion. So she had endorsed Carter and then she betrayed him by coming out for Kennedy later on. And then Kennedy had to shun her at the St. Patrick's Day parade because she was so politically toxic. But that's another story. So, you know, I kind of made this mistake. It was really kind of crazy in retrospect for Kennedy to challenge a president of his party who was... He sure felt so later on, as you know. Well, yes, but he never really made up with Carter. And they were like oil and water and their tension, their fraught relationship cost the United States a chance to have something like the Affordable Care Act in the late 1970s. So this is a story that I deal with. In any event, I hadn't had much to do with Carter in all the years since I interviewed him when I was writing a column for Newsweek. But, you know, I hadn't thought that much of it. After this evening at our book group, I started to think, you know, anybody who could pull off this virtuoso performance at Camp David and do what he did on human rights, which we also talked about with him that evening. There has to be more to him than this kind of easy shorthand which anybody will tell you. Oh, inept president, great former president. And he has always hated that, right? He's hated that, but, you know, he hates a number of things. What I found was he had good reason to be offended by that depiction of his really quite extraordinary, almost cinematic, novelistic American life. And his presidency was significant. It was a presidency of consequence. And I think of him as a political failure. Obviously, you know, he was swamped by Ronald Reagan in 1980, but a substantive and often farsighted success. So it also related to me as a, you know, as a journalist and historian, like journalists judge presidents on how they're doing politically. And on that score, Carter failed. And, you know, he was, he had a tinier for politics. His wife, Rosalind, was much better politician than he was. But historians need to look at what did the guy get done? How did he change the country? And this is a president who had a Democratic Congress for four years. Clinton and Obama only had one for two years. And they had bill signings like every few weeks. Yeah, I mean, it seems antique now, doesn't it? Yes, and these were important pieces of legislation which we can get into. So, but, you know, my book isn't that policy heavy, but I was struck when I was trying to decide whether to write it, that there was this, you know, misapprehension about his presidency. And then my editor at Simon & Schuster, the late Alice Mayhew, who is also, you know, Bob Woodward's editor, Doris Kearns. Well, I would guess was probably a Kennedy person in 1980. No, actually, I don't know where she was in 1980, but she was much later on. She was his editor, right? She was his editor all the way through to the end of her life at the beginning of this year. And so once she heard that I might be interested in doing this, she got very excited about it and she smoothed the way for me. So I had extraordinary access. I spent a large amount of time with the Carter's and their whole family. And eventually, Rosalind Carter gave me the love letters, very steamy love letters, steamier than any between a president and first lady. That Jimmy sent her from the Navy and she trusted me with those. And so I was able to, and they had never been seen by anybody outside of their family. So I had, you know, that level of access. And then I interviewed another 260 people who know them or knew them in the past. And so I was trying to get a kind of a, when I realized I could get a kind of a 360 degree take on him. And I could combine scholarship with the help of the National Archives with journalism, interviewing people. And access that I could do something that was a little bit unusual because there was this gaping hole in the line of scrimmage. There just had not been Carter biographies. There was one way there were a few books that were written around the time it was president or even before he ran and then almost total silence for decades. Right. So Stu Eisenstadt, his chief domestic policy advisor, wrote a good book about his presidency from, you know, from his perspective inside the White House. And there were other books about it. Doug Brinkley did one about his post presidency. Peter Bourne, who had been an aide to him going back to the 60s, wrote one that about 25 years ago that, but there hadn't been an independent biography of him. So this is really unusual. I mean, Ted Kennedy, I think, has had nine. Is that right? Yeah. I'm not surprised. Well, yeah. So if you mean, I know some of the answers to these questions, but I want to hear them from you because all other people watching will not have read the book yet. If you had met Carter as a child growing up, is this someone that you would have singled out as a possible future president? Were there qualities there that were so unusual? No. Tell me. Absolutely not. And he didn't think of himself as a future president. His career goal was to be chief of naval operations. And from the time he was a very young boy, since his uncle was in the Navy, his uncle Tom Gordy, who Jimmy Carter and Barry Gordy of Motown Records have the same great grandfather. The great grandfather had a relationship with a slave. But so Lillian Carter was a Gordy and her brother was in the Navy. That's Jimmy's mother, Lillian. And he would send these letters and postcards to his favorite nephew. So Jimmy developed his ambition when he was very young. And then he was able to go to the Naval Academy and he joined Hyman Rickover's Nuclear Navy, which was the most exciting technological project of the middle part of the 20th century. Holden Powell and others say that Rickover won the Cold War because we had submarines that could stay underwater and the Soviets did not. I changed the strategic balance. So Carter was involved there. Then his father dies. That was what, like 1953? 1953, yeah. And he goes home over his wife's objections. So she did not want to go back there? She absolutely did not want to go back there. Because? Because her mother and her mother-in-law, you know, made her life difficult in this tiny town of 600. And they had all known each other all their lives, right? At this point, Jimmy and Rosalind Carter have known each other for 93 years. That's how old Rosalind is. And Lillian, who was a nurse, delivered Rosalind. And she brought her two-and-a-half-year-old over to see the new baby in 1927. So, you know, they didn't start going out until Jimmy was at the Naval Academy. But she loved being the wife of a naval officer. And when he decided to go home upon his father's death and assume control of the family business and agricultural warehouse and farms, she gave him a silent treatment on the drive from Schenectady, New York, to Plains, Georgia, and said to their young son, Jack. They have three sons who are older than Amy, which a lot of them don't know. She said to her six-year-old, Jack, tell your father we need to stop at a rest area. And she told me that it took her about a year to stop sulking after they returned to Plains. So it wasn't until, just in terms of the presidency, I'm sorry to give you such a long one. Yeah, no, it's correct. So, you know, he is in business and he's honestly ducking the civil rights movement. That's the only way he could be elected to the Georgia State Senate. And then he runs unsuccessfully for governor in 1966. Let me stop you for a second. Not everyone who was a peanut farmer in Plains ran for the state senate. So what was going on there? So Jimmy assumed his father's civic responsibilities. And one of those was on the Sumter County Board of Education. And I actually went into the minutes of the board meetings because I was very struck by the fact that, right after Brown v. Board of Education, they did nothing. They didn't even discuss the idea of integrating the schools there and carrying out that decision. In part because there was a Georgia state law that said that the schools were automatically closed and even one black student were admitted. And one of the governors of Georgia in that period had a slogan, No, not one. And by that he meant not one black student in a public school, white public school. So Carter is wrestling with this and he's a really strong believer in education. And he tries and fails to consolidate, not integrate, but consolidate schools in his county and this was interpreted as a Trojan horse integration. And he was slapped down by the voters and especially in Plains itself, his own family, his cousins, you know, were leading the opposition. And so then after the end of something called the unit rule, after the one man one vote Supreme Court decision, it ended this system in Georgia that was stacked on behalf of the county bosses. And it allowed reformers like Carter in 1962 to have a chance in politics. Despite that, one of those county bosses literally stole that first election from Carter. He literally not figuratively stuffed the ballot box and Carter, unlike Trump, had an actual case. And he went to court, he won and he eventually took his seat in the Georgia State Senate. But then I don't think even then he's starting to think what he gets there, starting to think about governor. I don't really think he started to think seriously about being president until he was governor and his first year as governor. All these national politicians like Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, later Ted Kennedy, they come down and they stay with him at the governor's mansion. And he goes like, I'm smarter than these guys. And he was impressed. His IQ is considerably higher than those guys, but his EQ is emotional intelligence. I would argue was lower than those politicians. And in any event. And do you think looking back, is that genetic? Is that the way he was brought up? Why is that? I mean, we know that he was an engineer. We knew that he was going to be in the Navy. But if you had to explain why you think that his emotional intelligence was lower, what was going on there? So that is a bit of a nature and nurture question that one can't fully resolve. But just your instinct. I think that he was too influenced. And this is the argument of his former daughter-in-law, a very insightful woman named Judy Langford, who later became a therapist. He was too influenced by his father and Hyman Rickover. And they were both these strict disciplinarians. And they both could be very cold, colder than Jimmy. His parents, who was smarter, his mother or his father? They were both very smart. But his father was a white supremacist and his mother was a nurse who took care of black patients for free. And there was really a third parent who was enormously influential on the good side for Carter. And that's a woman named Rachel Clark, a black farmhand who signed her name with an X. And she taught Carter on their fishing, they'd go fishing nearby river and she would talk to him about nature and the importance of being a steward of nature. And he became our greatest environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt, for reasons that I can explain. But she also helped strengthen his faith, which is obviously an important part of his life. And after Lillian Carter died, Lillian Carter was this great character who was on Johnny Carson a lot when he was president. And on the night he won, she was at the Omni Hotel I think in Atlanta and had a t-shirt. She took off her shirt and said, Jimmy won, right? Yeah, yeah. Did this on camera. That was the kind of thing that she would do. Right. A lot of color in the Carter family, really great color. But, you know, she, after she died, Jimmy was seen weeping at Rachel Clark's grave. And he considered himself to be closer to Rachel Clark in many ways than to his own mother. And he often slept in the shack that Rachel Clark and her husband Jack was the foreman of the Carter property had on the Carter farm. And remember, this is a feudal system that's just one step up from slavery. Sure. I kind of concluded that Jimmy Carter is the only president, maybe only major figure who you can say effectively lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924, but it might as well have been the 19th century. No running water, no electricity until he was 11 years old. He obviously is an important figure in the 20th century, not just because he was president, but his connection to the great movements of the 20th century. He took the US government from tokenism to genuine diversity. He appointed five times as many women at the federal benches, all of his predecessors combined, and among them Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So connected to these 20th century movements. And then in the 21st century, until very recently, he was actively involved in democracy, promotion, global health, and peacekeeping that are the cutting edge issues of the 21st century. But when he was in that sort of 19th century part of his life, he was developing in a fascinating way. He was developing an enlightened view on race. It took many years before he found the courage to be outspoken about it. And it wasn't until after he took the oath as governor of Georgia that he came out of the closet as an integrationist. And when he was governor of Georgia, as you say, he began to think about running for first vice president, maybe with George McGovern in 1972, later on for president. So he announces in late 1974. And you probably remember it a little bit. I do just from the time as well. But with this have been seen as a likely nominee in 1976. So there was a headline in the Atlantic Constitution. Jimmy Carter is running for what? And at this point, he'd already been planning for two years. Carter, when asked his profession, would often say planner. He was the founder of these planning councils in Southwest Georgia noted a lot of attention to this. And he methodically planned his race, successful race for governor four years right after he lost the first time. He has a born again experience and he goes door to door. And that was like 67, right? 67, 68. And he saw a sign saying if you were to be tried for being a Christian. And he said, I think I could probably get off given his degree of commitment of the time. So he decided he needed to commit himself and he goes door to door in the north in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. At one point, they even come upon a Bravo and he and his partner try to convert the madam unsuccessfully. But so throughout this period, he's already running for governor again planning. Same thing happened with president. The night Nixon one, he is starting his planning in 72. He's starting his planning for 76. But through the next few years, he's at 0% in the polls and nobody gives him any chance. And then he, he engineers this quite brilliant campaign in 1976. And just to go to your earlier question, you know, about his temperament. In many ways, he, I see him as an engineer with a humanist trying to escape, you know. And now he writes books of poetry and novels. But the engineering part of him is really central to who he is. And the self discipline. Enormous self discipline. And also to this day, the problem comes in is he thinks like a lot of engineers, if I can get to the right solution to this problem, I can break down the problem, fix it. Why can't everybody else see it that way? Since I've solved the problem or figured out the right way to solve the problem. And this I think is why engineers often fall just short of being CEOs. They're smarter than the CEO, but they're lacking some kind of natural leadership quality. So I ended up thinking of Carter as kind of a, you know, unusual, highly unusual president. And that he was a visionary without being a natural leader. Not just because he put solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Reagan took down. But there are literally scores of examples of him looking over the horizon and trying to do something. There was a gene for duty, responsibility, a willingness to tackle issues that everybody else doesn't want to touch. Jimmy Carter had that gene. He did not have the Schmu's gene, which made it often harder for him to get his way. Sure. And so how much in 1976 was his success that he managed to convince people justifiably that he was the opposite of Richard Nixon. If they were looking for someone with enormous ethics and compassion, as good as the American people, you know, this is the way to basically sweep out any vestiges of Nixon. He never would have been elected without the lies of Vietnam and Watergate. And he, you know, Ford was president, that's we beat, but he was in many ways running against the Nixon Ford administration. And he was doing it in a way that's very similar to the campaign Joe Biden ran. He wasn't a hard-hitting slashing campaign. He rarely mentioned the Nixon pardon only when asked, but then very briefly, he was running an upbeat. Although his vice presidential nominee did at the convention in 1976. Yeah, Mondale did some of that for him. But he came through the worst scandal in our history and the incumbent pardoned the guy who did it. Yes, yes, but Carter ran a kind of a vague campaign when it came to the issues. So he would be, you know, the moderate alternative when he was running against the liberals in the north and then the more liberal alternative when he was running against George Wallace. Well, well, let me stop you there. How much do you think he was helped by the fact that George Wallace was running in 1976? And a lot of people who probably would have found otherwise Carter too conservative wanted him to be the southern moderate who would drive Wallace out of the race as he basically did. Well, I mean, I think there were some voters who would calculate that, but he really won the Iowa caucus in New Hampshire primary because he reimagined what Iowa could be. Right, realized what it could be. A launching pad and and so when he was able to win in the north, that's, you know, was highly unlikely to happen that Southerners had not done well in New Hampshire in the past. He was ended up being the first Southerners since Zachary Taylor in 1848 to be elected president, but that Florida primary that you referred to where he beat Wallace and ended George Wallace's political career. I think that really set him on the course to the nomination and it was, you know, Jerry Brown got in at the end Frank Church. You'd all kept finishing second, but. And as you say, Humphrey thought of getting in. Yeah, Humphrey did not. Carter lost steam toward the end of the primaries in the same way that he did toward the end of the general election when Ford closed a huge gap with Jim Baker's help. But it took me a while. This is something that you probably would have been on earlier. That Florida primary we beat Wallace. It didn't just set him on the road to the White House. I think it was a very important historical marker for this country because it ended the racist wing of the Democratic Party. And that wing went back to the 1790s when the Democratic Republican Party was founded and then one of these were Dixie Crats. Yes, all the way through all the way through to the 1970s. And after Carter ended Wallace's career, you could not be an avowed segregationist or in any way suspect on the issue of race and continue to be a member of the Democratic Party. Right. All of those folks went into the Republican Party. Yep. No, that was a big moment. And Wallace endorsed him that year, which very few people might have imagined at the beginning of 1976. But I think it was a big moment. I think it was a big moment reluctantly. Yes. But at least for the record. Yeah. All right. I want to keep on going because I want to make sure we do the presidency and the ex-presidency. But one question about the campaign, and I'll make this compact since we don't have a lot of time. If Gerald Ford had not screwed up on Eastern Europe in the second debate, would Carter become president? True stance. I think he might have, because Ford was on the move in the polls. And that debate, which was on my birthday, it was October 6, 1976, that stalled Ford. And then later in October, he was able to pick up steam again. And a lot of analysts think that if the election had been held even two days later. But the trend would have continued. Yeah. And so if he had those three or four days when he stalled in early October, he might well have been re-elected. But at the same time, if the press hadn't gone crazy over the Playboy interview, which was in September, where Carter said he had lost his heart. I mean, that was, I couldn't believe when I researched this. That story, which now probably wouldn't survive a single news cycle, would be over by now. But he said he had lost in his heart and lost it after women. Right. It went on for like three weeks. It was nuts how long that story. And it hurt him really with conservatives, right? Because before then, I think I read it in your book, or maybe I knew it otherwise, that a lot of the polling found that he was liked equally by a lot of liberals, conservatives, and moderates. And that made him begin to look to some people weird. Well, it was, I was going to say it was the weirdness factor. Hamilton Jordan called it. And it's unclear. I think it's unclear who exactly that hurt him with. I think it hurt him with some moderates who just thought, you know, this guy's a blind date. This is too much of a gamble. Yeah. What are we buying here? We don't know him well enough. So, but, you know, he, in terms of conservatives, I mean, he carried the South, he carried Texas, not just, you know, Georgia, but like basically ran the table in the South, except Virginia, which went for Ford. So, but in those days, you know, Ford was Republicans were very competitive in the North, and he lost a number of what we now consider to be solidly blue states. Sure. Okay, I'm going to keep fast to make sure that we get everything in. So then comes the presidency. If you're talking to someone who does not remember Carter as president, which is an awful lot of people now. What do you tell them is important about those years? Well, first of all, I think it's important to understand. I mean, the reason that I have the Andy Warhol on the cover of the book is that Jimmy Carter was cool at this point at the time he was elected. And in his first year, you know, Hunter Thompson adored him, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and he's up in the 70s in popularity. But he has this post Watergate press corps, which had helped bring him to the White House. And then they leap on him and they turn everything into a gate, like Watergate, like every little flap is a gate. And so Bert Lantz and Bert Lantz not really heard him. He lost his very close friend and budget director. We stuck with too long. He's not doing great in his first two years, but does OK in the midterms. The Democrats do OK. And if things had gone the way they were, he probably would have been reelected. Then he swamped in 1979 and 1980 by the Iran hostage crisis, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Billy Carter's problems, Ted Kennedy's challenge. That's the part that everybody knows a lot about. I deal with it at length. There are very dramatic stories involved, particularly Carter's mistake in allowing the Shah of Iran into the United States for medical treatment, which just days later precipitated the seizure of the hostages in Iran. I think people remember that and they remember the goofy things like the killer rabbit approaches his canoe and he collapses in a road race. He has a TMI problem, so he tells the world he has hemorrhoids because he doesn't want to worry people and he believed in total transparency. It was said at the time that people were grateful that unlike Eisenhower who put out a lot of pictures from his operations, Carter did not decide to do that when he had hemorrhoids. Yes, and there's funny stories behind that. But my point and answer to your question is that these things became the focus. Meanwhile, there are serious and important things that he is accomplishing. Just to take one relevant example today, Trump would never have been impeached if it wasn't for the Ethics and Government Act of 1978, which gave the first whistleblower protections Inspector Generals Act, first Inspector Generals, FISA courts, the creation of FEMA, obviously the creation of the Departments of Education and Energy, deregulation of trucking and airlines and other sectors that were a huge boon for consumers and helped establish the just-in-time economy that powers Amazon and a lot of the rest of our domestic economy. And then I could go on for a long time on the domestic side, but on the foreign policy side. So you have Camp David, most durable and important peace treaty since World War II. He has to put the whole thing back together again six months later because it fell apart. Right. So this is a world-class diplomatic performance by a president. Who had never really been involved in foreign policy beyond the trilateral commission before. That's right. But he also, I didn't realize that the Panama Canal treaties, which sounds like kind of a sleepy story, this is how Ron Reagan almost, this is how he came to national prominence in 1976 when he almost got the nomination. And, you know, we don't want to give the canal back. So it was enormously unpopular, but Carter managed to get these treaties through the Senate. And this was a huge accomplishment because the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it prevented us having to send 100,000 troops to Panama in perpetuity. They would have had to stay there and we would have had basically a Vietnam in our backyard. The establishment of full diplomatic relations with China, which Carter believes will be his longest lasting legacy. This is the foundation. Look at how it changes our life to this day. It's the foundation of the global economy, that bilateral relationship, and there's a whole story there. And then I think in some ways most important is human rights policy, which was hypocritical. You know, he supported the Shah of Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, but it was the first time really in modern history anyway, that a head of state said that his foreign policy would depend in part on how governments treated their own people. And this even conservatives said it helped win the Cold War. Boscov-Havill says this, and it helped kick off a democratic revolution in Latin America and parts of Asia. And so there's a lot to kind of get your arms around substantively about the Carter presidency that I think has been, honestly, has been neglected by history. And also I think, and see if this sounds right to you, that one reason among many white people love the book so much is that, you know, who was president in 2020. This is basically about as much the opposite of Donald Trump as you can find. And as much as he was the anti-Nixon in 1976, I think he's the anti-Trump in 2020. I mean, even though I knew the general outlines of the story, it was just exciting to me to be reminded of who he was, how he practiced politics, what he accomplished, enormous modesty. Yeah, I mean, he promised not to lie, and even though he exaggerated some. And Bob Dole joke that in so doing, he was giving up the substantial liars vote among Americans. Well, Charlie Kerbo, his close friend and aide told him that you're going to lose the liar vote. Right, right. If anybody cheats on their life. I guess Dole said it in public and Kerbo said it in private. But, you know, he really, I looked pretty hard and he really didn't tell any, you know, for five Pinocchio liars. Right. And there was a, you know, he can be a cold, difficult person. And there are many layers to him. Even like Trump, it was Stephen Colbert says is fundamentally boring, you know, because we know exactly who he is. Yeah, you're never going to find another layer. Carter is all layers. He really contains multitudes. And sometimes you think he's zen, and sometimes you think he is a cold SOB. And the answer is he's both. And so this really kept me going. And he became an escape from Trump. Every time it would motivate. I was going to say, you know, of all the books, you would have had so much fun writing during this period. Yes. Must have been an escape. Yes, because there's this core decency. So when I'd be going through his papers, they would be kind of brushing away the toxins. Right. Trump. And I didn't have to think about Trump. And it was much better to think about Carter. And then one day, you know, I did a number of in-person interviews and helped build a house with him in Memphis for Habitat. And I, you know, went on the road with him to the Naval Academy. But later in the process, I was dealing with him by email, which unfortunately is not possible anymore because his site is now mostly gone. And he would respond almost right away to my fact-checking questions and my other inquiries. And, you know, I'd send him 10 questions. I'd go out for a walk and I'd come back and have the answers. And at one point I said, you know, Donald Trump is an outsider. You are an outsider. Do you have anything in common with Donald Trump? And when I got back from my walk, I just saw one word answer. No. I assume that smoke was coming from your computer in getting his reply. We've got about three more minutes, so I want to make sure that we get in the ex-presidency. We were talking offline about the fact that I think we both agree that this is justified, that he is impatient with people who say he's the best ex-president in history, which I always think is like saying something is the best restaurant in a hospital or something like that. Forgive me, anyone watching who works in a hospital restaurant. But why is that and why do you think he's been so popular since he left? Well, so I kind of argue that his presidency is underrated, his post-presidency is a tad overrated, very inspirational, but, you know, he didn't have any power as a former president and that's why I devoted a shorter part of the book to that period and also Doug Brinkley wrote a whole long book about it. But, so Jimmy Carter reinvented three important roles in American life. First, he reinvented the vice-presidency, revolutionized it. He was the first president to give his vice-president an office in the West Wing and, you know, real substantive responsibilities. And the vice-president staff was on the Carter staff and he really nailed the two. There were a whole series of things. He put them in the military chain of command, which had never happened before. He revolutionized the role of the first lady and Rosalind Carter became the most powerful first lady at that point in American history, much more powerful, say, than Eleanor Roosevelt and influential with her husband. And then after he left office, he revolutionized the post-presidency and set a new standard for how, I don't think Trump will do it, but other former presidents feel like they have to do something more than play golf. They can't just go off and do nothing or make money. Right. And Carter did not cash in, did not go on those boards. He leads a very modest life and that's inspiring. And, you know, he's basically eradicated Guinea worm disease, which used to afflict more than three million people. And this has ruined many more millions of lives in African villages and made progress against several other diseases. His monitoring of elections has been very important. He doesn't actually run Habitat for Humanity, but by doing a Habitat house building once a year for a week, he put that organization on the map, the largest builder of nonprofit housing in the world. And then the peacekeeping was actually a little bit less significant than I thought when I started. But in 1994, he did prevent wars in Haiti and North Korea, and very possibly on the Korean Peninsula, but he did so in a way that included kind of an ego turn. He went on CNN before he reported back to Bill Clinton in both cases, infuriating the Clinton. So his fraught... And they had this odd relationship with you allude to? Yes, very fraught relationship that goes back many years. And I interviewed George H.W. Bush as well as Barack Obama for the book. And Bush, who was in touch not long before he died, ended up with great respect for Carter and was especially appreciative of Carter talking Daniel Ortega into leading power in 1990 when Ortega had lost an election. And unlike Trump, this Marxist leader, after, you know, was willing to relinquish power peacefully, Carter told him it's hard to lose, you can make a comeback, but you have to do this for the people of Nicaragua. And he did. So Bush was very grateful for that, but he also... Carter went behind Bush's back in the run-up to the Gulf War, and he actually privately contacted other heads of state telling them to vote against Bush in the UN, which Bush considered pretty understandably to be a terrible breach. And as Bush said, you know, to me, we only have one president at a time, and Carter didn't fully respect that. And so he became kind of a freelance secretary of state that caused some real problems for his successors. Well, that's the reason it's so spectacular to write about. All right, I wish we had about three more hours, but instead everyone should buy the book, read the book quickly, and John and I will call you up tomorrow morning with a quiz. Final question, has he and his family read the book, and what kind of reactions have you been getting? So Carter, as I mentioned, is having trouble with his sight, and so he has been listening to the book. Did you read the book for audiobook? No, this wonderful black actor named Michael Boatman reads the book, and he does a terrific job, and Carter, according to somebody who visited him recently, is very appreciative. He knows that there is criticism in it, but he's appreciative that somebody finally came along and did this. Rosalind, and she has in common with Barbara Bush's initial reaction to John Meacham's biography of Bush, you know, she's a little harder on my book. Every spouse I've ever met of this, it's usually what happens. But you know, I've gotten a very nice response from Carter's circle, which is one of them summarized, their reaction was finally. I think that's exactly right, and that's what I would say. John, thank you, this is a gift to all of us Americans, and it's particularly a gift, as I was saying earlier in the year 2020, anyone who is feeling downhearted about presidential leadership and the goodness of humankind, read John's book. You'll feel a lot better and you'll learn an immense amount about American political history. Thank you so much. This has deserved every wonderful word that's been written and said about it. Congratulations, John. Thank you so much, Michael, for doing this, and thanks to the National Archives. Thank you to everyone who's watching and listening. Stay well, have a great holiday, and everyone stay safe. Thank you very much for joining us.