Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975-2020

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter #2

by E. Stanly Godbold Jr.

The dual biography of the powerful First Couple who attempted to use their presidency to bring peace, human rights, and justice to all peoples of the world and dedicated the remainder of their long lives to making a safer, more caring world.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's marriage of over seventy-five years is the longest of any American presidential couple and has been described by them as a "full partnership." President Bill Clinton once said that they have changed more lives around the world than any couple in world history. Their lives have been public and private models of honesty and integrity in post-Watergate America.

The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy. It picks up with their departure from the Georgia governor's mansion and their tireless campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, the first time a Southerner won the White House in over a century. It details the Carter couple's struggle for recognition on a national stage, the challenges of rising energy costs, mounting inflation, geopolitical tensions, and the "October Surprise" that tainted the 1980 election in which they went down to defeat. During these years, Rosalynn demonstrated that she was a better politician than her husband, offering policy advice,
serving as ambassador extraordinaire, sitting in on Cabinet meetings, and working determinedly to provide care and respect for those suffering from mental illness. Their post-presidential work has been unprecedented on the international stage with Habitat for Humanity and especially their establishment of the Carter Center to "wage peace, fight disease, build hope." Carter, after reaching the zenith of his career in negotiating the Camp David Accords of 1978, continued for decades to work for peace in the Middle East. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a prize which he quickly said equally belonged to Rosalynn and to the Carter Center.

Among the greatest peacemakers of the twentieth century, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter emerge from this account as inspirational giants in American history and a shining example of the power of a couple in public service.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Politics

904 pages, Hardcover

Published September 20, 2022

About the author

E. Stanly Godbold, Jr. is professor emeritus of history at Mississippi State University.

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I write this on the last day of 2023, it’s been more than a month since Rosalynn Carter passed and, improbably, nearly a year since Jimmy Carter entered home hospice care. So there’s been ample opportunity this year for the country and the world to reflect on the couple’s lives and legacies, until the day inevitably comes - hopefully not too soon - when we mark the passing of Jimmy Carter himself.

Until then, we have Godbold’s two-volume dual biography to consider. It’s long - and, apologies in advance, so is this review. Because I have thoughts.

With a combined 1,300 pages that span nearly a century from the Carters’ births to the beginning of the Biden administration, the two volumes together do not necessarily represent the most insightful assessment of their lives and legacies. But they are undoubtedly the most thorough. And while I often felt Godbold could have provided more context and perspective, there is much to be gained by taking in the information he provides and using it to reach your own conclusions.

Volume one ended with Carter’s decision to run for president. So volume two picks up with the primary and general election campaigns, and spends a good 100 pages on this period, showing no impatience to zip ahead to the presidency. Godbold characterizes candidate Carter as shrewdly managing to present himself as both a regular guy and a policy wonk, a humble southerner and a knowledgeable man of the world, who had a personal touch with regular voters while also cultivating support from the well-connected, all while displaying an ability when necessary “to be politically evasive and win votes on both sides of an issue.” As for Rosalynn, her “gentle, lady-like nature masked the ambition of a brilliant, politically experienced woman.” In short, he writes, the Carters “posed as ordinary people,” but were anything but.

While Godbold aimed to write a dual biography portraying Jimmy and Rosalynn as equal partners, Rosalynn is more of a supporting character here in what is largely her husband’s story. But Godbold includes her whenever possible, whether emphasizing her tireless campaigning, or looking at familiar campaign events through the prism of what she thought about them - Carter’s infamous “lust in my heart” Playboy interview, for example, is looked at not only in the context of how it affected his campaign, but how it affected Rosalynn.

As a side note, I will say that at a time when people travel and relocate more, when our regional differences are less pronounced, and we’re generally more welcoming of and accustomed to diversity, it's interesting to look back 50 years and see just how alien a southern religious presidential candidate seemed to so many at that time.

Nevertheless, Carter won, of course, which brings us to the centerpiece of the book and its focus on his presidency. Godbold foreshadows some of the issues and challenges that Carter would face in Washington, portraying him as a political iconoclast, doing things his own way, antagonizing some power players even before his administration began. He showed an early commitment to human rights, Middle East peace and maintaining good relations with Iran, all of which proved to be major issues in his administration. As a manager and in his dealings with Congress, meanwhile, Carter is said to have “preferred government by memo in lieu of old-fashioned backslapping and horse-trading,” as many members of Congress felt he did not seem to recognize them as an equal branch of government.

As the book works its way through the Carter presidency, it is almost defiantly not thematic. This can be a strength in ways, as the rigidly chronological approach gives you a sense of how events played out in real time, intersecting and overlapping, the meaningful mixing with the mundane. Godbold is able to incorporate a lot of anecdotes this way, relating less-important stories not often told in Carter biographies, which lend some color and flavor to his story (I didn’t know, or didn’t recall having read, for example, that Carter once took his family on a weeklong riverboat cruise down the Mississippi, mingling with the tourists on board and making speeches to crowds on the shoreline to promote his energy program).

But this approach can also lead to a lot of narrative whiplash. Going from Middle East peace, to an Ohio coal workers’ strike, to the energy crisis, to the far-off Marshall Islands’ desire for home rule does have the effect of portraying a dynamic presidency that dealt with a wide range of both important and long-forgotten issues. But it also causes much of the book to read like a mere chronicle of events - this happened, then this happened, then this happened - like an infodump of the presidential daily schedule, with little analysis and frequently-clumsy transitional sentences meant to get us from one unrelated topic to the next.

Another critique, as long as I’m at it, is that Godbold can sometimes outright declare something to be true when we - or he - don’t necessarily know that to be the case. The most glaring example is when he treats the hotly-debated “October Surprise theory” - which places Reagan campaign manager William Casey, George H.W. Bush and others in Paris, engaging in secret meetings to prolong the Iran hostages’ captivity until after the 1980 election - as settled fact, with copious end notes but no attributions in the text or acknowledgments that we don’t know with certainty what, if anything, actually happened. It may well have occurred as he describes it, and some have come close to proving that it did, but there are still enough ambiguities that Godbold hasn’t earned the right to state authoritatively that “the mounting evidence, scholarship, and journalistic investigations proved that the Republicans’ October Surprise did take place,” full stop.

Lesser examples have Godbold relating potentially apocryphal or unconfirmed stories that aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, but aren’t necessarily true just because he saw them in print somewhere. A story about Carter planting a kiss directly on the lips of the shocked Queen Mother during a visit to Buckingham Palace is attributed in the end notes to a 2020 Daily Express article, which itself cites a 2010 Daily Mirror article, which cites a biography of the Queen Mother, which cites unnamed press reports, the first of which to reference this story didn’t emerge until years after the meeting where the incident purportedly happened. Carter, for what it’s worth, (reportedly) insisted that he just gave the Queen Mum a simple peck on the cheek.

My main critique, though, is that the events of Carter’s presidency as told in this book seem to take place in a Washington-centric bubble. Godbold broadly hints at Carter's growing unpopularity among the public, alluding to it by citing poll numbers, barbs from political opponents and the occasional negative story by journalists. But the public is largely invisible in Godbold’s telling - he never gets at why so many average Americans disapproved of Carter’s performance, and why there was a very real sense of “malaise” at the time.

Instead, he tends to either downplay or ignore it. He heaps blame on aide Pat Caddell for Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech, saying he was the one to convince both of the Carters to spend a week cloistered at Camp David engaging in endless navel-gazing introspection, which ultimately resulted in the speech. He casually makes mention of newly-appointed White House communications director Jerry Rafshoon, without mentioning he was brought in to help boost Carter's floundering approval ratings. He oddly downplays the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, saying Carter “knew that the technical problems could be corrected, but the sensationalist media employed rhetoric that sold newspapers.” And he dismisses the devastatingly critical article that disillusioned former speechwriter James Fallows wrote, as a mere “petty squabble,” he does not analyze its content, and makes no mention of its impact on the public (and, to be nit-picky, he misstates one of the better-known critiques in the piece, by saying Fallows wrote that Carter micromanaged so much that “he personally scheduled the use of the White House swimming pool” when it was actually the tennis courts that Fallows had referred to.)

In short, everything seems to happen in a vacuum. No public reaction is ever cited, to the malaise speech, the gas lines, the Iran hostage crisis, the Olympics boycott - all of which generated a lot of public reaction, but you wouldn’t know it here. A single sentence acknowledges that, while Carter had successes with foreign policy, voters in 1980 “were more concerned about the hostages, energy shortages, inflation, unemployment, and not participating in the Olympic Games than international diplomacy.”

Ultimately, while Carter did much good as president, he comes across as rather overwhelmed by the unending responsibilities of the presidency, keeping his focus on important issues - and issues important to him - that the public didn't seem to notice or care about, while failing to solve the issues that did have a greater impact on their daily lives. “Gasoline lines, inflation, and long-held hostages” had a more visceral impact on voters, while “serious issues of SALT II, the normalization of relations with China, civil service and welfare reform, mental health, and human rights” just didn’t move the needle as much, for better or worse.

What of Rosalynn, meanwhile, the professed second character in this dual biography? Godbold provides thorough accounts of her roles as diplomat and campaigner, representing her husband on various overseas trips or campaign events. He recounts her work on her own issues like mental health and her outspoken support for the ERA. And he portrays her as a close confidante to her husband, offering ideas, advice and suggested speech revisions. “Although Jimmy sometimes disagreed with her,” Godbold writes, “he always listened.”

After the presidency, there’s still a lot of ground to cover in this very long book. While many other Carter biographies skim over the post-presidency with a brief overview of some of the highlights like Habitat for Humanity, the Carters’ work in Africa, and the Nobel Peace Prize, Godbold takes the exceedingly thorough, blow-by-blow, chronicle-of-events approach, with all of the benefits and drawbacks that entails. In addition to the well-known highlights, he chronicles the establishment of the Carter Center, with its aim to solve global problems without stepping on the current administration’s toes, which only resulted in some inevitable overlap that often caused tension. So, too, did the Carters’ tendency to speak their minds and not hold back in criticizing their successors, which often made them the odd ones out in the ex-Presidents’ and First Ladies’ clubs.

Without taking sides, Godbold covers controversial issues like Carter’s freelance diplomacy, which had critics accusing him of coddling dictators; his attempts to thwart the Bush 43 administration’s plans to go to war in Iraq, which critics said bordered on treason; and his positions on Middle East peace, which had critics accusing him of being too stridently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Ultimately, Godbold does come down on the side of giving Carter great credit for his successes that he says are largely unheralded by history, because “peace was not as glamorous as war.”

The Carters are perhaps most popularly known for their work with Habitat for Humanity, even though it’s often erroneously believed they founded the organization. Godbold for some reason straddles the issue, as though he can't decide whether to emphasize or downplay the Carters’ involvement. He says at one point that despite his work at the Carter Center, Carter’s “heart seemed to be with Habitat,” then immediately shifts gears to declare bluntly that “Habitat occupied only one week each year in Jimmy and Rosalynn’s lives.”

The frequency of distracting typos increases as the book nears its end, suggesting a possible rush to finish the book and get it into print. Dates are misstated, words are misspelled, and names are mangled (“Kim Jon Il” is substituted twice for Kim Jong Un, and George Romney is said to have been a 2012 presidential candidate).

The end of the book just about brings us to the present day, and its conclusion neatly summarizes the two volumes. Despite all the drawbacks as described above, the books are still incredibly comprehensive and leave you with the feeling that you’ve learned just about everything about the Carters there is to know, while somehow still leaving you wanting more.

Toward the end, there’s a now-poignant reference to a 2008 essay that Rosalynn wrote, about “how longevity was leading to new problems of dementia,” in which she observed that “this blessing of long life presents us with a new set of formidable challenges.” Both Carters’ twilight years certainly came with their share of challenges. But Godbold’s excellent but imperfect, comprehensive but incomplete, sympathetic but honest books do ultimately show that theirs were certainly lives well lived.

[Henry Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stanly Godbold’s second volume on the Carters is well-researched and remarkably detailed. Certainly the reader gets to know the Carters and their family quite well. But the book gets bogged down in details, especially when the post-White House era is covered. We are treated to an almost exhaustive, year by year rundown of the Carters’s lives in that timeframe. Furthermore, the copy editing is poor, a detail this reviewer normally ignores but the errors were too numerous to count, especially for a title that is published by Oxford University Press.
But perhaps the worst aspect of this book is Godbold’s clear ire towards Ronald Reagan and his repeating of questionable aspects of the “October Surprise” story. Some details have been established by other scholars, but Godbold goes beyond those to categorically and unfairly implicate the Reagan campaign in an effort to delay the release of the hostages. Equally as problematic is Godbold’s hostility towards Israel, which seems to be as strong as the subjects he writes about. While informative, this volume disappoints in a number of ways. Rating 3/5

[Jonathan Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finish this 700 page book the evening of the State Funeral of Jimmy Carter. It is certainly a well researched book and the author really breaks down the Carter presidency in great detail often day by day. I found this part enjoyable yet tedious at times. What was lacking was attention to the almost half century after the presidency, which, if the media is correct, was really the Carters’ moment in the sun. You won’t necessarily find it here, however. The end seems rushed and simply a laundry list unfortunately. I am also highly critical of the author’s blame on Carter’s 1980 election loss, whjch he attributes more on Reagan’s unproven duplicity than Carter’s own failures. A more balanced approach and a shorter book was needed here.

[John Taylor Pullen]

spoiler alert: I of course have not read this book yet ⏤ I did however read his "Georgia Years" and that is the first book in this two-part biography.

This book seems quite a bit longer than the first one ⏤ but as such it was a refreshing time travel to Old Archery and the world of Georgia politics.

I bought the book used from a bookshop in Winston-Salem many years ago which has since then moved ⏤ called Edward McKay ⏤ and I'm not sure if that would play a part in the sentimentality.

Good luck with this ⏤ I'm not sure if you'll read this one without the other.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good summary of the president and First Lady’s life during and after the White House

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-researched book, however, I docked it a star because the proofreading got noticeably worse starting around the 30th chapter. A book as massive as this one needs multiple proofreaders.