A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Archery and the Race Issue

CHAPTER TWO

Navy Years

CHAPTER THREE

Back to Georgia

CHAPTER FOUR

Atlanta to Washington

CHAPTER FIVE

Life in the White House

CHAPTER SIX

Issues Mostly Resolved

CHAPTER SEVEN

Problems Still Pending

CHAPTER EIGHT

Back Home

Acknowledgments

About Jimmy Carter

Illustration Credits

Index

To Rosalynn, who has kept my life full of love

R
eaching my ninetieth birthday is a good time to look back on moments that changed my life and reflect on some of the memories that are especially important to me. Some of these events affected me profoundly or taught me lessons, large and small. Others are amusing, and some make me contemplate who I was at that time. There are some that I enjoyed and savor, and others that I wish had never happened or that I could change.

I spent four of my ninety years in the White House, and they were, of course, the pinnacle of my political life. Those years, though, do not dominate my chain of memories, and there was never an orderly or planned path to get there during my early life. At each step in my career, I made somewhat peremptory decisions about the next one.

I had no idea of returning home during the eleven years when I served in the navy, or of running for political office while I was farming and expanding my business. I ran for Congress and then shifted to governor to fill a competitive urge, and then really enjoyed making decisions as a top government executive. I saw the presidency as a way to accomplish specific goals that I considered important, decided four years in advance to be elected, and my entire family joined in the all-out campaign.

With hard work and favorable circumstances, I was chosen, and I relished the challenges and opportunities to make important decisions as president. I always tried to address the issues forthrightly. I wanted another term, but seemed to be plagued with a series of misfortunes when the time for reelection came. I look back on those four years with peace
and satisfaction, knowing that I did my best and had some notable accomplishments. Vice President Mondale summarized our administration by saying, “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.” I would add, “We championed human rights.”

Teaching, writing, and helping The Carter Center evolve during more recent times seem to constitute the high points in my life. I don’t think I have changed much in this entire process, but I have learned some helpful lessons, and they are the primary subject of this book.

I have written a number of books about some of my experiences, including my boyhood on a farm, my religious beliefs, my outdoor adventures, our time in the White House, and major projects of The Carter Center during the past thirty-four years. I still receive between fifteen hundred and three thousand letters each month, varying according to how controversial my latest statements or writings have been, but there are always a number of them from readers of these earlier books who wish to share their similar experiences with me. There is a list of these books on page iii for readers who desire to pursue any of these subjects more deeply. I have also commented in op-eds and published speeches on a number of important political issues, especially in an attempt to bring peace in the Middle East and to promote human rights. Many of them are posted on the website
www.cartercenter.org
.

Some of the more personal and intimate events of my life are covered here for the first time, including my years on battleships and submarines, my seventeen years as a farmer involved in local community affairs, my reasons for entering politics and eventually running for president, the campaigns themselves, some of the unpublicized things that happened to me or my family during our years in the White House, special people, my relationships with other presidents, and how Rosalynn and I have spent our more private times since the Washington years.

M
y life has been shaped inevitably by the experiences and decisions of my forefathers, and I have learned a lot about my family history. My mother was Bessie Lillian Gordy, and I knew all her intimate relatives and many of her distant cousins. We would sometimes drive after church services to Richland, her hometown, to have dinner with her close-knit family, where the table conversation often led to an explosion of emotions and angry departures. My father was James Earl Carter, and I never knew even his close cousins who lived in the county seat just nine miles from our home in Plains. It seemed that the Carters were not interested in each other.

During my first year as president, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the White House and presented me with a genealogical study of my Carter family. The information went back thirteen generations, to the early 1600s, and included birth, death, and marriage records, land deeds, and data from some of the early courthouse proceedings that involved legal disputes. I put it all in a big box and sent it to our home in Plains. After leaving the White House I bought my first computer and entered the Mormon research data when I was sent the first edition of a software program called Family Tree Maker. My wife Rosalynn’s family always had three reunions each year (there would have been four if two Smiths hadn’t married each other), so in 1998 I decided to have a reunion of the direct descendants of my great-great-grandfather
Wiley Carter, on what would have been his two hundredth birthday. More than 950 people came, and I corrected mistakes in my family records and brought them up to date. More recently, I gave the data to our son Jeffrey, and he has published a much more definitive study,
Ancestors of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter,
focusing on our time in America.

These were rough pioneer days as immigrants struggled for existence or preeminence, and even our more recent family history was, to a surprising degree, shaped by violence. Wiley Carter (1798–1864) was deputized in a sheriff’s posse in Wilkes County when he shot and killed a man named Usry. There was a routine one-day trial, and the sheriff testified, “Usry was evidently preparing to shoot Carter. The two men were cursing each other and both raised their guns about the same time and fired. Usry was killed.” Wiley was found not guilty of murder because the victim was armed and threatening. However, it was known that there had been a long history of ill will between the two men, and after the trial a lot of resentment was stirred up in the community by Usry’s family and friends. After Wiley’s wife, Ann, delivered her eleventh child and died, Wiley remarried and moved to a farm about ten miles north of where the town of Plains is located. He had traded for the land with an original owner, who won it in a lottery that was held in 1833, after Indians had been forced to leave West Georgia in the late 1820s. Wiley’s second wife had another son, who moved to Texas.

Wiley’s fourth son, Littleberry Walker Carter (1829–1873), was my great-grandfather. He served with two of his brothers as artillerymen in the Confederate army. They fought in twenty-one battles and finally left the service in Florida, a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He then bought and operated a farm just west of Americus that later became Souther Field (now Jimmy Carter Regional Airport), where Charles Lindbergh made his first solo flight. He was killed “in an argument over the proceeds of a flying jenny [merry-go-round]” in 1873, as recorded in the county newspaper.

Known as Billy, his son and my grandfather William Archibald Carter (1858–1903) moved in 1888 about fifty miles south to a rural community known as Rowena, where he was a farmer, operated two sawmills and a
winery, and owned a cotton gin. He was small but tough. One time when he was harvesting sugarcane, his machete was deflected into his thigh, inflicting a deep gash. Billy used his belt to stop the flow of blood, sent to the house for a needle and thread, sewed up the wound, and resumed work. He was shot and killed in a fight with a man named Will Taliaferro, in an altercation over a desk stolen by Taliaferro from Billy’s cotton gin. After his property was sold, Billy’s family moved back to Plains and purchased a farm in nearby Webster County in 1904, which my father, Earl Carter, became responsible for operating as a teenager. I can only imagine the multiple skills needed to perform all the duties of my ancestors, and it may be that my inclination to pursue new ideas and to design and create things in my woodshop is inherited from them.

My mother, Lillian Gordy, left her job as a postal clerk in Richland and moved eighteen miles to Plains (population about five hundred) in 1920 to become a registered nurse. She married Earl when she finished her training, in 1923. I was born in October 1924, and our family lived in a house on South Bond Street with Edgar and Allie Smith as next-door neighbors. Edgar was the only automobile mechanic in the community, and directly across the street from his shop my father owned and operated a small general store after completing military service as a first lieutenant in World War I. The Smiths’ daughter Rosalynn was born in August 1927, and my mother later told me that I was taken to the house next door and peeked into the cradle to see the newest baby on the street. Our families were very close, and Rosalynn’s younger sister was named for Mama, who nursed Rosalynn’s father during his terminal illness with leukemia. Daddy became a full-time farmer in 1928, when I was four years old. I was raised on a farm he bought about two and a half miles west of Plains in the rural community known as Archery.

My boyhood home in Archery was a Sears, Roebuck house that had been built six years before our family occupied it. At that time the Sears catalogue offered homes of several sizes, with three basic options: (1) all the components of a complete house and the tools needed to construct it, loaded into a single railroad boxcar with plans and instructions; (2) everything needed for a house except the lumber; and (3) just the plans and instructions, practically free but requiring doors, windows, hardware, and other parts that were sold by Sears. We learned later that our home was one of the second options, since genetic testing showed that its wooden frame and siding had come from trees harvested on the farm.

My boyhood home in Archery was a Sears, Roebuck house that had been built six years before our family occupied it in 1928. There were about two hundred people who lived in the unincorporated community of Archery.

There was no running water, electricity, or insulation, and the only heat sources besides the kitchen stove were some open fireplaces, all fueled by wood and used just when badly needed. We relieved ourselves in “slop jars” during the night and emptied them in an outdoor toilet when it was daylight. It was the only privy on the farm; other families just used the bushes for concealment. We drew water from a well in the backyard until 1935, when Daddy had a windmill installed and ran a pipe from its tank into our kitchen and bathroom. He made a shower bath by punching holes in the bottom of a galvanized bucket hanging over a concrete floor, and the used water ran through a pipe onto the ground outside. It was especially cold in winter, but more convenient than a galvanized bathtub. Electricity reached some farms near us in 1939, and after a year or so Daddy prevailed on the local cooperative to extend the lines to our home.