Jonathan alter his very best
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HIS VERY BEST
Presidential historian Alter delivers the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Jimmy Carter.
James Earl Carter Jr. (b. ), the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, can be “brisk—sometimes peevish—in private, with a biting wit beneath the patented smile.” So writes Alter, observing that Carter, who cooperated with the author, was not always the nice guy of his public image. What irritates him most, it seems, is the widespread, almost canonical perception that he was weak. “I made many bold decisions,” Carter insists, “almost all of which were difficult to implement and not especially popular.” Alter demonstrates as much, meticulously unfolding proof of Carter’s many accomplishments while just as carefully showing his missteps. High on the list of the latter was a managerial style that left Cabinet members to operate pretty much as they wished, leading to incoherence at times. However, his achievements, both during his presidency and after, are significant, as A
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His Very Best
Prologue PROLOGUE
JUNE
It was just hours before the first day of summer, and the sunny weather in Washington, DC, was perfect for a leisurely drive in the country. But June 20, , was the wrong day for Wednesday golf or a picnic at Bull Run. That week, more than half of the nation’s gas stations were running out of gas.
The morning’s Washington Post reported that local authorities were inundated with requests for carpools from angry motorists who couldn’t get to work, yet a small collection of harried reporters and dignitaries managed to find transportation to the White House. There the beleaguered president of the United States was preparing yet another announcement that would lead to eye rolling in the press corps and make little news. The only thing that stood out then about this seemingly minor event was its unusual location: the West Wing roof.
The spring and summer gas shortages marked the worst of a depressing , a year that would later see the seizure of
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His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life
Jonathan Alter writes in the introduction to the first full-scale, comprehensive biography ( pages; pages of text) of Jimmy Carter that he began the book in , but that after the election of
I felt a new urgency. It seemed to me there was no better time to reexamine our superficial assessments of Jimmy Carter. inom write out of a fragile hope that the life story of the thirty-ninth president might help light our way back to some sense of decency, accountability, and seriousness in our politics….
I figured that there must be more to Jimmy Carter than the easy shorthand: inept president who becomes a noble ex-president. When I learned that he would almost certainly have begun to address global warming in the early s had he been reelected, inom was hooked. I set out to paint a portrait of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.
Alter goes on to list Carter’s accomp