EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: President Jimmy Carter

On May 18, 2007, I interviewed President Jimmy Carter in his office in the Carter Center in Atlanta. The thirty-ninth president granted me an unusually long interview, excerpts from which are printed here. GE: Mr. President, first, let me thank you for meeting with me today. I know that devoting an hour to an interview is unusual. I am honored to have this opportunity, and our readers will be most grateful for your insights. The first question I have is a broad one. I do not have to tell you that there are great differences among the contexts of presidencies in such fundamental aspects of politics as the state of the economy, the party alignment in Congress, or the issues on the agenda. Richard Neustadt once commented that it was silly that so many people in 1977 were using the LBJ analogy of 1965 to think about your presidency. From your perspective as president, how did the context of your presidency affect you as you set out to govern? PRESIDENT CARTER: I had been governor when Nixon was in office and part of the time when Johnson was there. I campaigned for a long time, throughout 1975 and up until November 1976, in all fifty states. I had intimate contacts with different constituencies, beginning with just tiny groups and building as I gained popularity and fame. I had a very good opportunity to learn from my choice of the most respected analysts or thinkers on the political scene, primarily those who related to the Democratic party. I would bring busloads of key people down to Plains after I won the nomination, and after I won the election, to give me intense briefings all day long, maybe forty or fifty people at a time, on the economy, on the Panama Canal issue, on the Middle East, or on relationships with Russia and China--whatever I wanted. So I was thoroughly familiar with the issues when I finally was inaugurated. Before that, I worked very intimately with Dr. Brzezinski in outlining roughly ten major goals that I wanted to accomplish while I was in the White House. I was minimally affected by what Johnson had done or Kennedy had done, although I was aware of it. My hero among my predecessors was Harry Truman. I thought he epitomized what I wanted to be as a president. I was heavily affected by his ordaining an end to racial segregation in the military, years before Rosa Parks sat in the front row of the bus or Martin Luther King was known. Maybe I was overly confident when I was inaugurated about what I could do. I recognize that my positions were somewhat of an anomaly in that I was not compatible with the Kennedy regime, the liberal wing of the party. I was not compatible with the Richard Russell and Walter George constituency in the South. I was very progressive on social issues and very conservative on balancing the budget and on a strong military. That created a quandary in the assessments by news reporters and columnists and, I guess, by many of the people with whom I had to work in Congress. I deliberately chose Walter Mondale to be my running mate because he and I were compatible personally, but also because I wanted somebody that was younger and progressive and was familiar with the congressional scene. Hubert Humphrey was kind of a hero of mine as well, so that is why I went ultimately toward Walter Mondale. I had a pretty clear concept of what I wanted to accomplish when I went to the White House. I heard a cacophony of voices in dealing with some of the major issues that I would face. Energy, for instance, was one. I had been immersed in education matters before I got into politics when I was a state senator, and when I was governor. I saw the need, for instance, to create new departments for Energy and Education. I brought them together, I think thirty-three agencies into Energy--I cannot remember exactly, and I made Education a separate entity. I was taken aback in my first few clays in the White House. I could not get a single Democrat to sponsor my legislation that I wanted for reorganizing the government, legislation that gave me authority to reorganize and then Congress authority to veto what I did. …