His Very Best (1924-2024)

A little of my experience as Carter's biographer

When I heard the news of Jimmy Carter’s death, I felt a sense of loss for the country and the world. We need his sense of decency and ceaseless commitment to helping other people. But I was also flooded with personal memories — not just of my time with Carter and his family but of the whole process of trying to write a biography of a formidable, complex man who became a world-historical figure. Rather than writing another piece about his legacy, which I did here when he went into hospice in early 2023 and in TIME, I thought I’d take you back to researching and writing the book between 2015 and 2020.

The timing was auspicious. When I began my research, the importance of character in the White House was not yet an issue in America. I was working in the Carter Library in Atlanta when Donald Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015. MSNBC asked me to go to a studio and comment on his attacks on Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. When I returned to the library, I found that turning the pages of documents that validated Carter’s core values had the effect of brushing away some of the toxins of our times. My book became a kind of balm — and continued providing relief for me in the following years.

At the same time, Trump’s election in 2016 gave my Carter project a new urgency — and it kindled a fragile hope that his life story might help light our way back to at least a slightly better politics.

I first met Jimmy Carter — for a split-second handshake — on the South Lawn of the White House on the 4th of July, 1978, when I was a college intern in his speechwriting office. In early 1980, like so many Democrats, I grew disillusioned with him. I worked for a few weeks as a part-time volunteer on Ted Kennedy’s campaign against him in the Democratic primaries. That was dumb. Carter wasn’t a bad president, just swamped by cataclysmic events and ideologically trapped: Too conservative for liberals, too liberal for conservatives.

Thirty-five years later, I found myself drawn back to a perplexing leader and to his virtuoso achievement— the 1978 Camp David Accords, which brought peace to Israel and Egypt after 2000 years of enmity and became the most durable major treaty of the postwar era.

My book group in New York was reading a book about Camp David by Lawrence Wright, and one of our members had worked in Jason Carter’s unsuccessful campaign for governor of Georgia in 2014. He arranged for Jason and the former president to come to our group. Carter was 90 and ridiculously sharp. As he talked about Camp David, the idea of a book took shape. If he pulled that off, I figured, there must be more to him than the easy shorthand — inept president/noble ex-president. Fortuitously, my editor, the late Alice Mayhew, was also Carter’s book editor, and she smoothed the way for lots of access to the Carters and their whole family. When I learned that he would almost certainly have begun to address global warming in the early 1980s had he been reelected, I was hooked. I became a bit obsessed with trying to understand the most misunderstood president in American history.

Carter was politically tone-deaf and made plenty of mistakes in office; even as he moved up a few places in the latest historians’ list, he will never be in the top tier of chief executives. But I came to believe he was one of America’s most consequential one-term presidents, with a long list of unheralded achievements and an enduring moral vision.

I was surprised to learn that Carter was our greatest environmental president. (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were also historic conservationists but in the era before efforts to combat industrial pollution). I knew about his human rights policy but had no clue how much change it helped bring worldwide. Many little-known accomplishments — from normalizing relations with China to diversifying the federal judiciary to enacting the whistleblower protections that made the impeachment of Donald Trump possible — have shaped our own time in ways that almost no one connects to Carter.

Now, thanks to the publication of a handful of new books, the long goodbye afforded by his time in hospice, and the striking contrast to Trump, more people are beginning to appreciate him, and a broader reappraisal is underway. I hope that interest and appreciation will grow in death.

From the start of my research, Carter’s journey from barefoot farm boy to global icon struck me as an American epic. I wanted to understand how he evolved from a short, timid kid nicknamed “Peewee” into an ambitious and born-again governor of Georgia; how — straddling two worlds — he miraculously advanced from obscure outsider to President of the United States; how he stumbled as a leader at the time but succeeded in reinventing himself as a warrior for peace.

Carter was warm in public, brisk — sometimes peevish — in private, and decent at his core. Throughout his long life, he passed what his Naval Academy rule book called “the final test of a man”—honesty. Like most politicians, he exaggerated. But he fulfilled his famous promise in his 1976 campaign and never lied to the American people, which is no small thing today.

I decided to call my book His Very Best because it reflects not just the title of Carter’s 1975 campaign autobiography (Why Not the Best?) but his intensity and his sense of obligation to God, humanity, and himself. In his daily, even hourly, prayers, he asked not just “What would Jesus do?” but “Have I done my best?” After cantankerous Admiral Hyman Rickover sternly asked the nervous young lieutenant in a job interview if he had done his best at Annapolis — and he confessed that he had not — Carter disciplined himself to make the maximum effort in every single thing he did for the rest of his life. When bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Carter in 2002, the chairman of the Nobel committee said. “Carter himself has taken [from Ecclesiastes 11:4]  as his motto: ‘The worst thing that you can do is not to try.’ Few people, if any, have tried harder.”

Whether sprinting as a naval officer through the core of a melted-down nuclear reactor, laboring to save tens of millions of acres of wilderness, driving 100 miles out of his way on rutted roads to talk to a single African farmer, or turkey-hunting at age 95 — Carter was all-in, all the time. Calling him the least-lazy American president is not to damn him with faint praise; the story of his long life should endure as a master class in making every minute count.

I interviewed him more than a dozen times in his home, office, over meals, in transit, and by email. I saw him teach Sunday school and helped build a Habitat for Humanity house with him in Memphis. I also interviewed Rosalynn Carter — who was kind enough to share Jimmy’s tender love letters from the navy and portions of her unpublished diaries for the first time. My most memorable interviews took place in Plains, the tiny town in Southwest Georgia that Jimmy and Rosalynn — married for 77 years — always called home. They met there as infants more than nine decades ago. Jimmy’s mother, a nurse, delivered Rosalynn and brought her nearly three-year-old son over to see the new baby. Plains is a friendly place, but I learned of its harsh past, with a county sheriff who Martin Luther King Jr. described as “the meanest man in the world.” I concluded that Carter’s historic focus on human rights abroad has been at least partial atonement for too often ducking brutal abuses of civil rights at home — the white terrorism in his own backyard.

Carter’s storied 1976 presidential campaign transformed American politics, but his presidency bogged down for reasons often beyond his control. In his last two years, he was often flailing, buffeted by events, and stripped of the mystery and elan he needed to perform in the theater of the presidency.

One day, I asked him to identify the biggest myth about his time in office. He answered: “That I was weak. I made many bold decisions, almost all of which were difficult to implement and not especially popular.” This is true. Carter was not fundamentally weak, though he allowed perceptions of weakness to harden. They have warped our impression of him, obscuring the enduring truth that contemporary unpopularity is often unrelated to larger significance. One of my challenges was to untangle the two and lift Carter from the muck of his times for inspection in the sunshine of historical context.

He was the first American president since Thomas Jefferson who could reasonably claim to be a Renaissance Man or at least a world-class autodidact. At various times in his life, he acquired the skills of a farmer, naval officer, electrician, sonar technologist, nuclear engineer, businessman, equipment designer, agronomist, master woodworker, Sunday School teacher, land-use planner, legislator, door-to-door missionary, governor, long-shot presidential candidate, U.S. president, diplomat, fly-fisherman, bird dog trainer, arrowhead collector, home builder, painter, professor, memoirist, poet, novelist, and children's book author — an incomplete list, as he would be happy to point out.

Midway through my research, it struck me that Carter was the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the 19th; he was connected — before, during and after his presidency — to many of the significant events and transformative social movements of the 20th; and the Carter Center he founded is focused on conflict resolution, global health, and strengthening democracy — major challenges of the 21st.

Throughout Jimmy Carter’s long life, classmates, colleagues, friends — even members of his own family — found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency. From my own observations and the people who worked for and with him in Atlanta and Washington, a complicated picture emerges: I concluded that Carter was a driven engineer laboring to free the artist within. He once told me that he could only express his true feelings in his poetry, which he wrote after leaving the presidency. Some of it is quite good.

I enjoyed trying to peel back the layers of his complex personality. Carter was a disciplined, driven and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and adult president —dependable in a crisis — whose religious faith helped keep him focused on saving lives; a friendless president, who in the 1976 primaries had defeated or alienated a good chunk of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes an SOB; a non-ideological and logic-driven president who worshipped science along with God and saw governing as a series of problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with profligate American culture; a sometimes-obsessive president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming and formidable president in small groups and when speaking off-the-cuff but often underwhelming — even off-putting — on television, especially when reading prepared texts; an insular, all-business president, allergic to schmoozing, with few devotees beyond his intimate circle of Georgians, in part because — like his father and Admiral Rickover, two of his greatest influences — he rarely spared time for small talk and often had trouble saying “Thank You”; and an unlucky president — hamstrung in Iran by his own humanity — who was committed first to doing what he thought was right in the long-term, with the politics that often imperiled him distinctly secondary to his larger aims.

For some in Carter’s orbit, his impatient and occasionally persnickety style — a few dubbed him “the grammarian-in-chief” for correcting their memos — would mean their respect would only turn to reverence and love in later years. Only then did many of those who served in his administration fully understand that he had accomplished much more in office than they knew and that he had done so with passion and foresight they had not fully appreciated at the time.

Now, the rest of us are learning that, too.