A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (17 page)

Before we began the frantic two-month general election campaign on Labor Day, Fritz and I hosted a series of all-day sessions on the most important topics of the time. Groups of the foremost experts we could identify would assemble in Atlanta and then come to Plains in chartered buses, and we would meet in my mother’s isolated Pond House for discussions about taxation, welfare, education, transportation, the military, and relations with the Soviet Union, Israel, China, and other countries. In addition to learning as much as we could, we had a chance to get to know these leaders and later to choose from among them the cabinet officers to serve with us. Many of them realized our dual purposes, and all of them were on their best behavior.

I had known Zbigniew Brzezinski as director of the Trilateral Commission when I was a member, and he helped brief me before the presidential debate on foreign affairs. Later—after my election and during the early months in office—he assisted me in preparing an ambitious agenda regarding other nations. It included the inevitable challenges but also a few that had not been at the forefront of the campaign issues or emphasized in the news media. I decided on a major effort for peace in the Middle East, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and majority rule in other nations; reduction of nuclear arsenals, normalization of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, open communications with Cuba, and resolution of the Panama Canal issue. This last was highly publicized, because in the Republican primary there had been a strong demand by Ronald Reagan that we “should not give away our canal.” I also decided that human rights would be the centerpiece of our foreign policy.

After President Gerald Ford narrowly overcame a right-wing challenge from Ronald Reagan and was nominated as the Republican candidate, he and I waged a vigorous but mutually respectful contest, and we both survived three national television debates. Ford had been hurt previously by political attacks from Reagan and by his pardon of Nixon, but I never raised this issue. During our debate on foreign issues, he had also insisted, inexplicably, that the Soviet Union did not dominate any of the East European countries that were occupied by Soviet troops. My own campaign suffered, perhaps even more, from an ill-advised interview I granted to
Playboy
magazine, in which I was explaining Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and stated that, like other men, I had “lusted” for women. I could not think of an effective way to further explain my blunder and decided just to live with it. Within a few days, I dropped almost 15 percentage points in public opinion polls.

Ford and I chose not to raise any campaign funds from corporate or private contributors but to finance our general election campaigns from the dollar each taxpayer could designate for this purpose. (That contribution has been raised to three dollars but has not been used by presidential nominees since 2004.) We had neither the money nor the desire to purchase negative commercials, which have more recently become the key tactic in winning elections. I respected Ford very much, for his integrity and his encyclopedic knowledge of the federal government and its agencies.

Our family and other close members of our political team assembled in Atlanta for election night and watched as returns began coming in from the East Coast and then moved westward, mostly by time zone. In general, I carried most of the Eastern states and Ford swept states in the West. We were almost tied until late returns from Mississippi came in last, to give me a slight margin of victory in popular votes and 55 percent of the electoral votes. The entire campaign was described in more than thirty books. Two of the most complete and accurate are
Marathon
by Jules Witcover and
Running for President, 1976: The Carter Campaign
by Martin Schram.

M
y inauguration speech was one of the briefest on record for the first inauguration of a president. It began with thanks to Gerald Ford for “healing our nation” and expressed two of the major themes of my administration: keeping the peace and strengthening human rights. Even though I had been preparing to be president, I was genuinely surprised when the Episcopal bishop from Minnesota pronounced “blessings on President Carter.” The phrase “President Carter” was startling to me, but I was ready and eager to assume the responsibility, and we looked forward to life in the White House. My first official act was to pardon the draft evaders from the Vietnam War.

I wrote in my diary: “The quarters at the White House are quite similar to those we enjoyed as the governor’s family in Georgia, but I have been constantly impressed—I almost said overwhelmed—at the historical nature of the White House, occupied for the first time by our second president, John Adams. When I see a desk or a writing cabinet or a book or a sideboard or a bed that was used by Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy, I have a feeling of almost unreality about my being president, but also a feeling of both adequacy and determination that I might live up to the historical precedents established by my predecessors.”

That first night we had a very relaxed and informal meal with our family. Earlier when Rosalynn had visited the White House some of our staff
asked the chef and cooks if they thought they could prepare the kind of meals we had enjoyed in Plains, and the cook said, “Oh, we’ve been fixing that kind of food for the servants for a long time.” The meals in general were superb, but we were shocked to learn that for the first few days our food bill in the White House was six hundred dollars, and that the president pays for all meals for the family and personal guests.

On inauguration night we attended eleven parties, but we moved fast, danced a few times for our own enjoyment and that of tens of thousands of partygoers, met all our commitments, and got back home in time to go to bed about 1:30
A.M
. Rosalynn had decided to wear the same evening gown that she had worn for my inaugural ball as governor. She was criticized by the news media for not choosing a new model from a famous designer, but I approved her choice and was very proud of her beauty and grace.

During the following days we shook hands with thousands of people in receiving lines to thank those who had helped us during the campaign and to cement ties with members of Congress, diplomatic officials, and also with members of the armed forces. I was particularly impressed by how many generals and senior enlisted men came by and made some reference to peace, their prayers for us, or just said, “God be with you.”

The first reception was for more than 750 people in whose homes members of our family had spent the night on the campaign trail. These meetings were emotional because some of the families had taken us in when few people knew or cared who I was. We gave each couple a small brass plaque stating that a member of my family had stayed with them.

We decided that, as much as possible, we would make the White House into a pleasant family home, and our private life there was eventful and enjoyable. The building had been completely renovated and repainted when Harry Truman was president, while he and his family moved across the street into Blair House. He was not much of an athlete, and his exercise was vigorous walking, but his friends installed a one-lane bowling alley in the basement as a birthday gift. In 1969 President Nixon, who was an avid bowler, replaced it with a more modern version. An outdoor swimming pool and cabana were installed in 1975, while Gerald Ford was president, to replace a pool alongside the Oval Office used by Lyndon Johnson and then covered over to provide space for the White House press corps. The tennis court had a longer history, having been first built in the early 1900s and used by Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. It was moved to its present location in 1975. All the members of my family and many of our invited guests enjoyed these facilities.

Carter family at the State dinner on the occasion of the peace treaty signed between Israel and Egypt, March 26, 1979.

A small but luxurious family theater was built in 1942, and all presidents have used it for practicing speeches, holding private group meetings, and viewing motion pictures. The first films that we watched were
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and
All the President’s Men,
about the Watergate scandal, which contributed to my election. We could order any movie, and often received new films before they were shown in public theaters. The projectionist’s records show that our family watched 480 movies (about 2 per week), many requested by Amy to share with her school classmates. On Friday nights the students would often stay up until dawn, watching one film after another, and then sleep until noon before going to the swimming pool or bowling alley.

Amy was nine years old and the center of media attention, and it was less well known that we had three older sons, two of whom lived with us. Our oldest son, Jack, his wife, and one-year-old son, Jason, stayed in Georgia. Our youngest, Jeff, was with us, and he attended George Washington University. Our middle son, Chip, helped both me and the Democratic Party with political affairs. Our mothers visited often and always stayed in the Queen’s Bedroom, across the hall from the Lincoln Bedroom.

When there was no official White House function, we arranged to have our family together at suppertime, and had our meals in a small dining room adjacent to the upstairs kitchen. As at our home in Plains, our family had frank and often contentious discussions around the table. They all had experiences I couldn’t share, and it was obvious that American citizens expressed their own points of view to my family members much more freely than to me. Rosalynn and the boys traveled a lot and attended many events, and Amy brought home accounts of life in her elementary school, located in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, about a
mile from the White House. She had no hesitation in sharing her opinions and provided our family with sound assessments of life in the public school system. In addition to her classmates she had close friends among the children of White House staff members who had served with me when I was governor.

I left for the Oval Office early every morning, read the morning newspapers and any personal messages that were waiting for me, and had an intelligence briefing about eight o’clock from Dr. Brzezinski, who was now national security adviser. Sometimes we were joined by the CIA director or other specialists. I usually had lunch there or in a small adjacent office and quite often invited the vice president, cabinet officers, staff members, or leaders from Congress to join me. Rosalynn lunched with me every Wednesday so we could discuss personal affairs and I could answer her persistent questions about official issues.

I was determined to be strict on expenditures for the nation, and to set an example in my personal life. I decided to sell the presidential yacht
Sequoia,
and to minimize the playing of “Ruffles and Flourishes” when I arrived at public meetings. I was surprised when some of these changes proved to be quite unpopular, and to learn how much the public cherished the pomp and ceremony of the presidency. I also planned to cut back on expenditures for the hideaway at Camp David, which had been established by President Franklin Roosevelt. This is an enclosed area of 120 acres, located in the Catoctin Mountain Park, about sixty miles north of Washington. Toward the end of February, Chip’s wife, Caron, began having labor pains, and we took her to Bethesda hospital, where a son was born, named James IV. After holding him for a while, we drove on to Camp David for our first visit. As did most other presidents, we fell in love with the place, and I told my budget director not to touch its funding and not to let me know what it cost to operate. Also, I didn’t want any more construction done there without my personal approval. Subsequently, our family and sometimes special guests went to Camp David on almost every free weekend.

At other convenient times we were able to go home to Plains or the coastal islands and other restful places in Georgia, to fish for striped bass
and bluefish along the Eastern Seaboard, and to enjoy some of our national parks. We took our boys down the Salmon River in Idaho and then fished the Snake River while staying in the Grand Tetons. It was on this trip that Rosalynn learned to fly-fish.

One of my boyhood hobbies that our family cherished was collecting Indian artifacts. When we returned home to Plains from the governor’s mansion or the White House during winter months, Rosalynn and our three boys would almost immediately change clothes and go to a favorite field where Native American villages had existed. There were a half dozen of these locations that I had previously known to be productive. After a crop has been harvested or the land plowed in preparation for new planting, a few rains will wash away the topsoil and leave pieces of flint stone exposed. We would slowly walk back and forth across the field, about fifteen feet apart, and search the ground carefully. On our best day we found twenty-six unbroken points. My total collection includes about fifteen hundred arrowheads and other stone pieces and clay pottery, which has been analyzed by professors at the University of Georgia to ascertain the Indian tribe, kind of stone, probable site of manufacture, and estimated age. A number of the arrowheads are almost identical and seem to have been produced at a central location and traded to distant places. Their ages range from two hundred to six thousand years. The Yuchi tribe of Lower Creek Indians was forced to leave our area in 1828, and our ancestors moved here five years later. This was exactly one hundred years after the first English settlement was established on the Georgia coast, two hundred miles to the east.