Outside Looking In (14 page)

Carter was the first American president to face up to the energy problems of the world. He responded to the oil crisis of 1979 by cutting back on fuel use in government buildings. He installed solar panels at the White House, promoted wind energy subsidies, and regulated gas consumption in vehicles:

Yet Carter showed, eventually, that he could be intimidated by intellectuals. When his polls dropped precipitately, he retreated to Camp David and invited in all kinds of professors and pundits. He organized a pep talk to the nation under the bumbling guidance of Patrick Caddell. The address he came down from the mountain to deliver became known as “the malaise speech,” though he never used the word “malaise” in it. This, combined with the unflattering picture of him collapsing as he jogged, and with his tale of being assaulted by a rabbit in the water, conveyed a false image of Carter as weak or cowardly. By letting the shah of Iran come to America for medical treatment, he provoked the American hostage crisis in Iran, and his attempt at a rescue raid there was feckless. He boycotted the Moscow Olympics to protest Russia's invasion of Afghanistan. The economy tanked as his term was ending. Thus, despite such achievements as the Panama Canal Treaties and the Camp David Accords, Carter ended up looking provincial, puritanical, and ineffective. His successor, Ronald Reagan, got the credit for the release of the hostages from Iran, a release Carter had prepared. Reagan used Carter's low approval polls (21 percent when he left office) to dismantle Carter's wise energy policy and other governmental regulations.

Out of office, Carter began to recover Americans' respect. I saw two sides of the man at a Mike Mansfield Conference in Montana where we were both on the discussion programs. Speaking to a small audience of students, he was asked how he, who had once been the chief law officer of the nation, could condone the action of his daughter in breaking the law—Amy Carter had been taken to jail for a protest against apartheid held in front of the South African embassy. He answered: “I cannot tell you how proud I am of her. If you students do not express your conscience now, when will you? Later on, you will have many responsibilities—jobs, families, careers. It will get harder and harder to be free to speak out about injustice. Amy was doing that.” The students loved him. That was in the afternoon. But at night, in a huge gymnasium, with what looked like half of Montana flooding in, Carter gave a formal speech that was preachy and dull. As he droned on about “agape love,” the audience began to stream out at all the doors.

Subsequently, Carter's has been the most successful ex-presidency of all time. No one else has made such an impact worldwide after leaving the nation's highest office. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia—but one reason he did that was to baffle the antislavery movement of northern universities. James Madison tried to draft a new constitution for the state of Virginia—but he failed in his compromise measures. Herbert Hoover made important contributions to public life, first by leading the European Food Program in 1947 and then by chairing two Commissions on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government. But Carter's activities dwarf all earlier work by former presidents. He is the only ex-president to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. (Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama won the award during their presidencies.) The Carter Center in Atlanta is at the heart of many international negotiations for peace. He has personally overseen the fairness of foreign elections. He has taken an activist role in poverty programs like Habitat for Humanity. He has been a leader in the conversation over moral leadership in politics, arguing that respect for life cannot be restricted to outlawing abortions, gay marriage, and stem cell research.
³
His is a voice of conscience in all nations, not just in ours.

Early in the (early) Iowa primary of 1988 I flew around the state, first with Michael Dukakis, then with his wife Kitty, in progressively smaller prop planes. At the end of one day, when Dukakis had to get back to Massachusetts for some duty as the state's governor, we got on a small Learjet loaned him by a business supporter (there were fewer controls on this back then). Dukakis had only a small staff with him and two journalists. He sat up front with me and the other journalist, David Nyhan of the
Boston Globe
. Nyhan breathed with relief that at last he was on a jet, no matter how small, rather than the prop aircraft we had been riding in short jumps around the state. Dukakis asked why it made a difference to him. Nyhan said the jet made him feel safer, and “I don't want to die.” Dukakis said with surprise, “You think of dying?” Nyhan: “Of course. Don't you?” “No, never.” I was no longer surprised to hear such an answer from Dukakis. He is the supreme government wonk. If there is no government program against dying, why bother to think about it?

This fit with what he told me when I asked for the book that most influenced him. Unlike many who have to consult their memory or their caution, he answered at once: “Henry Steele Commager's
The American Mind
.” It is the most secular account of America one can imagine. To judge from it, no one could imagine religion having any place in American history or culture. It is not surprising that Dukakis was drawn to it. His campaign managers had to remind him that it would be useful for him to remember that he has a Greek heritage, and to start showing up at Greek churches. It was the same pattern observable when another Greek ran for national office. Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's vice president, had to resume the name Spiro after being known for most of his adult life as Ted Agnew.

I got what seemed to me the essence of Michael Dukakis when my editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, told me about editing Kitty Dukakis's book during the presidential campaign. Alice called about some changes in the book and got Michael on the line. She asked for Kitty and he told her: “She's in the shower. Call back in thirteen minutes.” That attention to detail served him in some ways in his administrative tasks as a governor—and even as a professor—but it did not have the expansive touch of the born politician.

I learned something about Dukakis during the campaign. I took some time off to go to the Kennedy School at Harvard. He had taught there after his failed bid for re-election after a first term as governor. I looked at his student evaluations, and they were excellent. That is far from typical of the politician who turns to the classroom. After George McGovern failed to reach the presidency, my dean at Northwestern considered inviting him to teach a course there. Since I knew McGovern from the 1972 campaign, and from our shared participation in some programs at the Institute for Policy Studies, Dean Weingartner asked if I thought he would make a good visiting professor. I said yes (so much for my academic prescience). McGovern had earned a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern and had been a professor at Dakota Wesleyan University before entering politics. Unlike many politicians, he knew what academic work is all about.

There was intense interest in the course when it was announced. McGovern had run campaigns for the Senate and for president that were well supported on our liberal campus. A huge classroom was set aside for him, and many teaching assistants were happy to sign up to help him with the grading and discussion groups. Despite this large enrollment, McGovern did what many, perhaps most, politicians do when they return to the academy. He began by telling inside stories of the Senate and recounting anecdotes from his various campaigns. But when his stock of tales ran out, he did not know where to go, and students began streaming out of the course. The teaching assistants were left with nothing to do.

Politicians live for contact with people. They lose the gift for contemplation, or research, or simple reading. Being alone with a book is a way to die for many of them. Dukakis was the great exception—and, I presume, still is—since he was always a professor, not a politician.

I reported the 1980 campaign for
Time
, and did the cover story on then-vice president Bush. After flying around on his campaign plane, I went to interview Barbara Bush at the vice president's residence. She graciously showed me around the Naval Observatory and we talked of her family. What she most wanted to dwell on was a book she had just completed and admired intensely: Tom Wolfe's
Bonfire of the Vanities.
Then I went to interview Bush at his office in the West Wing of the White House. After talk of the campaign and of his war service, I asked him what book had influenced him most. He said, “I must admit I'm not much of a reader. I have so many reports and papers to read, I get little time for actual books. Of course, one read the classics in school—
Moby-Dick
. One book made a big impact on me in prep school,
Catcher in the Rye
.” Bush graduated from the Phillips Academy in 1942.
Catcher in the Rye
was published in 1951. He was so devoid of personal reading memories that he must have remembered his sons' talk of the novel when they were in prep school.

Before I left, Bush said that next week the Democrats would hold their convention, and he did not want to watch them, so “Bar gave me a book to read instead. But
unhh,
it's so
big
!” Here he mimed taking a book so heavy that his hands sank like a plummet. What was this huge tome?
Bonfire of the Vanities.
Later, after he was elected president, he was asked at times what he was reading. He said he was making his way through
Bonfire of the Vanities
. When George W. Bush became president, his close adviser Karl Rove claimed that he was a voracious reader. Rove was always telling George W. not to be like his father.

1
Jimmy Carter,
Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis
(Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 32.

2
Thomas L. Friedman,
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), p. 14.

3
Carter, op. cit.

I
was still writing for
Time
when Bill Clinton ran for office. I spent weeks in Little Rock interviewing the Clintons and their acquaintances. I went to see Clinton's mother and brother. I wrote a profile of James Carville for the
New Yorker
after visiting his mother (“Miz Nippy”) and sisters in New Orleans. When I had spent some time with Clinton, I got around to asking him for the book that had made the deepest impression on him. He hesitated for a while, and then asked, “What had the most impact on you?” I assured him that was not the game. He is such a politician that I suspected he was taking his time to choose the work that would make me admire him. When he finally came up with a title, I was sure I had been right.

Weeks before, when he asked what I was working on, other than the campaign, I said that I had a long-term project on the
Confessions
of Saint Augustine. So at length he came up with his answer: the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius. Dee Dee Myers, his press aide who was sitting in to tape the interview, looked stunned. And sure enough, when we went out of the office, she said to the rest of the staff in the next room, “You'll never guess what he just called his favorite book!” After Clinton was elected, a cheap paperback of the
Meditations
came out with a banner on it saying, “President Clinton's Favorite Book.” This should surprise anyone who knows that ascetical treatise, which condemns any yielding to sexual indulgence. At one point it calls intercourse “an internal rubbing with the squirting of slime.”

When I asked Hillary Clinton for her favorite book, she did not hesitate for an instant.
“The Brothers Karamazov.
” Why? “I read it in high school, and it opened ranges of spirituality I never dreamed of.” I came to know her fairly well, and to like her a lot. She drove me around Little Rock. We ate lunches at a restaurant and in the governor's mansion. She has a wonderful sense of humor, along with a gift (also shared by Barack Obama) of imitating the voices of people when she tells stories, as when she told me of a case she took when she was teaching at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She did pro bono work off campus, and one day she got a phone call from a small town in the north Arkansas hills. There was a black woman being held there without legal representation. Could she come? Her fellow professor and future husband, Bill, had their one car that day, so she got a law student to take her to the town in his truck.