His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life

"Alter’s book and Carter’s memoir pair together well. From the Carter memoir you get a close-range view of the presidency. From Alter’s book, you get the whole life—the upbringing, the training, the religious background, the self-improvement impulse. The other important thing about Carter is the post-presidency. Carter’s presidency was partly successful and partly unsuccessful. But there’s no question that he is the greatest ex-president the United States has ever had. One of the things I like about Alter’s treatment is that he gives a lot of attention to the building of the Carter Center at Emory, the way Carter involved himself in global health and election monitoring, the way Carter used his stature, his background, his connections and his prominence to do something constructive. Other presidents either fade into quiet retirement and paint watercolors, like George W. Bush, or hit the lecture circuit, like say Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Carter didn’t do either of those things. In keeping with what we know about his character, he did his best with the opportunities presented by the post-presidency. Carter came up in Georgia politics during an era, in the fifties and sixties, when racial relations were a dividing line in Georgia politics and the Democratic party. (There was no Republican party to speak of in southern states like Georgia until later in the sixties and seventies.) So, yes, he was a temporizer on race. You could not be elected to office in Georgia in the seventies as what we would consider a racial progressive. But Carter was part of a new generation of southern Democratic governors in that era who were aiming at making progress on racial issues and lowering the temperature around the racial divide. And when you contrast him with other prominent Georgia politicians of that era, he looks much better than he does by today’s standards. By the standards of his time, he was looking for a way to make progress on civil rights issues."