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Excerpt

‘White House Diary’

Preface

During my four years in the White House, I kept a personal diary by dictating my thoughts and observations several times each day. Some days I kept notes and dictated later. When time permitted, my secretary, Susan Clough, would type the notes and file the pages in large binders.

Each week, a record of every public statement or activity of the president of the United States is published, including documents signed, visits to any site, speeches made, and even answers to shouted questions from news reporters. When dictating entries to my diary, I tended to ignore this public record and interwined my personal opinions and activities with a brief description of the official duties I performed. Readers should remember that I seldom exercised any restraint on what I dictated, because I did not contemplate the more personal entries ever being made public. When my opinions of people changed, for instance, I did not go back and amend the entries.

Except for a few entries, I never examined these typed notes until February 1981, when Rosalynn and I unpacked our belongings after returning to our home in Plains, Georgia. I was surprised to find twenty-one large volumes of double- spaced text — a total of more than five thousand pages! I still have the original document in my home, and one copy has been sequestered in the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. Until now, none of the diary entries have been revealed except when snippets have been used in museum exhibits or when I have quoted brief excerpts in some of the books I've written about official matters.

Despite a temptation to conceal my errors, misjudgments of people, or lack of foresight, I decided when preparing this book not to revise the original transcript, but just to use the unchanged excerpts from the diaries that I consider to be most revealing and interesting. Admittedly, it was somewhat painful for me to omit about three-fourths of the diary, but for the sake of compression I concentrated on a few general themes that are still pertinent — especially Middle East peace negotiations, nuclear weaponry, U.S.-China relations, energy policy, anti- inflation efforts, health policy, and my relationships with Congress. I also included some elements of my personal life that illustrate how it feels and what it means to be president. At times, I abbreviated or omitted a sentence in a particular entry, but I was careful not to change the entry's original meaning. For the sake of readability, I did not include ellipses to indicate deletions, and I occasionally changed a word or two where the original text was confusing. Further, I sometimes used phrases within brackets to identify people and organizations. And to help orient the reader, when the date of an entry fell on a Monday, I noted that.

I also decided to make the entire diary (including my detailed handwritten notes) available at the Carter Presidential Library in the near future for scholars, journalists, historians, or others who might wish to explore more deeply some events of those four years. As anyone who reviews the complete diary will see, in only a very few cases did I delete an entry to protect the privacy of members of my own family or people still active in public life. To supplement this diary, of course, all my official and public activities are available from the U.S. Government Printing Office in nine volumes titled Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1977–81.

While working on this abbreviated version of my White House diary, I was surprised by the number of subjects that were of common interest to me and other presidents. Throughout this book, I wrote explanatory notes to help the reader understand the context of the entries, bring to life the duties of a president, offer insights into a number of the people I worked with, and point out how many of the important challenges remain the same. At times we presidents have reacted to similar events in much the same way; at other times we've responded quite differently. In presenting this annotated diary, my intention is not to defend or excuse my own actions or to criticize others, but simply to provide, based on current knowledge, an objective analysis of differences. Whenever possible, I attempt to articulate what lessons I learned and offer my own frank assessment of what I or others might have done differently.

Prelude: The Campaign

About the time I announced my candidacy for president in December 1974, Gallup published a poll that included the question “Among Democrats, whom do you prefer as the next nominee?” There were thirty-two names on Gallup’s list of potential candidates, including George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Walter Mondale, John Glenn, and even the Georgia legislator Julian Bond. My name was not mentioned.

Our campaign’s original presumption was that the major Democratic contenders would be Edward Kennedy on the left and Wallace on the right, and that I could occupy the middle of the political spectrum and prevail with persistence, hard work, and a bit of good luck. I was very disappointed when Kennedy announced his decision to end his campaign in September 1974; his unfortunate experience a few years earlier at Chappaquiddick was frequently mentioned in the news media as the primary reason for his withdrawal. Almost immediately, a number of new candidates announced; the most prominent were Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver; Senators Fred Harris, Birch Bayh, Henry Jackson, and Lloyd Bentsen; Governors Milton Shapp and Terry Sanford; Congressman Morris Udall; and of course George Wallace. Later, Governor Jerry Brown and Senator Frank Church entered the race, as did Adlai Stevenson III, who was a favorite son in Illinois. Almost without exception, they were better known and financed than I.

It was obvious to me and my advisors that many Americans were deeply concerned about the competence and integrity of our government. Still fresh in memory were the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the disgrace of Watergate; the failure in Vietnam and the misleading statements about the war from top civilian and military leaders; and the revelation that emerged from the Frank Church Senate committee that our government’s intelligence services had condoned assassination plots against foreign leaders. After much thought and discussion, I chose to focus my campaign on three basic themes: truthfulness, management competence, and distance from the unattractive aspects of Washington politics.

To every audience, large or small, I swore “never to tell a lie or to make a misleading statement.” I was able to point to my success, as governor of Georgia, in completely reorganizing the state government and instituting an innovative technique that made annual comparisons possible between old and new programs. My campaign literature emphasized my roots as a peanut farmer from the tiny village of Plains, Georgia. The support of Andrew Young, the King family, and other civil rights heroes helped me overcome the potential racist stigma of coming from the Deep South; I was well aware that if I won, I would be the first successful candidate from this region since Zachary Taylor in 1848.

I had very little money, but I began campaigning as soon as I left the Georgia governor’s office in January 1975. My former press secretary, Jody Powell, was my traveling companion. In Atlanta, we had a superb team of issue analysts working under the direction of Stuart Eizenstat, who had performed the same service for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. During the succeeding months, our campaign team put together two groups of surrogates that supplemented my full- time effort, an unusual technique that ultimately prevailed. One was a large group of my fellow Georgians, known as the “Peanut Brigade.” At their own expense, they traveled to New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and other key states. They walked door-to-door handing out my campaign literature and extolling my record and my views to every citizen they encountered.

Even more effective were the members of my own family. As directed by my campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, six teams campaigned separately, led by my wife, Rosalynn; my sons, Jack, Chip, and Jeff, and their wives; my mother, Lillian; and her youngest sister, Emily. When we got together, we shared experiences, discussed subjects that seemed most important to prospective voters, and made sure that we would be “preaching the same sermon” during the week ahead. All of us understood that it was critical that we speak with one voice regarding abortion, education, farm policy, Israel, nuclear weaponry, and other important and sensitive issues. To save money, we spent nights with families supportive of (or at least interested in) our campaign.

During most of 1975, the other candidates were campaigning part-time, and they never realized the effectiveness of what we were doing — until it was too late. Rosalynn, for instance, visited 115 towns and cities in Iowa and spent seventy-five days in Florida. We concentrated on the key states with the earliest returns, and in the winter of 1976 I came in first in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Florida. After that, my opponents cooperated in what became known as ABC — Anybody But Carter. They would choose the most popular person for a particular state and give that candidate their concerted support. This tactic sometimes succeeded, but by the end of the primary season I had a clear majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

My first decision after being assured of victory was to choose my running mate. I decided that I needed to compensate for my lack of experience in Washington, and seriously considered Senators John Glenn, Frank Church, Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie, and Walter Mondale. After long meetings and interviews, I found that Mondale was personally most compatible with me, and we shared similar ideas on how he and I could work together as a team.

For me, the general election was much more difficult than the Democratic primaries. I had been running as a somewhat lonely and independent candidate — a peanut farmer and former governor who was quite removed from the Washington scene. Now I inherited the leadership mantle of the

Democratic Party, including all its negative and burdensome trappings. My opponent, Gerald Ford, was a fine man who had survived a brutal primary challenge from California governor Ronald Reagan. Many Americans felt indebted to President Ford for having salvaged the integrity of the White House after Richard Nixon resigned in political disgrace.

Despite these handicaps, Fritz Mondale and I won a narrow victory. The day after the election, I began to prepare for my inauguration and the responsibility of serving as president of the United States.

Excerpted from ‘White House Diary’ by Jimmy Carter. Published in September 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by Jimmy Carter. All rights reserved.

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