A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety

by Jimmy Carter

  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.

  I had been a fisherman all my life, but I didn’t learn to fly-fish for trout until I was governor and living near the cold waters of the Chattahoochee River, which flows through Atlanta. Quite often on weekends at Camp David, I fished in Hunting Creek at the base of the mountain while Rosalynn practiced her casting technique in the pool behind our cabin. Our most gratifying recreational excursions were to Pennsylvania, where we sought out a convenient place to go fly-fishing on weekends. As guests of a private hunting and fishing club, we traveled by helicopter and landed on the farmland of a dairyman, Wayne Harpster, who owned or leased a good portion of Spruce Creek, about twenty-five miles south of Penn State University. We formed an immediate friendship with him and his entire family, and began to go there quite regularly.

  We would helicopter to Camp D
avid, be met by a horde of news reporters as we disembarked, and then proceed to our cabin while they went to nearby motels to await our return to Washington. We changed clothes, collected our fishing gear, returned to the helicopter, and flew another thirty-five minutes to the Harpster farm, where we landed in a remote pasture near our cottage. We did this during our last two years, and these fishing expeditions were never detected by the news media. This has continued to be an annual visit by us, and Wayne has become a regular companion when Rosalynn and I go fishing on other exotic streams in the world. Our most recent fishing excursions have been to Mongolia to fish for taimen, the largest species of trout; to the Kola Peninsula east of Murmansk, Russia, for Atlantic salmon; and to Argentina (for the fourth time) to fish for trout and other species.

  My family helped make my off-duty times in Washington very pleasant, with visits to museums, theaters, and many historic sites, and also just loafing around the White House playing tennis, swimming, bowling, and watching movies. I spent a lot of relaxing hours tying trout flies while listening to good music. All of us are also avid readers, and it was during the weekends that I had a chance to catch up on back reading and prepare for the week ahead, frequently studying voluminous briefing books from my staff. During the first few months, our family and a number of staff members took a speed-reading course every Friday night, which made it much easier for me to read what my secretary informed me was an average of three hundred pages of official documents each day.

  Rosalynn and I decided that Amy would attend one of the nearby public elementary schools, which aroused some comment in the news media because it had been assumed that she would go to one of the more elite private institutions. I had been deeply involved in education as a member of the county school board, state senator, and governor, and was committed to the public school system. Rosalynn and I wanted Amy to be deeply involved in the Washington community and with children of diverse backgrounds. At Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School she had classmates who were from a wide range of families, including blacks, Hispanics, and children of the servants in foreign embassies.

  I was still a parent. In July 1977, I received word that our son Chip was renting a home from a man whose close friend was going to be receiving a large quantity of marijuana in the Gulf of Mexico on a fishing boat. I called Chip, and, without telling him what the problem was, I asked him to come home. I learned that he had been invited to go fishing on the boat that was soon to receive the marijuana. The marijuana was transferred, the bust was made, and three tons of marijuana was confiscated. Chip’s contact turned out to be a federal government informer.

  I was running every afternoon from five to seven miles, and I usually extended this distance to at least ten miles a day on weekends. During my maximum running times I was averaging about forty miles a week. I kept a careful log of distances run and times required, but this was one of three things we lost when we went back to Plains. (Two superb bamboo fly rods were stolen.) I really enjoyed this daily break from my official duties. By the way, I never ran with Secret Service agents but always with my military aide, who provided constant communication access between me and agencies of the government and the outside world. White House physician Dr. William Lukash, members of my family, and a few guests would sometimes join me. Willie Nelson would run five miles with me when he spent the night at the White House. I lost some weight, and Rosalynn complained that I was too thin. I remember that when I had my first annual physical examination, Dr. Lukash reported that my heart rate was forty-one beats per minute. When some of the news reporters questioned him, a second count was forty.

  In September 1979 I decided to enter the ten-thousand-meter race on Catoctin Mountain, near Camp David. I ran the course twice in advance to become familiar with the difficult terrain and timed myself at a few landmarks along the way. On race day I decided to cut my previous best time by four minutes, which proved to be a serious mistake. The weather was unusually warm and humid, and I overexerted and had to drop out of the race, overcome with heat exhaustion. I recovered quickly and handed out the prizes at the awards ceremony. Although I felt a little weak, I didn’t have any aftereffects. I should have played it safe to make sure I finished, because the news media had a field day with my failure, with photos of my sagging body in many newspapers.

  Nobody in our family had ever even seen skis, but we decided to take up cross-country skiing during our weekends at Camp David. There were several convenient places inside the fenced compound, and the surrounding country roads and park area provided excellent trails. Catoctin Mountain Park Superintendent Tom McFadden gave lessons to all the members of our family. I had two notable falls during this time. On a late Sunday afternoon in February 1979 we were going down a steep slope on a newly constructed section of highway. The groomed trail was narrow, and there was about an inch of ice on both sides. My right ski went under the ice sheet, and I fell over on my face. My forehead, cheeks, lips, and chin were slashed. We radioed Dr. Lukash and learned that he was treating Superintendent McFadden, who had had a spill and cut his face even more severely. I rode back to Camp David on a snowmobile, bleeding badly. Dr. Lukash treated all the superficial cuts on my face, and we skied the next day. The big problem was that I was scheduled to make a speech at Georgia Tech on Tuesday. We called Lillian Brown, who was a superb artist with cosmetics, and she applied several layers of greasepaint and powder and accompanied me to Atlanta. I got through the ordeal without embarrassment, but I had to be careful to avoid any broad smiles, which caused the thick makeup to crack.

  My other accident occurred two days after Christmas in 1980. With only two inches of snow on the ground, I went out to ski on the steep nature trail behind our cabin at Camp David, and my ski hit a rock. I fell, jammed my left elbow under my body, and broke my collarbone. I went to Bethesda hospital to get it X-rayed and strapped up, then returned to Camp David. This left me partially handicapped during the final few days of my term in office. It didn’t hurt much at first but was uncomfortable when I experienced vigorous handshakes. This happened when we had a reception for the fourteen hundred staff members who worked in and around the White House and also when I went to the Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans and Georgia’s star player, Herschel Walker, clasped my hand and almost lifted me off my feet. It was six years later, when I was sixty-two years old, that Rosalynn and I became avid downhill skiers.

  Amy and I spent a lot of time together, swimming, bowling, and hitting balls on the tennis court. She said she wanted a tree house, and we looked at possible places on the South Lawn. I didn’t want to damage any of the historic trees, so we decided to place the sleeping area up in the tree but supported from the ground. She outlined what she wanted, and I drew the plans, ordered the necessary lumber, and Amy and her friends were soon spending nights up in the green foliage—watched carefully by the Secret Service agents. Later, when Bob Hope came to visit us, he made a wisecrack about being a Republican and I announced that he would be moving from the Lincoln Bedroom to sleep in Amy’s tree house.

  Our youngest son, Jeffrey, was an amateur astronomer and borrowed a fine tracking telescope that he set up on the roof of the White House. He studied the various constellations and galaxies and could describe what we were observing. Jeff became friends with Dr. Carl Sagan, who invited us in December 1977 to visit the naval observatory adjacent to the vice president’s home. The Mondale family joined us as Dr. Sagan gave a slide presentation on outer space, including his speculation about life on distant planets. We enjoyed the stargazing, and I wrote a poem about the lovely sight of a flock of geese flying over Washington, their breasts reflecting the city lights.

  A Reflection of Beauty in Washington

  I recall one winter night

  going to the White House roof

  to study the Orion nebulae,

  but we could barely see the stars,

  their images so paled by city lights.

  Suddenly we heard a sound

  primeval in its tone and rhy
thm

  coming from the northern sky.

  We turned to watch in silence

  long wavering V’s,

  breasts transformed to brilliance

  by the lights we would have dimmed.

  The geese passed overhead,

  and then without a word

  we went down to a peaceful sleep,

  marveling at what we’d seen and heard.

  We were enjoying the White House but missed the large veranda that surrounded the governor’s mansion in Atlanta. The Truman Balcony overlooked the South Lawn, Jefferson Memorial, and the distant Washington airport, and was furnished with little glass tables and straight-back chairs something like those in a soda fountain. We decided to import some comfortable rocking chairs and ordered six from Georgia. After that, our family had a pleasant vantage point from which we could observe a portion of Washington, and we went there especially during late afternoons and at night. This is where I would take important foreign visitors when I wanted our discussions to be relaxed and completely private.

  I remember one session with British Prime Minister James Callaghan, who asked for a conversation that would be totally off the record. We had a cocktail while enjoying the new rocking chairs, and he described Great Britain’s economic troubles and told me that the International Monetary Fund was putting pressure on him to reduce their deficit with what seemed to be draconian actions. I interrupted to offer my help in easing the IMF demands, and he said, “No, no! I want you to support their restraints. I want them to force me and my government to do what I know is right but is not politically popular.”

  Over the years we invited thousands of our friends to the White House to spend the night, for South Lawn events, concerts, and official entertainment of foreign dignitaries. Rosalynn and her aides and the State Department worked together to prepare the guest lists and did a fine job. We also enjoyed having children and grandchildren of former presidents, but for some reason we made one glaring omission by failing to invite Margaret Truman, whose father was the president I most admired. We later apologized to her, but I will always regret this mistake.