Jimmy Carter: "This Is My Place"

By Robert Ajemian

Alone in Plains with Rosalynn, his word processor and his woodshop

"People keep telling me there's no way an ex-President can go back and live in Plains, Georgia. They don't understand Jimmy Carter."

--Charles Kirbo, Carter's lawyer and closest friend, in January 1981

Even at noon, the small brick ranch house was strangely quiet and dimly lit. Out of the silence, a soft voice offered a greeting. Jimmy Carter looked unchanged from the White House days, although perhaps a bit less imposing in heavy blue jeans, black boots and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. He had been working on his memoirs since before dawn, he said. As he sat in an easy chair, smiling warmly, he spoke with that familiar instructive manner, still wary and somehow aloof, his gentle mien always at odds with the ambition and defiance that surely cooked inside him. He had not mellowed much.

Ever since his defeat, just as Kirbo had predicted, Carter has resumed his rustic and provincial life in Plains, the tiny (pop. 651) crossroads town where his extraordinary journey to power had begun. Absorbed by his book, he has deliberately closed himself off from the rest of the world. In political terms, he has vanished so completely that he might almost never have existed. Shunned by his fellow Democrats, ignored by his successor, Carter has virtually become a nonperson, a President who never was.

Those who know him are not all that surprised. Carter was always something of a hermit, even in the turbulence of the White House. He never invited anyone over unless he just had to. Even his Cabinet officers had to force social engagements upon him. He made few friends. This remoteness, this reluctance to cultivate personal relationships or to hear differing views, stunted his presidency.

That self-imposed isolation continues in Plains. After repeated refusals, local acquaintances stopped sending invitations. Carter seldom leaves the house except to go to church on Sunday, to jog or to attend the funerals of old friends. His daughter Amy, now 14, tries to get him to catch a movie in nearby Americus, but he is rarely inclined to do so. Every six weeks Carter goes to town to get a trim from Norinne Lowell at the local barbershop. He never goes out to buy his clothes, but orders them by mail from a designer friend in Bowdon, Ga. Even his White House secretary for four years, Susan Clough, who returned to Plains to work for Carter, conversed with him only a couple of times in the nine months she was there.

For the past 15 months Carter's life has centered on the book about his years in office, which he plans to call Keeping Faith. Each morning he wakes at 5, pours himself a glass of grapefruit juice and heads for his study. There, sitting in front of the keyboard of a white word processor, the ex-President works about eight hours a day. As the bright green letters appear on the screen, he speaks the words out loud. Around 7, he realizes that breakfast is near when he hears Amy practicing her violin down the hall.

Carter was eager to show his visitor the much prized white machine. "This is my place," he said, pointing toward the corner of the wood-paneled study, where he spends hours turning back and forth between the word processor and a desk that once belonged to his father. He refers to one of the remarkable diaries he kept so doggedly through his four years. Each evening, no matter how tired he was, he dictated his feelings--often blunt and troubled--into a tape recorder. Six thousand pages of transcripts, a historian's treasure, now fill dozens of black books on shelves that surround his desk.

He opened one of the black diaries and at random picked out a few paragraphs. There was the description of a prominent Senator who had visited the Oval Office with a proposal that day. "Such a jerk," the President had noted. Reading through the diaries over these past months has given him new perspectives on his presidency. He now believes, for example, that he should have picked up earlier on the problems that the Shah of Iran was having at home. Flipping through the diary pages, he turned to a day in the fall of 1977 when he had stood with the Shah on the White House lawn while tear gas used to disperse protesters near by drifted over them. As the diary reported, Carter then took the Shah into his private study and chided him about the need for more civil rights at home. "He was embarrassed," read the presidential notes about the reprimand.

Carter suddenly interrupted himself and pointed across the study to a large table, a lazy susan 5 ft. in diameter. He had designed and built the table, he said proudly, of longleaf pine, virgin timber cut 150 years ago for the home of Rosalynn's great-grandfather. Woodworking has become a Carter obsession. When he wants relief from his writing, he said, he moves to his nearby woodshop, a converted garage where he spends long periods alone chiseling out bowls and building benches and chairs, all his own designs. During the summer, he recalled, he often worked for hours with the big doors open, clouds of gnats hovering around his face and mouth, while a Secret Service agent took refuge from the heat and the bugs in one of the little wooden guard booths.

In the woodshop, the ex-President showed off his work with his own restrained style of joy. One piece was a coffee table that Carter had made out of some walnut he had got by trading a book with a neighbor; another was a bedside table made from a purplish slab of wood that came from the Congo. A huge hickory tree from the backyard had provided him with his own supply of local wood. He split the felled tree with a wedge, then used a heavy blade called a froe to cut them into the proper lengths for furniture. Pieces of white hickory sat in pails of water on the floor; Carter explained that the wood will not harden if it is kept moist. Long curls of hickory bark, which Carter uses for the seats of chairs, hung on string nailed to the ceiling.

Carter the perfectionist is evident in the woodshop. He never uses nails or screws, but painstakingly cuts and notches the joints together. He prefers hand tools to electric for more quality. He has actually made several of his own tools; among them are a hollow auger and a bow saw, and they hang neatly on the wall. He began explaining how to cut chair rungs to size and showed a little exasperation when he thought his visitor's attention was wandering. Carter puts his name on all his pieces with a branding iron. And he pointed out, in his meticulous way, that the signed objects would be worth a lot of money a hundred years from now.

By now it was mid-afternoon and Carter began looking for his wife. Rosalynn was in the kitchen, a red bandanna on her head, wearing white sneakers, a white pullover sweater and blue slacks. She looked fresh and trim, and he hugged her for a moment. The Carters eat every meal together and share the washing-up chores, do sit-ups before jogging and regularly view the evening news together. They have watched Reagan's press conferences, and Carter says he can quickly recognize what Reagan knows--and does not know. For the first six months after they returned to Plains, Rosalynn could not bear to watch the news. She had been stung badly by the defeat, and most particularly by comments that the Reagans had restored some class to the White House. Carter was so enraged he was ready to punch one disparaging writer, but he says he has since forgiven him. Rosalynn is not that easy. When a tactless old friend teased her recently about laying out a tablecloth for lunch, saying that Nancy Reagan surely would have approved, she glared at him, unamused.

Rosalynn Carter said that it had been hard at first to decide what to do with the rest of their lives. She has made the huge adjustment. Occasionally she takes shopping trips to Atlanta or Washington with a friend. Like her husband, she is immersed in writing a book, an autobiography that reaches back to her early days in Plains. At first she was terrified by the project. Now she spends a good deal of time clicking out the story of her life on a white word processor of her own.

Rosalynn Carter remains feisty in defense of her husband's record. She is especially proud of the restraint he showed for months over the hostages, noting grimly that if he had bombed Tehran, he would probably have won the election. She is personally bitter that Reagan's deep budget cuts have eliminated the federal mental health programs that she fought for.

It had stopped raining, and the Carters walked outdoors. In the driveway the ex-President bent down and squirted oil along the chains of their bicycles. Then he and Rosalynn wheeled through the gate, past the high black rail fence frugally imported by the Government from Richard Nixon's home at Key Biscayne. They pedaled down deserted country roads, followed by two agents in a car and another on a bike. The fields were green with wheat, and pecan trees were budding. They biked for miles, up sharp hills, past the house where they had first lived and then back into Plains itself. Far fewer tourists migrate here now, and the town has reverted to its backwater state. Billy Carter, the ruinous brother, has auctioned off his famous gas station for $30,000 and moved to Alabama. Real estate speculators from California and Canada who excitedly bought up land in Plains years ago at inflated prices are now stuck with it. Change comes slow. Just the other day someone complained about smelling marijuana in the post office.

The Carters rolled into the driveway of his mother's house, and then remembered that Miss Lillian was out at her weekly poker game. In the back, a pond had turned dark from the heavy rains. It was here, almost six years ago, that Carter had picked his presidential team. He and his wife got off their bikes and stared down at the brown water. Then, leaning against a tree, Carter reminisced about the troops of pinstriped dignitaries, the princes of the party, who had sloshed through the Georgia mud to meet the President-elect.

Now the Democratic leaders want no part of him. Carter recalled that he had tried to take the party in a more centrist direction but failed. He had been unable to root out the more liberal elements. There are sour feelings all around. Candidates never mention his name or seek his help. Carter was invited, almost as an afterthought, to the annual dinner of congressional Democrats; men like Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd and House Speaker Tip O'Neill were privately thankful that he decided not to come.

The party leaders have asked him to next month's midterm conference in Philadelphia, but are fervently hoping he will not ask to speak. "They are treating him like a leper," said one of Carter's aides bitterly. "I know I'm looked on as a symbol of defeat by some," the ex-President admitted. "But I'm confident that most of my policies will be vindicated." Some Democratic leaders, like Party Chairman Chuck Manatt, fear that Carter will become ambitious for the presidency again; the man from Plains curtly dismisses such a notion.

Back at his house after the bicycle ride, Carter spoke of his concerns about the country. After the book is finished, he said, he intends to speak out more. Two weeks ago, he and Rosalynn left Plains for a vacation trip to Scandinavia, and on the way back he visited French President Franc,ois Mitterrand. Carter has been strangely polite in his criticism of Reagan, despite the fact that the President, as Carter knows, holds him in contempt. For some months, Carter was denied even the minimal daily briefing reports that are provided to a hundred or so top officials in the Government. He endured it for a while and then asked his former press secretary, Jody Powell, to complain. After Powell threatened to go public with the slight, the briefing papers began arriving in Plains.

The ex-President sees his successor eventually edging toward. Carter-like policies on arms control and the Middle East. He sharply disagrees with Reagan's assertion that the Soviets have a definite margin of superiority in strategic weapons. "Reagan is flat wrong about that," he said, sounding like a man who knows the facts. "Even if it were true, which it isn't, it's an extremely unwise thing to say."

The Middle East remains a key interest of Carter's, and the subject will take up at least a quarter of his book. He has told friends that he believes Reagan could have utilized him as a negotiator because he is trusted by both sides. Carter has always feared an Islamic uprising in the West Bank, and the harsh occupation tactics of the Israelis trouble him. His book will be tough on Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the power of the Israeli lobby in this country. In the past, Carter has told intimates that he believes the Israelis do not want a second term for any U.S. President for fear that, free of electoral pressure, he might then turn on them.

Carter plans to work at fund raising for a library and public affairs institute associated with Emory University in Atlanta. This fall he will give some time to teaching at Emory. Looking pleased with himself, he unfolded the architect's drawings of the institute and stretched them open on his desk. The project stimulates his greatest personal hopes for the future; he spoke with real feeling of how he would hold seminars on such issues as human rights, the environment and arms reduction, and how he hoped to attract world leaders to his forums. For months, his wife remembered, he would talk excitedly about the institute before he fell asleep.

As his visitor prepared to leave, Jimmy Carter headed back to his word processor. The house was still silent and dark. He began rewriting a section of the book that describes his closest aides. Some who had read the draft had told him that it was much too soft on them. Engrossed in the work, he pushed himself well past his usual 10:30 bedtime. Day after day, he applied to the book the same drive and ruthless self-discipline he had brought to the presidency. Back home in Plains, he worked as if his very survival as a man depended on it. --By Robert Ajemian

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