TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. On this day of Jimmy Carter's funeral, which has also been declared a national day of mourning, we listen back to more excerpts of the interviews I recorded with him over the years. At 100 years old, Carter was the oldest living former president in American history with one of the longest and most productive public lives after leaving the White House.
Those post-presidency years were devoted to public service. He and his wife, Rosalynn, teamed up with Habitat for Humanity, building or repairing thousands of homes in the U.S. and other countries around the world including Mexico, South Africa, Haiti, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. He flew around the world to war zones to mediate violent conflicts and monitor elections in fledgling democracies. And Carter wrote several memoirs about his presidency, his childhood, his deep religious faith, his reflections on getting older and life after leaving office. That gave me the opportunity to interview him several times.
We'll start with a side of Jimmy Carter most Americans were unaware of when he was in the White House, his lifelong interest in and love of poetry. When we spoke in 1995, he just published a collection of his poems, titled "Always A Reckoning." Carter was the first former president to publish a book of poems.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: What do you think the assumptions are that people make when they hear a former president is also a poet?
JIMMY CARTER: Well, I think it's been a rare thing in history to have a president who was a published poet. I imagine a lot of folks who have been in the White House have written a poem or two.
GROSS: And hid them (laughter).
J CARTER: And hid them, yes. Or shared them with maybe a wife, you know, on Mother's Day or something of that kind. But I think to write poetry seriously is probably considered to be incompatible with being a politician who's been in the White House.
GROSS: Why? Why incompatible?
J CARTER: Well, it's just not something that's been done in the past except a couple of times in ancient history. And my own background, of course, is in engineering and nuclear physics, and not in literature. But I've been a poetry lover all my life, and I'm kind of an expert on some poets' works. I think the general reaction would be, well, they'll be extremely amateurish, or they'll just be frivolous, or...
GROSS: Or inspirational or calls to patriotism.
J CARTER: I think so. In this particular book, I put together about 45 poems and tried to make them as diverse as I could in their character.
GROSS: I'd like you to read a poem called "Of My Father's Cancer, And His Dreams." And you're welcome to introduce this if you'd like or to just begin the poem, but I think it would be nice for you to tell us first when you wrote it.
J CARTER: I've written most of these poems in the last five years. And what I've done ordinarily is revise each poem maybe a dozen or 20 times, trying to simplify them, make sure we had the right word and that the words were juxtaposed properly and that the lines either rhymed or didn't rhyme. In this particular poem, there are kind of slant rhymes. They're not direct rhymes. This one is a poem about my father's last days. I was a submarine officer working under Admiral Rickover, developing the second nucleate submarine in history. And my father, I discovered, I learned was dying. And I went home to be with him. And I've tried to put myself in the position of someone who is in his or her last days on a deathbed and how they might react to the world around them. The name of this poem is "Of My Father's Cancer, And His Dreams."
With those who love him near his bed, seldom speaking anymore, he lies too weak to raise his head, but dreams from time to time. In one, he says, he sees his wife, so proud in her white uniform with other nurses trooping by - their girlish voices aimed to charm the young men lounging there. Then her eyes met his and hold. A country courtship has begun. They've been together 30 years. Now, she watches over him as she tries to hide her tears. All his children are at home but wonder what they ought to say or do, either when he is awake or when he seems to fade away. They can't always be on guard, and sometimes if his mind is clear, he can grasp a whispered phrase never meant for him to hear.
He just seems weaker all the time. I don't know what else to cook. He can't keep down anything. He hears the knocking on the door, voices of his friends, who bring a special cake or fresh-killed quail. They mumble out some words of love, try to learn how he might feel and then go back to spread the word. They say he may have faded some. He'll soon give in to the rising pain and crave the needle that will numb his knowledge of a passing world and bring the consummating sleep he knows will come.
GROSS: Have you read that poem - did you read that poem to your family before publishing it?
J CARTER: All my family, I did. I read it to Rosalynn.
GROSS: Yeah, I was thinking of Rosalynn, yeah.
J CARTER: But my father and my mother, and both my sisters and my brother have all died with cancer. And so I don't have anyone to read it to, except my wife, who's a very good editor and who is familiar with all these poems.
GROSS: In your dedications in this book, you dedicate the book in part to your father who - let me turn to the page, actually, so I can quote it. You write, to my father, Earl, who labored all his life but also loved the good times, his innate goodness curbed by the Southern mores he observed. A man who relished discipline, who reached out to his son with love, always tempered with restraint. What were the Southern mores he observed that you were referring to there?
J CARTER: Of separate but equal. Of discrimination against African American neighbors. Although, he wouldn't have put it in those terms. He would not have thought it was discrimination.
GROSS: Did you ever try to change him on that? Do you think it's possible for a son to change a father?
J CARTER: Well, those were times - my daddy died in 1953.
GROSS: So you were still pretty young.
J CARTER: Well, I was in the Navy. And I remember once I came home from a submarine cruise. And I was bragging on the fact that we had been to Jamaica, and the governor general of Jamaica had invited our submarine crew to come to a ball or party, where young Jamaican women would be there. And then he discovered that one of our crew members was Black. And the governor general sent word back that everyone could come except that one crew member. And the crew took great pride in telling the governor general to go to hell.
And when I came home and told my father that story with some pride, he was embarrassed by it. And my mother said that I shouldn't discuss race issues with my daddy. But those were times - it's hard to remember now historically when there was really not much question in the South of the advisability of a totally separate but equal society. And I don't think it's proper to condemn my father in ancient history because he complied with the mores of his time.
GROSS: OK, it's time for another poem.
J CARTER: OK.
GROSS: (Laughter) I have another request.
J CARTER: All right.
GROSS: This is called "Itinerant Songsters Visit Our Village."
J CARTER: All right.
GROSS: And it's really a poem about poetry and writing poetry and learning to write poetry.
J CARTER: This is really what precipitated my getting serious about writing poems. Some famous poems came down to Plains to do a reading, along with country music singer Tom T. Hall. One of these poets was Miller Williams, who wrote the textbook used in most colleges, called "How Does A Poem Mean?"
GROSS: Do you know, by the way - let me stop you here...
J CARTER: Yeah.
GROSS: ...That his daughter, Lucinda Williams, is a wonderful singer and songwriter?
J CARTER: She's great, yeah.
GROSS: Yeah, yeah.
J CARTER: She won a...
GROSS: I was wondering if you liked her music.
J CARTER: I do. I have two CDs by her, and I was very pleased when she won one of the top Grammy Awards this past year.
GROSS: Yeah, right. Right.
J CARTER: I'm very pleased with this, and this - I'm glad you know that. That's wonderful (ph).
GROSS: Yeah (laughter).
J CARTER: But Miller Williams has been a lot of help to me. But this is a poem about their coming to Plains. It's called "Itinerant Songsters Visit Our Village."
(Reading) When some poets came to Plains one night, two with guitars, their poems taught us how to look and maybe laugh at what we were and felt and thought. After that, I rushed to write in fumbling lines why we should care about a distant starving child. I asked how we might love the fear and death of war, rejecting peace as weakness, how a poet can dare to bring forth out of memory the troubled visions buried there and why we barely comprehend what happens out in space. I found my words would seldom flow. And then I turned to closer, simpler themes - a pony, Mama as a nurse, the sight of geese, the songs of whales, a pasture gate, a racist curse, a possum hunt, a battle prayer. I learned from poetry that art is best derived from artless things, that mysteries might be explored and understood from that which springs most freely from my mind and heart.
GROSS: I like this poem a lot, and I like how you describe in the poem you trying to, you know, write about great themes - war and peace and troubling visions - and then you turn to specific details and very specific things that happened to you. Tell me more about how you learned to do that in your poems.
J CARTER: Well, I was fumbling around trying to say great things and trying to emulate famous poem - poets. And I was having a lot of difficulty. The poems didn't quite come together, and then kind of a breakthrough occurred. And I found, as I said in the poem, that my words would seldom flow. And then I turned to simpler things about matters that really meant a lot to me. One of the poems that's my favorite is the sighting of a flock of geese that flew over the White House when I was living there and how in a submerged submarine, we would hear the song of whales on our sonar and how the - a visit to a pasture gate behind our barn was a turning point in my life on the race issue. Those simple things that meant so much to me - it became possible for me to express perhaps profound ideas and feelings and thoughts using a simple theme as a vehicle rather than a complicated theme.
GROSS: Did Miller Williams give you advice about that, too?
J CARTER: Yes, he did. Most of my poems are factual, and Miller used to make fun of me because I would be factual in my poems. He said, forget about exactness. It's the words and the thought that means more. But I was - he used to tease me because the poems about myself are pretty, well, factual.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter's poetry collection is titled "Always A Reckoning." We'll hear more of my 1995 interview with him after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRANK WOESTE, RYAN KEBERLE AND VINCENT COURTOIS' "BLUE FEATHER")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Today we're remembering Jimmy Carter. Let's get back to my 1995 interview with him about his poetry collection, "Always A Reckoning."
When you're president of the United States, you're the most, you know, important person in the country, and you have the most power and so on. And then when, you know, fairly late in life, you start writing poetry more seriously than you ever wrote it before...
J CARTER: Yes.
GROSS: I mean, you're getting started, you know, pretty late with that and everything. There might be this feeling, well, how could I possibly be any good? And as former president, I'm only allowed to do things that I can really excel in.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Did you ever go through a crisis about that and think, like, if you wrote poems, they'd better be the best poems, otherwise you wouldn't be able to measure up to your own standards.
J CARTER: Well, I did. And I have to say that I approached it fairly tentatively. I didn't just all of a sudden decide, I'm going to write a book of poems. I wrote a few poems, and then I submitted them to magazines and to quarterlies around the country.
GROSS: Anonymously (laughter)?
J CARTER: Well, I would put J. Carter on them. And they would - I would ask the publishers not to reveal the fact that they came from a former president, not to mention that at all. And then there were, you know, very helpful critical reviews, most of them, by the way, favorable, I have to say. And so I increased in my confidence (laughter) with experience. And finally, I decided to take about 45 of my poems and to put them together in this book.
GROSS: Well, did you get rejection slips from anybody?
J CARTER: Yes, a few.
GROSS: And did that hurt a lot?
J CARTER: Not really because I didn't expect very much at the beginning. I expected to be rejected, and when I did get an acceptance, it was a very pleasant surprise (laughter). I submitted a few poems to some of the more prominent magazines. And the first time I sent a few poems to my present publisher, he said that he didn't think that a poetry book was appropriate for me. And I took one of the poems out of The New Yorker magazine that I could not comprehend at all.
GROSS: (Laughter).
J CARTER: And then I sent it to him, Peter Osnos. He says he has it on his wall in his office, but it's a totally incomprehensible, ugly collection of words that has no meaning to me, no rhythm, no rhyme. The words are not even good, but it was published in The New York Magazine. And I don't understand that kind of poetry. So, you know, I went through a laborious process...
GROSS: (Laughter).
J CARTER: ...Of finally saying, OK, I'm going to publish the poems that I like. I'm going to let them be truly expressive of my inner feelings, and if people like them, fine. If they don't, OK. So far, the reviews have been quite favorable.
GROSS: There's another poem I'm going to ask you to read called "Difficult Times."
J CARTER: OK. It's a very brief poem. That's the title of it, "Difficult Times." (Reading) I try to understand. I've seen you draw away and show the pain. It's hard to know what I can say to turn things right again, to have the coolness melt, to share once more the warmth we've felt.
GROSS: Was that a poem to Rosalynn?
J CARTER: Yes, when we were having some difficult times. And that first version of the poem is not this one. I rewrote it several times to simplify it and to abbreviate it. But I think we all go through those things, and there's a reaching out to someone else that can be expressed in poetry that couldn't be expressed, at least by me, in prose or verbally.
GROSS: So did you give her the poem after you wrote it?
J CARTER: Yes.
GROSS: Did that help...
J CARTER: Well, we got along all right.
GROSS: ...Warm things up?
J CARTER: Well, we're still...
GROSS: You're still together (laughter).
J CARTER: We're now approaching our 49th wedding anniversary, so, yes, it did.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter recorded in 1995, after the publication of his poetry collection, "Always A Reckoning." In 2005, I spoke with him about his book "Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis." Carter was the first American president to tell the public that he was born again. But he believed in the separation of church and state, and in this memoir, he focused on his concerns about the intertwining of politics and religion.
You were the first president to say that you were born again. And you said that during the election when you were asked by a reporter.
J CARTER: Yes.
GROSS: After you proclaimed that you were born again, how did that change perceptions of you?
J CARTER: It was a very serious mistake for me to make. I was actually in the backyard of a friend in North Carolina, and I was asked, are you a born-again Christian? And I answered truthfully, yes, I am. I had always assumed that that phrase was completely acceptable, at least among Christians. And there were news reporters there - it was kind of late in the '76 campaign - and it was reported. And the reaction was very severe and negative because the people who were not familiar with that phrase assumed that I was claiming to have some special endowment from God and visions and that I also tended to elevate myself above all other human beings in my moral standards, which was not the case at all.
Being a born-again Christian had been a phrase I used since I was probably 3 or 4 years old - is used in - regularly in the Christian churches in my area. So it was a very negative reaction to what I had to say, and I was very careful from then on to separate openly and ostentatiously my religious faith from any responsibilities that I assumed when I became president.
GROSS: When you were president, did you ever find that your political position and your religious views ever came into conflict?
J CARTER: Yes. There was one issue in particular that was a very serious problem for me, and that was abortion. I have never believed that Jesus Christ, whom I worship, would approve abortions, unless the mother's health or life was threatened or perhaps if the pregnancy was from rape or incest. This is hard for me to accept. And at the same time, I was sworn by oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court had ruled that abortions in the first semester of pregnancy were completely acceptable.
So I tried to do everything I could within the bounds of the law to minimize and discourage abortions. One of the easily understood principles is that two-thirds of the women who have abortions claim that the reason is that they cannot financially support another child. So I developed what's known as a Women, Infant, Children's program - WIC program - to give special benefits to pregnant women and infant children. Also, I promoted the proposition that adoption should be easier, and I tried to promulgate training in high school on ways to avoid unwanted pregnancy. But I had to uphold the law, so that particular one was troublesome for me.
Another that was legally troublesome for me that didn't really ever come into effect was the Supreme Court's ruling shortly before I became president that authorized the death penalty. But when the Supreme Court ruled, luckily I went through my entire term as governor and my entire term as president and no one was executed under my administrations. And I have never felt that Jesus Christ, again, would approve the death penalty as it's presently supported so strongly by some of the conservative Christians and others in this country. Those are the two issues.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter recorded in 2005. Our remembrance of Jimmy Carter will continue with more of that conversation and another interview I recorded with him and his daughter, Amy, when she was 25 about family life in the White House after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE FRED HERSCH TRIO'S "A RIDDLE SONG")
GROSS: This is
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're remembering Jimmy Carter with excerpts of interviews I recorded with him over the years. Let's get back to the one we recorded in 2005, 30 years after Carter's successful campaign for the presidency. George W. Bush was president at the time.
Now, you mentioned that when you publicly stated that you were born-again when you were running for president that it worked against you. People misunderstood what you meant by that. And you thought it hurt you in the election. It's funny because, you know, President Bush is born-again. He discussed that when he was running for office and, you know, it seemed to help him very much in his campaign. So would you reflect a little bit about what's changed?
J CARTER: Well, what's changed is what I described earlier, that is that the rise of fundamentalism has affected both politics, including national policy in domestic and foreign affairs, and also has affected the religious community much more than it ever did when I was in politics. And the two have now merged. So there is an ostentatious and very aggressive effort among, you might say, the religious right leaders - and I don't criticize them because of their beliefs - publicly to align themselves with the Republican Party, provided the Republican Party members whom they support are adequately conservative. So that marriage has been a radical departure, in my opinion, from the ancient values of our country as espoused most clearly by Thomas Jefferson, who advocated a wall between church and state.
GROSS: Let me ask you about evolution since, you know, intelligent design is before the courts now. How do you deal with the fact that science tells us different things than the Bible does about the creation of men and women and the Earth?
J CARTER: Well, in "Our Endangered Values," the book, I describe my feelings about this quite thoroughly. I studied nuclear physics when I was a young man. I was one of the originators of the nuclear submarine program. I worked under Admiral Hyman Rickover. At the same time, as you've already mentioned, I'm a devout Christian. I don't see any incompatibility at all between the two. My belief is that God created the universe. My belief is that God permits us to understand the new developments that we can witness in universal matters. When the Bible was written, we didn't have the Hubble telescope. We didn't have microscopes so we could look at small items. We didn't have a way to test the age of rocks and so forth.
Now we have these scientific capabilities. And so I think that science is just a revelation of God's creation. And so the two are completely separate. And we can't prove the existence of things in our faith, as a matter of fact. The definition of faith in the Bible is that we know things that cannot be proven. Well, we don't have to have faith to believe that the moon is out there. That's something that we can see for ourselves. And we can't have science prove the existence of God or all of the things that we know about Jesus Christ as a Christian. So the two are separate. I don't believe there's any place in a scientific classroom to try to prove to the students that God exists. I think the two ought to be completely separate. So I believe in both of them, the science and religion. The two are completely separate. One should not be imposed on the other.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter recorded in 2005 after he'd written his book "Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis." Coming up, family life in the White House. We'll listen to an excerpt of an interview I did with Carter and his daughter, Amy, when she was 25. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE WESTERLIES' "FROM THE VERY FIRST TIME")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering Jimmy Carter by listening back to excerpts of interviews I recorded with him after he left the White House. In 1995, I spoke with Carter and his daughter, Amy. She was 9 when her father was elected president. She was 25 at the time of this interview. She and her father had just finished a children's book. Jimmy did the writing, and Amy did the illustrations. Their book, "The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer," was based on stories Carter used to tell his children. It was about a lonely boy who's befriended by an intimidating underwater creature known as a snoogle-fleejer.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
J CARTER: Well, this was a hero of a lot of stories that I told my children beginning maybe 40, 45 years ago. And this is a monster, but a young one, but still very large and extremely ugly. And he comes out of the ocean on occasion to become involved in adventures with little children who were about the same age as my children when I told them the stories. And he interrelates in a very exciting and dramatic way to help resolve some of their problems or to deal with crises that affect their lives. And so the little baby snoogle-fleejer is always fearsome to all the other kids.
And usually in the stories - the hero of that particular story, the little child, is the only one who can relate to the little baby snoogle-fleejer. Because he is so ugly and formidable-looking, he's a very lonely little creature. And he's always searching for friends but rarely finds any, spends his time underneath the ocean, underneath the waters. But he can come up to the top on occasion. And amazingly, he's able to speak different languages. In this particular case, he speaks English.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter, do you think you invented an undersea creature in part because you were stationed on a submarine in your military days?
J CARTER: Well, I think so. Actually, I probably began telling these stories when I was still on a surface ship. But I always had submarines in the back of my mind. And one of the submarines I was on was a killer submarine designed exclusively to hunt and destroy Soviet submarines if we should have had gone to war before they could hear us. It was extremely quiet and very small and specially designed. So we would stay submerged for sometimes days at a time and listen to the sound of shrimp and whales and dolphins on our very elaborate sonar equipment. And I think there's no doubt that having a undersea creature become a startling hero came from my experiences underneath the water for sometimes days or even months at a time.
GROSS: Amy Carter, your father describes the little baby snoogle-fleejer as an ugly creature. How did you decide to draw it, what - the colors you used, the shape you gave it? Where did you get your visual impression from? How did you come up with it?
AMY CARTER: I actually looked at a lot of fish and old National Geographics. And I wanted to have his skin be sort of modeled - and I guess the only - perhaps I didn't really try to make him as ugly as I could have. But I added his big teeth sort of in that way and just sort of green, moldy colors.
GROSS: I should say for our listeners who are hearing unusual sounds in the background that that is not the snoogle-fleejer. That's actually the sounds of construction near the NPR studio in New York. So what was it like for the two of you to collaborate on something? You know, sometimes it's very hard for family members to work together, particularly to learn to drive from each other. But what was I like to work on a book together? I mean, Jimmy Carter, you're the father and therefore are used to being in control or wanting to have control, but that's not the attitude to have when you're collaborating...
J CARTER: Well...
GROSS: ...With somebody.
J CARTER: I had been through a horrible experience writing a book together with my wife a few years ago called "Everything To Gain." It almost destroyed a marriage of 48 years because it was about a traumatic experience in our life having been defeated for reelection as president, having lost all our money, having gone back home to an empty house with all our kids gone. And the book was advice on how other people might deal with these unexpected and difficult events.
Rose and I could agree on 97% of the text, but the 3% became paramount. And we had a horrible experience, literally. I'm not exaggerating. We could only communicate by writing ugly messages back and forth on our word processers. And it was only a very enlightened editor who saved our book and saved our marriage by finally taking those 3% of paragraphs and dividing them half and half - half of Jimmy's, half of Rosalynn's. And you can put a J on your paragraphs. Rosalynn doesn't have to agree, and she can put an R on her paragraphs, and you don't have to agree. So we saved our book.
So I went into this event with Amy with that as a historical background. This time, though, Amy was off at graduate school. I was in Plains, and I felt that it was my story and my image of snoogle-fleejer, and Amy just had to fill in the gaps. But it turned out that Amy has an artist's temperament. When she decides on how something should look, how it should be presented, there's very little opportunity to change her mind. And I think not only did I discover this, but the editor of Times Books found this out. So there wasn't any chance for argument much.
GROSS: Amy, I know that there was a period when you were at Brown University when you engaged in a student protest against CIA recruiting on campus. That ended up in a big court case. You spent a lot of time away from your actual school work and ended up, I believe, being expelled. I'm wondering if that was a turning point in you deciding what you wanted to do, I mean, what you wanted to study and what you wanted to be. I mean, were you pursuing art then, or did that kind of crisis get you onto a different and ultimately maybe more satisfying course?
A CARTER: Oh, I definitely think so. I was actually pursuing art to some degree at Brown. But I guess it really made me consider what kind of environment I really felt comfortable in instead of, like, the idea that I had been set up for particularly by going to a prep school in Georgia that was sort of geared towards the Ivy League. So I think that that came to a head. And I also returned to the South at that point and went to Memphis, which was really, I think, probably an important step for me just in terms of the fact that, moving so much, I needed some - or I felt like it was time to sort of deal with what area of the country was really my home and, like, explore Georgia to a fuller extent and be close to family and friends.
GROSS: You went to Memphis College of Art.
A CARTER: Yeah. I did.
J CARTER: Another thing was that Amy had been very active in demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa.
GROSS: Right.
J CARTER: And she had already been arrested or detained three times before that. She was very active in college as a leader in that respect but, at the same time, I think, very withdrawn and - if Amy will excuse my saying the word shy person. She didn't want to be confronting TV cameras and news reporters, but she felt very deeply about these kind of things.
GROSS: Amy, it sounds like you're a mix of very shy and defiant.
A CARTER: I think that's exactly right.
J CARTER: That's one reason that we don't really argue with Amy when she tells us that she's decided to do something - the defiant part.
GROSS: So, Jimmy Carter, you were governor and president. Was there much time when you were in those positions to actually tell stories to Amy?
J CARTER: I think never enough. You know, this is something that you always find to be startling when you look back and maybe tabulate how many hours you actually spend with your sons or daughter whom you really love. And then you can go a year or so and all of a sudden realize, I haven't spent but two or three days actually with my kids. Nowadays, we have a fixed habit of going off for at least a week with the whole family together. There are 18 of us, and we do that every year so that we can get to know each other better and become acquainted. But this is a particularly exciting and unpredictable experience in my life, spending a few days with Amy on, you know, talking about this book because I don't think I've ever had a real partnership before, even with my three sons. So I have approached it with some degree of trepidation, but I have to say this interview has helped me overcome some of my concerns.
GROSS: How does a first family put aside time as family time? What family time did you actually have together in the White House?
J CARTER: Well, I'll let Amy answer that, too, but I stayed, you know, in the Oval office and worked pretty hard. And we had three grown sons and Rosalynn, who were out a lot, who would meet with elderly people, meet with those who are interested in abortions, meet with those who are interested in education and health and welfare and so forth. And Amy was going to a public school in Washington. So around our dinner tables and so forth, supper tables, we had these intense discussions of what's going on in the world, what's going on out in the public school system or in the welfare lines. And it was a very wonderful education for me.
Amy went to school the first morning as a 9-year-old child, and she was inundated with TV cameras and radio microphones being thrust in her face. And that evening on the television, they showed this little child struggling up the walkway with a large sack of books, abused, really, by dozens of eager reporters. All the reporters that were at the White House at that time - I think they wanted 1,200 then; there are more now - got together after seeing this television display and pledged to one another they would leave Amy alone.
So for the rest of the four years we were in the White House, she led a kind of a protected life, and she would bring her classmates to the White House to go swimming or to watch movies. And so I think she had a fairly normal life as a child within the bounds of, you know, living in the White House. Maybe Amy would disagree with me, but that was my impression.
GROSS: Amy, how much family time did you actually have in the White House years?
A CARTER: I actually think, from discussions with both my parents, that they feel - are more concerned about that than I remember or than I was at the time because I really remember it as being very frequent. Like, there was never a time when I could not walk into anyone's office and speak to them. I remember having dinners together. And...
GROSS: How often would you have dinner together?
A CARTER: I think we had - well, my memory might be shaky, but I think we had dinner together very regularly.
J CARTER: Almost every night. The only exception was when we had a state banquet and some king or president would come from a foreign country to have an official banquet. On a few occasions, Amy went to the official banquets. And she was severely criticized...
A CARTER: For reading.
J CARTER: ...For reading...
GROSS: Oh.
J CARTER: ...At the table.
GROSS: I completely identify. I completely identify. I used to bring a book with me to a lot of family events and be roundly chastised for it. But, you know, I used to be really bored, to be honest, with a lot of adult events when I was a kid. I was like, they're talking about adult things, and, you know, I don't care. I'd rather watch TV. But, Amy, when you were surrounded by adult events, it was, you know, like, presidents from other countries and, you know, probably, you know, famous performers who are doing White House performances and things like that. Were you interested in these very famous adults, or were they uninteresting to you also?
A CARTER: There's several that I remember meeting that I was really drawn to and happy to have known - just kind of mixed group. But Sadat I remember very vividly. He's one of the people that I met that I think I was most thrilled to meet because he was so kind and would come and say goodnight to me before he left, which - I think maybe it was the people who went out of the way to treat me - who went out of the way to say hello to the one who was young that I remember. Cher is actually another person I remember. I was completely overwhelmed...
GROSS: Really?
A CARTER: ...By meeting Cher and John Travolta. There's some really - you know, I was young, and I really admired those people.
J CARTER: That was when she was married to one of the Allman brothers, right? And they both came.
A CARTER: And her fingernails - I still remember her fingernails because I thought they were so beautiful.
GROSS: Were they really long? They were probably fake.
A CARTER: They were very long.
(LAUGHTER)
A CARTER: But she was very sweet to me, too. She...
GROSS: Oh, that's nice.
A CARTER: Yeah. She spoke to me - I feel like she spoke to me about an hour alone, which, I think, made me feel adult...
GROSS: Yeah.
A CARTER: ...Probably.
J CARTER: I remember when King Hussein came to the White House the first or second time with his sons, and we had - I think Rosalynn had briefed Amy, you know, very carefully about, you know, your royal highness and so forth. And so as they approached, Amy said, hi. How you doing? And they relaxed very quickly and became friends.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter and his daughter, Amy, recorded in 1995. We'll conclude our tribute to him after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. When I interviewed Jimmy Carter in December 2001 about his memoir "Christmas In Plains" - he grew up in Plains, Georgia - it was at the beginning of a somber holiday season when the country was still mourning the losses of the September 11 attacks.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: I would like to wish you a merry Christmas, but it strikes me as not exactly as a merry period. And I'm wondering what language you're using when you're sending your best sentiments about Christmas this year. Are you using the word merry?
J CARTER: Well, we're sending a message of a peaceful Christmas, a Christmas filled with love, wishing for harmony among people and families who have different faiths. I think this year is more of a wish for peace and love than it is for happiness or merriment. One of the things that I have described in "Christmas In Plains" is how we have to accommodate those times of sadness or distress or sometimes maybe even fear or sorrow when we've lost a loved one right before Christmas. We can't be expecting happiness or merriment or celebration, except the celebration of things, as I said earlier in the program, that never changed, that are precious to us.
One of the things that Rosa and I do nowadays, since we've got I think 23 members in our family, is to try to bring together all the members of our family at least once a year. So over a period of years, as I described in the book, we've carved out for ourselves a week after Christmas. So on the 27 of December each year, we gather our whole family together and we go somewhere that's attractive enough to bring the grandkids along with us. And our children and grandchildren who have jobs save up their vacation time for those few days, and we all go to some interesting place. Rosa and I generally try to pay all the bills. We save up our frequent flower miles to pay the transportation, and we just get reacquainted. So I think in that respect, no matter what the outside world is doing, the Carter Center still preserves the essence of Christmas.
GROSS: Boy, I bet you get a lot of frequent flyer miles through your work with the Carter Center, travelling around the world.
J CARTER: (Laughter) Well, we - you'd be amazed at how many frequent flier miles...
GROSS: Are you a member of all the VIP clubs?
J CARTER: Yes.
GROSS: You fly first class with the miles most of the time?
J CARTER: Well, we actually buy tickets tourist class, but Delta Airlines is nice enough to me and Rosa, so that when they have a vacant seat - two vacant seats - they don't have first class, they have business class - they sometimes - most of the time, elevate us to a higher status. But one of the things that I have done ever since I left the White House is every time I get on a plane to travel in a commercial plane, as you know, I don't have an Air Force One anymore - I go back and shake hands with everybody on the plane before we take off. And it's a very pleasant thing for me. And I meet a lot of old friends there and people that share experiences with me.
And the flights that I took immediately after the September 11 tragedy - when I did this, there were four rounds of applause that I did it. I think at first when I told Rosa about it, she said - I thought that they were just glad to see me, and she said, Jimmy, what they were glad to see was a secret service on the plane with you.
(LAUGHTER)
J CARTER: But I enjoy doing that, and I think that kind of brings out maybe something of the spirit of Christmas.
GROSS: Jimmy Carter recorded in 2001. If you missed the first program in our two-part series remembering Carter, you can listen to it on our podcast or stream it at freshair.npr.org. We're grateful to have had him on our show several times and to be able to reflect on his years of service to our country and his commitment to working for affordable housing, democracy and peace around the world. Rest in peace.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HADEN'S "AMERICAN DREAMS")
GROSS: Today's edition was produced by our executive producer Danny Miller, and our director Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Some of these earlier interviews were produced by Amy Salit. Our digital media producers are Molly Seavy-Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HADEN'S "AMERICAN DREAMS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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