"Jimmy Carter is the most active and influential former president since Teddy Roosevelt. He has earned everyone’s admiration and become a model of how to not just carry on but to contribute after leaving the White House. Douglas Brinkley, the best of the new generation of American historians, tells us in vigorous language the story of Carter’s quite amazing range of activities, at home and around the world. As a bonus, The Unfinished Presidency offers a marvelous portraits of a wide range of world leaders, as seen from the unique perspective of Jimmy Carter. Highly recommended!" – Stephen E. Ambrose, Author of Undaunted Courage

"Douglas Brinkley, one of our most exciting historians, not only provides a richly textured narrative of Carter’s amazing postpresidency, he also uses the story to explore the relationship between realism and moral values in American foreign policy." – Walter Isaacson, Author of Kissinger

"This superb book shows how broad, sustained, and controversial were Carter’s efforts in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Middle East, the Gulf War, and Korea. Every chapter is filled with insight and revelation." – Gaddis Smith, Learned Professor of History, Yale University

"With fastidious research and extraordinary access to his subject, Brinkley has brought us a fascinating, thoughtful account of Jimmy Carter after the White House – easily the most detailed real-time inside look we have ever had at an American ex-president." – Michael Beschloss, Author of Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-64

"Jimmy Carter has given the role of ex-president new luster; and Douglas Brinkley’s excellent book records the possibilities and perils of an activist ex-presidency with candor, insight, and readability. A fine history!" – Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Out of Retirement
Related Link: First Chapter: 'The Unfinished Presidency' | By GODFREY HODGSON
Former President Jimmy Carter has tried to mediate some of the world's most stubborn conflicts.

Only a decade ago, more than five million people, mostly in central Africa, were afflicted by a disgusting parasite called the Guinea worm. It lives inside the human body for a year before breaking the skin as a two-to-three-foot-long worm. Agonizingly painful, it can cause sepsis and even tetanus, which is often fatal.

Jimmy Carter had never heard of Guinea worm disease until his friend Dr. Peter Bourne gave a presentation about it. His response was characteristic. ''If Guinea worm is so easy to eradicate,'' he asked, ''why is it not being done?'' Within months he had persuaded the World Health Organization to make it the No. 2 priority after smallpox. He toured Africa, talking Guinea worm with the dodgy Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi (of B.C.C.I. fame), and talked Du Pont into supplying millions of drinking-water filters and American Cyanamid into providing larvicides. Into the bargain, he called in his markers from a dozen African and Asian leaders, urging them to campaign for the disease's eradication. The number of cases in the world is now under 100,000.

After his humiliating re-election defeat in 1980, Carter retired to Plains, Ga., where his family has been prominent for over 100 years. His staff presented him with the best Sears, Roebuck could do in woodworking tools. Before long he was making furniture and gifts like cedar-lined cigar boxes. He loves fly-fishing too, writes competent poetry and still regularly teaches Sunday school at the interracial Maranatha Baptist Church, which the Carters joined because Plains Baptist, where they originally worshiped, voted to get rid of a pastor who had welcomed black people to the congregation.

But Carter, an ex-President of the United States at 56, was not about to contemplate graceful retirement. His religion is deeply held and passionate, but it is of the covenanting, not the quietist, strain. Once he had recovered from the hurt of his loss, and an entirely human, quite unsaintly resentment of the way he had been misrepresented by the Republicans and the media, he threw himself into one crusade after another, for human health, human rights and above all for what he considers one of the most fundamental of those rights: peace.

All ex-Presidents get to have a library to house their archives and scholars who want to work on them. Carter decided to set up, alongside his library in Atlanta, the Carter Center. His wife, Rosalynn, tells a Horatio Alger-style story about how the idea for a center to carry on the ideals of the Camp David accords he had brokered between Israel and Egypt came to him in the middle of the night. The truth was more complex. But the central idea of the Carter Center did derive from Camp David. He wanted to create a place where the parties to the world's most stubborn conflicts could come together and work out solutions.

Raising the money for the center, from the Coca-Cola Company and from most of the largest foundations in America, consumed a great deal of Carter's time. But he also found time to work with saw and hammer (and a great deal of publicity) for the charity Habitat for Humanity, created by his good-ol'-Georgia-boy friend Millard Fuller. He began a campaign to distribute drugs that can cure ''river blindness,'' which threatens 120 million people, again mainly in Africa, with losing their sight.

Most important, he set himself up as a private-enterprise crusader for world peace. Sometimes his efforts were done in harness with Washington or with other world leaders, sometimes alone. Sometimes he supervised elections and guaranteed their legitimacy, as in Panama and Nicaragua. Sometimes he inserted himself into dangerous confrontations to head off conflict, as in Haiti and North Korea. Most persistently and most controversially, he tried to repeat his Camp David success by offering himself as a mediator in the Middle East, and ended up so identified with the Palestinian cause that his efforts were largely self-defeating.

Douglas Brinkley has told the story of Jimmy Carter's second and subsequent comings with critical sympathy and a wealth of research. On occasion he seems, like his subject, a little naive about the wicked world out there. Certainly the reader is sometimes brought up with a start by the ethnocentric nature of his take on the world. He calls Egypt's Copts ''Coptics,'' for example, and his accounts of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and his explanation of Arab-Israeli history are seriously simplistic. For a historian (he is director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans and the author of books on James Forrestal, Dean Acheson and Franklin D. Roosevelt), Brinkley is curiously incurious about history; here is the Middle East without Zionism or the Holocaust, and Yugoslavia without the Ottoman Empire or the Nazi invasion.

He is excellent, however, at bringing to life the elusive personality, sweet yet angular, of Jimmy Carter himself. He quotes a perceptive assessment by David Brinkley (no relation), that ''despite his intelligence, he had a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people.'' Much of ''The Unfinished Presidency'' is a commentary on the two sides of Carter's personality: his Christian values and his fierce, competitive egotism. This dualism pervades his private life. Carter refuses to see visitors who arrive even as little as one minute late, and made his wife miserable by criticizing her if she was late in getting ready to go out. Then, one year, he forgot to buy her a birthday present. So he sat down and wrote her a note, promising not to make a fuss when she was late. ''He kept to his word,'' she joked, ''but he does tap his foot impatiently on occasion.''

Self-righteousness may be the worst temptation of the righteous, and many of the flaws debited against Carter's impressive post-Presidential achievements can be set down to that unattractive failing. At times, as after his successful negotiation with the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, he came close to spoiling the effect by going on CNN (which, thanks to Carter's trout-fishing friendship with Ted Turner, often acted like his personal network) and upstaging the White House.

Carter's relations with successive Presidents have been bad, sometimes in ways that raised the question of whether he has continued to resent his 1980 defeat. His relations with Bill Clinton have been oddest of all. In a telling passage, Brinkley points out that though they were both moderate Southern governors, they ''had about as much in common as, well, a peanut farmer from the Deep South and a Yale-and-Oxford-educated lawyer from Arkansas, a state that is as much Western and Midwestern as it is Southern.'' He quotes William Fulbright as saying, ''Carter had deep roots; Clinton had none.''

CARTER has acquired the reputation of being on the left. In domestic terms, that is far from the case. But his foreign policy is deeply in rebellion against many of the assumptions of the last five decades of orthodoxy. Although, as befits a former naval officer, he is not against war in all circumstances, he has opposed almost every exertion of American military force since Vietnam. Compulsively, he sides with underdogs and outsiders. His religion commits him to what Brinkley well calls this ''dialogue with the ostracized.'' But it has led him to strange bedfellows. In the interests of mediation, he has found it easy to forgive some fairly rank sinners, from Kim Il Sung to Manuel Noriega. Strangest of all, for many, are his fondness for Yasir Arafat, who flattered him shamelessly, and his undeniable bias, if not against Israel, at least against Likud governments and politicians.

Even Carter's severest critics, though, will find it hard to be unmoved by his blend of idealism and practicality. ''Conferences and committees are not an end in themselves,'' he once wrote in righteous anger. ''I need something a peanut farmer can (a) Understand and (b) Do.'' Like him or not, a reader of this remarkable book may well conclude that this peanut farmer has understood more than anyone imagined, and done more than anyone expected.

Godfrey Hodgson is the director of the Reuter Foundation Program for journalists at Oxford University.

Kirkus Reviews
April 15, 1998

If you wonder why Jimmy Carter was so unsuccessful as a president and outstanding as an ex-president, this book is for you.

Carter's reaction to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) captures the essence of the Carter enigma. Promoting a technically impossible ''Star Wars'' scheme, Carter believed, was dishonest. Yet as historian Brinkley (Univ. of New Orleans; Dean Acheson, 1992) points out, Carter's public condemnation of SDI reveals not only moral conviction, but also an utter inability to consider that the Reagan administration was simply using SDI to pressure the Soviets. As president, Carter was a man of moral absolutes in a world colored in shades of gray. As an ex-president, however, this same quality leaves him undeterred by concerns that prevent public officials from moving forward. To gain peace Carter will sit down with terrorists; tunnel vision can be instrumental when it is the ultimate goal that matters. The moralistic Carter has ''turned the establishment of personal rapport with political outlaws into a diplomatic art form,'' and the world is better off as a result. Brinkley is a sympathetic biographer, but Carter's less admirable traitsunrelenting competitiveness, an occasional mean streak, and the oft-noted self-righteousnessare recognized along with the qualities Brinkley admires. Be forewarned, however: Brinkley is also an encyclopedic biographer. This volume reflects a decision to interrupt work on a complete biography of Carter to write a ''short book'' on Carter's post-presidency. That this ''short book'' runs 500 pages reflects Brinkley's emphasis on comprehensiveness, resulting in a sometimes tedious ''first he did this, then he did that'' tone that makes the work less lively than it should be. But there are also delightful vignettes, such as Brinkleys discussion of the origins of Habitat for Humanity, that make persevering to the end worthwhile.

Carter's post-presidency appears not as an ''unfinished'' presidency, but rather as the continuation of work that was always about more, for Carter, than being president.

USA TODAY
May 21, 1998

In terms of sheer scope, Jimmy Carter's post-presidential projects open a window on the level of self-confidence, industry, energy, tenacity and goal-setting ability it takes to become president
in the first place.

This exhaustive history of Carter's years as a former U.S. president takes readers from November 1980 and Carter's raw grief over his eviction from the White House at the hands of Ronald Reagan to
January 1998 and an Oval Office meeting in which a scandal-seized President Clinton asked for his prayers.

Historian Douglas Brinkley of the University of New Orleans portrays the 38th U.S. president as a brilliant, studious and untiring humanist.

Running through this lengthy work is a discussion of how Carter's Christian faith holds him duty-bound to use his personal gifts to build shelter for the homeless, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick and promote peace.

The Unfinished Presidency is an unauthorized biography, not a hostile one. It's clear that Brinkley spent months with Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, debriefing them about their reflections and motivations.

Rosalynn Carter recalls a night in January 1982 when the "grand notion" for The Carter Center came to her husband. She thought he was sick when he suddenly sat up in bed. He told her he'd figured
out what to do with his presidential library, saying: ''We're going to make it a place to resolve conflicts. No place like that exists."

Brinkley's work provides as much insight to the work of The Carter Center as to the very public life Carter has led, and recorded in his own prolific writings, since 1980.

Brinkley discusses how Carter's friendship with fellow Georgian and CNN founder Ted Turner helped keep his foreign views before the public. Turner sent a camera crew to follow Carter as he trotted the globe.

Brinkley recounts how Carter parlayed his personal contacts and expertise in advisory roles in the foreign policy operations that Reagan, Clinton and George Bush pursued in the Middle East. And he details how Carter played public relations consultant to PLO leader Yassir Arafat, tutoring him on how to tailor pronouncements for U.S. consumption.

From what began as exile in Plains, Brinkley analyzes how Carter raised the practice of thinking globally and acting locally to high diplomatic art. The historian sums up a key criticism of Carter this way: "He's all offense and no defense, like a star basketball forward who scores 40 points while his team loses.

But Brinkley does not buy it. His book stacks up evidence of Carter's tangible successes.

He estimates, for instance, that while Carter is no longer leader of the free world, he has coupled his personal power of persuasion with the power of the presidency to win the release of approximately 50,000 prisoners of conscience since he left office.

He gives Carter credit for mediating peace efforts between warring factions in Ethiopia and Eritrea, Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, North Korea and Bosnia. And tells how Carter became an international media hero by monitoring elections in Central America and Africa.

Brinkley's book also illuminates a little-known area of Carter's good works. Carter has pursued the eradication of infectious diseases and hunger around the world by enlisting prize-winning epidemiologists and agronomists.

Brinkley presents illustrations of Carter as husband, farmer, military strategist, Sunday school teacher and neighbor in a relaxed, conversational style. Until Carter authorizes a biography, this rigorously footnoted text gives a thoroughly sourced intimate portrait of one of the country's most respected ex-presidents.

Coming soon.