His Very Best

Zusatztext Jonathan Alter has painted an important and revealing portrait of Jimmy Carter, an American president who led many different lives. Alter's memorable book goes a long way toward illuminating the shadows that have long obscured him. Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America "Jonathan Alter's new biography promises to offer a fresh look at a familiar face." BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK "An engrossing story about a truly decent man." AARP Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Alter is an award-winning historian, columnist and documentary filmmaker. An MSNBC political analyst and former senior editor at Newsweek , he is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies ; The Promise: President Obama, Year One ; and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope . Klappentext The first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States and Nobel Prizewinning humanitarian. Leseprobe Prologue PROLOGUE JUNE 1979 It was just hours before the first day of summer, and the sunny weather in Washington, DC, was perfect for a leisurely drive in the country. But June 20, 1979, was the wrong day for Wednesday golf or a picnic at Bull Run. That week, more than half of the nation's gas stations were running out of gas. The morning's Washington Post reported that local authorities were inundated with requests for carpools from angry motorists who couldn't get to work, yet a small collection of harried reporters and dignitaries managed to find transportation to the White House. There the beleaguered president of the United States was preparing yet another announcement that would lead to eye rolling in the press corps and make little news. The only thing that stood out then about this seemingly minor event was its unusual location: the West Wing roof. The spring and summer gas shortages marked the worst of a depressing 1979, a year that would later see the seizure of American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Gas stations closed up like someone died, John Updike wrote in his novel Rabbit Is Rich. For a generation bonded to cars the way the next would be to smartphones, this was traumatic. Millions of Americans missed work, canceled vacations, and pointed fingers. Public opinion surveys in June 1979 showed Carter's approval ratings in the Gallup poll plummeting to 28 percent, the lowest of his presidency and comparable to Richard Nixon's when he resigned five years earlier. Vice President Walter Mondale later cracked that the Carter White House had gone to the dogsand become the nation's fire hydrant. As usual, the president had few options. A month later, he would offer new, ambitious energy goals as part of his infamous malaise speech (though he never used the word), in which Carter delivered a jeremiad against empty materialism. But events all year were largely out of his control, wreaking havoc on the American economy. First came a decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to jack up global oil prices by 14.5 percent virtually overnightan effort to exploit strikes in Iranian oil fields against the teetering shah of Iran. After the shah fled into exile and was replaced in February by the radical Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranian oil exports to the United States ceased altogether. Over the next eighteen months, oil prices doubled to nearly $40 a barrel. This represented an astonishing thirteenfold increase in a decade. Energy is our Vi...

Autorentext
Jonathan Alter is an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. He is a former senior editor and columnist for Newsweek, where he worked for twenty-eight years, writing more than fifty cover stories. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and other publications. He is the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, both New York Times bestsellers, and Between the Lines, a collection of his Newsweek columns.

Klappentext
The first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States and Nobel Prize–winning humanitarian.

Leseprobe
Prologue PROLOGUE
JUNE 1979

It was just hours before the first day of summer, and the sunny weather in Washington, DC, was perfect for a leisurely drive in the country. But June 20, 1979, was the wrong day for Wednesday golf or a picnic at Bull Run. That week, more than half of the nation’s gas stations were running out of gas.

The morning’s Washington Post reported that local authorities were inundated with requests for carpools from angry motorists who couldn’t get to work, yet a small collection of harried reporters and dignitaries managed to find transportation to the White House. There the beleaguered president of the United States was preparing yet another announcement that would lead to eye rolling in the press corps and make little news. The only thing that stood out then about this seemingly minor event was its unusual location: the West Wing roof.

The spring and summer gas shortages marked the worst of a depressing 1979, a year that would later see the seizure of American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Gas stations closed up like someone died,” John Updike wrote in his novel Rabbit Is Rich. For a generation bonded to cars the way the next would be to smartphones, this was traumatic. Millions of Americans missed work, canceled vacations, and pointed fingers. Public opinion surveys in June 1979 showed Carter’s approval ratings in the Gallup poll plummeting to 28 percent, the lowest of his presidency and comparable to Richard Nixon’s when he resigned five years earlier. Vice President Walter Mondale later cracked that the Carter White House had gone to the dogs—and become “the nation’s fire hydrant.”

As usual, the president had few options. A month later, he would offer new, ambitious energy goals as part of his infamous “malaise” speech (though he never used the word), in which Carter delivered a jeremiad against empty materialism. But events all year were largely out of his control, wreaking havoc on the American economy. First came a decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to jack up global oil prices by 14.5 percent virtually overnight—an effort to exploit strikes in Iranian oil fields against the teetering shah of Iran. After the shah fled into exile and was replaced in February by the radical Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranian oil exports to the United States ceased altogether. Over the next eighteen months, oil prices doubled to nearly $40 a barrel. This represented an astonishing thirteenfold increase in a decade. “Energy is our Vietnam,” a White House aide told Newsweek.

By the following year, inflation—driven in large part by energy prices—would pass 12 percent, with unemployment over 7 percent for a combined “misery index” of nearly 20 percent. Yet harder to imagine in the twenty-first century was that interest rates in 1980 hit an eye-popping 19 percent. Even if everything else had gone right for Jimmy Carter in 1979 and 1980—which it most definitely did not—that was a gale-force economic wind blowing in his face as he sought reelection against former California governor Ronald Reagan.

For two years, a clean-energ…

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