THIS ITEM IS COMPRISED OF 2 x HC/DJ BOOKS - ONE DEALING WITH THE 1976 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN (WON BY JIMMY CARTER); THE OTHER ABOUT THE LIFE OF CARTER AFTER HIS PERIOD AS PRESIDENT.
The UNFINISHED PRESIDENCY : JIMMY CARTER'S JOURNEY BEYOND THE WHITE HOUSE by DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
PUBLISHED BY: Viking Penguin. New York. 1998.
SIZE: 6.7 x 9.7 inches
PAGES: 586, plus 2 sections of photos
CONDITION: book is mint. Dj is mint.
Synopsis
Jimmy Carter left the White House in January 1981, defeated in his bid for reelection and rejected by the American public - but hardly broken. In fact, as Douglas Brinkley's book reveals, he attacked the next phase of his life more determined than ever, outside the scrutinized and politicized Oval Office, to complete a mission to pursue peace in embattled areas throughout the world, from Bosnia to Haiti. Historian Douglas Brinkley has had unique and intimate access to the former president, as well as exclusive access to the postpresidential papers, including Carter's correspondence with fellow world leaders Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, and Oscar Arias. Brinkley's book captures Carter's prickly personality and remarkable political life, including the complex relationships he has developed with such international pariahs as Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung, Hafez al-Assad, and Yasir Arafat. He explores the sometimes difficult relationships Carter has had with the presidents who have succeeded him, and details his extraordinary partnership with Rosalynn, his fearless ally and confidante.
Salon - Theo Spencer
He stained our national pride with a failed hostage rescue mission, hobbled us financially with helium-infused inflation and interest rates and, perhaps most unpardonably, made us wait in interminable lines at the gas pump. If you still can't forgive Jimmy Carter for these things, among many others, Douglas Brinkley's faithful chronicle of our 39th president's accomplishments since leaving office should go a good distance toward changing your mind. In The Unfinished Presidency, Brinkley stacks between two covers an exhaustively detailed compilation of all that the man from Plains has done since leaving office. In doing so, he reserves an ultimately positive (if not entirely exalted) place in history for the man he calls a "grinning Georgia overachiever blessed with a tinkerer's restless mind and a zealot's near messianic confidence in his own abilities."
Is Carter messianic or megalomaniacal? Brinkley presents conflicting evidence. We witness Carter making peace in Bosnia, Haiti, North Korea, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia; monitoring elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and elsewhere; helping eradicate diseases like river blindness from the globe; working to eliminate famine from African countries via the spread of high-yield wheat; and struggling to free some 50,000 political prisoners, all since 1981. In Brinkley's hands, some of this material is gripping, such as Carter's tough-talking efforts to get Haitian coup leader Gen. Raoul Cedras to step down in 1994, minutes before American troops were scheduled to invade the island nation. Other anecdotes are less flattering: Carter grabbing the spotlight by briefing CNN before President Clinton on his work in Haiti, or trying to subvert George Bush's Gulf War plans by sending anti-aggression letters to various world leaders. Carter was, Brinkley writes, "complicating U.S. diplomacy with his unorthodox assumptions of authority."
Throughout all this, Brinkley -- a University of New Orleans professor and National Public Radio commentator who's written well-received books on Dean Acheson and Franklin Roosevelt -- also serves up some behind-the-scenes goodies. These include Carter's friendship with PLO leader Yasir Arafat (one that occasionally bordered on a "love fest") and, more recently, his intimacy with Clinton, who asked the Baptist minister to "pray for him in his hour of darkness."
Brinkley is an admitted Carter acolyte, and a persuasive one, but he ultimately fails to present his subject as a three-dimensional man. He makes it redundantly clear that it's Carter's small-town, overall-wearing values and Christian beliefs -- not the desire to buff his image or win a Nobel Peace Prize -- that keep him marching around the globe. Brinkley constantly refers to his subject as a "pious Christian" whose "bedrock faith" urged him and Rosalyn to "press on, to abandon despair for love and to turn defeat into victory." But he doesn't go far enough in explaining why this man, as journalist James Reston has noted, was so intense that when he dined, his knife "cut into the plate." He doesn't shed light on the Carter who famously told Playboy magazine he "lusted in his heart," or the one whose knee-jerk actions made his post-presidential staffers joke that his motto was "ready, fire, aim." Brinkley's book may lead to Carter's acceptance as one of our greatest ex-presidents, but as far as what motivated the man to become a candidate for that title, we get too much shell and not enough peanut.
Kirkus Reviews
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 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 traits—unrelenting competitiveness, an occasional mean streak, and the oft-noted self-righteousness—are 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 Brinkleyþs 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.
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MARATHON : The PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENCY 1972-1976 by JULES WITCOVER
PUBLISHED BY: The Viking Press. New York. 1977. 1st edition.
SIZE: 6.7 x 9.7 inches
PAGES: 684
CONDITION: book is VG. DJ is fair. Considerable general edgewear and chipping/creasing top and bottom of spine. A few qtr-inch tears front top edge. Nicks at top of flaps and also lower front flap.
Reader Review
Though it is often overshadowed by the author's own later collaborations with Jack Germond (as well as the then-contemporary efforts of Hunter Thompson), Jules Witcover's Marathon is one of the unheralded classic works of the political nonfiction genre. Covering the twists and turns of the rather bizarre 1976 Presidential election, Witcover follows the campaign from the very first stirrings of Jimmy Carter's longshot candidacy at the '72 Democratic Convention all the way to the photo finish that finds the nation faced with a choice worthy of Samuel Beckett -- Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Lester Maddox, or Eugene McCarthy? In between, Witcover provides excellent, insightful coverage of the now-forgotten efforts of such diverse men as the tragically witty Mo Udall, the endearingly spacey Jerry Brown, the bizarrely sympathetic George Wallace, and the deliberately enigmatic Ronald Reagan to take their respective nominations away from these men and change the course of American history. If you ever wondered how America eventually produced a political system that could see everyone from Pennsylvania's hapless Gov. Milton Shapp to Oklahoma's radical former Sen. Fred Harris transformed, however briefly, into a legitimate presidential contender, this is the book for you. Years after it was written and, unfairly, neglected, Marathon stands as one of the best books ever written on the subject of how we occasionally stumble into selecting our nation's leader.
By A Customer
Jules Witcover has written several excellent books on American politics over the last 35 years. Among them are a moving account of Bobby Kennedy's doomed 1968 presidential bid and a critical look at Reagan's election to the Presidency in 1980. In "Marathon" Witcover attempts to pull a Teddy White and write the definitive account of the 1976 presidential campaign. White became famous in 1961 with the publication of "The Making of the President 1960", his bestselling account of the legendary Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign. White had the advantage of being the first journalist to write an entire book about how we elect (or elected) Presidents in this country so soon after the election he covered. White then wrote an entire series of "Making of the President" books, covering the campaigns of 1964, 1968, and 1972. By 1976 White was tired of writing about campaigns that he felt made less and less sense and which seemed to be dominated more by primaries and photo ops than by the old-fashioned back-room dealing and campaign barnstorming that he loved to write about. So in 1976 White took a break from covering presidential politics to write his memoirs. That left the field open to other journalists, and Witcover took up the challenge. And while "Marathon" never equals White's eloquence or gift for grasping the overall theme, or meaning, of a campaign, Witcover does provide an entertaining account of a close, hard-fought race. And 1976 truly provided a wealth of stories - Jimmy Carter's rise from almost total obscurity to defeat a host of better-known Democrats and claim the Democratic nomination, thus proving the power that the primaries now had over the nominating process; George Wallace's last presidential campaign, his former racism and Archie Bunker-type qualities now hobbled or changed by his paralyzing gunshot wound suffered four years earlier; the thrilling fight between President Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, a race which was so close it wasn't decided until the actual balloting at the Republican Convention; and Ford's spectacular comeback from a 33-point deficit in the polls in August 1976 to a dead-even race by Election Day in November. Witcover does a marvelous job of explaining the "little moments" that can mean victory or defeat for a campaign - the consistent bad luck of Morris Udall, an Arizona Congressman and Carter's main rival for the Democratic nomination; Ford's complacency after beating Reagan in the first 4 Republican primaries, allowing himself to ease up on Reagan in the North Carolina primary - which allowed Reagan to pull off a stunning upset, save his campaign, and make a comeback to nearly defeat Ford at the Republican Convention; and Carter's verbal gaffes in the fall campaign - including the famous "lust in my heart" remark he made to "Playboy" magazine which led to weeks of ridicule in the national press. My chief problem with this book is its' length - at 700 pages in the paperback edition it is far longer than any of White's books, and includes a great amount of tedious detail that could easily have been left out (does anyone really need to know that George Wallace liked to dump ketchup over everything he ate?). Basically, this book could have used a better editor. However, even given its' length and overattention to detail, "Marathon" is still the best book you'll find on how television and the primaries allowed Jimmy Carter to become President - something that would never have happened just a few years earlier.
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