In September, 2011, I drove to Plains, Georgia, with Gerald Rafshoon, President Jimmy Carter’s former media adviser. Rafshoon had asked me to write a play about the 1978 Camp David summit between Carter, President Anwar Sadat, of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister. They were three pious men. Sadat called himself “the first man of Islam.” He plotted against the British and was charged with complicity in an assassination of a pro-British minister, and had come to the Presidency only through the death of the charismatic leader of the Arab world, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Begin was an Orthodox Jew—the first non-secular leader of Israel and the founder of the Likud Party—and had lost his parents in the Holocaust. He had also been the head of a terrorist organization, the Irgun, and was responsible for the deaths of more than ninety people in the bombing of the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, in 1946. Carter, an evangelical Christian, had had little prior political experience other than a single term as the governor of Georgia. These men spent thirteen days secluded near Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain and produced a peace treaty that has endured for forty years. It was Jimmy Carter’s signature accomplishment and one that has never been matched in the region, despite decades of strenuous attempts.
The Carters lived in a ranch house on the edge of town. We met in the front room, where Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, sat on a couch upholstered in a blue print that matched the curtains. Behind them was a painting that Carter had made of the same room, with its grandfather clock, rocking chairs, and roll-top desk. It looked like an illustration from the children’s book “Goodnight Moon.” Not depicted were two matching elliptical machines that faced the television. Carter was eighty-six at the time. He wore khaki pants, short athletic socks, and a blue shirt that almost disappeared against the couch. His silver belt buckle was a horseshoe enclosing the initials J.C. He had not shaved, and his white stubble made his face more wintry than usual. I was just beginning my research, and I didn’t yet know who the characters in the play should be, beyond Carter, Sadat, and Begin.
Rafshoon introduced me by saying that I had recently published an article in The New Yorker about Scientology. “Oh, I read that,” Carter said. “I found it most intriguing.”
“Since when did you start reading The New Yorker?” Rosalynn asked.
“I read it every week!” he protested.
Rosalynn rolled her eyes. It was as if she had leapt onstage. Dramatically, I needed someone who could talk to Carter with the unvarnished candor and the unsparing insight that comes from a lifetime spent together. Rosalynn was born in Plains, and her family lived next door to the house where the Carter family then lived, though she and Jimmy didn’t become romantically involved until 1945, when he came home for the summer from the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis. After their first date, he told his mother that he was going to marry Rosalynn. They were wed the following year, after his graduation. He was twenty-one and she was eighteen.
Carter owned a stand of pines, which were being harvested, so we rode out in a Secret Service Tahoe to watch the trees being cut, trimmed, and loaded onto a flatbed truck. The agent driving the car was new and unfamiliar with the back roads. Carter was testy and snapped at him when he missed a turn. I felt sympathy for the agent, who had signed up to protect his country and found himself driving down on a dirt road, answering to an impatient old man who had once been the most powerful figure in the world and had since become the closest approximation in public life to an American saint. Along the way, Carter gave us a drive-by tour of his childhood home, which is now a historic site, the Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm, in the small community of Archery, three miles west of Plains, where his family moved when he was four. “This is where I learned blacksmithing. This is the barn where I used to corral mules,” he said, not bothering to get out of the car. There was a dirt tennis court that his father had built. “I could beat every kid in town, but I never beat my father,” Carter told us.
The Carters were the only white family in Archery, and his playmates were the children of Black tenant farmers. The lessons he drew from his background in southern Georgia would define his political career. He lost his first run for governor, in 1966, to Lester Maddox, one of the most racist figures in modern Georgia history. That defeat sent him into a spiritual crisis, and he later credited his experience of being “born again” for getting him through this bleak period. In his gubernatorial inaugural address, in 1971, Carter said, “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.” In the South at that time, the declaration was a landmark, and it got him on the cover of Time magazine.
Carter made a point of showing me the family cemetery—a dirt patch surrounded by a hurricane fence. His people had been in the area since the early nineteenth century, and the tombstones were worn and covered in lichen. He was clearly proud of how tidy the ground was, having cleared it himself, nearly stepping on a rattlesnake in the process.
We passed a deserted farmhouse that Carter said was haunted. “By what?” I asked. “Haints,” Carter said, using an old Southern term for ghosts. He said that, as a boy, when he was working in town or staying late at school after dark, he was terrified of walking past the house. Several times, he thought he saw a haint in the window, “a woman with a lamp.” There was a legend that a woman who once lived there kept her daughter in the attic, he told me. “Maybe that was her.”
When we got back to the house, the Carters decided that we should all go into town for dinner—i.e., lunch—at Mom’s Kitchen. The Carters rode in the Tahoe, and Rafshoon and I drove with Mary Prince, an African American woman who had worked for the Carters for decades. Prince had been convicted of murder following the shooting of a man outside a bar in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 1970. When the Carters lived in the Governor’s Mansion, she was assigned there as a trusty prisoner, and worked as a nanny to their daughter, Amy. During Carter’s Presidency, he arranged to be designated as Prince’s parole officer, so that she could work in the White House. She was eventually declared innocent of the murder and was granted a full pardon.
Mom’s turned out to be an all-you-can-eat buffet serving fried chicken, meat loaf, and collard greens. We talked a bit about politics and the 2012 election. Carter had his differences with President Barack Obama but thought that he would be reëlected. Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, had just jumped into the race as an early favorite. Carter thought he had no chance of winning, but, if he did, “it may be a disaster for the Republican Party.” “Of course,” Rosalynn observed, “we thought the same about Reagan.”
I was still intrigued by Carter’s paranormal experiences, so I asked him about a time in the nineteen-sixties when he said he saw a U.F.O. He was the head of several Lions Clubs in Georgia, and had gone to make a speech at a club in another town. “There were about twenty-five other men standing outside,” he recalled. “There was a light over the trees, at first no bigger than a star, then like a moon, then it hovered over the trees. It was big and round. Then it moved away.”
I said that I had once seen something similar, while driving through Alabama. An astronomer friend had said it was a “noctilucent cloud,” a mysterious phenomenon which, at the time, was common enough to have acquired a name but still defied understanding. It was shaped like a perfect globe and appeared solid, like a hovering moon, until it slowly dissolved.
“Something else strange did happen, while I was President,” Carter said. “We had a plane go down in Zaire with some important documents. We searched for it. We adjusted our satellites to comb through the area, without success. Finally, my director of intelligence, Stansfield Turner, said he knew of a psychic in California. Apparently, he spoke to her, and she wrote down some coördinates. And we programmed that into the satellite, and, the next time it passed over, there was the plane.” “That tells me a lot about the intelligence community,” I said. “Indeed,” Carter said. “One of our few successes.”
In 1973, when Carter was still governor, he and Rosalynn journeyed to Israel. It was both a spiritual and a political pilgrimage. Golda Meir was the Prime Minister, and, as a courtesy, she accorded the Georgia governor and his wife an old Mercedes and a driver to ferry them around the Holy Land. The trip to Israel fortified Carter’s international portfolio and awarded him credibility among American Jews, a critical Democratic constituency for the improbable race that he was considering. The Carters also visited several Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which he concluded posed a significant obstacle to peace. He was profoundly moved by Israel’s struggle, and on his first day in the Oval Office, in January, 1977, he stunned his Vice-President, Walter Mondale, by saying that his first priority was to bring peace to the Middle East. Carter later told me that he believed God had put him into the Presidency for that very reason.
