Jimmy Carter on Power

Why not be a pastor or a bishop, and not a President? [Laughter]

You’ve read my book. [Laughter] This came up early in my life, you know, I got home from the Navy, and I was thinking about running for the Georgia Senate and we had a visiting pastor, and he was giving me a hard time about going into politics. He said it’s a disgraceful profession, stay out of it. I got angry, and I turned to him and kind of lashed back. I said, how would you like to be a pastor of a church with some 80,000 members? Because there were 80,000 people In this state Senate district. I don’t look on the Presidency as a pastorate.

I was going to ask you if the President — a pastor of 230 million.

No. Although Teddy Roosevelt said that it’s a bully-pulpit but, no, I don’t look on it with religious connotations. But it gives me a chance to serve and it also gives me a chance to magnify whatever influence I have — either for good or bad, and I hope it will be for the good.

Gives you power, too.

And power.

You have been searching for power for the last ten years.

Well I can’t deny it.

Do you need power?

Well, I think so. Not as an unfulfilled, all-obsessive hunger — no. I feel powerful enough now. And secure enough now. Wealthy enough now. I have a good family life now. But I like to have a chance to change things that I don’t like, and to correct inequities as I discern them, and to be a strong spokesman for those that are not strong. So, I can’t deny that one of the purposes that I want to be President is to have power, yes.

I remember that when I was a small child, my life was spent in a fairly isolated way, out in the woods and in the streams and swamps and fields. Plains was the nearest town, population of 600. We didn’t have electricity or running water but we didn’t suffer. I lived a sheltered life. My mom and my daddy were always there. Home was always a haven. I didn’t have but one desire, aspiration that I can remember, and that is going to the Naval Academy. Nobody In my father’s family had ever finished high school before I did. I put into commission, as a pre-commission crew chief, the first ship the Navy built after the Second War and then I went in the first nuclear submarine program. You know, the choice jobs in the whole Navy. Then my father had terminal cancer, and I had to go home to be with him about the last month of his life. I hadn’t seen him since I was about 17 years old. This was ten, twelve years later.

Did you regret that those last eleven years of your father’s life you had really not been in close touch with him?

Well, I would like, obviously, in retrospect, to have been more with my father. I never thought he would die so young but I’ve never regretted a day that I served In the navy. That was an opportunity for me that paid off and I had a chance to travel extensively. I read and studied everything from music, drama, art, and so forth. I stretched my mind, had a great challenge and I never had any regret.

Do you think this is a just society?

No, no, I don’t. I think one of the major responsibilities I have as a leader and as a potential leader is to try to establish justice and that applies to a broad gamut of things — international affairs, peace, equality, elimination of injustice in tax programs, in our criminal justice system and so forth. It’s not a crusade. It’s just common sense. There’s only one person in this nation that can speak with a clear voice to the American people. There’s only one person that can set a standard of ethics and morality and excellence and greatness or call on the American people to make a sacrifice, or answer difficult questions, or propose and carry out bold programs, or to provide for defense posture that would make us feel secure, a foreign policy that would make us proud once again, and that’s the President. In the absence of that leadership, there is no leadership, and the country drifts. So strong President, yes, but an autocratic President, an imperial Presidency, no.

You think that day is over?

Yes, it’s over.

What do you want for your children that you didn’t have?

Well, I have to say that I had almost everything that I could have needed. I worked hard when I was a little child but I’m proud of It. I lived in an isolated area when I was a little child but I’m proud of it. I had a stability there. When things started going wrong in my own life, my father and mother were there, and my sisters and brothers were there, and my church was there and my community was there — that never did change. Never has changed, yet. In the modern day world, you don’t have that. It’s a mobile world and things to cling to are kind of scarce and few and far between. I wouldn’t swap the life I had for the new, modern, fast-moving, open, non-structured, minimal family life. Which Is best, I don’t know. We can keep the advantages of the modern world, but going back to those principles that give stability are things that we’re still searching for. We haven’t found them yet.