President Carter’s straight talk on 60 Minutes

“I didn’t try to conceal anything. I tried to put down exactly how I felt.” That’s how former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, described the White House diary he published at age 85. 

He told Lesley Stahl that he dictated into a tape recorder seven or eight times virtually every day he was in office, and later transcribed those notes, excerpts of which became the book. As he explained in 2010 (full story above), it offers an unusually candid take on the highest office in the land – and his own disappointments. 

Carter railed against the late Ted Kennedy, for instance, who ran against him for the Democratic nomination in 1980. He referred to members of Congress as “juvenile delinquents,” and told Stahl he considered it “blackmail” when they sought his support for a political appointee in exchange for their votes on legislation. 

But Carter also turned a critical eye on himself, admitting to Stahl that he alienated too many Congress members, and that his folksy style offended some of his constituents. When he insisted, for instance, that “Hail to the Chief” no longer be played when he entered a room, a public outcry forced him to reverse himself.

With the country facing long gasoline lines and double-digit inflation, even Carter’s own loyalists began to question him. He described a brutal Cabinet meeting to Stahl. “I think they were telling me that the public image of me was that I was not a strong leader, that I should not only arouse support from affection, but also from fear,” he told Stahl. 

Carter agreed to alter his strategy, but he still favored diplomacy over military might — even when 52 Americans were held hostage in Iran. After a failed rescue attempt by the U.S. military, some Americans called on the president to bomb Tehran, but he refused. 

“We went through four years. We never fired a bullet. We never dropped a bomb. We never launched a missile,” he told Stahl. “There’s no doubt that usually a president’s public image is enhanced by going to war. That never did appeal to me.”

Carter knew his legacy might suffer. In a 1985 story, Mike Wallace visited the former president at home in Plains, Georgia and asked him about his lackluster reputation. If Ronald Reagan had an untouchable “Teflon presidency,” Wallace proposed, surely Carter’s was the “flypaper presidency” – with Carter himself shouldering the blame when anything went wrong.

“I think that’s true,” Carter said. “When I was there, there was no doubt who was responsible.”

Stahl raised a similar point in her 2010 story. Despite victories like brokering a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, normalizing relations with China, and vastly reducing our reliance on foreign oil, Carter was often remembered as a “failed” president. Yet, she noted, his image was transformed after he left office, as he committed himself to fighting disease in poor countries and helping to resolve conflicts abroad, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. 

“A lot of critics of yours, when you were president, say that you’ve been a fantastic ex-president,” Stahl told him. “You hear that all the time.”

“I don’t mind that,” Carter said, laughing at the thought.