[The title of this book review comes from the lyrics of the song Giving My Best, a gospel tune recorded most notably by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. The home choir of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church, a non-denominational evangelical church, they have won six Grammys for Best Gospel Choir. You may remember them from the 2013 second inauguration of Barack Obama, where they sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". The song quoted in the title invokes not only Carter’s attitude toward life (to always give his best) but his deep faith — he was the first “born again” evangelical Christian elected to the White House. You can hear the Choir perform the song here.]

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

We’ve been back home for a couple of weeks now but I’m just getting around to putting down into words my book review for Jonathan Alter’s 2020 biography of President Jimmy Carter. I did finish the book by the time we left Spain after completing our Camino Primitivo pilgrimage last month. It’s good to be back home but it’s taken a bit longer than I hoped to get back into the swing of things here.

We’ve traveled so much over the first part of the year that both Tony and I are both feeling a bit worn out and like we want to stick around at home for the foreseeable future. So hopefully that means more reading and more reviewing!

Over the last few weeks, I have managed to read another couple of books too, so I’m looking forward to sharing reviews of those with you in the weeks ahead. One of them is another biography - this time of the new Pope. And the other is a murder mystery, the third in a whimsical series by the writing duo that publishes under the pseudonym Juneau Black.

Anyway, on to this week’s book review —

Jimmy Carter became president in 1976, defeating Gerald Ford, who had become President on the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 9th, 1974. Nixon’s resignation as a result of the Watergate scandal, and the years long conflict in Vietnam — where the US sent troops to support the South Vietnamese government in its war with the Communists in the North — both played a role in breaking the faith that many Americans placed in their Presidents and their government.

While Carter was seen by many as “the right man at the right time” to help repair that broken faith, his 1976 campaign also benefited from a fight within the Republican Party. In a move that had rarely happened in Presidential politics Ford, the incumbent, was challenged within his party by Ronald Reagan, who very nearly took the nomination from him. The rift in the party was not sufficiently healed by Election Day, and many Republican supporters of the more conservative Reagan opted to stay home.

Four years later Carter stood in Ford’s shoes and suffered a similar fate, as Senator Ted Kennedy mounted a challenge within the Democratic Party to unseat the incumbent as the nominee for President in 1980. Carter, whose popularity had cratered in part due to the Iran Hostage Crisis, was seen as weak by Kennedy, who determined that 1980 was his best chance to move to the pinnacle of American politics. His bid ultimately failed, and Carter did become the party’s nominee. But he then lost the White House in an overwhelming defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Jonathan Alter’s biography of Carter covers all those events, but starts much earlier in the tiny Georgia town of Plains, where James Earl Carter, Jr. was born in 1924 to Bessie Lillian Gordy and James Earl Carter, Sr. Carter’s early years were spent under the watchful eye of his father, a man who wasn’t afraid of literally whipping his boy into shape when required. He grew up a farm boy in the segregated South, doing farm chores alongside black farm workers. A timid boy, he loved to read.

Carter left Plains for a stint in the Navy and proved to be a capable and successful officer and nuclear engineer, then back home with new wife Rosalynn to take over the family business, and from there to a successful run for Governor of Georgia and the President.

The title of the book comes from an exchange Carter had in a Navy job interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, who asked the young Annapolis graduate if he had always done his best while at the Naval Academy. As Alter says in the Preface, after Carter confessed to the Admiral that he had not always done his best, he “disciplined himself to make the maximum effort in every single thing he did for the rest of his life.” Alter notes that Carter titled his campaign autobiography Why Not the Best?

While Carter may have always tried his best as President, his approach was to always deliver his best for the country, politics be damned. Just as he had done as Governor in Georgia, Carter thought little of politics and scorned political calculus. He was a detail-oriented leader who studied topics and thought deeply about what the best course of action should be, then took it. He had enormous success winning Congressional actions with this approach even as he made it harder than it needed to be to achieve that success.

And, as Alter points out, many of the decisions he made and actions he took have proven themselves with the passage of time. But policy success and political success are two different things, and Carter suffered his 1980 loss in part due to his lack of attention to the political ramifications of his decisions, but also to a series of unfortunate circumstances mostly outside of his control (notably raising inflation and the taking of the hostages in Iran).

Alter’s biography is well-balanced and despite weighing in at over 600 pages it’s easy to read. It brought back lots of memories for me from Carter’s time in office. I turned 16 the year he won the Presidency, so he is the first President whose progress I followed with at least somewhat adult eyes. I’ve personally always thought Carter was not only a good President but a good man, who didn’t get the recognition he deserved.

RATING: Three and a half Stars ⭐⭐⭐🌠

RATING COMMENTS: Jonathan Alter’s biography is well-balanced and despite being 600 some pages it’s easy to read. The detailed account of Carter’s presidency was like a walk down memory lane of the late 1970s in America.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I purchased a copy of the hard cover from a local bookseller.