A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety
A successful presidency may be a function of steadfastness, leadership, decency and intellectual acuity, but it is also a resultant of happy accidents of cosmic confluence and contemporary affections of the citizenry. Presidential historians do not rate Carter’s presidency very highly. President Carter is a living testament that being a decent human being is not sufficient to be a successful president.
In his book, President Carter reflects on his life at 90, looking back at his idyllic childhood in rural Georgia, his entry into politics, his life in submarines, and finally evaluates his presidential tasks completed and incomplete.
Some Notes:
- President Carter remembers his house being a Sears Roebuck catalog house. In these days of E-commerce, I always talk in class about Sears being a historical comparison and a precursor to the Amazon internet retail business. Even before electricity reached some locations in the USA, Sears was shipping houses to those locations. There is some debate on whether Jimmy Carter’s boyhood home in Archery, Georgia was truly a Sears design. Some speculate that it was a “home-made” design, but built mainly of material shipped by Sears. Sears apparently made higher margins from selling the building materials than from their designs.
- President Carter has many wonderful things to say about past and present presidents from both parties. He is particularly moved by the benevolence in the friendship with President Ford. In his description, only two people – Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy – come across as slightly less-than-charitable.
- President Carter’s mother was a Peace Core volunteer in Vikhroli – a town outside Mumbai. Vikhroli is at the foothills of my alma mater, IIT Bombay. Mumbai’s urban sprawl has now swallowed the locations into one megapolis.
- It is fascinating how US democracy has a complicated checkered past. In particular, it is interesting to learn how even within states, votes were allotted to geographies instead of voting citizens, very much like the electoral college system.
I learned about the Georgia County Unit system that lasted well into the 1960s. Basically, the top 8 populous counties in Georgia got 6 votes each, the next 30 populous counties got 4 votes each, and the rest of the remaining 121 counties got 2 votes each, all of which add up to a total of 410 votes. In 1964, this scheme resulted in 39% of the population in Georgia living in most populous counties, having only 12% of the 410 votes.