Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House, by Betty Glad
Barnes, Fred
BOOKS IN REVIEWS - "Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House, by Betty Glad" "He has violated the law; Now he must pay the penalty." Although I suspect that what really irked Mrs.eForer was Dame Rebecca's disrespect for that self-effacing patriot, the...
...Vague themes and blurred images were the hallmarks of Carter's gubernatorial campaigns in 1966 and 1970, with Carter running as a more-or-less liberal in the first race and as something of a conservative in the second...
...But a successful fraud...
...Glad spells out the dirty tricks and low-road rhetoric of the successful 1970 campaign, but these details are old hat...
...Carter has been unmasked before, with all his petty maneuverings and palpable inadequacies 9b ared, and it has come to naught...
...Wooten depicts a Snopesian Carter who is, above all, a hypocrite...
...Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., which held that a corporate officer (or anyone else) who buys or sells securities on the strength of inside information violates Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and must at a minimum cough up all his profits and perhaps pay damages to every investor who lost money by buying or selling without knowledge of the inside information...
...More serious is Glad's reliance on the silliest and most fawning book about Carter, How Jimmy IVon by Kandy Stroud, for insights on Carter and his presidential campaign...
...He has slithered to safety every time, only to return with a new mask or persona and, to borrow...
...compelling explanation...
...Guess who is dumb, reckless, and lazyt What is most depressing in all this is the dSj~ vu aspect...
...Nor is Mailer likely to recall fondly his conclusions a f t e r a summer 1976 visit to Plains: "His [Carter's] aura was hardly the same as other people's...
...His assertion, in a Speech to the American Legion, that his father was a second lieutenant in World War I appears to be false, she says...
...Just as his Georgia campaigns foreshadowed his presidential drive, so did his mediocre gubernatorial performance presage his White House years...
...Here is a specimen: Corporate and white collar crimes cause infinitely more havoc, misery and death than street crimes...
...I feet reasonably sure that I can detect in Jimmy Carter what I long ago recognized in myself--an indelible class sense, ingrained in us while growing up in the South during the Depression, and fundamentally unaltered by later affluence," Wicker wrote...
...I suspect that Mrs...
...Better she should have turned to Dasher by James Wooten, the best Carter book next to hers...
...In the fall campaign, he and his image-makers are flogging the idea that he is brainy, prudent, and tireless...
...James Fallows becomes Robert Fallows in the source notes...
...She accepts unproven and unprovable assertions with naive credulity...
...And for those willing to slog through 546 pages of Carteriana, Betty Glad will reward you with convincing "documentation of this, along with a lode of piquant details (for starters, try Carter's recollection of meeting Otis Redding in the 1970s, though the black singer died in 1967...
...If these crimes are largely unreported, how does she know that there are countless, or even tens of thousands of, victims...
...Although I suspect that what really irked Mrs.eForer was Dame Rebecca's disrespect for that self-effacing patriot, the ostensible ground of her criticism is the English w r i t e r ' s deplorable ignorance of law in supposing that for every offense there is a fixed and mandatory penalty...
...That's not an insight Wicker is likely to boast about these days...
...When his reorganization measure passed in dramatically revised form, Carter said it was 95 percent of what he had sought...
...There was a frenzied though meaningless push for government reorganization...
...Well, don't get your hopes up, John...
...It may be noted in passing that she quotes Gunnar Myrdal for the proposition that "Negroes [sic] do not commit white collar crimes...
...There was the breakdown in relations with the legislature...
...Against Teddy Kennedy this year, it was enough for Carter to present himself as a man of"unquestioned character" and unparalleled devotion to family...
...For all the clarifying of the Carter record, Glad makes a few minor mistakes of her own...
...And there were the wildly exaggerated claims...
...Carter, in her view, has "an almost uncanny ability to influence how people interpreted him...
...Glad suggests that there are a series of untruths which Carter has been spouting over the years...
...9 Glad, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois, has a Fred Barnes is a nationa/ political reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...For others Carter was the Southerner who could win and carry out some of the good things Wallace stood for, such as reforming the government in Washington, making it more responsive to the people...
...ing of him, "He has violated the law...
...Out of this they projected "fantasies" (her word) about what a great president Carter would be...
...They were brought out in a famous Harper's piece in 1976 entitled ".Jimmy Carter's Pathetic Lies...
...Glad writes...
...I am quite sure that Dame Rebecca supposed nothing of the sort: She was simply using a common English idiom...
...All this said, most of Cmminals and Victims is entertaining, not very heavyweight, reading, and some of it is instructive...
...Carter's stance toward opponents had a strong and favorable impact on voters in 1976 and again this year...
...So the Carter beat goes.on, lies and all...
...She is outraged by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's use of the phrase "benign neglect," which she says is "like every oxymoron, as Webster's dictionary declares, 'pointedly foolish.'" Not my Webster, which gives as examples of the oxymoron two phrases which are far from foolish: "thunderous silence" and "sweet sorrow...
...The fact is that Judge Forer seems not to know much about white-collar criminals, who probably do not appear in her courtroom very often...
...That statement was as far from reality as Carter's claim as president that the energy bill altered beyond recognition by Congress provided 60 percent of what he wanted...
...Carter, who purports to be the most successful president this century in getting Congress to vote his way, insisted he pulled more from the Georgia legislature than any other governor...
...The article threatened to ruin Carter's presidential bid, but he squirmed free by cleverly making the author's credibility and motive the issue...
...JIMMY CARTER IN SEARCH OF THE GREAT WHITE HOUSE Betty Glad / Norton / $19.95 Fred Barnes John B. Anderson, the cleanfingernail presidential candidate, mused early in the fall campaign that Jimmy Carter would soon be "unmasked in all his glory as just another fellow who is using any tactic that he can to hang on to a political job...
...Eleanor Clift is not a Time magazine reporter from the South...
...The Mafia is not an equal-opportunity employer, at least in its upper echelons, but there are black tycoons, who display considerable administrative and merchandising ability, in the drug, gambling, and prostitution industries...
...In short, whenever Judge Forer leaves the firm ground of her judicial experience, she is likely to indulge in liberal piffle of the most preposterous variety...
...Her use of "[sic]" apparently reflects the hyperliberal notion that the word "Negro" is somehow a racial slur...
...The observation was not entirely true even in 1.944, for black swindlers were by no means unheard of...
...I think people will catch on that he's not the sweet, little, sanctimonious fellow that he's always wanted people to think he is...
...But Judge Forer ignores the fact that blacks have in the last couple of decades moved into white-collar crime...
...In 1976, both journalists, especially liberal ones, and voters proved to be susce~atible to Carter's forceful personality, goodygoody morality, and uplifting but ambiguous campaign themes...
...Happiness came off him...
...Glad leaves one with a stronger word in mind to encapsulate Carter--fraud...
...The meaning, if any, of the second clause of her sentence, that huge profits can be made by dividing stock into different classes, is beyond me, although I have been teaching corporation law since 1957...
...It was as if he knew that God had given him intelligence and good work that would make sense, and so he could give his strength to the world and get new strength back...
...Her book is at once the most impressive of the dozen or so volumes written about Carter--none of the others was a tough act to follow--and a very depressing chronicle indeed...
...Hunter Thompson, Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, and Norman Mailer were all successfully courted by Carter...
...For liberals and Northerners, he was the moderate Southern alternative to Wallace--the man who could defeat the Alabaman on his turf and 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 remove him as a factor in national politics...
...the recipient of an endorsement in 1970 by Senator Richard Russell (Russell vigorously denied i 0, or heir to a Georgia "plantation" (modest farm is more like it...
...This is undoubtedly true if what we want is retribution, and I do myself feel rather vindictive about embezzlers, securities swindlers, and corrupt officeholders...
...Forer, like most liberals (not, however, including Justice Brandeis, Who said that "the right to be let alone is the right most valued by civilized men"), believes that it is sinful to leave other people to their own devices, when she obviously knows what is good for them so much better than they do...
...And Greg Schneiders, the former White House aide, did not work for Carter as governor...
...One final example...
...I assume that the ordinary reader will not have much trouble sorting out the intelligent parts from the pishposh...
...she is from New York and covers Carter for Newsweek...
...TA[ .i[-].ow, after all, has Jimmy Carter managed to pull offso many escapes...
...Wild rhetoric, which she would be too shrewd to believe if it were directed at street crime, she eagerly gulps down when it is directed at Caucasian businessmen...
...and violators of pure food and drug taws whose products cause cancer, physical and mental defi)rmities, and other diseases in tens of thousands of people...
...But as a general proposition the incarceration of such offenders is not necessary to the public safety: Most of them cease to be dangerous when they are exposed, though the stiff sentence imposed on Michele Sindona is likely to have a salutary effect on other high financiers who may be tempted to similar acts of fraud and larceny...
...I infer that Judge Forer has managed to remain ignorant of the landmark decision in SECv...
...Wicker assumed Carter shared his concern for the downtrodden, if only because he and Carter came from small Southern towns...
...the owners and managers of improperly constructed and operated nuclear plants...
...Ronald Reagan's slogan, a new beginning...
...The law permits a corporate officer to reap profits from inside knowledge or from division of stock into different classes so long as there is ' d i s c l o s u r e . ' " In the first place information which is disclosed ceases to be "inside...
...Richard Moe, not Robert Moe, is Vice President Mondale's chief aide...
...She cites no authority, not even Ralph Nader...
...Nor was Carter a finalist in the selection of Rhodes scholars in 1947 (he lost at the state level), 59th in his class academically at Annapolis (he was 60th), THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 37...
...He's really a rough, tough, gut-fighting politician...
...These crimes cost at least $400 billion a year . . . . One should include in this category of crimes which are largely unreported and rarely prosecuted a number of other white-dominated groups [sic] such as manufacturers of machinery which is unsafe and causes mutilation and death to countless people...
...It may also be noted that she seems to know almost nothing about corporations (except that they are evil) and corporation law...
...Judge Forer feels that affluent, educated lawbreakers should go to prisons just as unpleasant for periods just as long as poor, black street criminals...
Vol. 13 • November 1980 • No. 11
