The Love Song of James Earl Carter
Lapham, Lewis H.
Lewis H. Lapham THE LOVE SONG OF JAMES EARL CARTER 1982's worst book. This is very special. The winner of our J. Gordon Coogler Award for the year's worst book is a former President of the United...
...we might argue, but I would never be bored...
...He's been at camp for little more than a month, hardly time enough to unpack his catcher's mitt, but already he can "disagree strongly and fundamentally" on questions of state...
...The scout believes that his time is not like other men's time, that he has been blessed with omniscience and grace...
...He also enjoys a close and long-standing acquaintance with God, to whom he "prayed a lot—more than ever before in my life...
...What is important is the play of the scout's feelings, not what is happening in Algeria, England, Germany, or Iran...
...To the scout this is unimportant...
...Pick another ax to grind...
...stuffed into the pages like blurred photographs of the camp baseball and swimming teams...
...Nobody else in the room attains the status of reality, and before he has gotten to page eight, Mr...
...I couldn't force myself to read the text...
...Next to the members of my family,'' he explains in one of his letters home, "Zbig would be my favorite seatmate on a longdistance trip...
...If any doubts remain as to Mr...
...Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith,* the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp...
...Carter would do as well as anyone else, largely becaus.e the media had become enchanted by a fairy tale of their own invention in which Jimmy Carter appeared as the avatar of the old-fashioned rural virtues believed (at least among city folks) to reside in small towns...
...On page 57 he explains that once he had found his way to the lake and athletic fields, he felt pretty confident with the camp routine...
...The praise of Rostropovich is worth ten thousand times the praise of the Washington Post...
...It isn't that Mr...
...The alliance between his own sublime competence and God's political tips removed from his mind "any possibility of timidity or despair...
...In point of fact, only one other editor and one other magazine approached his astuteness and persevered in abominating the ignoble high jinks of Jimmy Carter throughout the rogue's brief and absurd public life...
...The pundits live in a fantasy world where all is bliss and gorgeous celebrity...
...He and I were to spend many good times together—talking, fishing, skiing, playing tennis—as well as the less enjoyable hours negotiating a Middle East settlement and praying for the hostages...
...Once or twice he saves Western civilization...
...Nothing more needs to be said about the deranged melody that Mr...
...airport is on the outskirts of the capital city of Iran, and only a few months ago it was one of the busiest in the world...
...Why to the contrary do so many persist in rolling out the same dubious conventional wisdoms about the scamp...
...Lapham, it is your show...
...he travels to romantic, far-off lands...
...He said that we had meant more than anyone in the United States to him and his family when they came here from the Soviet Union...
...It is the morning on which his agents arrange to transfer almost $8 billion through the Bank of England in return for the release of the American hostages in Teheran...
...Of these flatteries "the most memorable of all" is presented by Slava Rostropovich, the cellist recently arrived in the.United States as an exile from the Soviet Union...
...The tone never varies, nor does the scout's unfailing ability to achieve a subtlety of perspective comparable to that seen on a postcard of the Lincoln Memorial...
...And then, of course, there was Fritz and Cy—the most expensive objects displayed in the catalogues...
...Humility and good taste restrain me from mentioning the editor and his magazine...
...Ham and Jody and Charlie and Bert, of course, he knows from the old days in Georgia...
...Why did I not take on the ceremony myself...
...I'm told that the book was accorded respectful reviews in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and a number of other journals supposedly interested in the direction of American politics...
...The young and upright Jimmy Carter goes north to Washington, and there among the cruise missiles and the cherry blossoms, he has a wonderful time...
...Few shared his insight...
...How could it be otherwise...
...Now that Mr...
...The evening is a wonderful, wonderful success...
...Glancing at the diarist's notes that continue throughout the book, I see that the scout persists with his relentless discovery of the obvious...
...You will have to put on your morning clothes and greet them.' " During the intervening eight hours and fifty-five minutes Mr...
...He compares himself, flatteringly, to President Wilson, and then, a few pages later, he expands the comparison to embrace Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson...
...To this day the giants of our time cannot and will not recognize the damage he did...
...Carter plays on his two-string banjo...
...Carter perjures himself in the first sixty-two pages of his memoirs but rather that he shows himself so incapable of self-knowledge that his words lose all hope of relation to the events he chooses to describe...
...he lives in an old and famous house...
...Carter revised this entry when getting it ready for the printer, augmenting the excitement of "I am personally receiving reports" with the geopolitical dimension provided in the phrase, "The airport is on the outskirts of the capital city of Iran," but I'm afraid that the notation appears as Mr...
...For the purposes of a review, it is enough to read the first sixty-two pages (all of them introductory and advertised under the heading, "A Graduate Course in America"), and then to look at random through the rest of the collection...
...Carter had become so peripheral a figure in American politics that he had to push his way into the locker room at the end of a World Series game in order to attract the notice of the television cameras...
...Presumably it is his mother that Mr...
...About Cy, the scout can't say enough...
...By the time he comes to page 54 the scout has persuaded himself that he knows most of what needs to be known about "history, politics, international events and foreign policy...
...That's about as far as the scout gets with the question, which, fortunately for all concerned, doesn't exceed the moral capacities required of a first-year camper...
...The scout collects the ornaments of the policy-making establishments in the way that twelve-year-old boys collect the portraits of baseball heroes found in packages of bubble gum...
...Carter was a fraud...
...In the New York Times Book Review's assessment of Jimmy's memoirs, the Times's former White House correspondent even repeated the tired myth that this transparent fraud is "an eniema...
...The chapter headings of Keeping Faith indicate that beyond page 62 the scout discusses China and Bert Lance and human rights and the energy crisis and the Panama Canal and Camp David and God knows how many other topics of pressing concern...
...Come, come, '' they would be told...
...Others came to Lapham 's position, hut slowly...
...it appears on pages 593 and 594, in the place that a musical composition would reserve to the coda...
...What was there to say except that it would be nice to be back in Georgetown...
...He is as pleased with "the quality of the notes" (i.e., the memoranda prepared by the household clerks) as he is with "the procedures for responding to nuclear attack...
...Instead of a history he writes what he calls "a highly personal report of my own experiences" because he wants to share (certainly with his mother and maybe with a few other ladies in Plains, Georgia who wonder how he's doing up there in Washington) the "feelings of gratitude and pleasure" that he has gathered as keepsakes during his visit to the nation's capital...
...He intoned their platitudes, and they were reassured...
...The Democrats that year lacked the moral and intellectual energy to go to the trouble of staging even the pretense of debate...
...and few maintained the watch to the end...
...the Ayatollah deprives him of re-election in 1980...
...An idealist or a Republican might say that this was not a proper occupation for the President of the United States, but so stern a judgment would fail to make sympathetic allowance for the Wagnerian magnificence of Mr...
...The jolly times never end...
...He said history was going to treat my administration the same way they did Verdi, Puccini, and Beethoven...
...This is a sobering duty of the chief executive of our country, and every serious candidate for this office must decide whether he is capable of using or willing to use nuclear weapons if it should become necessary in order to defend our country...
...He believes what he reads on the labels, and it is enough that Brzezinski can find Czechoslovakia on a map...
...The book continues in this voice for 596 pages, and except for Jimmy Carter's mother I don't know who could bear to read the whole of the correspondence...
...As for example: 7:55 a.m...
...Thus he could make quick work of the business of state ("option papers describing the choices I had to make rarely stayed on my desk overnight") and get back to the more urgent and poetic task of writing bulletins to his diary...
...Carter wrote it that morning in the White House, holding the telephone in one hand and scribbling notes with the other in order that his mother should be apprised of momentous events until the very end, until finally Rosalynn had to come and tell him that scout camp is over and that it is time to go home...
...The thing was inevitable...
...On page 39 the scout briefly addresses the dilemma of nuclear war and responds with his customary self-satisfaction: I wanted to understand our defense organization . . . and my myriad special responsibilities in the control and potential use of atomic weapons...
...Arranged in chronological sequence, they tell the story of a boy and his mirror...
...Carter has in mind as his perfect reader, and I'm sure that she also enjoyed looking at the candid snapshots (Jimmy in the Oval Office, Jimmy at Camp David, Jimmy among dignitaries, etc...
...he admires his humility as exemplified in his wanting a policy of "no Ruffles and Flourishes or honors being paid to me...
...Most pundits remained silent, and they remain silent still...
...Carter's self-serving fictions from the arena of political chicanery to the amphitheatre of clinical pathology...
...She said, "I believe we're going to be happy in the White House...
...He is the only President we have, " or ' 'He is soooo smart, " or "We all know about Carter...
...At 1:50 a.m...
...As a populist, Mr...
...He pointed out that the masses . made a mistake on November the 4th, as they had when they rejected Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, rejected La Traviata, and in the first performance of Tosca the audience reacted against it so violently that they couldn't even raise the curtain for the third act...
...Well, if everybody knew about Jimmy's pathetic presidency, why is no one writing about it today...
...All of it is pretty big-time stuff, Mama, for a boy who, before coming north, thought that history was for girls...
...This is so ludicrous a mis-statement of the facts that it changes the venue of Mr...
...He wrote his memoirs...
...Jimmy was President...
...Lewis H. Lapham is the former editor of Harper's and a columnist for the Washington Post, who is also engaged in writing a book about the superstitious worship, especially virulent in the United States, of money...
...Neither would I willingly listen to a narrative of the Wilderness Campaign told to me by some poor soul imagining himself to be Ulysses S. Grant...
...sometimes he is sad, but most of the time he is happy and brave...
...The winner of our J. Gordon Coogler Award for the year's worst book is a former President of the United States of America...
...Nor does the scout have much trouble making decisions...
...I did my utmost for four solid years to make my own hope come true...
...I would like to think that Mr...
...He was the candidate boomed by the New York Times, by Time magazine, by David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission, by the entire apparatus of eager Democratic office-seekers who hoped for nothing better than a chance, after eight years of eating nuts and berries in the Republican wilderness, to return to the picnic tables of federal patronage...
...He chooses them because of their titles and credentials, because he has seen them advertised in the pages of the New York Times and the catalogues published by the Trilateral Commission, the Aspen Institute, and the Council on Foreign Relations...
...It never occurs to him that he is dealing, almost without exception, with the personifications of the same toadying mediocrity that distinguished the administrations of Presidents Nixon and Ford...
...If this is true and not merely a vicious rumor put about by right-wing extremists, then the nation probably can look forward within the next few years to the election of a President capable of composing even crazier music for drums, cymbals, and atomic bomb...
...The presidential stenography continues unabated for four pages until 10:45 a.m., when, "from Rosalynn: 'Jimmy, the Reagans will be here in fifteen minutes...
...Wonderful, wonderful Fritz Mondale who was a man of such stature, and Cy, good old decorous Cy...
...What difference did it make...
...As Georg Wilheim Friedrich Hegel used to say, Timothy Dickinson tells me, what is had to be...
...Rosalynn's prediction proved to be correct, and...
...Diary, January 13, 1981 This notation all but ends the scout's reverie...
...Bantam Books, $22.50...
...Brzezinski undoubtedly possesses many talents, bpt thinking and writing, at least in English, are not among them...
...He conceives of Zbigniew Brzezin-ski as "a first-rate thinker" and a master of expository prose...
...In fact, he was the candidate of all polite pundits, and by endlessly repeating the old fables about his prodigies they can spare themselves the pain of self-indictment...
...several of the guests come forward to whisper compliments into the scout's eager ear...
...Not only would this be too difficult and boring a task, but, even worse, it might interrupt the diarist's elegiac contemplation of himself...
...the American people fail him throughout his Administration because they concentrate too much on their own selfish interests and refuse to understand that he had come among them as their saviour and redeemer...
...I wanted to learn as much as possible and devoted full time to it, just as I had done as a young submarine officer, a businessman, a governor and a political candidate running against enormous odds to be elected President...
...The technological luxuries available to the President move him to little cries of wonder and delight...
...Into none of their characters does he evince the least glimmering of an insight...
...Carter's passion...
...Later in the camp term the scout humiliates Cy in a particularly nasty and mean-spirited way, but this is Cy's fault, and by that time the scout has taken to referring to him simply as Vance...
...We were silent for a moment, and then I replied, "I just hope that we never disappoint the people who made it possible for us to live here...
...Because he "devoted full time to it," the scout assumes that he has reached complete understanding...
...He learns that the press is irresponsible, that the Congress puts its private interests ahead of the public interest, that the Arabs and the Jews don't like each other, that the Russians have a lot of guns...
...Nonetheless through all his shabby pratfalls only Harper's and that other magazine that I shall not mention continued to jeer and to gasp...
...Whenever possible, he mistakes the novelties of technology for the substance of diplomacy...
...Impressed by the merit badges sewn on the sleeves of the older scouts, the diarist marvels at their sophisticated banter with the camp counselors...
...Toward the end, Lapham and that other editor who must remain anonymous were frequently being rebuked by the mature adults among the intelligentsia...
...he begins "jotting down some rough notes...
...he thinks wonderful thoughts (some of them statesmanlike, others merely warm and human...
...Whenever something goes wrong, it is invariably somebody else's fault...
...I am personally receiving reports on radio traffic halfway around the world— between the Teheran airport control tower and three planes poised at the end of a runway...
...An eager and voluminous diary...
...Carter has jotted down twenty-five dutiful notes, and the reader is left to ask who, if Mr...
...In November of that year he was rescued from oblivion by the divine intercession of Allah...
...He made so many notes that it is a wonder he had time to do anything else...
...He thinks of them as giants, as leaders, as Very Important People who have been to NATO and the Bohemian Grove...
...The scout passed his preliminary examinations with people like Cyrus Vance and Douglas Dillon and Paul Austin, persuading those fine gentlemen on the admissions committee that he possessed the traditional southern qualities that William Faulkner attributed to the Snopes family—small-minded and mean, only too eager to do what he was told in order to protect the Yankee investment in the cotton fields...
...He was writing about himself, and the subject so captivated him, so consumed him with the fires of love, that he abandoned himself to it in the way that lesser men abandon themselves to their enthusiasms for stamps or butterflies or Civil War cannon...
...Carter was serving as recording angel, was acting the part of President...
...Against Gerald Ford, the heir presumptive to Richard Nixon's disgrace, the Democrats figured they could win with any candidate willing to spend the required period of time in Holiday Inns...
...During his last week in the White House he presides at a banquet for the happy few who remain loyal to his vision of a world that might have been...
...The entry deserves to be quoted in its entirety: Slava Rostropovich gave an excellent little speech at our table, pointing out that the masses of people were often wrong—that what was significant was the personal relationship that developed between leaders or performers or artists and others...
...I realized that my ability to govern well would depend upon my mastery of the extremely important issues I faced...
...because he can listen to an air traffic controller "halfway around the world," he thinks he has become fully informed across the entire spectrum of Islamic affairs...
...Thus when Jimmy shambled out from the boondocks the giants of our time would not see him for the fantastic figure he was...
...The notes reveal the temper of the scout's mind...
...Carter's last few hours in office...
...these wonderful fellows professed their belief in Jimmy Carter before he was elected President, and so obviously there can be no question about their worth and talent...
...crazier music for drums, cymbals, and atomic bomb...
...Within the span of the next 39 pages the scout effectively destroys his credibility as a witness to anything other than his own innocence...
...Except as the odd expression of mind afflicted with terminal narcissism, how is it possible to accept the testimony of a man who believes that the White House is a fun and comfortable place, that Zbigniew Brzezinski is a first-rate thinker, that the arts of government devolve automatically, with the desk and the telephone system, on the occupant of the Oval Office...
...Sometimes he marks the spot with an exclamation point...
...I quote the passage at length because it offers a fair example of Mr...
...Given the events in question, another writer might have endowed the scene with liveliness and force...
...On page 19 the scout establishes the major key of pious self-approbation in which he composes the rest of his ballad to the lost loveliness of the Carter Administration...
...Carter reduces it to dullness by the simple expedient of staging the action in the theatre of his emotions...
...The opening chapter is meant to be a dramatic account of Mr...
...Under those circumstances, I was ready to perform this duty...
...He is describing his wonderful, wonderful inauguration day, and as he and his wife "approached our new home," he remembers the following colloquy: I told Rosalynn with a smile that it was a nice-looking place...
...His Cabinet officials he looks upon as items of elite merchandise...
...A lover's diary five-thousand pages long and bound in eighteen precious volumes...
...It was beautiful...
...By the autumn of 1979 Mr...
...Walter Sullivan, the American Ambassador in Teheran, causes him to suffer the agony of the hostage crisis...
...Carter's method as well as the sound of his complacence...
...In the campaigns of 1976 he enjoyed the full faith and backing not only of the northern media but also of the eastern financial interests...
...To the editors of Newsweek Jimmy Carter looked like the political analogue of the Beverly Hillbillies and the Nashville Sound...
...It was the bicentennial year, and the media were in a mood to listen to homespun sermons and country guitars...
...feeling slightly sheepish, he confesses to the pleasure in hearing the military bands play "Hail to the Chief...
...Toward the end it gets a little hard to find enough people who properly appreciate the gift of his person...
...He confides to his diary the thrilling experience of seeing his first movie in the White House...
...All in all, despite the world's ingratitude, the scout still manages to have a wonderful time...
...Two years later, after it became painfully obvious that the scout also believed his Sunday-school nonsense, the media turned away from him in scorn and disgust...
...Apparently he was forever writing in a corner, jotting down his thoughts and observations, preserving his impressions of historic moments...
...already he has become the peer of Kissinger and Castle-reagh, and guess what, Mama, these Very Important People, these veteran scouts who can read a menu in French, they nod and smile and listen to what he has to say...
...On page 23 he completes the sentiment: As we walked through the living quarters on my first day as President, we were properly awestruck—but comfortable, and at home...
...Among all the members of my official Cabinet, Cy Vance and his wife, Gay, became the closest personal friends to Rosalynn and me...
...He tells his diary that he likes nothing better than to sit around with "Ham and Jody and Zbig," talking wonderfully important talk about the fate of mankind...
...The same Christmas shopper's mentality animates his discussion of the men whom he chooses to serve on his staff and in his Cabinet...
...RET During his four years in the White House Jimmy Carter kept a faithful diary...
...After dinner the guests go into the ballroom to listen to John Raitt sing hit songs from Carousel and Oklahoma...
...Why have Lewis Lapham review this work...
...In 1976, as editor of Harper's magazine, Lewis Lapham was present at the creation, so to speak, and for four years he was duly indignant...
...The scout thinks the phrasing especially fine because Rostropovich is "a courageous man . . . and special friend of ours" who has suffered the cruelties of a police state and therefore knows what life is all about...
...Carter has reverted to extensive quotation from his beloved diary...
...So delighted is the scout with the music of the cellist's "heavily-accented" voice that he must have found it difficult to wait until everybody left before rushing upstairs to tell his diary the wonderful, wonderful news...
...Well, of course Jimmy was the Times's candidate...
...He meets wonderful and important people...
...Carter's delusions of moral grandeur, he puts them to rest with the repeated references to himself as "a populist," i.e., a humble man of the people winning the prize of the presidency against the all but insuperable obstacles raised against him by the northern and eastern establishments...
...Yet you ask...
...Though Lyndon Johnson's presidency may have been the most disastrous of the century, it is now irrefutable that Jimmy Carter was the century s worst President...
...A he scout concedes-trrhis preface that he has no wish to write "a history of my administration...
...Edward Kennedy prevents him from giving the country a wonderful, wonderful health-care program...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
