Jimmy, We Hardly Know Y'all

a southern odyssey: unguarded moments in the life, times and recent past of the most guarded presidential candidate in decades

The Man Himself is sitting, smile in place, in his studiously plain living room in front of a life-size portrait of his daughter, Amy, as though he were waiting for Norman Rockwell to appear. He is dressed in rumpled, down-home Levi shirt and pants and is telling me and my Playboy editor that it would be a good thing to have a Southern Baptist as President, because it would be good for the young, the poor, blacks, women and even those citizens who might be inclined to fornicate without the blessings of marriage. And once again, one wonders if Jimmy Carter is not too good to be true.

On one level, the man is simply preposterous. On another, he seems reasonable, sincere and eminently sensible. It is difficult for me to believe that after four months of following him around the country, listening to the same speech five or six times a day, and after many hours of one-on-one conversation, I still nod in smiling agreement, like some kind of spaced-out Moonie, as another human being tells me he would never lie, would never be egotistical, doesn't fear death, would make Federal Government simple, workable, responsive to the average citizen and that, in addition to doing away with the fear of death, he would do away with the fear of taxes.

As we stumble out into the muggy heat of Plains, Georgia, a movie-set hamlet of about eight buildings and what seem like 200 photographers, all taking pictures of Jimmy's Central Casting mother, Miss Lillian, my editor tells me, "Hey, I really like the guy." Then, not 30 seconds later, he wonders aloud if we've been had. Which is how it always is with a James Earl Carter performance.

The ambiguity that one feels about Carter can be maddening. Is he one of the most packaged and manipulative candidates in our time or a Lincolnesque barefoot boy who swooped out of nowhere at a time when we needed him? Is he a rigid proselytizer who wants to convert the country to his own vision of small-town, Sunday-school values or just a guy who believes in his personal God and will let the rest of us believe whatever the hell we want? Is he a true populist from something called the New South or yet another creature of the Eastern establishment?

Hanging Out With Carter's Act

When Carter is a winner--and he seems to be as I write this--all these doubts emerge: his puritanism, his waffling on key questions, the sense that he and his campaign are an inexorable machine that have made us all cave in without really testing him. There is also at times an insufferable arrogance that seems almost patrician. But despite all that, when defeat threatened, back in the primary days, I was drawn to the man.

One night during the Oregon primary, the press people traveling with Carter were put up at a third-rate hotel and that fact seemed symbolic of what was then thought to be the coming disintegration of his campaign. The other candidates, Frank Church and Jerry Brown, were staying at better hotels. We were staying where we were because Carter had made a last-minute desperation switch in his schedule to spend an extra weekend in Oregon. He was running scared.

Brown had won handily in Maryland and Church seemed well ahead in Oregon. It looked like Carter was facing a third-place finish in this Western primary. All of which seemed to portend the resuscitation of Hubert Humphrey's political corpse. Sam Donaldson, the ABC television correspondent, sat slumped in a sofa in the seedy hotel lobby and announced to anyone who would listen, "I smell blood in the water." We asked him to elaborate. "I smell a loser," he said. "I have a very sensitive nose and James Earl Carter is a loser."

Donaldson is a good reporter and the judgment was so definitively stated that I mulled it over and was surprised to find myself suddenly depressed by the prospect of Carter's defeat. I say this with some objectivity, because, on the surface, the man was further from my own political beliefs than some of his more liberal opponents; but I didn't want him to leave the political stage. It was a sense that he did, in fact, represent some new, needed force that I couldn't yet define-- but that somehow ought to have its day.

•

The feeling grew as I spent time with Carter, his family and his aides in the months leading up to his nomination. To start with his aides, I found it increasingly difficult to think of them as possessing that cold-blooded uniformity of the Nixon gendarmes. Press secretary Jody Powell, campaign manager Hamilton Jordan, speechwriter Pat Anderson and pollster Pat Caddell just don't fit the Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell stereotypes. They are effective packagers, but worries about the palace guard throwing up the gates around the White House seem to fade as one stays up all night drinking with them in some redneck bar.

Maybe I'm just being suckered in by too much rural Southern exotica, but there is something raw, spontaneous and physical about the people around Carter that puts a limit on their malleability and opportunism. It causes them to fuck up in ways I find reassuring. On one such occasion, I was riding with Jody and his wife, Nan, from Plains to nearby Americus. A car behind crowded us too closely and then passed, narrowly missing us. Jody shouted, "That fucking asshole!" and took off after the car. It would have made a fine wire-service story: Carter's press secretary, a former football player, wipes up the street with some local toughs. Nan managed to cool him down, but it was clear to me that in that moment, Jody had stopped being a politician's aide. On another occasion, Jody and Pat Anderson got into a hassle with some locals over a rented car. Again, shouts and anger while the next President of the United States cooled his heels, waiting for Pat to show up with a draft of his acceptance speech.

One of Jody's more useful functions on the campaign is to serve as proof that one can have been born in a small Southern town, be a Baptist, serve for six years as Carter's closest aide and still not be tight-assed. Add to that Anderson, who has written a novel called The President's Mistress, Caddell, hip and fresh out of Cambridge, Gerald Rafshoon, his media advisor and something of a carouser, Greg Schneiders, a onetime Washington restaurateur who is Carter's administrative assistant--and it becomes clear that Carter has not applied his concern with the Ten Commandments to the behavior of his staff. They are, at least some of them, as hard-drinking, fornicating, pot-smoking, freethinking a group as has been seen in higher politics.

Here's an exchange 1 taped with Hamilton Jordan:

Q. Given the purity this campaign has projected, I find it odd that few of you guys go to church, that you all drink and mess around and some of you even smoke dope. Isn't there a contradiction?

A. No, Jimmy's not self-righteous. He's very tolerant. If he weren't, he just wouldn't have people like me and Jody and Rafshoon around him.

Q. So when you're with him, you don't feel like you're with your Sunday-school teacher?

A. No, I don't feel that way. I'd never expect him to tell me how I should act. If people are concerned about his trying to foist his personal views on other people or that he somehow expects others to follow some rigid code he adheres to--well, that's just not him. He obviously hasn't made us change our way of living. He differentiates his personal and religious views from his actions as a political official. Look, all the same people who are so goddamned concerned about jimmy's religion were early supporters of Martin Luther King, Jr. His forum was Southern Baptist, too, but it happened to be black. This thing of Jimmy talking about religion was a result of the press's always bringing it up, not him. If you're in Boston and you're a politician, you try to get your picture taken with Cardinal dishing. If you're in the South, you're usually a Baptist and you go to church a lot. So?

Once, during the early stages of the campaign, a couple of his aides who were married had met two women in the hotel lobby and were taking them to their rooms. The elevator stopped at a floor below theirs, the door opened--and in walked Jimmy and Rosalynn. Not a word was exchanged. The aides stared nervously at the ceiling of the elevator as the two ladies giggled nervously and nudged each other. I was told later that Jimmy never mentioned the incident to either aide.

•

So much for reassuring anecdotes. At least these are anecdotes I've plucked out myself. But a modern campaign doles out anecdotes like a priest dispenses Communion wafers. The pack of reporters covering the candidate is always in a holding pattern of desperate anticipation, each waiting to be singled out for the blessing of an exclusive anecdote. This is because, during a campaign, a candidate is rarely going to say anything clear or provocative about anything important and, as a result, "color"--which is really just the plural for anecdote-- becomes all-important. When we came out of our last interview session with Carter, a U.P.I, reporter approached the assistant press secretary. The reporter was on the "body watch," which, as it was explained to me, means that the candidate might croak or fart and if the reporter's not there to record it, his ass is on the line. The newsman knew we'd been interviewing Carter and said, "Hey, what did those guys ask him? I need one crumb--anything for my lead this afternoon--because I've got nothing so far." The aide took an insignificant comment from our interview and doled it out.

So let's take the "oral sex" anecdote that Jody reserved especially for me. (Previously, I'd been given a Bob Dylan-meets-Jimmy Carter anecdote, but it slipped out and ended up. being printed elsewhere.) It seems that on a trip to Washington, then-Governor Carter, Rafshoon and a state trooper guarding the governor all went to a screening of the movie Lenny. During the performance, the trooper kept snorting and poking Rafshoon about the language and some of the steamier scenes. Carter just sat quietly, taking it in. When they got out, Rafshoon couldn't resist asking. "Say, Governor, do they have oral sex in Plains?"

Carter, after a pause, said, "Yep, but they don't call it that."

Which is a nice thing to know about Plains. But it's safe to say that the anecdote was reserved for a writer from Playboy and that Jody didn't offer it to, say, the people from Reader's Digest who preceded us that day. It served a purpose: to telegraph to the "typical" Playboy reader that Jimmy Carter is a regular guy. He may not use hip language, but he has hip thoughts. The same purpose was served when he dropped that Dylan quote into his acceptance speech at the convention--to do for the Dylan generation what a reference to Polish people did for those 5,000,000 voters: tip them off that he was secretly one of them.

Well, compared with Ford, Carter is hip. And there's no doubt the people around Carter are good guys, quite the opposite from the cold technicians' image that has frequently been attached to them. I'd buy a used car from Jody or Hamilton--or from Jimmy, for that matter. After all, what he wants is for me to have a car as good and decent and as full of love as I deserve. I'm tired of cars and State Departments and CIAs that arc lemons. But the trouble is that every time I feel good about the man, I can feel bad 20 minutes later when I remember that Jody wanted Wallace above all others to join Carter at the podium of the Democratic Convention and that, sure enough, there was Hamilton clapping politely for various Democratic politicians as they were called up to the podium, then clapping enthusiastically when Wallace's name was called. (From my conversations with Jody and Hamilton,' I'm sure they were responding to a Southern outsider's having his day at the convention and not to Wallace's racist reputation. But it still made me nervous.)

So who is hustling whom? The problem is that one's judgments about Carter are necessarily fragmented, because we have no sense of the depth of the man, of his experience and roots. He just came to us a winner. Carter's people are good at their business, so good that they've managed to cover the hard and interesting edges of the man. What we see is the packaging. The young men surrounding Carter let an occasional nugget drop for a particular constituency, then wrap him up again quickly. The manipulation of staged media events along with color results in lopsided opinion polls that will probably carry him to the White House, but when you look closely, you end up confused. His more liberal aides, such as Peter Bourne and Mary King, will tell you that he is a closet progressive, as Roosevelt was when he first ran, and that he has withheld disclosure of his full program: Once he's in the White House-- whammo! Others, such as Charles Kirbo, a more traditional politician, will confide to his friends that he's really a closet conservative. And so speculation about Carter the man and Carter the President really hangs on an appraisal of where his gut feelings are coming from.

•

Reporters covering Jerry Ford or Ronald Reagan or Scoop Jackson soon stop looking for the "real" person behind the campaigner, because they realize that if they should happen to find him, he would be boringly similar to the one they've seen all along. But I have yet to meet a reporter who feels that way about Carter. He is intriguing, baffling and perpetually confounding. Even to Ins family.

One afternoon, I was visiting with Carter's sister Gloria and her husband, Walter Spann, in their farmhouse about five miles down the road from Jimmy's home. Carter had remarked during the Playboy Interview that he felt closer to Gloria than to his evangelist sister, Ruth. The remark confused me. because Gloria is loose and outgoing--as opposed to Jimmy--and supported McGovern, drives motorcycles and doesn't seem to give much of a damn about her image. I had first met Gloria when I was over at Miss Lillian's. Garter's mother had told me that Gloria wasn't giving interviews. When Gloria walked in, 1 asked her if she'd make an exception. She shot me a look and said, "I'm not talking to any reporters unless they have jeans, boots and a beard." I had two of the prerequisites.

"Look," I said, "I'm only wearing this suit because I thought that's what you do when you go calling on Southern ladies."

She laughed and said. "Well, I ain't no Southern lady, but you finish here and come by and see me and Walter. I'll give you some bourbon, but no interview."

At the Spann home, as the three of us sat drinking, my reportorial instincts got the best of me and I started inquiring about Walter's political beliefs. He was even blunter than Gloria: It was none of my business, he said, whom he preferred for President or if he voted at all. He added, "I like it fine if you're over drinking with us. but I don't want to be interviewed. I'm a farmer, not a politician. Jimmy's the politician."

Later, they became more talkative and let me take notes. Gloria said that she had always known Jimmy as a vibrant, adventuresome person. She said that as a child, he was given the nickname Hot by his father and that his sisters and brother still called him that privately. Hot seemed to fit Jimmy, she said, because he felt deeply and was always in a fevered rush to do significant things with his life. (The other family nicknames she mentioned seem appropriate as well. Gloria, the family free spirit, was called Gogo. Billy, the self-conscious redneck, was Buck. And faith healer Ruth was Boopy Doop.)

Gloria said it was "bunk" that Hot, or Jimmy, should be considered cold, ruthless or unemotional. It was true that he had always taken himself seriously but that the political life had made him become more guarded. At this point, late in the boozy evening, Walter broke in and said, "You reporters aren't going to get to know Jimmy, because he's onstage. He's been onstage ever since 1966, when he ran for governor."

To which Gloria added softly but with affection: "He's been onstage longer than that."

At one point during the interview with Carter, as I was fumbling with my tape recorder. I mentioned that my talk with Gloria had led me to believe he was a more relaxed and less mechanical person than he seemed on the campaign trail. Was there going to be any time in his life for the sort of openness that Gloria described?

"Sure," he said, "I've always lived that way. Listen, we're having a fish fry Saturday afternoon and you're welcome to come. We're not inviting many people. We're going to drain my little pond and get some of the bigger fish out of there and then have a fry afterward. I think it would be a good time for you to just see a typical incident in the life of the Plains community."

Two hours after I spoke with Carter, Jody invited the entire press corps to the fish fry. The typical scene in the life of the Plains community turned into yet another media event flashed around the world by television. It was a mob scene, with reporters outnumbering locals four to one. Carter looked about as relaxed as one of the Happing fish in the drained pond.

But Carter does come from a delightfully informal family. On one earlier occasion, Gloria and Miss Lillian had invited me to go along for supper at a local diner. Gloria had carefully prepared two jars of liquid refreshment--one filled with Early Times bourbon and the other with water--so I "wouldn't get thirsty" on the way to dinner. While we were there, they playfully felt under my coat to see if I were wired for sound and became totally relaxed as they sipped on the bourbon and talked irreverently about the foibles of people in Plains.

The shame is, they get uneasy when they see how friendly and natural they come off in print. 1 hope Miss Lillian doesn't react to my description of her the way she responded to some of what's been published about her--and, my God, she does get a wonderful press. Here is Miss Lillian talking to me about the media:

"Frankly, I don't like women interviewers. They're pushy, though one I had was just as sweet as she could be. Some of them, they free-lance, and if what you say isn't interesting, they touch it up a bit. That one girl wrote an article and she said I had a drink in my hand and I waved it around in the air. I never had a drink with anyone who was interviewing me. Never. If I offered you a drink, I don't know whether you'd write it down or not, because I don't trust anybody. I know it's going to get worse and I'm prepared. I'm just kind of suspicious of a woman writer until I know where I stand. Most women are free-lancers, did you know that? I'm besieged by publishers and I just tell everyone that Gloria is going to write my story. She's got all my letters and everything, isn't that right, Gloria?"

But the afternoon of the fish fry. another member of the family delivered an opinion on the press that was a bit less charming. I was on the porch, chatting with Gloria and Walter. Jimmy had escaped from the other reporters and walked over to kiss Gloria on the cheek. He shook Walter's hand, too, but ignored my presence. We had recorded a number of conversations by then and it was an awkward moment for me, given the fact that he'd invited me over to see him in a "relaxed" frame of mind. But what made it even more awkward was that he began to speak about the press in unflattering terms to Gloria and Walter, as if I were not present.

"Guess it's hard for you to get away from all those reporters," Walter said. "They're like gnats swarming around."

Carter paused in his munching of a catfish and replied, "The press people are afraid I'm going to eat a fishbone and choke on it. They're afraid they won't have a picture when it happens." The tone wasn't bantering; it was more on the bitter side.

Now, it's true that the body watch doesn't want to miss anything and that that can get depressing for a candidate. But the press people hadn't climbed over any fences to get in--Carter had invited them because he wanted a folksy image of his fish fry beamed around the world. A part of Carter undoubtedly loves down-home fish fries. But another part of him wants to exploit the hell out of them.

And that's the dilemma: He uses the process and gets consumed by it. He cares for his mother, but, as the 78-year-old Miss Lillian told me, "When I came back from India [she was with the Peace Corps], Jimmy asked me to accept every single speaking engagement I could to help him get exposure." That's why he plays up Gloria, the motorcycle rider, to a bike-race audience in Oregon and sister Ruth to church folk in South Dakota. That's why his son Chip will be sent off to attend a gay function in San Francisco while Dad is addressing a meeting of black ministers (during which he pronounces homosexuality "a sin").

It is not that Carter is shallow or exploitative but rather that he and his staff have consciously decided to use-- and thus to submit to--a process of campaigning that is inherently shallow and exploitative. One realizes that Carter is capable of dealing with complicated thoughts. One also senses that he is a good man who cares for his family; that he has real roots; that he is serious about fairly representing the American people. But it is a fact that his life in these past two years--and perhaps longer, as his sister suggests--has been one staged media event after another.

Carter would probably admit to being onstage, to being packaged, and at times--when he becomes testy and stiffnecked--he seems to be grappling with the implications of this to his personality. When I brought it up with one of his aides, I was told that that was the precise reason Carter insists on returning to Plains every weekend during the campaign, even if only for one night. But, as a result, Plains itself has become a stage prop that he has prettified for us.

Offstage

The town of Plains has by now become sticky with media hype. It's what one Manhattan friend calls cracker chic. Residents and reporters alike have entered into a conspiracy not to disillusion visitors. Among the locals, "We wouldn't do anything to hurt Jimmy's chances" is the most common refrain. What we have are caricatures. There is talkative old Miss Lillian, rocking on her porch, a lovable interview junkie; brother Billy, the redneck cracker; Rosalynn, the dutiful if uptight wife; cousin Hugh, the genial worm farmer; Jimmy's father, James Earl Carter, Sr., who died in 1953 and is rarely mentioned except to say that he had Old South (i.e., racist and reactionary) ideas.

But, of course, as is the case with Jimmy himself, the scene is more complicated than that. Fewer solid colors; more gray. Southern rural life is no simpler than urban life. And if you throw in the extreme pressure of the civil rights years, probably tougher. The folksy, innocent facade that surrounds Plains may be convenient to the Carter campaign, but it simply rewrites history.

Coincidentally, I had been through Plains 16 years ago and felt the tension beneath the surface of this placid town. In 1960, I was driving through southwest Georgia with a group of people who wanted to integrate public facilities. I have a particular memory of a gas station in Americus where I stopped so a white companion could deliberately use the "colored" rest room. An ugly confrontation ensued.

Recently, I was riding around town with Walter and Gloria and I spotted what appeared to be the same gas station. I mentioned the 1960 incident to them and Walter said, "Did you do that? Hell, they should have blown your fool head off." I like Walter and I knew he was kidding. In fact, he's one of the few people around Plains who don't feel a need to ennoble the past.

And that's the point. Carter does. Just as the campaign packaging prevents one from seeing his complexities, his tolerance and his tensions, so the whitewashing of the past prevents one from studying his real roots. His family have become town characters with stereotyped pasts, and his own past, though somewhat more closely examined, becomes a part of folklore. But to get a glimpse of the complexity of real life, there is no better case study than the crucible the Old South went through to become the New South: the civil rights struggle.

•

There are two roads at the edge of Plains that meet at nearly right angles: One goes toward an integrated farm called Koinonia and the other leads to Americus. Both places were sources of the main shock waves from civil rights that reached the Carter family.

Americus has been much discussed in the press. It was once one of the meanest towns in the South, the scene of some of the ugliest demonstrations and acts of violence during 1963 and 1964. It was in Americus that Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed and told to sweep the floors. Until not long ago, its bulletin boards displayed a letter from King "thanking" the jailers for their hospitality. What Carter did and did not do as a moderate and a supporter of Lyndon Johnson has been raked over the coals. He did not speak out forcefully during the Sixties (and, indeed, took no position at all during the worst disturbances) but paid his dues as his family and he were taunted as "nigger lovers" during L.B.J.'s campaign. Americus is nine miles from Plains.

But Koinonia is something else. It is a raw nerve to both Jimmy and Miss Lillian. It has not been raked over the coals, because it is hardly mentioned. Koinonia was founded in 1942 by a progressive white couple named Clarence and Florence Jordan. It was a courageous attempt to show that an integrated communal farm run on Christian principles was a possibility in the Old South. It is seven miles from Plains.

When I questioned Miss Lillian about the Carters' relationship to the farm, I caught a rare flash of anger. "Why do you want to bring that up?" she snapped. "It's over with. You'd just stir up some of the wilder people around here, and then nobody knows what will happen."

The people who might stir-things up around Plains are the same ones who gave Miss Lillian and Gloria a hard time back in 1964, when they worked for Johnson's election at the Americus headquarters. "Children yelled at me," Miss Lillian recalled, "and threw things at my car because Johnson was what they called an N-I-G-G-E-R L-O-V-E-R." Were they some of the same people who have turned to private schools to avoid integration? "Some of them," she admitted, (continued on page 186)Jimmy, We Hardly Know Y'all(continued from page 98) "but they're not the nicest people in town."

Why Not the Best? is the title of Carter's autobiography. And the concept of the nicest, or best, people is the key to understanding Jimmy Carter, for it comes out of a patrician rural tradition of responsibility to which he is heir. The white elite who survived the civil rights strife without losing their power either by overtly siding with the blacks or by taking racist stands formed the core of the New South that Carter personifies. It is moderate and pragmatic and, above all, patrician.

The Carters, after all, were patricians. Part of Jimmy's packaging includes reminiscences about his childhood in a home without electricity. Well, in the days before rural electrification, nobody much had it. But Earl, as Jimmy's lather was known, owned 4000 acres, employed servants and died with money in the bank. And to be patrician toward a radical experiment such as Koinonia meant to keep it at a proper distance without really siding against it.

Another personal coincidence: The period I spent nosing around Plains wasn't the first time I'd heard about Koinonia. I remember that when I left the gas station in Americus, I stopped to ask directions for the farm. I had read about it and stopped at a corner to naively ask a group of white men how to get to Koinonia. One of them sneered at me. "Why you want to go there, boy?" I chose to discontinue the dialog. For the next few hours, there were many false starts up red-clay roads with flashlights shining on our California license plates and enormous dogs barking. I was about as scared as I've ever been and, to this day, I can't fathom the courage of blacks in Americus who decided to take a stand. Or the whites and blacks who dared to live together at Koinonia. That was the night I met Florence and Clarence Jordan, the founders of the farm.

Sixteen years later, on the Carter campaign, I met Hamilton Jordan and asked him if he were related to the Clarence Jordan I'd met years ago. Hamilton told me Clarence, who died in 1969, was his uncle and "one of the two people in my life I have respected most," the other being Carter. Hamilton and I discussed Koinonia and his uncle for quite some time.

Hamilton has his roots in this southwest Georgia clay and reached adulthood during the worst of the racial turmoil. He recalls that he was a segregationist until "after Kennedy," but he was always awed by the idealism of his uncle Clarence. He visited Koinonia as a kid and remembers: "Clarence had a tragic life, but he was a great, great man--a straight shooter, at peace with himself."

Hamilton, like Jimmy, played the proper, white-sheep role in his family. A crusader like Clarence was therefore a "loser," but one who was a challenge to the rest of the family. As Miss Lillian admitted, "Clarence was 20 years ahead of his time."

Clarence Jordan was a Baptist minister with a Ph.D. who, quite literally, practiced what he preached. The Christianity and brotherly love about which he spoke so eloquently from the pulpit included blacks, and it didn't take the townspeople of Plains long to figure that out. In 1942, he formed a small community of farmers and workers, black and white, in what was essentially a commune. The Klan paid its first visit that year. By the Fifties, the powerful White Citizens' Council had moved on to boycotts, bombings and shootings. The farm became famous in the middle Fifties when an Atlanta newspaper printed a cartoon showing the Koinonia barn with a lightning rod on its roof.

How did Carter, back from the Navy after his father's death in 1953, respond to the farm?

"I went there several times in the Fifties and Sixties," he told me. "They couldn't get anyone else to shell seed for them, and I did. I went down there a couple of times to talk to Clarence Jordan . . . I knew Clarence Jordan when we were going through the years of integration."

I checked his recollection with that of Clarence's widow, Florence, who still lives on the Koinonia farm.

"It's not that I want to throw a monkey wrench into his campaign," she told me, "because most of us will probably vote for him. But it does seem kind of bad when a reporter calls here on the basis of Jimmy's having said he used to visit here and knew us. I have to say I'm sorry, but I don't even know the man. I've never met him, and we've been living down the road for 34 years. People-came here from all over the world, but he hasn't come seven miles."

In that same conversation, she told me that there were people who had been friendly to the Koinonia folks but that most of them had been forced to leave the area because of the social pressure. No one else in the county offered support. "They would lose their business or lose their friends," she said sadly, "and that was more important than their Christian beliefs. That was true of most people in the county and [Jimmy] was no different."

I went back to Carter and pinned him down on what stand he had taken when he heard about the shootings and bombings at Koinonia.

"I didn't shoot at them or throw bombs," he replied, in what I believe was a sarcastic tone.

"I know," I said, "but did you speak out against it?"

"There was a general deploring of violence," he replied, "and the grand jury investigated it and I think everybody was embarrassed by it. It was done--if it was done--by a fringe element. This was a time, I'd say, of very radical elements on both sides."

If Florence wasn't lying to me about Jimmy's visits to Koinonia, then Jimmy was. Since the shootings are vastly documented, his hedge--"if it was done"-- is chickenshit. And his answer to my question about whether he'd spoken out--"There was a general deploring"-- indicates his embarrassment at any but the most heroic image of his past. And, to top it off, the grand-jury investigation Garter referred to as a presumably impartial force is known to have been a McCarthy-type witch-hunt directed agai nst Koinouia.

When I considered Carter's promises never to lie, his sanitized version of events in his past and his stubborn refusal 10 admit to imperfection, the implications of this exchange angered me--which comes easily and self-righteously to a Northerner. But it almost caused me to overlook what I was seeking but: complexity. I stumbled across another unknown incident involving an early member of Koinonia, and it softened the impact for me.

It was Gloria who told me to look up Jack Singletary. Singletary came from a patrician family like Carter's in another part of Georgia. He attended the Naval Academy at the same lime Carter did (though they did not know each other there) and served in the Navy. But when the postwar draft came along, Singletary refused to register on religious grounds. He had already joined Koinonia when he was sent to Federal prison; upon his release, he went back to the farm. After a couple of years, he moved to his own farm nearby, without giving up Koinonia's progressive ideas. He became, in Gloria's words, "the white nigger of Plains."

Chatting with this remarkable Georgian, who I thought would have little good to say about a man who did not support him through Koinonia's terrible years, I was surprised to find that his memories of Carter were positive:

"Jimmy came home from the Navy and I ran into him on the street and he and Rosalynn invited me to their apartment, which had never been done. That was in '53 or '54. He told me that night that he shared my views in regard to the race question. He told me about the incident when he was an officer on a ship and the crew was on shore leave and was invited to an official function. A black sailor wasn't invited, so the whole crew didn't go. He was proud. He wanted me to know this."

Singletary related the story of the boycott against his family. The White Citizens' Council in Sumter County decided that no merchant should sell goods to any member of Koinonia, and that included Singletary.

"There was a little store down here-- Mrs. Howell's store--and they circulated stuff that me and Koinonia were buying our groceries from her. So the sheriff and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent went to see Mrs. Howell. They told her that if she didn't quit selling to us, something was going to happen to her. But the only contact I was having with Mrs. Howell was that my oldest child was dying with leukemia and we didn't have a telephone. Mrs. Howell's store had the nearest telephone. We had taken our son to Sloan-Kettering in New York for treatment and we were keeping in touch with them by telephone about his medicine. I'd go down and use Mrs. Howell's telephone and I'd pay her telephone bill. Well, she told me that they had come to threaten her and that she was going to have to stop letting me use the telephone."

Singletary took his case to the local merchants' group, of which Carter was a member. The group decided to bend the boycott in Singletary's case, though it remained in force against the residents of Koinonia. They were good people, the merchants, and they weren't going to do something so inhumane as to deny help to a leukemic boy. It wasn't a great moment for Jimmy Carter, but it told the powerful White Citizens' Council where he and some of the best people stood.

There is even more to the Koinonia story that reflects on the Carter family and that invalidates the simple stereotypes we've been allowed to see. For instance, Singletary told me about a follow-up that changed my mind about Rosalynn, who doesn't get much credit for having taken courageous stands.

"Our little boy finally died of leukemia. It was when the boycott was on and we had our friends from Koinonia come over for the funeral. Rosalynn came the next morning and brought a ham. We invited her to stay and she did: we had a very informal Quaker-type service and put the body into a little box that Koinonia had made. We took it down to a little playground there where he had played and buried him without any remarks. Rosalynn left here, I'm told, really just all upset and went to Plains to see the Baptist preacher and bawled him out. He said he reckoned he'd be run out of town if he did it, but she made him come so we finally had a graveside service. Now, that's a little insight into the kind of person she is and I'm sure that Jimmy was with her."

When I told Rosalynn that I had been talking to Singletary, she said quietly, "Yes, that's right--they were heroic people. It took people from the outside to shake us up into seeing what was right. I have a lot of respect for those people." I don't care what I read about Rosalynn in the Ladies' Home Journal from now on; I'm prepared to admire her without being cynical.

•

As I began collecting other bits of evidence, many of them favorable to the Carters, from sources that seemed impartial. I realized how superficially the press--with the connivance of the Carter campaign--had characterized these human beings. Earl Carter, for instance, turns out not to have been the hidebound racist he is made out to be. It was he, in fact, who first befriended Singletary, inviting him (on one occasion with a black friend) into the back of the store for a soda pop when such an act took courage. "Mr. Earl," as Singletary called him, also went into partnership with him to combine clover when no other farmers would even share equipment with Singletary. When Earl was dying in 1953 of cancer, Singletary was one of the two non-family members Earl asked to his bedside.

Billy Carter, the incorrigible cracker who still uses the word nigger when he's drinking with his old buddies at the gas station, took an unpopular stand against the church people in speaking out against the antiquated liquor laws. That much may not be surprising, but it was also he who financed a 1966 lawsuit against segregated private schools.

On the other hand, there is cousin Hugh, whom news people love to quote for bits of quaint philosophy. Hugh was the one who fought against the very desegregation initiative his cousins supported; he was also head of the board of deacons in the Baptist Church and in 1962 voted to keep blacks out of the church that Jimmy tried to integrate. And it wasn't just blacks he was opposed to. His board of deacons unanimously voted against admitting the Singletarys as church members, merely for associating with blacks. Singletary told me that the board had warned his family they weren't even welcome to visit the church. Needless to say, Jimmy and Rosalynn opposed Hugh's position on this and Jimmy stood up in church the following Sunday to plead unsuccessfully for the admission of the Singletarys.

Nor is Miss Lillian the Central Casting figure she likes to play. For instance, we've heard a lot about the fact that she entered the Peace Corps at the age of 68, but usually in the context of an old lady going off on a lark. In one of our conversations, she revealed some of that condescending but well-intentioned patrician spirit that now marks Jimmy (I have condensed a much longer monolog) :

"I went to India, which is a dark country with a warm climate, because I felt the South had been so awful to blacks that I wanted to go where I could help people who had nothing. . . . I did a lot of family-planning work and had to explain to those poor people why it was necessary for them. . . . If a man had more than three children, he had to have a vasectomy, which was fair. It was the only way to handle it, because those people are ignorant and the only outlet they have is sex. . . . I listened to one of the women at the clinic explain to one of the men why he needed a vasectomy; I had seen some of the men almost lose their minds. You know, they could not believe that if they had the operation they would still be men, so I would see a lot of scenes of broken men. . . . I would see some of the attendants holding men down on the tallies for their operation and I said, I can do better than that, so I must tell you what I did: I would stand at the man's head; he hadn't had a shot or anything, he had to stand it without anesthesia. I stood at his head and I got a pan of cold water and I would talk in a low, soothing voice and put rags on his head, and I would say, That's all right--I had a few words of Hindi that I could say to keep him calm. . . . It hurts, you have to cut the thing in two and, oh, that hurts. So that's what I did with the vasectomies."

•

My focus on the Carters' patrician spirit and on Koinonia and on civil rights isn't to raise the specter of intolerance or closet racism. It's pretty clear that Carter and most of his family were never racists-- and were, on the whole, as courageous as any of the "best" families. But I do raise it to say that Carter and his family can't be capsulized as easily as they want to make u.s think. Despite Carter's acts of courage, he didn't always act courageously. He was caught in a terrible time and he was only human--which means he often didn't do the right thing. But Jimmy Carter won't admit it. The real heroes of the era were less than ten miles up the road in either direction from his home all his life, taking the most terrible punishment, and he won't admit that he shunned them like nearly everyone else. Like all of us.

Carter is addicted to the theory that we progress by stressing our virtues rather than by dwelling on failures; this is the major theme of his campaign speeches. There's undoubtedly some merit to this approach, but it seems to me that it excludes serious learning from past error.

•

The mythologizing of the past leads naturally to the prettification of present-day Plains. Right here, in brother Billy's fire-prone gas station and cousin Hugh's antique store, when the talking and drinking get going, one still finds considerable contempt for "niggers." I was with Billy when he pointed out a hulking, mean-looking local and explained, "He's a John Bircher--used to be in the White Citizens' Council. John Birch is real big around here. They've taken over from the Council and the Klan."

Plains and Americus are no better or worse than many other places, but hanging out in these towns makes you wonder where Jimmy gets off extolling the virtues of small-town living, as he often does. It merely leaves the rest of us feeling guilty, hankering for some sort of idyllic golden age that never existed. "Why not the best?" is a reasonable question if it is made clear that the best doesn't exist, that it's something we can only aspire to. And it is this self-righteous, sanctimonious, smily side of Jimmy Carter that gets to me, because it miseducates us about the real problems we face in trying to become the best. Carter frequently promises that he will never lie to us, but his power-of-positive-thinking stance is itself a lie. We are not all "full of love." We don't "all want the same things." His version of the good life, filled with churches and sermons, would bore a lot of people--including those in his home town.

I remember one afternoon in a small town in Oregon during the primary campaign when there was a convention of barbershop quartets. I didn't mind it until several of the quartets approached Carter and serenaded him with a syrupy rendition of Dixie. Carter began to speak about how the scene was exactly the same in Plains, where people sit around on the grass and listen to music, and said that that was what the good life was really like. It was such a cloying performance all around that I began muttering incoherently about the need for a little perversity in everybody's life. I asked one of the singers whether he believed in all this small-town goodness that he represented, fully expecting to be punched out. His answer restored my faith in America much more than anything Carter said that day. "Hey, man," he said in a pleasing tenor voice, "this is camp!"

Kids are being busted right now in Plains for hard drugs. Carter's nephew is a hard-drug user and homosexual who is serving time in a California jail for armed robbery. Rosalynn told me that her friend's 16-year-old son is serving time in prison on a marijuana charge. In August, a 28-year-old puritan named Randy Howard was elected Sumter County sheriff on the basis of his record as a one-man narc squad, hassling half the younger population. Howard claims that organized crime has moved into the area with drugs, pornography and gambling. He says alcoholism remains the number-one problem in the area.

The hypocrisy about booze is extreme. One hot night, when Carter and Walter Mondale were scheduled to speak at the Plains railroad depot, I went over to brother Billy's gas station to get a six-pack and then went back to the rally, only to be told by Buford Reese, a local Carter man, "Friend, would you put that away on behalf of the community?" We in the press giggled. But later I felt sorry for Buford and for Howard (who had told me that he never touches alcohol and doesn't think people need anything more than Coca-Cola), because their sincerity cannot possibly withstand their daily experiences with the reality of life in Sumter County. Hell, the next President's brother sells beer late into the night and his mother has been known, as are many older Southern ladies, to pick up a half-pint of harder stuff. (It always had to be bought in half-pint bottles or the liquor-store people, and therefore everyone else, might get the wrong idea.) But who needs this guilt?

Evidently, it serves a purpose. The way Jody Powell explains it, life in these towns is so intimate and passions so close to the surface that certain fictions must be maintained as social restraints. There are just certain things that the "best people" ought not to be seen doing or everything else will fall apart. Although everyone knows that the contradictions are there, it is important to conceal them. And it is this principle that Jimmy Carter has made the mainstay of his drive for the Presidency. In the wake of Watergate and the myriad other revelations about the seamy side of Government, Carter has proceeded to conduct himself as one of the best people who will not lie, cheat, screw around, gamble or in any other way reflect a disheveled and chaotic spirit. Carter decided, as he stales in his autobiography, to carry on "in the tradition of the best people," and that's just what he's been doing. His daddy had done the same and his momma took over after his daddy's death. They consciously attempted to publicly embody a high standard of morality as a playing out of their historic role as one of the leading families. It is therefore understandable that Jimmy has now extended that principle to national politics. What has startled everyone is that because of the particular disarray of American Government, at this moment, that old style fulfills a national need.

The limit of this stance is that it is based on paternalism. It assumes that the best people are the source of cultural and moral wisdom. And although they have an obligation to help educate the rest of us, we don't stand much of a chance of getting educated. Hence, they will have to lead, cajole and manipulate us sinners into being better than we are. That is why Jimmy appears fuzzy on the issues: He can't tell us too much or we might prevent his gaining power to do the right thing.

Will Carter Kick Ass ?

If, after the inauguration, you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And. I'd quit. But that's not going to happen. You're going to see new faces, new ideas. The Government is going to be run by people you have never heard of.

--Hamilton Jordan

By the time I'd finished my Southern odyssey. it seemed to me that despite all the contradictions I'd found, most of the fears of Carter's liberal critics appeared unwarranted. A Carter Presidency will probably be strong on civil liberties and civil rights. Blacks and women will probably be amply sprinkled throughout the higher levels of his Administration (though it hasn't yet happened in his campaign staff) and freethinkers won't be thrown into jail. On the contrary: Just as Nixon, secure in his right flank, was able to open relations with China, Carter's Bible base will probably permit him to extend our basic freedoms. If his current staff becomes the palace guard, it might even be fun.

But, having looked at Carter as a Southern patrician, what about his constant campaign cries against "political and economic elites," against "big shots"? Aren't successful Southern politicians part of the political elite? And when they're backed by large Southern-based corporations, aren't they part of the economic elite? Carter has a particularly close relationship with Coca-Cola board chairman J. Paul Austin, who organized fund-raising and businessmen's groups for him. There was even some trouble when the press reported that Carter had taken a couple of trips abroad that were paid for by Coke. And while it's true that Coke is based in Atlanta and Pepsi is in Purchase, New York, both are huge, multinational corporations with similar positions on foreign policy.

What got me thinking about all this was a campaign stop in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Carter was delivering his speech and I was chatting with Pat Anderson, his speechwriter, at the windswept airport. There was also a contingent of beauty contestants brought up onto the podium. I'd just interviewed Miss Poultry--honest to God--out of a fear that I'd go crazy if I had to listen to Carter's speech one more time.

Q. "Miss Poultry, I wonder if you could tell us your position on foreign policy?"

A. I'm sorry, we're not allowed to have positions. It's against the rules.

I turned to Anderson to ask him his position on foreign policy; I figured I'd have better luck with him, since he'd been jotting down notes for Carter's upcoming speech before the Foreign Policy Association in New York. Anderson waved me aside and said, "Later. I have to check this speech out with Brzezinski."

Check it out with Brzezinski? That was when I flashed back to the fact that the first time I'd ever really heard of Jimmy Carter wasn't over beers in some redneck bar with the likes of Jody Powell or Hamilton Jordan but in Mount Desert. Maine, with none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski.

It was the summer of 1975 and I was researching an article on the Rockefellers, who vacation on the coast of Maine. I'd met Zbig and his wife and they'd asked me over to their 27-room house just down the road from David Rockefeller's place. I found that Zbig had been sponsored by David Rockefeller in much the same way that Henry Kissinger had been sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller. ("With one important distinction," Zbig cautioned. "Henry worked for Nelson as an employee and I work with David as an associate.")

It was back then "that Brzezinski told me that he favored a former governor of Georgia as the Democratic candidate. I was surprised. Why a Georgian peanut farmer who was supposed to be a grassroots populist should have earned the enthusiasm of an establishment intellectual like Brzezinski was a mystery to me.

Well, it turned out that Brzezinski and Garter had a relationship going back to 1972, when David Rockefeller asked the then-Governor of Georgia to join the new international-elite organization that he was forming called the Trilateral Commission. Carter told me he was never to miss a meeting of the Trilateral Commission during the next three years and that he received his basic foreign-policy education under its auspices. It is also clear that during this period, Carter was able to impress David Rockefeller, who is part of the group that runs things in this country. Carter had already decided to run for the Presidency, remember. Rafshoon, his media specialist, told me during the campaign that Carter's selection to the Trilateral Commission was "one of the most fortunate accidents of the early campaign and critical to his building support where it counted." It is also the source for the main foreign-policy ideas in the Carter program. Which should be enough of a build-up to justify the question: What is a Trilateral Commission?

Essentially, the Trilateral Commission is a group of political and financial bigwigs from west Europe, Japan, Canada and the U. S. formed to provide a common negotiating position for the industrialized capitalist nations. David Rockefeller was instrumental in its founding. It's as much of a political and an economic elite as you can find.

The Rockefeller family has long had a propensity for establishing foundations, commissions, think tanks and study groups. These basically involve using tax-free dollars to buy up high-priced intellectual talent in order to develop social programs that ostensibly meet the public's needs while maintaining (a darker spirit might suggest "extending") the interests of the Rockefellers. The original Rockefeller Brothers Reports and, more recently, Nelson's Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, are examples of the process. David happens to have taken an interest in foreign affairs: The New York Council on Foreign Relations, of which he is the chairman, is one of his pet projects. The C.F.R. was directed for 25 years by David's college roommate, one George Franklin, who left the C.F.R. at David's behest to form the Trilateral Commission.

Franklin told me that he was the person who first hired an enterprising young Harvard professor to work for the Council and, after eight years of heading up or participating in Council studies, Henry Kissinger went on to do quite well in Government service. Kissinger and Brzezinski were in the same class at Harvard Graduate School. Although both have been Rockefeller/Franklin protégés, they try to avoid speaking to each other, which is more of a reflection of their egos than of any serious policy differences between the two men. Franklin and David like them both and one suspects they don't really care which one is Secretary of State.

Carter has made an issue of his differences with Kissinger's foreign policy, but given his reliance on the Trilateral Commission and Brzezinski, he must have had to dig for differences. Since there aren't many, he decided to attack Kissinger's "Lone Ranger" methods. But it doesn't add up to much in the way of real dissimilarities.

Also, Jimmy Carter, the man who now says the war in Vietnam was terrible and racist, has chosen the Trilateral Commission's Samuel Huntington as one of his advisors. Huntington's main claim to fame is that he came up with the forced-urbanization program for Vietnam, which meant bombing the countryside to "dry up the sea of people" around the Viet Cong. Carter is also relying on Paul Nitze, who, as nearly as I can tell, has been shouting "The Russians are coming!" since the days of the last czar.

It makes you wonder if we aren't safer with Kissinger. Henry's balance-of-power ideas may be old-fashioned and dangerous, but are we better off with Brzezinski's slightly different notions of a gathering of the powerful--which is what the Trilateral approach is all about? When the Democratic Party elite return from exile with Carter (and they probably will: I saw most of them pop up while I traveled on the press plane during the campaign and we all know about the trek they took from Harvard to Plains after the nomination), they'll want to do something to outdistance Kissinger's mark. They'll want to be spectacular. So here we go again: the best and the brightest, part two.

Against that prognosis, all I had to go on as I pulled out of my odyssey was the assurance by sister Gloria and Carter's son Chip that they'd lead a demonstration if Carter got us into another Vietnam. That, and the assurance by Carter's young aides that our next President is a committed Georgia populist who will never cave in to the Eastern establishment. And. to be fair, Carter himself has said that on principle, he is against military intervention in foreign countries.

Still, if Brzezinski doesn't become Secretary of State, it's only because you can't have two accents in a row. As in Kissinger's case, he'll probably first do a stint as national-security advisor. Zbig is better informed and more reasonable than most of the establishment figures Carter has gone to, but when I talked with Zbig that summer in Maine, he made it clear that to him. Carter was no Georgia populist who would rock any boats. He seemed to judge him an urbane thinker who had passed muster with the establishment.

So which is it going to be--some fresh new faces or the old gang from Harvard? Or, put another way, can a millionaire from southwest Georgia who was raised to care about the poor and wants government to be returned to the people do so without kicking ass?

Is Jimmy Carter too good to be true? I still don't know, because I hardly know him. But I do have one more anecdote to throw into the hopper.

A couple of nights before he was to give his acceptance speech in New York, Jimmy Carter was sitting in his expensive suite with Anderson, Caddell, Powell and Rafshoon. He was reading his speech aloud and stopping every few sentences to get their reaction. When he got to the section blasting political and economic elites, one of his aides suggested it be cut; it was too controversial. (In fact, The New York Times attacked that portion of the speech a few days later as "demagogic" and "populist.") Up in his hotel room, Carter thought for a minute, looked around the room slowly and said, "No. I have a very strong visceral feeling about that and I want to use it."

After all these months, after all the ambiguity and the packaging and the rewritten history, my visceral feeling is that Jimmy Carter has those visceral feelings.

It's also my favorite anecdote.