Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Jimmy Carter’s term as the U.S. President was essentially a time between two reigns, a bridge and carried the country from the end if its concern with Watergate scandal to the advent of Reagan revolution (Elston 3). Carter arrived in Washing from Georgia in 1977 as an outsider who conformed to the political odds to secure an elective position in the first place. He left office after four years, still largely an outsider, after a shocking electoral defeat in which he lost 44 out of 50 states. Keeping Faith is a personal memoir of those four years he stayed in office, which serves best to mirror the author as sincere, honest, intelligent, humorless, dry, and impersonal. The book does not give any real insight of the author, and how he actually felt.
These memoirs, written by Jimmy Carter have entered swiftly into history. The book presents Carter’s accounts of frustration, satisfaction, and solitude that attend to him as the American president. The memoirs give an account of the crises Carter faced during his tenure as American president from 1977 to 1981. Carter gives detailed accounts of his victory against all odds at Camp David, his anguish over hostage crisis in Iran, his secret communications with China’s president Deng Xiaoping, and his revealing and dramatic encounters with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, among other world leaders. He also gives a glimpse of his private life – his feelings of being treated as an outsider, his relationship with his wife Rosalynn, and his pain regarding attacks on his brother Billy and friends.
One review of Keeping Faith termed the book as Carter’s love affair for himself, but this was not accurate. Some have also criticized the book as unreflective and sanctimonious, and unfortunately, these qualities show up in his book. The author also has a tendency to introduce a topic without providing adequate explanation on certain subjects. The annotations help but are in most cases self-serving. However, patient readers will find the book fascinating on two levels: the entries give blunt appraisal of the people Carter interacted with, as well as his view on what it is like to be a president. According to the book, Carter was a loner in his approach to office and how he handled foreign policy. Any ready can get an early hint on his problems, for example, when he complains that piles of decision papers overwhelm him. Instead of considering restructuring of his staff, he decides to take a course in speed-reading.
However, journals also strongly reflect the experience of any president being faced with a series of crises. But these crises burgeoned for Carte as the careened through unemployment, rising prices, gas lines, sacked embassies, allies abroad overthrown or killed, hostage in Iran, nuclear reactors melting down, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and bankruptcy of Chrysler. Similar to familiar pattern in modern politics, Republicans maintained that Carter failed to adequately address inflation and Russia, while on the left senator Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Senator led a rebellion against his failure to address escalation energy prices, his budget cuts, and ultimately his presidency.
Viewed overall, it becomes evident that Carter’s charisma stemmed from his heartfelt belief in personal empathy, which he thought could help him instill in leaders at home and abroad. Carter sought comfort in his solitary endeavors and in the pleasure of visiting celebrities from Sophia Loren to Vladimir Horowitz, as well as in family activities like collecting arrowheads with his wife and sledding with his grandchildren. His diaries present a mix of affairs of the state and efforts to escape. In 1979, he wrote that he spent a whole week working on some of the most demanding mental work of his life when referring to the meeting at Camp David to reenergize his faltering presidency (Carter 121). He adds that it is hard to accept criticism as he can reassess himself by taking a jog from three to seven miles every day.
Work Cited:
Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Elston, M. D. Heidi. Jimmy Carter: United States Presidents (2009) Series. Minneapolis: ABDO, 2010. Print.
