think we surprised even the campaign with the effort because we were sincere, we knew Jimmy Carter personally, we could answer their questions about him, about his family, about his honesty and it made a tremendous difference. But on the plane back from New Hampshire, I sat down with Hamilton and I said, “Now Hamilton, when is the next trip planned?” And much to my surprise, he said, “We don’t have any more trips planned to send Georgians anywhere.” And that seemed a waste of talent and a waste of energy to me and the campaign of course, had no money and so I said, “You know, I know I can get three or four hundred people to go to Florida for that primary.” It startled him and scared him a little bit because we did have some of the network people on the plane with us and he said, “Oh, don’t say that if you think you can’t do it.” And so we started recruiting peo- ple and I was on the telephone and I knew the people that had supported Jimmy when he ran for Governor, I knew them personally and it was just easy enough to get people to agree to go either by their own transportation but we sent five buses into the Duvall County/Jacksonville area for a weekend and we just absolutely covered up that county with Georgians. The campaign – the head- quarters liked it so much they asked us to do the same thing in the panhandle and from there it just… every important primary that we had after that, Georgians went into the state. We spent a week there and of course everybody was spending their own money, at this time you could do that, and it was just a very successful effort and very unique and we had a heck of a good time doing this and we really felt that, well it did benefit the cam- paign and Jimmy, at the New York Demo- cratic Convention told the Peanut Brigadiers that were there, he gathered us all together and he said, “Without this campaign effort, I would never have made it.” So that was all we


needed. That was what we needed. And then of course in the general election it accelerated to – we ended up I think, going into eighteen states with hundreds and hundreds of people. So, I don’t really remember who started call- ing it the Peanut Brigade but it became known as the Peanut Brigade and as we went into cities and towns, they would welcome us with radio and TV. because by then we had a name and we had recognition. So that was the Peanut Brigade.


Oh well, that was interesting. I was going to say, during his actual cam- paign, he made an appearance in a lit- tle town, I live in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and there’s a little town in the county called Startex where my mother was actually born, birthed by a midwife and all this kind of stuff. So he ended up going to Startex to do a little speech and I got to meet Jimmy for just a second, and I’m gonna tell ya, just meeting him, talking to him for about three minutes endeared him to me for the rest of my life. That’s amazing.


So I wanted to ask you, Dorothy, since you’re a friend of his, to give us just a little take on Jimmy Carter, the man, the human being, the… everything. He does so many good things and he just seems like such a nice guy. He is a nice person but the thing that is out- standing to me is the characteristics that are a part of the very fabric of his being would be his determination to do the thing that he sets out to do and his goals. His discipline - he has so much control over himself and his disci- pline is just incredible. When he determines that he’s going to do something, that’s what he’s going to do and the tenacity... He could never have accomplished the things that he


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