paragraph in there about Phil and Shirley MacLane and Phil and this person and that person so you can see there’s some quality there that he provided and but you’re exactly right… I think he truly loved Jimmy Carter. I know he did, so you’re exactly right. Your perception was correct.


Well, thanks. Well Dot, what made you decide to write this book and it’s been a few years since you made the decision to start on it, right? Right. I don’t know if I made this statement on this particular C-Span episode that you watched, but I read a book in the 1980’s and it was written about Jimmy and it was written by someone who was supposed to have been a historian and it just was so negative, and I used the word “snarky.” I looked it up and it was just exactly what I wanted because this woman was snarky. Isn’t that a great word?


Oh yeah, I love that word. Everything about Jimmy, his growing up in Plains, his ambitions, it really just set me on fire and as I’ve said on many an audience, it really just sort of pissed me off so I thought, “Well, I’ll just write my own book about Jimmy Carter, the Jimmy Carter I know, the determination, the tenacity and the discipline that I know of Jimmy Carter.” And I had ma- terial, I had a lot of material because I had saved little bits and things and papers and notes and letters, personal letters from Jimmy and Rosalyn, so I had a lot of material to work with. Actually, my first manuscript was 900 plus pages. I had to delete a lot. Well, I didn’t have to delete it, I just had to take it out. And there were names and people and places that were not put in my book but it would have been. Mercer University wisely decided what size it should be and I think the book is a nice size, it’s good to hold in your hand and yeah I think we finally got it down to a good size. That was why I thought that I


could write a book about my story about Jimmy Carter who I consider a very extraor- dinary human being. And that was what prompted me to write it, because I thought, “I can do better than this book.” And of course, there have been other books that have been written about Jimmy that are very factual and are good books written by people who are probably real authors, and I’m not, I was just a novice. But I think I did a pretty good job.


You could have fooled me, I think you are really a good writer. Well, I have written newspaper articles and I’ve written a lot of letters to editors. She laughs, “I don’t know if that counts or not. It was usually protesting something.”


My kind of girl! Let me ask you what do you think, as President, were his biggest accomplishments when he was in office? When he was in office of course, my greatest passion that I think are the fifty-two Ameri- cans that came home.(Iranian Hostage Cri- sis, freed after 444 days captivity, January 20, 1981) I think that would be a good legacy for him but I have had conversations with people who tell me that can never be because of the way that it was sort of , and the way it was presented to the public. But those fifty- two Americans that came home safe, that is what I feel was his greatest accomplishment. Other than that, it would be hard for me to say, but I believe history will probably say the Camp David Peace Accords, which have stayed intact, will probably go down… I really don’t know… Panama, the country of Panama has flourished, democracy has flourished in that part of the world. You know, solar pan- els, he put solar panels on the White House and Georgia Power, all the other power com- panies so, Michael, it’s very difficult for me to say which one would be the one that would stand out. I would like for the 52 Americans who came home safe but I really don’t know


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