America
The Un-Celebrity President C
J
Jimmy Carter shuns riches, lives modestly in his Georgia hometown. BY KEVIN SULLIVAN AND MARY JORDAN
immy carter finishes his Saturday night dinner, salm- on and broccoli casserole on a paper plate, flashes his
famous toothy grin and calls play- fully to his wife of 72 years, Rosalynn: “C’mon, kid.” She laughs and takes his hand,
and they walk carefully through a neighbor’s kitchen filled with 1976 campaign buttons, photos of world leaders and a couple of unopened cans of Billy Beer, then out the back door, where three Secret Service agents wait. They do this just about every
weekend in this tiny town where they were born — he 94 years ago, she 91. Dinner at their friend Jill Stuckey’s house, with plastic Solo cups of ice water and one glass each of bargain-
24 NEWSMAX | JANUARY 2019
brand chardonnay, then the half- mile walk home to the ranch house they built in 1961. The 39th president of the United
States lives modestly, a sharp con- trast to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of another kind: wealth. Even those who didn’t start out
rich, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have made tens of millions of dollars on the private-sec- tor opportunities that flow so easily to ex-presidents. When Carter left the White House
after one tumultuous term, trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 elec- tion, he returned to Plains, a speck of peanut and cotton farmland that to this day has a nearly 40 percent poverty rate. The Democratic former presi-
dent decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”
arter was 56 when he returned to Plains from Washington. He says
his peanut business, held in a blind trust during his presidency, was $1 mil- lion in debt, and he was forced to sell. “We thought we were going to lose everything,” says Rosalynn, sitting beside him. Carter decided that his income
would come from writing, and he has written 33 books about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, wood- working, even a children’s book writ- ten with his daughter, Amy Carter, called The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer. With book income and the $210,700
annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents. Carter has been an ex-president for
37 years, longer than anyone else in history. He is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92
