Jimmy Carter's background

This episode contains references to racially offensive character names.

One of the quietest and most effective of America's humorists is a young middle-aged man, Russell Baker, who was at one time a first-rate reporter on the New York Times. 

He quit reporting to brood on the human situation. That sentence, I suppose, implies that a reporter is too fenced in by facts and what newspaper men called 'hard news' to spend much time thinking or meditating, which is a kind of 'floating' thought. 

Well, I didn't intend any slap at the New York Times. On the contrary, the New York Times is one of the few leading newspapers left whose reporters are reporters and not leader writers in disguise or ambitious novelists trying out their imagination on the facts that come to hand. More and more it seems to me, and most notably in England, you can see the political leanings of a given paper without having to turn to the editorial page and this is becoming more and more true of conservative papers, liberal papers, leftist papers. It encourages people to do what I believe they shouldn't be encouraged to do, which is to buy the paper that gives you the facts that you want to hear or a view of the facts that you feel must be so. I think it's a great pity. 

The difference between this practice and that of the New York Times is strikingly reflected when English friends of mine arrive in New York. To a man, they complain that the New York Times is dull and grey on its news pages. Well, even in its own country the Times is known as 'the good, grey Times.' What they mean is that the reporting isn't what they call 'lively.' The Times requires its reporters to see or hear what happened, to check with the people involved – whether or not they share the reporter's political bias – and to put it all down as accurately and baldly as possible. 

It seems to me to be one of the greatest compliments – perhaps THE greatest – that you can pay a reporter and that's to say that you have no idea which way he'd be likely to vote. But of course it makes for humdrum reading, unless the facts themselves have been hidden and happen, also, to be hair-raising, which was certainly true of the facts about Watergate dug up by the two, grey, impassive grave-diggers, Woodward and Bernstein, employed by the Washington Post. But, I'm afraid their success in exposing a flagrantly dishonest president unfortunately encouraged reporters everywhere to lust after a similar fame by digging out not all the facts, but all the scandalous facts in the hope, no doubt, of getting a movie contract and so graduating, once for all, out of the reporting business. 

Well, Russell Baker quit reporting for quite other reasons. He was an alert and excellent reporter but he had a talent for meditation and for whimsy and irony which got in the way of the grey, bald facts. So he became a columnist and he's now one of the most prized of the New York Times's stable. And this week was a good time for him to stretch himself because there's just now an absence, or rather a calculated pause, in hard, political news. The conventions are over, the candidates have been picked, but the presidential campaign, it's always agreed, will not fire its first guns until Labor Day, a national holiday and the official end of summer. 

Well, in this brief – or you could say briefing – period, the staff of the two campaigners are like Eisenhower's staff before D-Day. They're poring over battle plans, equipping the troops, bringing up the landing barges and the rations of gas masks and peanut butter. But on Monday September 6 – BOOM! 

In the meantime, the newspapers are also mobilising their war correspondents. So many reporters to Ford, some detailed from now to November 2 to Senator Dole, Ford's hopeful vice president, similarly another body to cover Senator Mondale, Jimmy Carter's VP, but the main body to stay with Carter till the election doth them part or sends them on to the White House. Understandably, there's a larger body gone off with Carter than with Ford because we all know old Gerry Ford, or think we do, and we know that he's hardworking and decent and pedestrian. We don't know who or what Jimmy Carter is, in spite of reams of profiles and character studies and a spate of funny cartoons. The cartoonists have pinned him down before anybody because his Southern origins tempted them beyond resistance to show him as a corn-bred Georgia cracker. 

The best of these cartoons came out several weeks ago and I'm afraid I have to weaken the punch of the joke by reminding some people that the chic-est shoes, worn by Madison Avenue advertising men and such, tend to be made by the Italian house of Gucci. Well, the cartoon showed in parody one of the immortal scenes of American literature – Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim, on their raft, hailing a passing steamboat chugging power and smoke. Huck, of course, is Jimmy Carter. Nigger Jim is his vice-presidential mate, Senator 'Fritz' Mondale. Carter is waving up to the steamboat and saying, 'Hi y'all! I'm Huckleberry Carter and this is my man Fritz!' And, out of the corner of his mouth, he's hissing to Mondale, 'Shuffle a little, Fritz!' To which Mondale is hissing back, 'I can't! I've scuffed my Guccis!' 

Well, this of course is meant to point up the incongruity of having a Southern hillbilly for president and an urbane senator as his running mate. It's too easy to be true. Whatever else he is, Carter is not a Georgia cracker or a hillbilly or anything so naive. Homespun, he may have been but then, in their several ways, so were Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson and Lloyd George. And Herbert Asquith, for that matter. What they became was something quite different. All of them highly intelligent, they turned into cool and sophisticated politicians. 

The suspicion that there is a great deal more in Jimmy Carter than meets the eye of the cartoonists is what has sent that army of correspondents down to encamp close to Plains, Georgia – Carter's home town – a place of 540 population, no motel, one petrol pump, a grocery store and several healthy farms. And the fact that Carter has cultivated a large and prosperous farm would be simply stated and left at that, if his principal crop were not in peanuts – what in England used to be called monkey nuts – and for some reason, known possibly only to Morecombe and Wise, peanuts are a comic commodity. It's going to take time to shake the reporters' out of their joyous preconception that Jimmy Carter is a latter-day Huckleberry Finn. 

Time, the magazine, published a facetious, lexicon of Southern words and pronunciations we're all going to have to learn if Carter becomes president. The truth is that Carter's speech is a very modified form of Southern American English, much less Southern than that of Lyndon Johnson, and I haven't heard of anybody American, English, Scottish or Australian who has the slightest trouble in following him. But newsmen are quicker than anybody in pinning a stereotype on a human being suddenly famous. They have to be because they have to write about him, while everybody, themselves included, is wondering what he's all about. 

For the time being and until he starts to declare himself on the issues, these people are busy boning up on what their editors require, namely background pieces. In Carter's case this means probing into his life and family history and coming up with little shining nuggets of homely anecdotage. It's a depressing process and sometimes an unfair one. Carter, for instance, has a nephew who's been in trouble with the law and people wonder if this will affect the outcome of the election. Well, somewhere along the family tree we all have weak branches but few of us stop to say, 'I wonder what the background stories about me would read like if I were suddenly a presidential candidate.' 

And this is what started Russell Baker off on his latest reverie and, for all its fun, it packs a moral, at least a cautionary, tale for all of us. 

The reporters, Mr Baker notes, have gone off in battalion strength to Plains, Georgia, to search for the roots of Jimmy Carter. And they made Mr Baker realise why he'd always shrunk from running for president. He came to reflect on what the press might do to him 'if they ever descended in force to do its sociological study of my roots'. He fears it would take these ferrets no more than a day or two to unearth the fact that 'as a toddler, one of my most memorable achievements was the discovery that my Uncle Sims hid his whisky in a jar behind the barrel of whitewash behind my grandmother's house or that my grandmother, on being shown the evidence by me, threw the whisky on the woodpile and gave Uncle Sims such a lecture that he never touched the stuff again for several days.' 

Well it seems that Mr Baker's Uncle Sims is long gone and, as he says, 'beyond public humiliation, but I cherish his memory too closely to want to see the story laid out in Newsweek under an old snapshot of him.' Apparently this rustic episode happened during prohibition when it was a criminal act to manufacture or even possess liquor, whether it was the genuine stuff smuggled into the United States or home-brewed moonshine. Mr Baker says Uncle Sims, whose only surviving snapshots show him with several days' growth of whiskers, would have inevitably emerged from publicity as a bum, which he was not. 'Every male at the crossroads', Baker says, 'shared his taste for moonshine while every female spent a good deal of time emptying jars on woodpiles.' 

Mr Baker also had a friend, the eleventh child of a mountain family, therefore called simply 'Eleven'. Mr Baker doesn't know what became of him but he says, 'I don't want to be sitting before the television some night surrounded by secret service men when suddenly a commentator appears interviewing a man named Eleven about my early deficiencies. I'd rather not be president.' And so say I! And so, I hope, say you. 

Childhood has much more to offer than quaint or disreputable incidents. What went on in the mind of young Jimmy Carter is everything, and that no reporter will ever dig out. As Mr Baker puts it at the end, 'The reporters are fiercely capable fellows when it comes to finding the Uncle Sims of America but they are not geared for the more important things, like detecting the way a June morning smelled in 1934 or what the wind sounded like in the chimney that December.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.