Jimmy Carter: This Is My Place

Alone in Plains with Rosalynn, his word processor and his woodshop

"People keep telling me there's no way an ex-President can go back and live in Plains, Georgia. They don't understand Jimmy Carter."

—Charles Kirbo, Carter's lawyer and closest friend, in January 1981

Even at noon, the small brick ranch house was strangely quiet and dimly lit. Out of the silence, a soft voice offered a greeting. Jimmy Carter looked unchanged from the White House days, although perhaps a bit less imposing in heavy blue jeans, black boots and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. He had been working on his memoirs since before dawn, he said. As he sat in an easy chair, smiling warmly, he spoke with that familiar instructive manner, still wary and somehow aloof, his gentle mien always at odds with the ambition and defiance that surely cooked inside him. He had not mellowed much.

Ever since his defeat, just as Kirbo had predicted, Carter has resumed his rustic and provincial life in Plains, the tiny (pop. 651) crossroads town where his extraordinary journey to power had begun. Absorbed by his book, he has deliberately closed himself off from the rest of the world. In political terms, he has vanished so completely that he might almost never have existed. Shunned by his fellow Democrats, ignored by his successor, Carter has virtually become a nonperson, a President who never was.

Those who know him are not all that surprised. Carter was always something of a hermit, even in the turbulence of the White House. He never invited anyone over unless he just had to. Even his Cabinet officers had to force social engagements upon him. He made few friends. This remoteness, this reluctance to cultivate personal relationships or to hear differing views, stunted his presidency.

That self-imposed isolation continues in Plains. After repeated refusals, local acquaintances stopped sending invitations. Carter seldom leaves the house except to go to church on Sunday, to jog or to attend the funerals of old friends. His daughter Amy, now 14, tries to get him to catch a movie in nearby Americus, but he is rarely inclined to do so. Every six weeks Carter goes to town to get a trim from Norinne Lowell at the local barbershop. He never goes out to buy his clothes, but orders them by mail from a designer friend in Bowdon, Ga. Even his White House secretary for four years, Susan Clough, who returned to Plains to work for Carter, conversed with him only a couple of times in the nine months she was there.

For the past 15 months Carter's life has centered on the book about his years in office, which he plans to call Keeping Faith. Each morning he wakes at 5, pours himself a glass of grapefruit juice and heads for his study. There, sitting in front of the keyboard of a white word processor, the ex-President works about eight hours a day. As the bright green letters appear on the screen, he speaks the words out loud. Around 7, he realizes that breakfast is near when he hears Amy practicing her violin down the hall.