Jimmy Carter: This Is My Place

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Carter was eager to show his visitor the much prized white machine. "This is my place," he said, pointing toward the corner of the wood-paneled study, where he spends hours turning back and forth between the word processor and a desk that once belonged to his father. He refers to one of the remarkable diaries he kept so doggedly through his four years. Each evening, no matter how tired he was, he dictated his feelings—often blunt and troubled—into a tape recorder. Six thousand pages of transcripts, a historian's treasure, now fill dozens of black books on shelves that surround his desk.

He opened one of the black diaries and at random picked out a few paragraphs. There was the description of a prominent Senator who had visited the Oval Office with a proposal that day. "Such a jerk," the President had noted. Reading through the diaries over these past months has given him new perspectives on his presidency. He now believes, for example, that he should have picked up earlier on the problems that the Shah of Iran was having at home. Flipping through the diary pages, he turned to a day in the fall of 1977 when he had stood with the Shah on the White House lawn while tear gas used to disperse protesters near by drifted over them. As the diary reported, Carter then took the Shah into his private study and chided him about the need for more civil rights at home. "He was embarrassed," read the presidential notes about the reprimand.

Carter suddenly interrupted himself and pointed across the study to a large table, a lazy susan 5 ft. in diameter. He had designed and built the table, he said proudly, of longleaf pine, virgin timber cut 150 years ago for the home of Rosalynn's great-grandfather. Woodworking has become a Carter obsession. When he wants relief from his writing, he said, he moves to his nearby woodshop, a converted garage where he spends long periods alone chiseling out bowls and building benches and chairs, all his own designs. During the summer, he recalled, he often worked for hours with the big doors open, clouds of gnats hovering around his face and mouth, while a Secret Service agent took refuge from the heat and the bugs in one of the little wooden guard booths.

In the woodshop, the ex-President showed off his work with his own restrained style of joy. One piece was a coffee table that Carter had made out of some walnut he had got by trading a book with a neighbor; another was a bedside table made from a purplish slab of wood that came from the Congo. A huge hickory tree from the backyard had provided him with his own supply of local wood. He split the felled tree with a wedge, then used a heavy blade called a froe to cut them into the proper lengths for furniture. Pieces of white hickory sat in pails of water on the floor; Carter explained that the wood will not harden if it is kept moist. Long curls of hickory bark, which Carter uses for the seats of chairs, hung on string nailed to the ceiling.