Award-Winning Journalist Jonathan Alter on Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Julius Caesar, and America's Greatest Presidents

[00:00:00] Welcome to Plot Twist Radio, the show where creativity, storytelling, and the unpredictable path of the creative life all collide. I'm your host, Erin Egnatz Hi Jonathan, welcome to Plot Twist Radio Glad to be here, Erin It's great to have you. Before we get going, can you introduce yourself to the audience? My name is Jonathan Alter. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm 68 years old.

[00:00:29] I'm from Chicago originally. I grew up on the north side of the city in a very political family. My mother was the first woman ever elected to public office in Cook County, the county that Chicago is in. And my father, both of them are gone, was a very civically active businessman and World War II aviator hero who would be 24.

[00:00:58] And shot down in World War II. And so I grew up in a very highly charged household, I guess you could say. Give you a quick example. When I was eight years old, Martin Luther King came to our house and I got a chance to get his autograph on my third grade state, you know, lined paper that you'd write a report on. And then I started working in political campaigns, but also doing my own little newspaper.

[00:01:25] So I got into journalism when I was, you know, probably nine years old and started reporting on what was going on in the neighborhood. And stayed very interested in politics, journalism and history, especially but not exclusively American history to this day. And I, um, after college, I worked at a wonderful little magazine called the Washington Monthly.

[00:01:51] And then I spent 28 years as a senior editor and columnist at the old Newsweek when it was a major publication in American life. And for the last 30 years, since 1996, just ending, I was a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. And, um, I'm writing my seventh book right now. Wow. So you've been busy.

[00:02:20] I've also done documentaries and entertainment, an entertainment show and a few other things just to keep life interesting. Yeah. And it sounds like it was, it's been a very interesting life for you at the Martin Luther King thing. That just had to be incredible, especially for such a young man that had to be quite amazing for you. Yeah. You know, that's just sort of like what my parents were like. So the same year, my mother took us to see the Beatles when they were at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

[00:02:51] And I found as I got older that people were more, even more impressed with my seeing the Beatles than they were. That I also, when I was eight years old, saw MLK. But they both were, you know, pretty influential experiences. And I, uh, I got, um, very interested in, um, kind of understanding the external world. Maybe wasn't quite as good at, at the internal world.

[00:03:19] Uh, uh, uh, and you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not the most introspective person in the world, but I, I really, um, used, uh, the curiosity that I got from my parents. I was always bugging them with questions. And that sort of led me into journalism. And as far as history and writing books, I, when I was about 10 years old, I started, uh, writing a book. My father, not long before that, called me the only American historian who didn't yet know how to read.

[00:03:48] But I, I nonetheless wanted to try to write a history of the United States. I got about four pages into it. And that embarrassed me until many years later when I was, um, doing research on Franklin Roosevelt for my, my first book, uh, which is called The Defining Moment. It's about Roosevelt and his famous first hundred days. And I was spending a lot of time at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. And I found, uh, that he had also tried to write a history of the United States.

[00:04:16] And he got maybe like 10 pages into it. And he was an adult. So I didn't feel as bad about having given up that project. But I, uh, you know, at one point when I was pretty young, I returned a book advance. I got, it wasn't until I was in my mid forties that I started writing books. That's cool. And, you know, a lot of authors that I talked to, it seems like right around 40 or so, that's when people really start with the books. And I think it's more of like a lived experience thing more than anything.

[00:04:45] But I, I just keep noticing that number. Like myself, I, um, became a published author last year at 39. So, yeah. Thank you. What is your book about? Mine are all fantasy because I'm also a history professor. So I do all that kind of writing, you know, during the business hours. So I'd like to escape to fantasy. Oh, wow. That's interesting. So, and what history do you specialize in? I, I like to specialize in the American Civil War.

[00:05:11] I'm a big collector of the American Civil War, but I am teaching right now Greek and Roman civilizations. Oh, okay. It's interesting, but it's, you know, not American history. As a fellow American history historian, you understand, I'm sure. Well, I tell you, this is kind of kismet because, you know, I was a Lincoln nut when I was a kid. I was growing up in Chicago. And in my most recent book, which is about the Trump felony trial, I had a seat in the courtroom.

[00:05:39] There's a picture of me at about age four holding the hand of a mannequin of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. I memorized the presidents when I was, when I was four. And, and I could, you know, always work back from Lincoln, the 16th president. So I wasn't as obsessed with the war, but I was very, very taken with the figure of Lincoln.

[00:06:02] But after doing six books that were either, you know, that were about Franklin Roosevelt, two about Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump, a collection of my columns, I'm now writing a biography of Julius Caesar. So I'm into your, your Bailiwick. And so I'm very much living in the first century BC, which is a fun place to have my head right now. Oh, I can imagine. It was a wild ride back in those days.

[00:06:32] Yes, it was. It was very, very wild. So right before you were, right before we started talking today, I was, I was writing about Caesar just after he crossed the Rubicon and what was, you know, as far as we could tell what sorts of things he was thinking about in that period in, in 49 BCE. Very cool. That, I look forward to that one because I, the more I teach it, the more,

[00:06:58] more ingrained into it I get. And, you know, I, I don't think we have enough focusing on that time period because, you know, it's harder for us to obviously explore. But I look forward to that when it comes out. So I'll be watching for that. Yeah, it should be out in about a year. And I've got a lot about American politics if you, just to do something a little bit different. So, like, I've got a section that's called Caesar's New Deal.

[00:07:24] And, you know, there are various American political figures that come into it, you know, and, and I have a number of different people who've tackled Caesar, not just Shakespeare, but George Bernard Shaw. And, you know, Napoleon wrote a book about Caesar and Machiavelli. And, and, and then Theodore White, who was a great political writer and a model of mine.

[00:07:52] He wrote a play called Crossing the Rubicon or Caesar at the Rubicon. And Anthony Trollope, I use him a lot. So I'm trying to bring in different people to make it what in, you know, in academia you call reaction studies. So it's not just about Caesar. It's about these, these other people and the way they interpreted Caesar. And then also some people that he resembles in certain ways. That sounds really cool. It's right up my alley for sure.

[00:08:22] As are your other books about the presidents, as you've written extensively about the American presidents, has your view of their leadership changed as you dove into them? Especially my view of Jimmy Carter. You know, my presence that I wrote about before were Franklin Roosevelt and my appreciation of his greatness deepened as I worked on that book.

[00:08:50] And then I wrote two about Obama. One was about his first year as president. It was a very inside account of what it was like to be in the White House in 2009. And then I did one about Obama and his enemies. The first one is called The Promise. The second one is called The Center Holds. And I think that my already high regard for Obama was basically confirmed by my work on those books.

[00:09:16] But neither those nor my books on Roosevelt and Carter are puff jobs. You know, there's plenty of criticism. And so these are all warts and all books. But basically very impressed by all three. And in Carter's case, it was something that I started to suspect after I spent an evening with him in 2015 when he was 90.

[00:09:40] And I started to suspect that there was more to this guy than, you know, mediocre president, great former president, which if you ask anybody on the street, that's what they would say. And I kind of learned that he was in many ways an underrated president and a slightly overrated former president. Former presidents don't really have any power. There's less than they can get that they can get done, even though he has, you know, cured, essentially cured, eradicated guinea worm disease, close to eradicating it.

[00:10:08] And he has some other real accomplishments, even though he didn't start Habitat for Humanity or run it. He's helped advance that. And the Carter Center has done a lot of good. But as president, he was achieving big things that were completely ignored. And so I was I wrote the first major biography of Jimmy Carter, and I saw it as part of my goal to try to change that impression. And I ended up concluding that he was a political failure.

[00:10:38] You know, he got shellacked by Ronald Reagan. But he was a substantive, in many ways, visionary success. If you actually looked at the policy outcomes with the benefit of hindsight. And, you know, I'm happy to talk about all that. But, you know, that that was I think that was my most, I think, sort of profound experience of the nine American presidents I've interviewed either before, during or after their presidency.

[00:11:08] None of the others. You know, can I really contribute to changing the public impression of and but I and another guy who wrote a book after me? And one of Carter's senior aides are three books together. Around five years ago, they kind of kicked off a reassessment of Jimmy Carter. And I'm glad that we we did that. He he deserved that.

[00:11:35] And I'm glad that he lived long enough to see it and appreciate it. Yes, absolutely. Because I know, you know, growing up, you would always hear who's the worst president? Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter. But then you turn on the TV and he's helping build a house with Habitat Humanity, like you said. So I was like, there's got to be a little bit more to it. There's a lot, a lot more to it. And, you know, he got slimed a lot, not just by Republicans. A lot of Democrats slimed him. And Ted Kennedy ran against him in 1980 in the primaries. And so he had a rough go.

[00:12:05] He had a lot of bad luck. He had good luck when he was running because he came out of nowhere. Peanut Farmer to become president. But he had bad luck after the second year in office and really bad luck when he, the year he ran for reelection in 1980. Like they tried to rescue the hostages and helicopters, you know, broke down in the desert. And a lot of bad things happened to him that were kind of beyond his control.

[00:12:30] He made some stakes and he wasn't nearly as good a communicator as Reagan, but he signed 15 major pieces of environmental legislation. Just to give you, you know, one example and his legislative record and his record on foreign policy with the exception of his failure to get the hostages back, although they did all come back in one piece, which is nothing to sneeze at.

[00:12:55] But in other areas, China, Panama Canal treaties, human rights and, you know, a series of other obviously the Camp David Accords, which are the most enduring peace treaty since World War II. These are big accomplishments that most Americans don't know anything about. Yes, absolutely. And it's really important. And I'm so glad that you were able to highlight that because I do think that he he got a bad rev. I absolutely do.

[00:13:23] You know, but, you know, as a historian looking into this stuff, I look into it deeper than your average American's going to. So it's nice that there's a book out there that people can reference that may not look into all of those things. It's an issue. Yeah. That's what I try to do. It's, you know, it's it's not a one night read. It's a little bit long, but it's not as long as, you know, Robert Caro.

[00:13:45] And I try to move the story along, try to keep it, you know, as snappy as I can. So we know your views on Jimmy Carter, which I agree with. What do you think future historians will think about the presidents of the 21st century? So it's it's a little bit hard to say for sure, because, you know, a lot of times assessments

[00:14:13] change, but so far in the 21st century, we've had two of the five worst presidents in all of American history. I don't know exactly how low George W. Bush will go, but pretty low, you know, that on

[00:14:42] the end, I think he'll probably be, you know, a little bit above like, you know, Andrew Johnson and Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan. He'll he'll come in a little bit higher than them, but maybe fifth worst. And I think without question, and this I'm very confident of Donald Trump will be seen as easily the worst president in American history. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will not be in the top rank.

[00:15:09] They'll be kind of in the middle of the pack and no, you know, I mean, Obamacare was was a big deal. And, you know, Biden got a certain amount of legislation through, but they'll be sort of bunched around where Jimmy Carter is, you know, sort of above the middle, but not not in the top. So. And Obama, you know, maybe he will maybe could break the top 10 because of his symbolic

[00:15:38] importance as the first black president. And, you know, he had a number of of other accomplishments beyond the Affordable Care Act. Biden, I think, will always be faulted for not recognizing that the idea of someone serving as president when they're 86 years old, which is how old he would have been at the end of his second term if he'd been reelected. That it was just preposterous and that it was selfish of him to put himself forward as a

[00:16:07] candidate for reelection when he had strongly suggested to voters that he was a transitional president and would not be a two term president. He didn't promise that he would not be a two term president, but he indicated he would not run for reelection. And I blame the Democratic Party for enabling him. They should have staged an intervention. I actually wrote up what an intervention would have looked like, you know, around, you know, 20, 22, 23, just to say, you know, don't do this. Get everybody in there.

[00:16:36] Get, you know, Stephen Breyer in there. You know, I left the court. We have to turn it over to younger leadership. And that didn't happen. And he wouldn't have listened anyway because he had wanted to be president since he was a little boy and he didn't want to give it up. And I can relate to that. I mean, my mother thought I was going to be the first Jewish president. You know, that's what she prepped me for. So I can relate to his ambition and not wanting to give it up. But it was ultimately bottom line selfish on his part.

[00:17:04] And Trump, it just it's hard to know where to begin. But, you know, he's not he's not only worse than, you know, Andrew Johnson or Warren Harding or, you know, James Buchanan. He's a lot worse than the runner up for worst president. And we could, you know, we could talk for five hours about why that's the case. I'm sure there will be plenty of books about him in coming years. I would hope at least. No, but I mean, I think it's going to be people will try.

[00:17:34] But I think it's going to be really hard to rehabilitate his reputation unless if he actually were to manage to reverse this, you know, war that is not going well and was able to dislodge the mullahs from power in Iran. Then you would find some people who would write, you know, say, well, all that tweeting, that was just noise. He got this done, you know, but the odds of that happening are not very good.

[00:18:03] No, it doesn't seem like it. So getting back to your books, when you are thinking of a new concept, what makes someone worthy of an entire book as far as historical figures go? Well, I'll tell you a little, you know, publishing story.

[00:18:22] So some of it is what your publisher wants to do because, I mean, it depends a little bit what your relationship with a publisher is like and how much money they're investing in it. So when they're investing a fair amount in it, your options are much more limited.

[00:18:40] So I when I signed my contract now 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago for the Jimmy Carter book, it was a two book contract with a second book to be determined. And the first one was on Carter. And then I gave them various things I want to write about and they they didn't accept any of them. And then one day my wife sent me out to get some takeout. I said, what do you want?

[00:19:07] And she said, Caesar salad, you know, something like that. So I come back to Caesar salads and I had just told my publisher that I was open to his suggestions, you know, about what he might want to see. So he suggested, you know, why don't you write a quick biography of Bobby Kennedy Jr., who I had written about, I knew in college. And I'd sent him back like a week or so before the Caesar salad.

[00:19:36] I'd sent him back something that's a hard pass, you know, not not interested. And so I bring the Caesar salads back and give my wife hers. I sit down and I don't even take it out of the plastic tray. That's how hungry I was. I open my Caesar salad plastic tray and then I open my laptop and I get a message from Jonathan Karp until recently, the president of Simon & Schuster. He said, OK, you don't want to do Bobby Kennedy. I understand it.

[00:20:05] How about a political biography of Julius Caesar? I looked down at my Caesar salad and I said, I think I know what I'm going to be doing for the next four years of my life. And I went, I typed back, you know, yep, we're good. We're good. It's fine. So sometimes it's really hard as it had been for maybe a year before that. I had been having a lot of trouble settling on a topic and other times it kind of comes together.

[00:20:32] And so I thought there was some serendipity in that and wanted to go with that. But it can be very, very tough. I'm sure that you know this as a historian, you know, finding what in football they call that hole in the line of scrimmage. Like what's something that nobody else has really done quite the same way. And I drilled a number of dry holes to make some metaphor.

[00:20:54] I mean, you know, I spent time in libraries like doing, you know, in one case, like spent a whole week, you know, at the library at Northwestern. Because I was thinking about writing a book about the Leopold Loeb murder case, you know, which was called The Crime of the Century.

[00:21:13] And then, you know, I kind of realized partway through it that another guy had written a book not that many years ago and that there was nothing I was going to be able to say that advanced the story. So even though Caesar has been written about a lot, I have a different way in and I'm focusing on different things than other classicists or other historians have. I'm not a classicist. I'm a non-expert. And, you know, with Roosevelt, I was worried about saying something new.

[00:21:43] And I called up a famous historian and Roosevelt scholar named James McGregor Burns taught at Williams College. And, you know, I was just saying, I'm kind of concerned that I won't find anything new. And he said, you'll find something new. Don't worry about it. And he was right. I was able to find new things. And then with the Obama books and the Carter book, I was interviewing more than 250 people for each of those books.

[00:22:12] For three books, my next three books, most of the Roosevelt people were dead. So I had only talked to, you know, three or four who remembered him. And obviously, you know, my Caesar book, everybody's been dead for a couple thousand years. But my two Obama books and my Carter book, they had a tremendous amount of reporting in them. And so I was using my journalistic training. And I knew that I would find a lot of new stuff.

[00:22:42] And I did. I mean, there were many things in the Obama books that had never been published before. And at least some things like Jimmy Carter's love letters to Rosalind Carter, which she gave me, which had never been published before my Carter book. So, you know, you want to bring something new to it if you can.

[00:23:04] And so, you know, that's that's kind of where, you know, I come out when I'm looking for a new topic. Very cool. I love that. I love the Caesar salad story. That's a great little anecdote put in there. That was like a clear sign for sure. That's what we always look for in the publishing industry. At least when I'm writing my books, I'm always looking for a sign when I get stuck. And that seems like the perfect sign there. So one last question for you. You've spent your career asking questions of other people.

[00:23:34] What's a question nobody ever asked you that you wish they would? Wow. Maybe maybe something about my family, you know, and because you can't do these things alone. You know, if you don't have a lot of backing from friends and from family. So like on my Trump book that I just did, my sister turned out to be this great editor. Like she could have been a book editor and she was saving me from doing something stupid.

[00:24:01] And on the Carter book, my daughter and son-in-law did as well. And my wife on the on the Camp David chapter. She was very tough, but she was right. You know, and so it's not essential to have your family behind you, but it really helps a lot. Yes, I agree. I agree 100% there. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been a pleasure. Yeah, it's great talking to you. You as well.