Jonathan Alter's Blog: Promotion Amid a Plague

While I was working on "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life," I was also co-directing and co-producing an HBO documentary, "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists," about the lives of the legendary NYC columnist, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill. On Tuesday, our film won the Emmy for Best Historical Documentary.
As I prepared my little speech (delivered virtually, of course), I started thinking what the two Jimmys I've devoted the last five years to studying may have had in common.
At first glance, nothing. Jimmy Breslin was a loud, swashbuckling newspaperman from Queens--Jimmy Carter a soft-spoken peanut farmer from Georgia. Breslin never much liked Carter, and ripped him often in his column.
But each was an enormously complicated man and, in his own way, passionately committed to truth-telling. Carter, in office and out, often spoke truth to power, as Breslin and Hamill did so well. They would have loved Carter's Law Day speech at the Univ. of Georgia Law School in 1974. That's where Carter, quoting Bob Dylan lyrics in a tough, extemporaneous speech, ripped into the Georgia criminal justice system. The gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson happened to be there. He had been bored by Teddy Kennedy and other speakers and kept going to his car for Wild Turkey. But when Carter started, he went to his car for his tape recorder. He became a strong supporter of Carter in his Rolling Stone pieces and in my book you'll learn how Thompson helped make
Carter president.
The two Jimmys were also both devoted family men--in businesses (journalism and politics) where that's fairly rare, or was in the old days.

Like so many others, I'm devastated by the news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death and terrified about what comes next. While its impact on my book was not the first, second, third or fourth thing to come to mind, I have to admit that it was the fifth or sixth thing I thought about last night.
Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the US Court of Appeals (the famous "DC Circuit," just below the Supreme Court) in 1980. I have a picture of them shaking hands in my book and the story of how, thanks to Carter, she went from law professor to federal judge.
A taste: Carter wrote in his diary on the night of her appointment that his choice "was a matter of some controversy." Indeed it was--and it wouldn't have happened if Sarah Weddington, a Carter aide who had earlier argued Roe. v. Wade, hadn't prematurely leaked the choice, then confessed to Carter, who didn't mind.
Among his many other unsung accomplishments, Carter moved the federal government from tokenism to diversity. He appointed five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined. As Ginsburg put it after Bill Clinton named her to the Supreme Court, Jimmy Carter "literally changed the complexion of the federal judiciary."
She later noted: "People often ask me, 'Well, did you always want to be a judge?' My answer is that it just wasn't in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president and was determined to draw on the talent of all of the people, not just some of them."