2024-12-30
35 分钟This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
Following the death of former US President Jimmy Carter, here's an edition of the BBC podcast AmericaSt with Justin Webb.
We just had the news that Jimmy Carter has died.
He was 100 years old.
He was the 39th president of the United States.
He was an extraordinary figure in so many ways, partly because of the times in which he president back in the 1970s, but partly also because of the extraordinary post presidential career that he had, both a long career and also a career in which he achieved a huge amount.
I've been talking to Jonathan Alton, who wrote the biography on the man.
It's called his very best Jimmy Carter A Life.
Here's our conversation.
Jonathan, hello.
Hello, Justin.
Let's start right back at the beginning and actually not necessarily with the man himself, but with the place.
He came from, Georgia, and it was a long time ago when he was born there.
Tell us about the Georgia that he was born into.
Well, Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, which is where he lived until the end of his days.
And Plains, Plains, Georgia is in Sumter county, southwest Georgia.
And to this day, visiting down there is like going to a different country.
And at the time of his birth in 1924, it was like being in a different century.
So not only was it ruled by rigid Jim Crow segregation, but Carter, whose family was one of the most prosperous in the whole area, had no running water, no mechanized farm equipment, no electricity until he was 11 years old when he got a rudimentary plumbing system that his father put in where they were able to take a shower through a bucket with holes punched in it.