| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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at Washington National Cathedral at 10 a.m. Eastern. | |
| Following the funeral, he'll be buried in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. | ||
| C-SPAN interviewed former President Jimmy Carter in 1999, discussing his 1976 campaign, his experiences in the White House, and the accomplishments of his administration. | ||
| President Carter, I saw a speech you gave four years ago in which you said that Harry Trumman was the best president of the 20th century. | ||
| Still believe that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I said he was my favorite. | |
| I think in many ways he was one of the best, if not the best. | ||
| In the first place, I don't think Harry Truman ever told a lie. | ||
| I think he told the truth to the American people all the time, whether it was good or bad news. | ||
| I think he was the first real pronounced champion of human rights, at least in my lifetime. | ||
| And he demonstrated it in very difficult ways by bringing a successful conclusion to the Second World War, when we could have been abusive and condemnatory and destroyed the society of Germany and Italy and Japan. | ||
| Instead, it was his background wisdom and judgment to let all of these countries survive the war, not with destruction, but with a new breadth of freedom and a commitment to democracy, which has persisted in all three countries. | ||
|
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I think he was quite generous, too. | |
| Obviously, the Marshall Plan, so-called, which was just announced by George Marshall, could have very well have been called the Truman Plan. | ||
| So he was generous to his cabinet officers. | ||
| I just have, you can see, a great admiration for him in many ways. | ||
| When you were president, had you thought a lot about what you wanted to be as a president, what the office should be, and have you changed your opinion on that since you looked, now you can look back on your four years? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, obviously I thought about that a lot. | |
| I began planning to run for president immediately after the Democratic Convention in 1972 when George McGovern was nominated. | ||
| And we began to assess every aspect of the campaign itself. | ||
|
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What news media we should contact, the detailed history and laws of each individual state where I would be contesting other candidates. | |
| My first presumption was that I would be run kind of in between George Wallace on my right and Ted Kennedy on my left. | ||
| I was disappointed when Kennedy withdrew from the race because my plans had been made accordingly and a lot of substitutes came in for him about nine or ten, as a matter of fact. | ||
| And then, of course, when I went around the country to campaign, which I did assiduously, the different questions that were asked to me concerning the Middle East, concerning China, concerning Panama, concerning the free enterprise system in our country, concerning environment, concerning education and welfare and so forth, made me mandatorily start getting my thoughts in order. | ||
| And so I would say that by the time I was inaugurated, I had a very clear picture of what I wanted to do as president. | ||
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And I have to say, not with too much ego, that we accomplished almost all of them. | |
| We had a very good and productive relationship with the Congress. | ||
| A vatting average that was at least equal to that of Lyndon Johnson, for instance, if you look at things statistically. | ||
| We had some very difficult issues to face, normalizing relations with China, breaking official ties with Taiwan, Mideast peace process. | ||
| The Panama Canal Treaties was the worst by far political issue I ever had to face in my life. | ||
| What to do about the young men who had gone to Canada during the Vietnam War. | ||
| There were a lot of things like that that I had to face, but I knew pretty well what I wanted to do. | ||
| Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft invaders? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I am. | |
| Why? | ||
| Well, it was a festering soar and involved tens of thousands of young men who had the choice. | ||
|
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In fact, I have three sons. | |
| My oldest son was in Georgia Tech, a very fine school. | ||
| He thought the draft procedures were very unfair in that anyone who could afford to go to college didn't have to go. | ||
| And the poor kids or the minority kids were the ones who went. | ||
| He thought that was unfair. | ||
| And there were a lot of other people who he didn't object to going to war and he was three years in Vietnam. | ||
|
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But I thought that it was time to get it over with. | |
| I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon. | ||
| So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left the site, I went just inside the door at the National Capitol and I signed the pardon for those young men. | ||
|
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And yes, I think it was the right thing to do. | |
| One of the first speeches I made was to the American Legion Convention. | ||
| And my father was a legionnaire. | ||
| I was a veteran, too. | ||
| And there were a few legionnaires in the front row that refused to stand up when I walked in as President of the United States. | ||
| I knew there would be some adverse reaction to what I did. | ||
| But yes, I think it was the right thing to do. | ||
| How much impact did the little village of Plains, Georgia, have on the entire campaign? | ||
| I know, you know, all the networks set up their trailers there and it became a stage. | ||
|
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I think it had a profound effect because, you know, I was genuinely not part of the Washington scene. | |
| And when I went around the country, I could see the extreme disillusionment that existed among the people of our country, not only about the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals and the revelations by the Congress that the CIA had actually committed crimes, including murder, and the fact that the people felt that they had been misled about the war and so forth. | ||
| So my basic approach was to project myself as an outsider who had experience as a governor, who had administered all the federal programs, you know, at the local and state level, who was at ease with the race issue. | ||
|
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I had strong support from Martin Luther King Sr. | |
| I had strong support from people like Andy Young. | ||
| So putting all those combinations together was a key to my ultimate success. | ||
| And I think that being from Plains proved vividly almost every day when the reporters were there and having that as a deadline, a byline, that I wasn't misleading anyone, that I was really an outsider. | ||
| And a lot of the things that I used for the campaign, my presence in the wheat fields and in the peanut fields, my pictures in my own woods or at my own barn, showed that I was really a farmer down to earth. | ||
|
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The Plains Baptist Church became a focal point of a lot of photography. | |
| So the things that I offered, I think, were attractive, which was proven by the final results. | ||
| The secret to my success, by secret, I mean secret from my opponents, and there were almost a dozen of them, very nice people, was that we had secret campaigns going on. | ||
| Everybody knew where I was. | ||
| But the same day I was campaigning, say, in Iowa, my wife would be in Florida. | ||
| My mother might be in Maine. | ||
| My oldest son, Jack, and his wife, might be in Pennsylvania. | ||
| My middle son might be in Wisconsin. | ||
| My youngest son might be in California. | ||
| And my mother's sister, Emily, would be in another state. | ||
| We had seven campaigns going on simultaneously. | ||
| We always went back to Plains on the weekend where we could report to each other. | ||
| This is what I heard in Maine. | ||
| This is what I heard in Wisconsin. | ||
| And I would make sure that they knew how to answer the basic questions. | ||
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unidentified
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What are you going to do about this or that? | |
| So we had a team that divided during each week, but got together on the weekends to share our experiences and to prepare for the following week. | ||
|
unidentified
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At the same time, once the general election started, of course, Fritz Mondale and I never campaigned together because we had learned then the advantage of being in two places at once, at least. | |
| And so the only time we ever made a common appearance was in Flint, Michigan the night before the final vote. | ||
| So I think we learned some things about politics that certainly paid rich dividends for us. | ||
| How much time do you spend in Plains Now? | ||
|
unidentified
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All I can. | |
| We've just gotten back from Mali in North Africa, and we have been on this trip to England, to Norway, to the Netherlands, to Switzerland, and to France. | ||
|
unidentified
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But we go to Plains whenever we possibly can. | |
| We try to be there on the weekends in particular. | ||
| Rosa and I have a very deep involvement in our local community, including our church. | ||
| I teach Sunday School Day when I'm home, and I just noticed that last Sunday, last year rather, I taught 37 times. | ||
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So that's two out of three Sundays we're home. | |
| But quite often we get home Friday night or Saturday morning and then leave again Monday. | ||
| You know, the memo that was written back on November the 4th, 1972, Ham Jordan, your chief of staff, and I know you had a lot to do with the memo, but there was one paragraph I wanted to ask you about. | ||
| And it has to do with the media, because it goes back to the planes and the image. | ||
| Mr. Jordan wrote to you, like it or not, there exists, in fact, an Eastern liberal news establishment which has tremendous influence in this country, all out of proportion to its actual audience. | ||
| The views of this small group of opinion makers and the papers they represent are noted and imitated by other columnists and newspapers throughout the country and the world. | ||
| I guess I wanted to ask you whether you think that's still true and what impact the media had on the image you had then and now. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think it's still true. | |
| I wouldn't want to identify them, although we did in preparing the data that Hamilton wrote down and shared with us. | ||
| But there were a few nationwide columnists, plus the regular reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, whose writings, without acknowledgement, made a great impact on other reporters, including television reporters. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so we made an inventory, in effect, or a list of all of those people who we considered to be opinion shapers. | |
| And this obviously included Face a Nation and Meet the Press interviews. | ||
| So we planned very carefully and in an escalating fashion how I would get to know these people. | ||
| Some of them were very eager to come down to Georgia and to meet with me and to meet with candidates who were running for president before the 1972 campaign. | ||
| And I would get to know them, even as a relatively unknown governor of a small state. | ||
| And so by the time we were ready to go public, really, which would have been in Iowa, the Caucasus, I knew a lot more about these reporters and their publishers than they thought I did. | ||
| It was not until Johnny Apple, surprisingly to us, New York Times, went out in the countryside in Iowa and talked to people, you know, teachers and policemen and I guess bartenders and others, and he sized up what we already knew about Iowa and wrote a headline in the New York Times. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did the other reporters ever dream that I might come in first in Iowa? | |
| They were looking at me as coming in fifth or sixth because they very seldom got out of Des Moines. | ||
| They would stay there, you know, and enjoy themselves and talk to each other. | ||
| But he actually went out and got opinions from people around the state and he projected that I was going to win, which I did. | ||
| This amazed a lot of people and it focused attention on me, which is very beneficial. | ||
| And then we went to New Hampshire. | ||
| I was not supposed to come in near the top in New Hampshire. | ||
| I came in first. | ||
| The big test for me early on was against George Wallace in Florida, who had done formidably well four years earlier, all over the country, not just in the South. | ||
|
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And he was solid in the northern parts of Florida. | |
| Scoop Jackson was a very favorite of the Jewish community, say in Miami. | ||
| But I came in first in Florida too. | ||
| And when I won those first three major contests against all kinds of opponents, then I think the other candidates began to say this is a guy we've got to stop. | ||
| But by then, it was almost too late for them. | ||
| 23, 24 years later, could anybody do what you do, did again? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I don't think so. | |
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
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Because nowadays the campaigning is done through television, which is enormously expensive, as you know. | |
| And in these days, the raising of $20 million is almost mandatory if you hope to be recognized even by the reporters as a substantive candidate. | ||
| If you can only raise $7 million or $10 million, even up to this point, a year before the election, then you're kind of written off as incompetent or inadequate or unpopular. | ||
| Well, we didn't use any so-called soft money then. | ||
| We campaigned in the primary and also in the general election on hard money, which has very strict limits. | ||
| It would be quite difficult now for anyone to do as we did and to campaign from schoolhouse to schoolhouse to courthouse and stand in line and hand out pamphlets and factory shifts early in the morning, meet with farmers, make speeches from the auctioneer's desk at Hog Sale Barns in Iowa. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's the way we ran our campaign. | |
| And if I had faced then a candidate with $20 million in the bank who was able to dominate television in New Hampshire or in Iowa or in Florida, I doubt seriously that I could have won in those states. | ||
| When you look back on your own presidency, I want to go through a bunch of things as quickly as possible just to get your take later. | ||
| You created the Department of Energy, you created the Health and Human Services, and then you spun off education. | ||
| Would you do that today again? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, because people forget it was not a creation of a Department of Energy. | |
| It was a bringing together of 30 different agencies into one agency. | ||
| That worked, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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That was manageable, yes. | |
| And I think it's impervious now to any major modifications. | ||
| It was very important then and still is. | ||
| It covered a gamut all the way from solar power to nuclear destructive power. | ||
| And it made it manageable. | ||
| And my background was in education. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was on the Sumter County School Board during the integration years and I was a chairman of the university committee in the Georgia Senate and I was a key player in different ways about education. | |
| And when I got to, well even before I got to Washington, I could see that education was basically submerged under health and welfare. | ||
| There was no cabinet post for education. | ||
| And most of what the federal government then did on education was just to resolve lawsuits between the federal government and states and so forth, which was to me very, I'd say, almost disgusting. | ||
| So I thought that it would be better to have education stand by itself, to play the crucial role of the federal government in offering some frosting on the cake that dealt primarily with kids who were untreated well, not treated well at the state and local level, which I think Lyndon Johnson had done so well, say, with Head Start. | ||
|
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But that way, I think the Education Department was very necessary. | |
| You deregulated the airlines. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, that was, you know, I think in looking back, that was one of the most remarkable things that we did during the four years that has not yet been recognized. | |
| I'm pleased that you have done it. | ||
| I was a businessman. | ||
| In fact, I was the outstanding young businessman of Georgia once. | ||
| That's my background. | ||
| And I deregulated, we deregulate, the airlines and the railroads and trucking. | ||
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unidentified
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We deregulated banks and banking. | |
| We deregulated communications, television, radio. | ||
| We deregulated oil and gas. | ||
| So in effect, we brought freedom to almost every aspect of the economic structure of America that never had been known before. | ||
| And the consequences of that are now accepted as routine, but they were revolutionary in character. | ||
| Why do you think people haven't paid much attention to that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Now people take for granted that airlines have to compete with each other and that truckers have to compete with each other and that banks can merge or that banks can offer savings and loan or even insurance capabilities or that the price of oil and gas is not ordained from Washington but has to find its own level in a competitive free enterprise system. | |
| Now people take that for granted. | ||
| But before I became president, none of the things that I've just said were true. | ||
| As you know, it's hard to change anything in Washington. | ||
| Eventually the Interstate Commerce Commission was eliminated, the CAB was eliminated, the Civil Air and Oxford. | ||
| How did you do it? | ||
| What device did you use to do it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I had some good advisors, first of all, who knew the inner workings of the ICC and the CAB and those other agencies that you mentioned. | |
| And there was a kind of an unpublicized willingness, I'd say, I wouldn't say eagerness, within the Congress to make the changes that I proposed. | ||
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unidentified
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For me, it was a high priority. | |
| And for the Congress, there was an element of dormancy about it. | ||
|
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These were not highly controversial issues. | |
| Even some of my best supporters from Georgia, like Delta Airlines, didn't like my deregulating all the airlines. | ||
|
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But of course, they have prospered since then. | |
| And there has been some adverse consequences in a way because with a monopoly on a particular route, which existed before deregulation, say Eastern Airlines could say, okay, we fly from Miami to Atlanta and then on up to New York. | ||
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If our pilots or if our workers want a 15% raise, we won't argue with them. | |
| We'll just give them to it, give it to them, and then we'll pass it on by a 20% increase in fares. | ||
| This is the way things were done before. | ||
| But I thought that was wrong. | ||
| And I think the main reason we were able to get it passed, to repeat myself, is that we were intensely interested in it, and the Congress wasn't all that interested in it. | ||
| Did you think much about your speech making back in those years? | ||
| Did you work at it? | ||
| Did you write your own speeches? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, yeah. | |
| The most unpleasant relationship I had with people who worked with me in the White House were with speech writers who disagreed with my major input into my speeches. | ||
| You know, before I went to Washington, I had never had a speechwriter. | ||
| I wrote my own speeches on my own typewriter. | ||
| And I still do, by the way. | ||
| But in the White House, it was expected that professional speechwriters would do the writing and that the president would basically make a few editorial changes and then read them on a teleprompter. | ||
| That was not my way of doing things. | ||
| So I had a couple of speechwriters who resigned in anger. | ||
| And one of them wrote negative stories about the White House life under me because I didn't accept what they wrote for me. | ||
| But I had to be involved in the words themselves and not just in the delivery of it. | ||
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unidentified
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I can make a lot better speech now than I used to when I was president. | |
| I've learned how to make speeches now. | ||
| I'm more relaxed with it and I've made a, I don't make many speeches, but I make one every now and then. | ||
| But now I choose my subjects to be, the subjects that I choose are ones in which I have a deep interest. | ||
| But speechmaking didn't come easy to me. | ||
| I think, however, to be objective about it, when I was campaigning around the country and speaking to 20 people or maybe 100 people, I think my sincerity did come across. | ||
| And when I said, I will never lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don't vote for me. | ||
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unidentified
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I think people responded to that kind of statement. | |
| In retrospect, the walking from the Capitol down to the White House Inauguration Day, the carrying of your own bags, the imagery that you created, would you do that again? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Well, the carrying of my own bags is something I still do, and I always did. | ||
| That was not a contrivance or an artificiality that was suggested to me by media experts. | ||
| I got by easily for five days of campaigning. | ||
| I would have a little suitcase, which I still have, very small. | ||
| Every night in the hotel, if I stayed in a hotel or in a private person's room, I washed out my socks and underwear and tried to get them dry during the night and washed my own. | ||
| And I had one extra coat and a pair of pants that I carried in a leather carry, which I still have. | ||
| I carried my own bags naturally. | ||
| The walking from the Capitol to the White House was really suggested to me by Senator Proxmire from Wisconsin. | ||
| He wrote me a note and he said that there was such a vast chasm in trust that existed between the people of the nation and Washington that he thought I might do something to break that tradition and maybe even expose myself more directly to the American people, or words to that effect. | ||
|
unidentified
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Rosa and I talked it over, and we had this bright idea of getting in the limousine, driving around the Capitol, and then getting out and walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. | |
| And then we broached that with the Secret Service, responsible, obviously, for our safety. | ||
| And they said, well, if you can keep it completely secret and don't let anybody know in advance that you're going to do it, we think the surprise element will probably be an additional protective factor. | ||
| So in effect, you know, we walked down Pennsylvania Avenue like any other people going to a fair or something with thousands of people on both sides and exposed to people if they felt like hurting us. | ||
| But it was such a surprise that I never did feel in danger. | ||
| This is out of the blue, but it gives you a chance to talk about the Iranian thing. | ||
| What was your reaction when Cyrus Vance resigned after that landing of the helicopters in the desert in Iran? | ||
| And is that why he resigned over that issue for some reason? | ||
| Three times before that, Cy Vance had come to my office and threatened to resign about different little issues. | ||
| Cy was one of the Secretaries of State and there are others that I won't name now who were very protective of the State Department. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I looked upon myself as a descendant of Thomas Jefferson as a president. | |
| They looked upon themselves as a descendant of Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State. | ||
| So if anything happened that might cause discomfiture to an employee, a worker in the State Department, Cy would come to see me in the Oval Office and with very hurt feelings would threaten to resign. | ||
|
unidentified
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So that was the fourth time, and he actually resigned. | |
| Cy had been involved in the meetings in the cabinet room, only I think seven of us present, when we decided to go ahead with the rescue operation. | ||
|
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And when he was absent, which was on occasion, the Secretary of State has to be gone, his deputy, Warren Christopher, was there. | |
| So we did not take Cy Vance by surprise. | ||
| When I made the final decision that this is the time to go in, after we had all been briefed on how it might be done, it was a very complicated procedure, Cy happened to have been away from Washington. | ||
| He came back and I called another meeting of a security council and we had another third discussion of the issue and then unanimously, except for Vance, we all decided to go ahead with the rescue mission. | ||
| After that, I was surprised and disappointed and somewhat angry when Sai announced that he was resigning. | ||
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unidentified
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If the mission had been successful and he resigned, I would have taken it with a lot more equanimity. | |
| But when it was unsuccessful, I was kind of peeved when he resigned when I was strained at best. | ||
| Would you do anything differently today looking back on the whole Iranian hostage crisis? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I would send one more helicopter in. | |
| We figured that it would take five full helicopters to bring all of our people out, including the rescue team and every hostage. | ||
| If we didn't have five, we would have to leave some Americans behind who would very possibly be executed. | ||
| So we had an extra helicopter and then another extra helicopter. | ||
| One, for some reason never yet ascertained, turned back to the aircraft carrier instead of going through with his mission. | ||
| One went down in the desert in a sandstorm. | ||
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unidentified
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And we had one extra one then. | |
| We had five on the ground ready to go. | ||
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unidentified
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And when they got ready to take off, they ran into each other. | |
| They hit a DC, an airplane. | ||
| And it only left us with four helicopters, which could not have brought our people out. | ||
| So the people in Iran and those in Egypt who were monitoring and the Secretary of Defense all unanimously said that we have to cancel the operation, so we did. | ||
| What do you want your legacy to be? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, you mean in addition to being a good grandfather and so forth? | |
| Yeah, all that. | ||
| Well, if I had, you know, I would like to be remembered as being a champion of peace and human rights. | ||
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unidentified
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We established human rights publicly and globally as the foundation of our anti-foreign policy. | |
| And I think that commitment has resulted in a lot of ending of human rights abuses and democratization and freedom in countries even going on today. | ||
| It's a notable thing. | ||
| And the other one was a commitment to peace. | ||
| You know, I was a professional naval officer. | ||
| I went through Annapolis. | ||
| I was ready to give my life to defend my country as a career. | ||
| I was a submarine officer. | ||
| And I strengthened the military establishment tremendously while I was in office, primarily because of the brilliance of Harold Brown, who was my Secretary of Defense, and he was a president of Caltech, and he was worthy to receive a Nobel Prize for Physics. | ||
| And all of the modern day weapons that were used, say, in the Gulf War, were developed under Harold Brown while I was president. | ||
| But I thought that it was better not to use our military strength, to have it as one of the persuasive factors, but to use my influence and the influence of the great United States of America to bring peace to people. | ||
|
unidentified
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So we went for four years, despite some very serious challenges and opportunities. | |
| We never fired a bullet. | ||
| We never dropped a bomb. | ||
| We never launched a missile against anyone else. | ||
| And at the same time, I think we accomplished our goals of bringing peace to other people, keeping our nation in peace. | ||
| So I think peace and human rights would be the two things. | ||
| I've kind of rambled. | ||
| For a moment, talk about the American presidency, the office of the president. | ||
| Would you change anything if you could? | ||
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unidentified
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And is it as powerful as it should be? | |
| Well, the American Presidency is extremely powerful in the arena of foreign policy. | ||
| For instance, when I decided to normalize diplomatic relations with China, the Constitution gave me unilateral right to do so. | ||
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unidentified
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The Congress had no role to play in that decision. | |
| If I had wanted to send troops into battle, I could have done so, as has been done many times since I left office, without consultation with or getting permission from the Congress in advance. | ||
| So in foreign policy, the President is it. | ||
| In domestic legislation, almost all the legislation that was passed during my four years originated in the White House. | ||
| I can't remember a single major bill that originated in the Congress. | ||
| The Congress expected me to present to them, this is what I want you to do about these subjects. | ||
| And then we had a very good batting average, as I said. | ||
| The thing that the President has practically no control over is the economics of the nation. | ||
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unidentified
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He has an equal role to play with the Congress in taxation. | |
| But the Federal Reserve Board, you know, really determines the rate of inflation and the tightness of money, which results in the growth of the economy. | ||
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unidentified
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Even greater than that, though, is the free enterprise system of our country. | |
| What the conglomerate mass of major corporations do, General Motors and IBM and so forth. | ||
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I need not name the others. | |
| And the other factor over which the president has no control is the international situation. | ||
| You know, if a war erupts or if you have a so-called Asia crisis, which we've had lately, the President of the United States has nothing to say about that. | ||
| When Nixon was in office as president, I was governor, and we had the formation of OPEC and the oil embargo against anyone who traded with Israel. | ||
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unidentified
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And we had long gas lines and the price of oil went sky high. | |
| That was not Nixon's fault. | ||
| He didn't have anything to do with it. | ||
| So the president gets blamed for economic changes if they're bad. | ||
| He takes credit for them if they're good. | ||
| But for all practical purposes, I would say the president plays maybe a 10 or 15 percent role in the nation's economy. | ||
| So foreign policy, the president is it. | ||
| Domestic policy, 50-50. | ||
| Economy, very little. | ||
| Last, you and your wife, Rosalind, have been married for how many years? | ||
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unidentified
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53 and a half. | |
| Your children, four of them, are how old and where are they? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, our oldest son was born just a year after we were married. | |
| He's in Bermuda. | ||
| He's a very successful banker. | ||
| Our second son, Chip, was born in Hawaii in 1950 when I was in the Navy, submarine force. | ||
| He's a vice president of the Friendship Force, which is a massive exchange program of Americans and others going back and forth to live in homes of foreigners. | ||
| He's now working on Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Cuba. | ||
| And our youngest son, Jeffrey, got a degree in geography and computer science. | ||
| Now he helped to develop some very successful software programs and to start some very fine, successful companies. | ||
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So he's retired at a very early age, and he's spending a lot of his time raising three of my grandsons. | |
| And Amy? | ||
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Amy has finished her graduate work at Tulane in art history, married to a fine young man who's a webmaster for a southern company. | |
| And we just enjoyed having lunch with and admiring one of the most extraordinary little grandsons in the world, who's now two and a half months old. | ||
| Same as a mother now, mostly. | ||
| And how many grandchildren do you have? | ||
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Ten. | |
| Ten grandchildren. | ||
| Our oldest grandson, by the way, is in the Peace Corps in South Africa. | ||
| And his grandmother, his great-grandmother, Lillian, my mother, was in the Peace Corps. | ||
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So we have a strong tie to the Peace Corps. | |
| I have very good grandchildren. | ||
| And we have a harmonious family. | ||
| We have 20 of us now in all, counting sons and daughters and their spouses and all of our grandkids and Rosalind and me. | ||
| And we go off somewhere every Christmas holiday, two days after Christmas, we go somewhere different. |