James Fallows: The Jimmy Carter Conundrum

Impolitic with John Heilemann

Audacy | Puck

News, Politics

4.8 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John is joined by Jim Fallows—former Atlantic national correspondent, National Book Award winner, and author of Breaking The News on Substack—to discuss Jimmy Carter’s life and legacy. Fallows, who served as Carter’s chief White House speechwriter, discusses the qualities that made Carter an initially mesmerizing but deeply flawed and historically misunderstood figure; his long-underrated policy accomplishments; the personal attributes that made him formidable (focus, toughness), those that were his downfall (vanity, naivete), and those people saw in him that weren’t there at all (niceness). Fallows also opines on the importance of Carter’s surprising relationships with artists and outlaws such as Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Hunter Thompson—arguing, in fact, that Thompson’s advocacy of Carter was what put him in the White House. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:36.8	Aloha and namaste everyone and welcome to Empolitic with John Heilman, a puck and
0:40.9	Odyssey joint featuring lively in-depth, sometimes just a little bit profaning conversations
0:46.6	with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in America weaving the
0:50.6	warp and wharf and weft of our politics and culture. After two plus weeks, entirely up the grid, we are back, baby, we are back.
1:00.9	Untanned, but definitely rested and ready.
1:04.9	For whatever 2025 has in store for all of us, it is fair to say that a lot of stuff
1:10.3	happened, at least by the normal
1:11.7	standards of a presidential transition while we were away, but nothing more laden with gravitas or
1:17.4	summoning more grace than the passing of the 39th president of the United States, James Earl
1:22.3	Carter Jr. The longest lived U.S. president in history and the only one ever to reach the ripe old age of 100.
1:32.0	Yesterday in Washington at the National Cathedral, all five current and former living presidents,
1:37.1	Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump,
1:41.0	gathered at the National Cathedral for the first time that they'd all been together
1:45.1	in the same room since George H.W. Bush's funeral in December of 2018 for the penultimate
1:51.9	memorial service in an eight-day stretch of mourning and remembrances that went from Plains, Georgia,
1:59.0	to Atlanta, to D.C.
	...

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