Page:Carter Interview with Harry Reasoner (Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter 1st debate)(Gerald Ford Library)(1554406).pdf/2



MR. REASONER: Tonight we have the first of several reports on the Democratic ticket. We went to Plains, Georgia last week for far-ranging conversations with Jimmy Carter and Senator Mondale with the aim of finding the flavor and measure of the candidates before all the speechifying of a fall campaign begins. We hope to do the same thing with the Republican ticket immediately after the Kansas City Convention.

Jimmy Carter took me walking in a peanut field. He knows a lot about peanuts, and it is a good place to begin to understand him. This is his land but his real business is in buying and processing peanuts from other farmers. He is used to picking up a peanut plant for visiting reporters and explaining to them that they are vegetables, not nuts, really, and good to eat even in this fetal stage.

GOVERNOR CARTER: You see there is a peanut just starting out, where it came out. I guess there is one in the original form. See? That is the end of the little short pair. It starts growing up and gets larger and larger and larger and larger and larger and that becomes a peanut.

MR. REASONER: They are pretty good, in texture sort of like a sauteed garlic bud.

A family cemetery was a few yards away, which brought up the question of Carter's evangelical Christianity and whether a Baptist in the White House would be likely to demand Baptist standards of behavior and morals from everybody else. We asked him.

GOVERNOR CARTER: Moral standards, you know, are primarily personal in nature. One of the teachings of Christ in which I believe is that we should not judge other people.