To visit Stanly Godbold’s basement is to walk into a small library. Books on the mantel over the fireplace, shelf after shelf packed with tomes, mostly history. Some, he’s quick to point out, written by his former students in the history department at Mississippi State University.
Over in a corner is a small desk, and the wall around it is covered with pictures of the subject of Godbold’s major work: former President Jimmy Carter.
“I taught at Valdosta State while Carter was governor of Georgia, and it never occurred to me that I would grow up to write a biography of him. I had no interest at all. In fact, when I was there I was kind of an unhappy camper because our salaries were so low.”
Godbold has published two books on Carter: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924-1974, published in 2010, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975-2020, which came out this year. The two combined stretch to about a thousand pages.
He was predisposed towards history – if not Carter – from a very early age, he said.
“If you grow up in South Carolina, you grow up with history,” he said. “If you grow up in one of the original 13 states, you grow up with it. My family was one of the founding families of South Carolina, so I have that kind of background.”
Godbold originally wanted to go into the ministry, but figured out it wasn’t for him.
“I was looking for something to do so I decided I would get a master’s degree in history and teach,” he said.
A master’s turned into a PhD, and a love of writing led to Godbold writing his first book: a biography of Virginia novelist Ellen Glasgow, published in 1972.
“I really enjoyed researching and writing that book,” he said. “I was going to write it even if I didn’t end up getting a degree.”
In 1977 Godbold came to MSU, and “stayed here the rest of my days,” he said. “I came here at a substantial pay increase. I told my students if somebody voluntarily moved to Mississippi to become a teacher, it must have been bad where they came from.”
Godbold first wrote about Carter in the 1980s, an article looking at the former president’s poetry, but he wanted to do more.
“I was just kind of casting around, and I decided I would go over to the (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum) in Atlanta,” he said. “This was in 1990, it had just opened in 1986, almost nobody was doing research there. It was just a treasure trove, and it just became increasingly interesting and expanded from that.”
He decided to write a biography of Carter for his next project.
“I was under no pressure to publish, and I was at a point where I could pretty well do what I wanted to,” he said. “I could take a risk and do something that, at least to me, would be more challenging. If I succeeded, that would be fine, and if I didn’t, that would be fine, too.”
Godbold decided on an unusual approach: he would write parallel biographies of both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.
“I realized you couldn’t tell Carter’s story without telling Rosalynn’s story,” he said. “I think that’s one thing that’s unique about my work, because biographers put her in the story but not as an equal partner. (Jimmy Carter) realized how talented she was as a politician, and he made her an equal partner.”
Godbold would spend the next 32 years working on the Carter project, starting in 1990 and publishing the second volume in September.
“I never set out to write two volumes,” he said. “I got discouraged, and wondered what I had gotten myself into, and my friend Fred Smith suggested I just chop the first part of it off and send it out and see what happens. The first publisher I sent it to, took it and offered me a contract for two books. Then I was stuck and had to write the rest of it.”
That writing process led Godbold to interview political figures ranging from Tip O’Neill to former CIA director Stansfield Turner, as well as the Carters themselves.
“It took me four years to get the interview,” he said. “I learned from his personal assistant that that wasn’t by accident – the Carters wanted to make sure that anybody who got through was a serious scholar. (Jimmy Carter) didn’t want to waste his time.”
The fact that he wanted to interview both Jimmy and Rosalynn at the same time further complicated things, he said, but he did eventually get it worked out. In October 1994, it finally happened.
“I got a security clearance, I got a code that would get me through the gate at a certain hour,” he said. “It wouldn’t have opened earlier or later. Then I found myself driving up to the door and parking like I would at your house.”
He eventually found himself running out of questions and defaulted to one a graduate student suggested.
“As I was leaving my office to go to the interview I asked a graduate student what he would ask,” he said. “He said, ‘Ask him if Willie Nelson really smoked dope on the White House roof.’ I had run out of questions, so I asked him. (Jimmy Carter) just laughed, and finessed it. Rosalynn did, too. She didn’t want that to be known.”
Carter is widely misunderstood today, he said.
“The one thing that irritates me is his reputation for being a failed president,” he said. “His accomplishments were stupendous – 75 percent of his legislation passed. He got a bad reputation in the 1980s because he lost, and most of the things (former President Ronald Reagan’s) camp said about him aren’t true.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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