I hit the jackpot and confirmed Lillian Carter’s comment: “When I look at my children, I say, ‘Lillian, you should have remained a virgin.'”
A February 26, 2023, Washington Post article titled “Jimmy Carter’s mother joined the Peace Corps at 68 and never kept her mouth shut,” remembering the outspoken “Miss Lillian,” is relentless.
Among her observations: “When her son promised never to lie during the 1976 presidential campaign, she told Newsweek, ‘I told him to stop talking about how he never lies and is a Christian.’ There are some things you don’t have to say everywhere.”
“Did she ever lie? ‘Oh yes, I couldn’t live without it,’ she told Redbook magazine.
“‘All I’m going to say about abortion – because there are pros and cons – is that I think a woman’s body should belong to her,’ she told Women’s News Service after her son said in 1976 that he thought abortion was ‘wrong,’ even though he supported Roe v. Wade. ‘I believe in equal rights for women, and I think this is one of them.'”
“I try to be tolerant of everyone, even people from Alabama,” she told US News and World Report.
Billy Carter was equally scathing about his brother and never backed down from an opportunity. Hunter Biden was not the first family member to be unfaithful to his campaign messages.
Greek drama endures because it remains true to human nature. Family problems are fundamental. The people closest to families follow family tragedies closely.
Mary Trump dissected her family in “Too Much and Never Enough” (2020). Her brother Fred III is enjoying his moment this election cycle. Fred’s memoir, “All in the Family” (2024), is surprisingly well-written – whether Fred is skilled and articulate, whether he had help, or whether his editors did their jobs as they should.
I forgot what I was reading several times and enjoyed the narrative as if I were watching a movie. The dynamic is archetypal and could occur in any family. Readers will be relieved to realize that their family is not the only one struggling to stick together.
The most interesting aspect of the story concerns the legal battle contesting the codicil to the will of the author’s paternal grandfather. It is questionable whether the dementia had progressed to the point where Fred Sr. could no longer understand what he had signed: the estate went to his surviving children. Fred III and Mary were disinherited because they could not share their late father’s fifth. The inheritance of Fred Sr.’s considerable estate to the four surviving children increased from 20% to 25%.
The story is comparable to Southern Gothic literature or theater, such as Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” (1939), which is set in turn-of-the-century Alabama – the title refers to Song of Solomon 2:15 in the King James Bible: “Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”
Bosley Crowther commented on William Wyler’s film adaptation in the New York Times of August 22, 1941: “Charles Dingle as Brother Ben Hubbard, the oldest and sharpest of the Rattlesnake clan, is the perfect villain in respectable disguise. Carl Benton Reid as Brother Oscar is delightfully gloomy, dour and unreliable. Patricia Collinge repeats her excellent stage performance… The Little Foxes will not increase your admiration for humanity. The film is cold and cynical. But it is a very exciting film, and one can watch in a pleasantly objective way, especially if you like expert stabs.”
Pollyannas would prefer that people ignore Hannah Arendt’s insight in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) that Adolf Eichmann was notable not for his extraordinary evil but for the opposite, the banality of evil: “The problem with Eichmann was precisely that there were so many like him, and that these many were neither perverse nor sadistic, but that they were and still are terribly and terribly normal. From the point of view of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgment, this normality was far more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
In political campaigns, candidates are claimed to be innocence personified. “The voter should beware”: Willie Stark put it exactly like this in Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” (1946): “… there is something about man. Man is conceived in sin and born in depravity.” Any criticism of candidates is commonplace.
— Jay Weiner is a lawyer in Jackson.
