ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Judy Woodruff is a longtime journalist who first covered Carter when he was governor of Georgia. She's a senior correspondent and the former anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour. Judy, welcome.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Hello, Andrew.
LIMBONG: So you started covering former President Carter when he was just governor, as I just mentioned. What were your first memories of covering him?
WOODRUFF: Well, I actually first covered him in my first year as a reporter.
LIMBONG: Oh, wow.
WOODRUFF: It was 1970. I was a year-and-a-half out of college, and I was hired by the CBS affiliate in Atlanta to cover politics, the state legislature, and among the candidates running for governor that year to succeed an infamous segregationist, Lester Maddox, was a peanut farmer and former state senator named Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Georgia. He was almost outrageously ambitious. He had run for governor once before four years earlier and come short, but he was trying again. And he made it, and he ran a campaign that appealed both to the most conservative of Democrats, who were the dominant party in Georgia at the time, and also everybody else in the state. And he declared in his inaugural address in January of 1971 that the time for racial discrimination is over, and that put him on the map as a progressive Southern governor.
LIMBONG: You know, when you were covering him all those early years, did you imagine that he'd go on to run for president? Did you see those ambitions early on?
WOODRUFF: No way.
(LAUGHTER)
WOODRUFF: But what I did see, Andrew, there was someone who had exceeded expectations almost at every turn. If you looked at his naval career and, again, at his running for governor, he came from a very rural part of southwestern Georgia to, again, defeat expectations. He wasn't part of the Democratic Party establishment in Georgia when he ran. It was the case that he was surrounded by a group of very smart young men - Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, a man named Gerry (ph) Rafshoon and a number of others who - Stu (ph) Eizenstat - who not only were devoted to Jimmy Carter, but they, with him, helped fulfill this ambition - this, again, outrageous ambition he had to do more than be the governor of Georgia. He watched what happened with Watergate, and he came to believe that he could be as good a president, if not a better president, than anybody else he saw on the horizon. And what I did see was that they were very organized. They had set out with a serious plan, and they were determined to do everything in their power to make it work.
LIMBONG: You know, you'd mentioned Watergate. Carter himself faced a number of crises during his presidential term. What was his relationship like with the press as he was going through all that?
WOODRUFF: It was not smooth. He faced a very, shall we say, skeptical press in Washington. Most of the Washington press had not known him. I was one of the few who, I guess you could say, sort of followed him from - I was in Atlanta, and then after he won the presidency, NBC News where I was working at the time sent me to Washington. There were a couple of other reporters who came up, but most of the press had not covered him. They viewed him with skepticism. He wasn't a Democratic Party insider. And there was - I think there was a great tendency on the part of many reporters to, I don't know, look down, I guess.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
WOODRUFF: I guess it's fair to say to be - to have that typical attitude that many in the North have toward those in the South, that they're not quite as smart, they're a little bit slower. And Carter was - again, he was determined to prove that they were wrong. But - and so it was a rocky relationship.
LIMBONG: Yeah. We've got about a minute left. I'm wondering after all this time you've spent covering him, is there one moment, one memory you have that speaks - that comes to mind?
WOODRUFF: I have to say that it's after his presidency as I watched him just almost will his way to make a difference in the world with the work that they did at the Carter - they've done and continue to do at the Carter Center for people, you know, who are in the most remote parts of the world suffering from disease, the Habitat for Humanity work that he did in the United States and, as you just mentioned, the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the accumulated picture that I have in my mind of Jimmy Carter, who was determined in an interview that I did with him in his home in Atlanta, where he spoke about all the things he was involved in and how determined he was to make a difference in the world. He never wanted to let a moment go to waste.
LIMBONG: Wow.
WOODRUFF: And that was the - that's the Jimmy Carter I remember, somebody who just - who never let go, never gave up, you know, never declared that he couldn't get something done.
LIMBONG: Yeah. That was Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent and the former actor (ph), anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour. Judy, thanks so much.
WOODRUFF: For sure. Thank you, Andrew.
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