The most jarring, since this is a 30-year-old diary, are the comments on today's news. These annotations, which Carter sets off in italics, fall into three categories: capsule biographies, policy justifications and Carter's opinions on current events. This turns out to be a mild version of a much bigger problem with 'White House Diary': Carter's insistence on annotating his diary, to the point that some pages get served up as half text, half exegesis. Adjectives and adverbs sprout up in some places and are pruned back in others, whole sentences disappear, and virtually every quotation included in 'Keeping Faith' has been tinkered with here. The changes are small, but they belong to a larger pattern. In the first entry, on his symbolic decision to walk during his inauguration, Carter writes, 'Many people along the parade route, when they saw that we were walking, began to weep.' Carter also quoted this and many other snippets from his diary in 'Keeping Faith,' his presidential memoir, but there it reads differently: 'People along the parade route, when they saw that we were walking, began to cheer and to weep.'

But the frustrations begin with Carter's presentation. It is on this last count, especially, that 'White House Diary' stands as such a frustrating book. 'White House Diary' includes only a quarter of this, Carter says in its preface, and he decided to devote his space to a few themes - energy, health care, the economy, the Middle East - and to 'some elements of my personal life that illustrate how it feels and what it means to be president.' By the time he left the White House, his secretary had transcribed more than 5,000 pages of material. In 1984, Carter told reporters he wanted to publish the diary, though not for 'a long time,' because it contained his unguarded impressions.Ĭarter dictated these impressions into a small tape recorder, often right after important meetings or events. During Carter's presidency, it became front-page news when he released 15 entries relating to his brother Billy's dealings with Libya. In his introduction to 'The Reagan Diaries,' for example, Douglas Brinkley claims that Ronald Reagan was the only 20th century president to keep a regular diary while in office.īut the arrival of Jimmy Carter's 'White House Diary' suggests otherwise - and it's not as if Carter's diary was a state secret. Still, we don't spend enough time thinking about it as something with its own history, with its own unique rules and rewards. The presidential diary has grown into a genre - and, lately, a lucrative one.

( Farrar Straus and Giroux 570 pages $30)

White House Diary by Jimmy Carter