CARTER, Jimmy (intro. Edmund S. Muskie). Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1982.

Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt titles and decorations to covers and spine. All edges gilt. Grey moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 622 pp. Laid in: eight-page introductory booklet by Edmund S. Muskie, former United States Senator and Secretary of State. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Library of the Presidents series. Signed by the author on the specially bound-in signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and bookplate adhered to front pastedown. Originally published New York: Bantam Books, 1982.

James Earl Carter Jr. (1924–2024) served as the thirty-ninth President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. He died on 29 December 2024, aged one hundred years. The Easton Press Library of the Presidents edition of Keeping Faith, published in 1982 — the year after his presidency ended — is among the earliest productions in that series, and Carter's signature, acquired during his lifetime, now carries the significance of a posthumous autograph from one of the most consequential and most morally serious figures in the history of the American presidency.

Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan in one of the most decisive defeats of the modern era, and Keeping Faith was written in the immediate aftermath of that loss. It is a candid account of four years in which the Oval Office confronted a succession of crises for which no preparation could have been adequate: the Iranian hostage crisis, which dominated the final fourteen months of the administration and which Carter has always believed cost him the election; the Camp David Accords of 1978, which brought Israel and Egypt to a peace agreement that has held for nearly five decades and which Carter rightly regarded as the crowning achievement of his presidency; his secret diplomacy with China's Deng Xiaoping; and his negotiations with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev over SALT II. He writes, as he governed, with a directness and a moral seriousness that were frequently misread as weakness during his time in office.

Carter's post-presidential career — the Carter Center, the election monitoring, the Habitat for Humanity work, the continued diplomatic interventions, and the eventual Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development" — gave the presidency itself a longer perspective. He became, in the judgement of many historians, a better former president than he was a president, which is itself a significant kind of achievement.

The introductory booklet by Edmund S. Muskie (1914–1996) — who served as Carter's Secretary of State during the final year of the administration, succeeding Cyrus Vance after the failed Iran hostage rescue mission, and who had previously been the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 1968 — provides a contemporaneous appreciation of the administration from its closest adviser.

Very good. Some loss to gilt on covers; scattered markings along gilt edges. Contents fine, clean and bright throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000591