Annotated Documents Illuminate the Jimmy Carter Years : Archives: The historians evaluating the last Democratic Administration have a revealing paper trail to follow.

Jimmy Carter’s tight, measured script is in the margins of virtually every memo, report and briefing book that crossed his desk in the White House.

Newly opened files at the Carter Presidential Library disclose that Carter, unlike some other modern Presidents, liked to put his thoughts on paper--usually on the paper that prompted the thought.

He was a speed reader and preferred memos to meetings so he could deal more efficiently with issues presented to him. He quickly wrote his decisions or questions in the margins and sent each paper on its way.

“He could write endlessly in a perfect hand,” said Robert Ivie, a speech communications professor from Texas A&M; University. In the writing of Carter’s first major foreign policy address, Ivie found draft after draft on which Carter had written extensive notes.

“It was shocking,” he said. “I have been to other libraries and only rarely did I find something in the President’s handwriting. But Jimmy Carter was all over.”

The Carter library, open for six years, has processed 7.5 million of the 26 million documents hauled out of the Carter White House in 1981.

The term processed, in this case, means that a historian with the National Archives and Records Administration has read the document, taken steps to preserve it, made a photocopy if it is really valuable, figured out where it belongs in the collection’s index and put it in a special, acid-free folder and box.

Last summer, after three solid years of work, archivists Jim Herring, Keith Shuler and Gary Foulk finished processing Carter’s staff secretary’s file, which included 150,000 pages of what historians call the handwriting file.

In most presidential libraries the handwriting file--documents written or signed by the President --is a small part of a staff secretary’s file, which includes most of the written material seen by the President.

Carter was different. He annotated virtually everything he read. Within a few days of his taking office, staff secretary Susan Clough gave up trying to separate the papers on which he made notes, library director Don Schewe said. Clough photocopied everything in Carter’s “out” box every day and put the originals in the handwriting file. The few pages without handwritten notes were stamped “the President has read this.”

One of the complaints about President Carter was that he immersed himself too much in the minutiae of the office.

Scholars are finding evidence to support that complaint in the range and detail of materials from Carter’s “out” box. They are a treasure trove that answers questions of what the President knew, when he knew it and, in many cases, how he reacted.

The copious details in the files give scholars reason to wonder just how much paperwork will be left to be reviewed in the years ahead.

With the proliferation of personal computers and stick-on notes, they fear that future presidential files won’t contain the kind of annotations that revealed so much about decision-making in the Carter White House.

Separate handwriting files have been kept since President Lyndon B. Johnson was in office, but Johnson preferred to make decisions orally and his staff did not keep a chronological file of all the material he read each day.

President Richard M. Nixon’s management style was closer to Carter’s in that Nixon also preferred to make decisions by choosing from options presented in writing, but the background for those decisions is spread throughout his files.

Logs of the tapes made by Nixon’s secret taping system give scholars a chronological list of Nixon’s conversations, but the tapes cover only about half of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan’s handwriting file contains fewer pages than Carter’s, even though Reagan served two terms to Carter’s one. And there is no corollary file containing all the material Reagan saw on a given day.

“Reagan was the President who was most likely to make decisions based on oral briefings,” said John Kessel, an Ohio State University political scientist writing a book on the presidency.

Leo Ribuffo, a historian at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said he got a lot of material for the book he is writing on the Carter presidency by looking through the hourly chronology of Carter’s days as revealed in the handwriting file.

The margin notes weren’t as helpful as he had hoped, however, “because what he wrote is often cryptic and he’s such a complicated guy, he’s contradictory. Jimmy Carter changed his mind all the time,” Ribuffo said.

Burton Kauffman, a historian at Virginia Tech who is also writing a Carter presidency book, said he liked being able to read, in order, the materials that influenced Carter to change his mind.

“The wonderful thing about the handwriting file is you can almost follow Carter’s logic as you see what’s coming in and what’s going out. Almost every document has his comments on it,” Kauffman said.

Carter’s logical mind and thirst for information led him deeper into the workings of government than virtually any other modern President.

“No detail was too small for him not to be interested in it,” said Dr. Stanley Godbold, a Mississippi State history professor who is writing a biography of Carter.

In perusing the handwriting file, Godbold found notes from Carter complaining that the White House grounds weren’t neat enough. He noticed that Carter corrected the grammar in some of his staff’s memos.

But he also spotted a note from Carter asking a staffer simply: “What can we do about world hunger?” He said the staffer wrote a detailed response and, from then on, the Administration consistently included world hunger issues in its foreign policy agenda.

Carl Biven, an economics professor at Georgia Tech, attributes Carter’s preoccupation with details to his training as an engineer. Carter studied at Tech for a year in the 1940s before getting his bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Naval Academy.

“What is wrong with a President being involved in detail? Supposedly, it takes his mind away from the broad conceptualizing. I’m not sure that was true with Carter,” said Biven.