Ex-President’s Forum for Ideas, International Issues : Library a Monument to Carter’s Vision

On the hill where Union Gen. William T. Sherman oversaw the burning of this city during the Civil War, former President Jimmy Carter hopes to set the world ablaze with new ideas to resolve international disputes, curb nuclear arms, safeguard human rights and eliminate hunger and disease.

The $25-million Carter Presidential Center that the former President has built on historic Copenhill is more than a library for his White House papers. In an ambitious effort to extend the public role that Carter has sought for himself since leaving office, it will also house a global public policy “think tank” and two foundations devoted to international issues.

“Every President has had a different attitude toward the post-presidential years,” Carter said in an interview. “I’m not interested in going into the corporate world or on the permanent lecture tour. I would like to work on the same kind of issues that interested me both before and after I was in the White House.”

Carter, looking younger and more energetic than when he left the White House six years ago despite his grayer hair and more deeply lined faced, gave reporters a personally guided preview of the presidential center Tuesday.

The complex, on a wooded knoll about two miles east of downtown Atlanta in the heart of the 219-acre Great Park, will be officially dedicated next Wednesday. The ceremonies--expected to draw more than 2,000 digni taries and guests, including President and Nancy Reagan--will fall on Carter’s 62nd birthday.

“That’s not entirely coincidental,” the former President said of the Oct. 1 ceremonies. “As a matter of fact, we broke ground on Oct. 2 two years ago and it will be open to the public on noon of Oct. 2.” Asked whether he had ever had a better birthday gift, he flashed his famous smile and said: “Not recently.”

The presidential library complex, the eighth of its kind dedicated to a former U.S. President and by far the most ambitious in the breadth of its mission, consists of four low-lying cylindrical buildings nestled in a semicircle around a graceful 2 1/2-acre lake and Japanese garden, linked by adjoining walkways.

The buff-colored buildings blend unobtrusively into the rolling, forested terrain of Copenhill, one of the highest points in Atlanta. They contain more than 130,000 square feet of space. Other presidential libraries, for comparison, range from 30,000 square feet for Herbert Hoover to 117,000 for Lyndon B. Johnson.

Funds for the project were raised by private donations, with about half of the total coming from Georgians, and about a quarter from foreign donors.

The largest of the structures houses the presidential library and museum. More than 27 million documents from the Carter Administration, along with 1.5 million photographs, 900 hours of video and audio tapes and 4,500 cubic feet of foreign and domestic gifts to the President, will be housed there.

In addition, the facility boasts a full-scale reproduction of the Oval Office during the Carter presidential years, a simulated town hall meeting room with an electronic “President Carter” on a video screen to answer visitors’ questions and an exhibit setting out major issues faced by 20th-Century presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Carter.

“We didn’t want just a library that would look back at ancient history about our family and so forth,” Carter said. “So the library-museum will be a teaching center, not just about me, but presidents down through the ages (and) about our country and what made it great. . . .”

It is also apparent that the library-museum is designed to improve the negative public image that Carter has carried since the debacle of the Iranian hostage crisis and his resounding electoral defeat by Reagan in 1980.

In a section of the facility devoted to the hostage crisis, for example, an audio-visual display invites visitors to select their response to a terrorist crisis: attack with military force, negotiate, apply sanctions or try all options. After pressing one of the four buttons, the visitor watches the screen as a videotape of Carter appears and explains the pros and cons of the particular choice.

Carter feels that although public opinion has largely treated him unfairly thus far, history will vindicate him.

‘Tough Decisions’

“We did restore integrity to government, we dealt with international crises in a humane and effective way, we extended the American principles of human rights and democracy to a maximum degree possible in four years, and we made some tough decisions without flinching,” he said.

But it is the activities in the other buildings that seem to bring the most obvious delight to the former President. There are situated the three organizations through which he intends to pursue the international goals that prompted him to seek the presidency in 1976.

Chief among these is the Carter Center of Emory University, a permanent public policy institute created in 1982 at the private Atlanta university where Carter is a visiting distinguished professor.

Carter plans to use the experience and influence he gained in office to draw political leaders, business leaders and scholars to the center.

“I have access to almost any leader on earth, not just political but military leaders, as well as leaders in the fields of agriculture, education, trade, finance, commerce and health care,” he said. “So I’m able to invite experts here . . . and let them meet and discuss matters at the highest level of competency and experience and knowledge.”

In the four years since its inception, the Carter Center has already sponsored consultations on Middle East peace prospects, U.S. health care policy, arms control and international security and the Latin American debt crisis.

The first program at the new center will be entitled “Reinforcing Democracy in the Americas.” Scheduled for mid-November, it will be co-chaired by Carter and former President Gerald R. Ford and will feature a keynote address by Argentine President Raul Alfonsin.

The other two organizations in the complex--which Carter describes as “more activist” in nature--are Global 2000 Inc., which concerns itself with world hunger, environmental protection and health care, and the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation, which was formed with French-born philanthropist Dominique de Menil of Houston.

Although work on the 30-acre presidential complex is nearing completion, construction on the so-called presidential parkway leading to it has been halted for months as the result of opposition from community activists who contend that the road will damage the character of several historic Atlanta neighborhoods in its path--including parts of the Druid Hills district designed by the noted 19th-Century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

Carter’s plans call for a 2.4-mile, four-lane parkway along a right of way that, ironically, was abandoned in the early 1970s during Carter’s tenure as Georgia governor when a similar controversy erupted over a proposal to build two interstate highways through the area.

Work stopped on the presidential parkway last year when the courts, acting on legal challenges, invalidated the transfer of park land to the state. A new Commission on Condemnation of Public Property is slated to act Friday on the state’s request to condemn the land.

“I expect the commission to approve it and, barring any other obstacles, construction could resume in the next couple of months,” said Terry Adamson, an Atlanta attorney who represents the presidential center in the dispute.

Adamson said that construction of the parkway is essential if the complex is to handle a projected 600,000 visitors a year. At present, the only access is through a network of residential streets and up a steeply pitched temporary driveway.