Jimmy Carter : All the More Like a President Now That He’s Not

I’ve known Jimmy Carter for 30 years--since he was a Georgia state senator and I was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution. I’ve known him as a governor, as the nation’s 39th President and as the country’s busiest ex-President. He’s always been a man in a hurry, a man with a lot of goals.

When I interviewed him recently for an hour-long documentary, Carter talked about the triumphs and failures of his presidency and about what he hopes to accomplish now. He has so many plans and they are so sweeping in their goals that someone quipped he may be the only man to use the Oval Office as a steppingstone. Yet Stephen E. Ambrose, the biographer of Dwight D. Eisenhower, recently referred to Carter as the “greatest living ex-President.”

Carter was so unpopular as President that, in July, 1980, he received the lowest rating of any President in the last four decades--21%. That’s three points lower than Richard M. Nixon when he resigned over Watergate. Carter’s approval rating had climbed to only 34% when he left office in 1981.

Since then, however, Carter has continued his efforts as a peacemaker and advocate of the world’s poor, monitoring foreign elections, working to eradicate a crippling insect parasite in Latin American, conducting seminars on foreign policy and lobbying on behalf of peace in the Middle East. Perhaps not coincidentally, his popularity has risen dramatically. In a recent Times Mirror poll, his rating eclipsed that of his archenemy, Ronald Reagan, 70% to 63%.

In some ways Carter has not changed since his presidency. He’s still proud, self-righteous, single-minded and bent on pursuing lofty goals. He doesn’t hesitate to skewer a political enemy like Reagan.

But he’s changed, too. He is far more introspective, more willing to admit his own mistakes and failures, even to laugh at himself. One of the nice things about not being President, he said, is that he is free to make his own decisions without worrying about what Congress, the press or even the voters might think. For Carter, that means enjoying life as he never has before.

Question: A lot of international lead ers come here to the Carter Center. You’ve flown all over the world on behalf of humanitarian causes, on behalf of peace. What would you say is your most important mission since you’ve left office?

A: We operate under the general framework of what we call waging peace. It’s an active intrusion into troubled areas to bring a better life to people.

We look at it in a fairly generic sense. It’s not just negotiating to end a war. It’s not just supervising an international election to bring about democracy to Haiti or the Dominican Republic or to Panama or to Nicaragua. But it’s helping to alleviate suffering. In that way we not only reduce the likelihood of civil wars, domestic wars, direct and indirect human rights oppression, but we also get to know people and their families and their villages in a way that I would never have been able to learn while I was an incumbent President. I go to many places in Africa and Asia to see why farmers can’t triple their production of food grains, or why we can’t eradicate Guinea worm, or why we can’t do away with the blight of river blindness . . . . As of the first of last October, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait, there were 30 major wars in the world that we were monitoring--a major war being one within which more than 1,000 people had been killed on the battlefield. Of those 30 . . . they were all internal wars, domestic wars, civil wars, wars between neighbors . . . . (Some) are horrendous in scope--a million people have already been killed in the Eritrean-Ethiopian government war; 260,000 died in one year in Sudan.

The tragedy is that the United Nations and the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity--even our own government and other governments--are precluded from being involved in these domestic wars because it’s improper or illegal for us, for them--the institutions--to communicate with revolutionaries who are trying to overthrow a government that’s a member of the United Nations.

So this leaves a horrendous vacuum in the world, in very destructive wars. That is a vacuum that the Carter Center is trying to fill.

Q: I know you feel deeply about the Middle East and you worked hard to bring about the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. What did you see as the cause of what led up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait?

A: It’s not very popular to even give Saddam Hussein credit for rationality, and I’m not saying the invasion was justified.

Q: But you don’t buy he’s a madman?

A: No. I think he has a very shrewd ability to analyze things from a parochial point of view. He does not have any acquaintance with the Western World. He has been isolated basically in Iraq, so he doesn’t understand the outside world much, but there was a long history there. Let me give you a few examples.

He had fought a horrendously costly war with Iran, eight years. It had cost his country about $150 billion. He felt that he had, in the process, protected the integrity of Kuwait against an Iranian invasion. At the same time, the Kuwaitis had loaned him about $12 or $15 billion in cash to buy weapons which defended Iraq and Kuwait from the Iranians. At the end of that period, he started trying to get the Kuwaitis to forgive his debt, and also to share some of the money they had made by selling oil while he was at war.

In addition, there’s an oil deposit that crosses the border between Iraq and Kuwait. Kuwait had been pumping oil--about a million barrels a day more than they had agreed to do under the OPEC agreement. This not only was robbing Iraq of its part of this pool of oil, but it was also depressing the price for the oil that everybody sold, and he tried to get them to stop.

So he negotiated with them. He negotiated through the Saudis. He tried to negotiate through the Arab League even, and the Kuwaitis were very tough negotiators. They didn’t give him practically anything. He even warned the world that he was going to go in. Nobody believed him. He marshalled 350,000 troops at the Kuwaiti border, nobody believed him, and he went in. I think he believed at that time that the world would accept his invasion of Kuwait, and maybe condemn him but not take any action.

Another very important issue--there has been a growing awareness among Arab, just average Arab citizens--and also Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan: They are in effect, beggars. They are poverty stricken; and they have to walk around all the time with a tin cup out asking the oil-rich royal families, please give me a few dollars to make my life better. There’s a growing awareness that the oil that has been extracted from Arab land--through the emirs, through the kings--have now been deposited in the West, and the Arab people have not benefited. This amounts to an incredible figure, $900 billion. So there’s a dissatisfaction there on which Saddam is capitalizing. . . .

The last thing is in the Arab world, they still go back even to the Crusades time. They feel there’s an Arab nation--not 19 or 20 different Arab countries, but many people feel a greater Arab community ought to be put forward as Nasser tried to do during the ‘60s. They see Saddam Hussein in some ways as being the fulfillment of their goal, let him be the leader.

None of that justifies the invasion of Kuwait, but that’s some of the reasons why Saddam was tempted to make this very serious misjudgment.

Q: There are two institutions that any President who comes to Washington has to find a way to deal with--the press and Congress. You said yourself that you had an incompatibility with the White House press corps that you called distressing.

A: Right.

Q: It’s true. The Washington press never warmed to you. I wondered if maybe part of the reason was you didn’t seem to warm to the press?

A: What you say is putting it mildly. If I’ve had one major failure in my life in the political world--and I have--it’s a total incapacity to deal effectively with the American press--particularly the White House press when I was in office.

There have been scholarly analyses done that show that I was treated more negatively by the press than any other President in this century--that includes Nixon in the depths of Watergate, and it includes other Presidents in their most embarrassing moments. Out of the 48 months I was President, I only had favorable press one month--when we had the Camp David accords, when we had the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, the press was still negative toward me. I never understood why . . . . I had much more success with the Congress.

Q: After the 1976 election, one of your aides told me, “What I’m concerned about is Gov. Carter, as President Carter, is going to treat the Congress like it’s the Georgia Legislature, and the Congress is going to treat him like he’s Georgia’s governor.” Do you think that happened?

A: In a way it did. Let me give you a quick example. One of the major comments that I made during the campaign was that I wanted to reorganize the government, which I had done as the Georgia governor. It was a modest approach. But when I was elected President, my first request was that a Democratic chairman introduce my reorganization bill. I could not get a single Democrat to introduce my bill. I had to go to Republicans to get them to introduce this first bill that I wanted to get passed.

But later I think I had good success. If you look at the statistics, which I think Congressional Quarterly has done, I had about the same batting average . . . as had Lyndon Johnson or John Kennedy--about 65% of what I proposed was actually passed. A lot of it was controversial. But there were some things on which I was not willing to compromise, and I can see in retrospect they were sensitive and maybe symbolic issues, like water projects--the building of dams.

What happened then--before I changed part of it, and it was later changed more by President Reagan--when a freshman congressman would go to Washington they would put in a request to build this dam, this lake, in my district, and then that congressman would get reelected for 20 years. At the end of 20 years, his dam project had gotten to the top of the list. At that time, 20 years of change had taken place . . . (and) he was probably chairman of a committee or subcommittee.

So those projects automatically went through, at enormous cost--we’re talking about billions of dollars--and I vetoed them. This was striking at the very heart of the congressional privilege because, quite often, when a congressman finished his 20 or 30 years . . . the only thing he’s got to show for it tangibly is a dam or a lake with his name on it. This . . . typifies the relationship I had with the Congress, and I aggravated many congressmen along those lines.

Q: But I also know that some of the congressmen felt you didn’t pay enough attention to them. And you told me once that you knew more about the issues, on many of the issues, than they did.

A: That was an arrogant thing to say. (Laughter) Sometimes I did know more than the congressmen did, because you have to remember that in our system, perhaps even since I left the White House, the major bills that are considered by the Congress do not originate in the Congress. They originate in the White House or in the Treasury Department or in the State Department or wherever . . . . They’re submitted through the congressional procedure and come up for debate. So we did a lot of work . . . .

Q: Speaking of the Panama Canal Treaty, I know you turned around the Congress and the public on that, and it cost you a lot of political capital. In retrospect, do you think it was worth it?

A: Yes. . . . Even if I had it to do over again, it would be my nature--and you can call it stubbornness or whatever--to go ahead and do what I thought needed to be done. I had excessive confidence in myself to explain my unpopular actions to the public and convince them I was right. I overestimated that ability.

I think, just as a historical footnote, that the most courageous action ever taken in the last 200 years by the Congress were the senators who voted for the Panama Canal treaties. They knew it was right, they knew it was fair, they knew it was just, they knew it had to be done, but it was horribly costly in political terms. I’ll give you a quick statistic. Of the 20 members of the Senate who voted for the Panama Canal treaties in 1978 who were up for reelection, of those 20, only 7 came back to the Senate the next January . . . .

Q: One thing President Reagan didn’t carry on was your human-rights policy. You made it necessary for countries to have an advantageous relationship with the United States for them to do something about protecting human rights. Does this make a lot of difference?

A: I think the seeds we planted, the emphasis that we placed on human rights, is probably a lasting legacy. I think even if Presidents go through their terms and don’t emphasize human rights, or even denigrate the problem of human rights, it still is there.

The first action that President Reagan took after he was in office was to make a speech about the Carter period of human rights is over. He also sent (U.N. Ambassador) Jeane Kirkpatrick down to meet with--on a very friendly basis--the five military generals who were responsible in Argentina for 9,000 young people being taken out of their homes at night and killed, they disappeared. Then she went from there over to visit (Gen. Augusto) Pinochet in Chile to say now things have changed (and) we’re going to have a different policy.

The first two foreign leaders he invited were two foreign leaders that I wouldn’t invite to the White House because of their human-rights violations. One of them was (Ferdinand E.) Marcos from the Philippines; the other one was President Chun (Doo Hwan) from South Korea. This was not just an accident, it was a deliberately planned and orchestrated message to the world that the human-rights emphasis by Carter is now going to be changed.

But still, we underestimate the intensity or the importance of human-rights violations among people who are suffering. I think this is a cutting edge of societal change, and it still is, and a lot has been done since those first few years of President Reagan’s Administration--by him and by President Bush--to re-emphasize now that the United States is a champion of human rights. And I’m very grateful for that.

Q: You’ve reflected on the limits and the arrogance of government power. Now the United States is the last remaining superpower. Does that give us a special obligation for restraint?

A: I think it does. The rest of the world looks at us to an extraordinary degree. I’ve only come to realize that clearly since I left the White House, and now I travel extensively in the poorer nations on earth and I travel more than I ever did before.

But what we do concerning peace affects the rest of the world’s attitudes. What we do in the case of human rights, what we do in the case of economic stability, what we do in the case of environmental quality--just to name four things. We’re the leaders even among people who despise us publicly and who condemn everything we do. They still look at us and they inherently are affected by our decisions.

We profess to be a nation of peace and--whether justified or not--we have the reputation of being the world’s warmonger--with the possible exception of Saddam Hussein. We were the ones that sent troops into Lebanon. We were the ones that bombed in Lebanon. We’re the ones that bombed Tripoli. We’re the ones that invaded Grenada. We’re the ones that invaded Panama. We’re the ones that orchestrated the Contra war to overthrow the Sandinistas. No other country has done that.

We are very proud of ourselves as a nation whose moral standards are the highest. What is a moral standard? What are moral standards that we generally accept no matter where we live and no matter what our religious beliefs might be? I would say peace is perhaps pre-eminent. Peace, justice, fairness, concern, compassion, sharing, humanitarian attitudes, love, but peace comes there. So we have to realize that when we don’t do something to settle a dispute peacefully, we set a precedent that is very damaging to the world’s consciousness. . . .