Clinton’s Trust in Carter Rests on Long Relationship

It was almost midnight when George Bush went to bed, but fellow guest Jimmy Carter decided to stay up with their young host and press his case for a more active role in foreign affairs.

The host was President Clinton, and the two former Presidents were spending the night at the White House a year ago this month to speak the next morning in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Carter and Clinton talked until 2 in the morning. Political allies for two decades, their relations had chilled since Clinton took office. The former President complained that the Administration had rebuffed his efforts to play a more prominent foreign policy role, even though he had dealt extensively with foreign leaders since leaving office.

In his young ally, the elder statesman found a sympathetic ear. He was able to carve out for himself an expansive role as a special presidential envoy in major foreign policy crises, an assignment that would take him to North Korea and, most recently, Haiti.

In that capacity, Carter has scored some extraordinary achievements. Negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, agreement to stop the flood of raft people from Cuba to Florida, the accord averting a U.S. invasion of Haiti--all these can be traced in whole or in part to the efforts of the former President.

But each time Carter ventured to--and sometimes apparently beyond--the limits of his authority. He blasted Clinton’s foreign policy, as when he declared himself “ashamed” of U.S. economic sanctions against Haiti. He made foreign policy on his own, as when he said the United States was prepared to suspend its pursuit of economic sanctions against North Korea.

The public could hardly be blamed for wondering whether Carter was an unguided missile or the Clinton Administration had abdicated its responsibility to conduct foreign policy.

Yet Clinton himself retains his confidence in the sometimes prickly elder statesman. The President, according to aides, is grateful for the role Carter has played in easing crises in Haiti and North Korea and expects him to continue to be active in those areas.

“They continue to have a good, substantive relationship,” a senior Clinton aide said. “While they differ on some things, and both have strongly held opinions, an awful lot binds them--they’re Democrats, Southerners who have been governors and want to bring changes in foreign policy. A lot of foreign countries do a better job than we do of using former presidents. Clinton believes this is the right way” to use them.

Clinton’s confidence rests on a long, solid, if somewhat up-and-down, relationship that dates to 1974, when Carter was Georgia’s 50-year-old governor beginning to plot his presidential campaign and Clinton was an eager 28-year-old congressional candidate from Arkansas who was already dreaming of being President.

After losing his race for Congress, Clinton supported Carter’s presidential bid in 1976 and was himself elected Arkansas attorney general that year.

From the beginning, Bill and Hillary Clinton hit it off with Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. “Jimmy Carter has always thought of Bill Clinton as one of his earliest and strongest and most visible supporters, and feels he knows him well,” a longtime Carter adviser said. “All through the presidency, the Clintons were considered part of the Carter political family.”

Although Hillary Rodham Clinton was only 30 at the time, Carter appointed her as a board member of Legal Services Corp., which provides legal advice to the poor. The corporation’s budget had been slashed by one-third, and the appointment of the aggressive young lawyer signaled Carter’s intention to revive the institution.

When Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, the former President, breaking his own rule against supporting one Democrat against another in a primary, endorsed Clinton and helped him carry the Georgia primary. It was a crucial win at a time when the Arkansas governor’s campaign was reeling over charges of draft avoidance and an extramarital affair.

Carter remained a strong supporter and lavished praise on Clinton in a speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. But after Clinton’s election, Carter felt slighted when the President-elect consulted with former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford but not with him.

Some of Clinton’s aides began spreading the word they did not want to see the new Administration become “Carterized.”

“We don’t want to see this Administration called ‘Jimmy Carter II,’ ” one Clinton adviser said at the time.

Although none of the remarks were attributed to Clinton or even to his top advisers, they caused a rift. “Clinton was busy, and I’m sure he had nothing to do with it, but the carping by some of his aides was hurtful,” one of Carter’s advisers said.

Carter felt humiliated at Clinton’s inaugural gala. The only former President in attendance, he was assigned a seat near the back. Celebrities read quotes from previous Presidents, including Reagan, but none from Carter. When Clinton spoke, he did not recognize Carter.

The former President was steaming when he returned to the Carter Center in Atlanta and resumed his busy life of conducting foreign policy discussions and traveling around the world, meeting heads of state, monitoring elections in emerging democracies and seeking remedies to problems in developing nations such as river blindness, the devastating Guinea worm and the vestiges of slavery.

Carter believed that he could at least count on his old friend, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, to help him in his ventures into foreign affairs. Carter had advised Clinton to nominate Christopher, who had served as his deputy secretary of state, calling him “the greatest public servant I’ve ever known.”

But their relationship cooled as Christopher’s State Department resisted Carter’s efforts to get more involved in foreign policy. Carter’s role as a special envoy is widely viewed, particularly at the State Department, as usurping Christopher’s powers and overshadowing Clinton’s official foreign policy team.

And while Carter’s success in easing the Haitian and North Korean crises is broadly acclaimed, some Administration officials say his role has greatly complicated Administration implementation of foreign policy. They especially resent his frequent public criticism of Administration policy.

It was not until last September, when Carter went to the White House to support the trade agreement and be an honored guest at a ceremony marking the historic Israeli-Palestinian accord, that he re-established a close relationship with Clinton. “That was a real breakthrough,” a Carter associate said. “They both came away from it saying it was very constructive, they felt very good about it.”

It was Carter’s first trip to the White House since Reagan was inaugurated to succeed him in January, 1981.

Later that morning, Clinton, Bush and Carter spoke out forcefully in the East Room of the White House at a ceremony arranged to drum up public support for NAFTA, a crucial measure that was in danger of dying in Congress.

But only Carter took on Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who was financing an anti-NAFTA campaign and had been a thorn in Clinton’s side since running third as an independent in the 1992 presidential election. In an attack that brought the audience to its feet, Carter branded Perot “a demagogue who has unlimited financial resources and who is extremely careless with the truth, who is preying on the fears and uncertainties of the American public.”

Carter’s help on the trade agreement--a Republican initiative opposed by many Democrats--further cemented his relationship with Clinton. “The President deeply appreciated his help and the fact he didn’t hesitate to take on Ross Perot,” a senior Clinton aide said.

Clinton felt that Carter’s performance set up Perot for the televised debate with Vice President Al Gore, which Gore won handily and was widely considered crucial to Congress’ passage of the trade agreement.

Before his September meeting with Clinton, Carter had told friends he felt a “sense of betrayal” because the White House had shown little interest in contacting him, and he had been rebuffed by the State Department. He made no secret that he believed his old friend Christopher had personally frozen him out.

Carter told friends that he had had better contact with the Bush White House and had an especially cordial relationship with then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

Christopher “snubbed” him, he declared, while Baker cooperated.

And last week, just after returning from his Haiti mission, Carter lavished praise on Baker in a videotaped statement for use at groundbreaking ceremonies at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston.

Ironically, Christopher, though upset at some of Carter’s excursions into foreign policy, has been a strong proponent of Presidents utilizing the services of their predecessors. In a speech at the opening of the Carter Center on Sept. 30, 1986, he deplored the fact that Presidents seldom seek their predecessors’ help. Turning to another guest, then-President Reagan, Christopher reminded him that former Presidents are a national resource who leave the White House with the ability to do great things.

“One comes away from a cursory review of the lives of the ex-Presidents with a chilling sense of a wasted resource,” Christopher said. “On the whole, their experience was undervalued and their advice too little sought.”

In recent days, Christopher has tried to make light of the rift with Carter and declared that he still views former Presidents as an “underutilized resource.” He also visited Carter at his home in Plains, Ga., on Saturday on a mission a State Department aide said was “to bury the hatchet.”

Officials described the 2 1/2-hour session, which included lunch served by the Carters, as cordial and constructive. It ended with a promise of better communication between the former President and the Clinton White House.

But regardless of any effort at reconciliation, aides to both men say the relationship is likely to remain difficult--and a complication for the Carter-Clinton relationship--as long as Christopher is secretary of state.

“Carter always considered Christopher to be a very capable deputy secretary of state,” a State Department aide said. “Their roles have changed now, and Christopher is secretary of state, but Carter still remembers him as a capable deputy and relates to him that way.”

Nor is Carter’s bond with Clinton likely to proceed without more bumps. Carter walks a difficult line. By serving as a mediator rather than purely a presidential envoy, he represents not only the United States’ position, but the position of its adversaries.

To succeed, a mediator cannot be supportive of only one side. Thus, when Carter went to Haiti, he appealed to the “honor” of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the Haitian dictator Clinton had accused of leading a reign of terror. And the agreement forged by Carter providing for the military dictators to leave office did not include a provision important to Clinton: that they also leave the country. Cedras had balked at that.

Carter’s personality has also rankled some Clinton advisers, if not the President himself. Carter is known for stubbornness, moral righteousness and being unyielding to the point of exasperating his own aides. He does not take slights lightly, as his feud with Christopher demonstrates.

Whatever problems might develop between them, however, Carter admires Clinton, as he told an Atlanta audience, as “a brilliant young man” who survived a savage political campaign and upon becoming President has grappled effectively with some “very difficult foreign policy questions” inherited from the Bush Administration.

As President, Carter endured two independent counsel investigations--one into whether he got campaign funds illegally from his peanut warehouse and one into his brother Billy’s foreign-agent relationship with Libya. No wrongdoing was found in either case.

But because of the experiences, Carter empathizes with Clinton’s ordeal as the subject of the independent counsel investigation into the Whitewater real estate venture and related matters. In fact, unbeknown to Clinton, Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, each has sent $1,000 checks, the maximum allowed, to the defense fund the President established to pay his legal fees and other expenses incurred during the investigation.