Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter, wearing faded, tight-fitting blue jeans and a white, yellow and blue polo shirt with the initials of the U. S. Naval Academy, relaxed in an easy chair and propped his loafers on a coffee table last week. In a few days, on Oct. 1, the former president would turn 75 years old. Now, in his spacious office at the Carter Center, he was spending an hour reflecting on questions about his presidency and post-presidency, his relations with President Bill Clinton and three former presidents and even about life and death and his 53 years of marriage with Rosalynn.

Carter, who has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, disclosed that he had expected to receive the award in 1994 for his efforts in North Korea, Bosnia and Haiti, but is now reconciled to never receiving that honor. He also voiced irritation that the Clinton administration has sometimes excluded the Carter Center from its international diplomacy. Yet, the former president was clearly at ease with himself and the life he has made since leaving the Oval Office in 1981.

He had just finished printing out a manuscript copy of his 14th book, a memoir about growing up in the South during the Depression. And he waxed enthusiastically about his 15th book, a novel-in-progress about the Revolutionary War that is three-fourths completed. He plans to write other books, he confides, but never another with Rosalynn because the tensions created by the one book they co-authored, dealing with health issues, almost wrecked their marriage. “We can’t do that,” he said. “Rosalynn is too strong-willed. And I am, too.” They disagreed so vociferously on some points that they included notations in the text specifying that one or the other was the sole author of particular portions of the book.

Through exercise, a careful diet and an active and disciplined life, Carter has kept the same lean build he had when he left the White House more than 18 years ago. The former Georgia governor and one-time peanut farmer rises promptly at 5 a.m. every day and gets right to work, whether writing or tackling one of the Carter Center’s many international projects. He goes to bed by 10 o’clock or 10:30.

The former president talks unabashedly about his deep love for his wife, and both of them say these are the best years of their lives. In his 1998 book, “The Virtues of Aging,” Carter, writing about older couples continuing to enjoy sexual relations, observed that “well past 70, Rosalynn and I have learned to accommodate each other’s desires more accurately and generously, and have never had a more complete and enjoyable relationship.”

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Question: You wrote about there still being a lot of prejudice against the aged, that it’s like sexism or racism.

Answer: There is. A lot of that is self-criticism. It’s the underestimation of people about growing older, about what they’re still capable of doing, so they withdraw from active and expansive participation in life and lead an increasingly and unnecessarily restrictive life. . . . In generic terms, America does slough away a tremendous reservoir of potentially beneficial human beings because they themselves, and the general society, put a limit on us. Like a mandatory retirement age of 60. Or almost all the major corporate boards require somebody to resign when they’re 65. I’m fortunate in that that has not affected me. Rosalynn’s mother had to retire from the post office when she was 70. She’s now 94. She could have worked 15 more years, I think, and very beneficially. But I tried to outline in the book some things that might be used to accommodate that: part-time work, obviously beneficent work. We have people in their 90s that are still helping us build houses for Habit for Humanity.

Q: You’re just turning 75 and you’re as busy as you were when you were 65 or 55. I want to know your secret.

A: I spent a year or two studying other people’s aging processes when I wrote “Virtues of Aging.” I talked to people and analyzed my own habits and those of Rosalynn and how other people in my family have done. But I think I’ve just been blessed. So far, I’ve had good health. We are vigorous. Rosalynn and I do everything together, which is one secret. But we take up new habits, like climbing mountains or bird watching or fly fishing or downhill skiing. We do it together. We’re always together, just about. We have unique responsibilities.

But I think that keeps us vigorous and interested in things. I’ve had the Carter Center as an almost unlimited menu from which I could choose. . . . We have, for any particular day, maybe 50 things presented to us that we could select, and we choose the ones that we want to do. It’s never boring. Negotiating peace and dealing with human-rights problems at the highest possible level. We monitor elections and promote democracy. We have health programs, agriculture programs in Africa. We have programs in 65 foreign countries. And with a former president, the opportunities to consummate a desire are almost unlimited. When I go to an African country it is a big deal. It’s not as big as the queen of England, but it’s a big deal.

Q: You’re treated like a head of state?

A: Exactly. And that makes it possible for me to do things that many other people can’t do. Just a telephone call from me, sometimes two minutes, can resolve a frustrated effort by someone else that’s been going on for a year or two.

Q: In “The Virtues of Aging,” you wrote that you and Mrs. Carter have had some pretty heated arguments in the past that lasted for a while. Is there a competitiveness in the relationship that can add to the friction?

A: I think so. We had two or three serious arguments years ago. And we survived those OK because, I think, the intensity of our love finally overcame the problems that made our life with each other uncomfortable for several months. We’ve had a few little aggravated things. . . . One was about punctuality. I am still a fanatic on punctuality.

Q: You and Mrs. Carter have executed living wills to exclude any artificial prolongation of your lives. Do you recommend that to other people?

A: I do.

Q: And do you think that should be made more available to people?

A: I do. And more publicized. My father died at home in his bed. My mother died in the hospital with all of us around her--still conversant an hour before she died. Billy died at home in his bed. . . . Ruth died in her bed with all of us around her. And so did Gloria, she died in the hospital. [Billy, Ruth and Gloria were Carter’s siblings.]

Q: And they all had living wills?

A: No, but they chose at the time not to be artificially sustained in life. . . .

Q: President Clinton recently presented both you and Mrs. Carter with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Can you say something about your relationship with Clinton? It’s been a little bit rocky in the past--

A: It’s been quite rocky in the past. But, I think, the last few months, at least, both of us have gone out of our way to be reconciled and to understand each other a little bit better. I’d say the exclusion of the Carter Center by the Clinton administration from issues and assignments that I thought were appropriate for us is what caused my problem . . . . When President Clinton went into office and the Washington Post and others began to report all the people that he brought in around him, in foreign policy, were Jimmy Carter people--at that time, I really had a very low reputation--my stature in the country was lower six years ago than it is now. But, I think, there was just a general statement, OK, we will not use Carter.

Q: Any particular projects you can think of?

A: I have offered a number of times to be directly involved when I had an opening in the Mideast. In recent years, since I came back from North Korea, I have had direct invitations from the North Koreans to come back and help resolve a crisis, and [from] Sudan.

Q: But has the Clinton administration resisted your going back to North Korea?

A: Yes. Yes. All three of those places.

Q: Any other place?

A: That’s the only three I want to mention. What we’ve done is to carve out for the Carter Center in the fields of foreign policy--although we have no authority--those areas of the world where it does not create a problem with the White House or the State Department. And that’s primarily the forgotten kinds of nations. . . .

His people know what I’m doing, and I have never been on a trip overseas that I didn’t send him immediately, the day after I returned home, a full report on everything I did that I think is important.

Q: What is your relationship with Vice President Al Gore?

A: Friendly, I would say. After Gore and Clinton were reelected, I realized that we had a problem in this Carter Center relationship. I never have had a problem personally with President Clinton or anyone else, but I wanted particularly to see if I had done things that aggravated the White House, and I know I’m pretty aggressive when I go overseas. Clearly when I went down to Panama--I read articles in the news magazines [that they thought] that I had gone too far. Well, I wanted to get that straightened out, so I went up and spent a whole day with Al Gore explaining the problem and hoping that we could work it out. And Al has been, I think, adequately supportive of us, but I have been there, and I know that there’s a limit on what the vice president can do.

Q: What are your views on Hillary Clinton running for the Senate?

A: That’s her right to do so. I don’t have any doubt that her candidacy has and will hurt Al Gore’s candidacy. But I think she’s obviously brilliant. . . .

Q: Why will it hurt him? Because it raises his connection with the Clintons?

A: Yeah. To the extent that the Clinton family is a negative factor, and I don’t know what extent that is, I think her keeping it so vividly on the nationwide consciousness is not helping Al Gore. And it’s not her fault, obviously, that her campaigning in New York does have global interest. But it not only detracts from fund-raising and so forth for him in New York state, but it’s a big story in Montana.

Q: You’ve been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize, and many people think it’s long overdue.

A: There has been a book written that in 1979 the Nobel committee voted to give the prize to me and Israeli Prime Minister [Menachem] Begin and Egyptian President [Anwar] Sadat, but because they didn’t have a nomination [of Carter] in before the end of February, I did not get it. The only year that I expected to get it--and I have never talked about this--was in 1994, when we went to North Korea and, I think, defused what could have been a war. That was a singular thing that we did. The same year we went to Haiti and, I think, defused a dangerous situation. It just happened that that December, because I was urged by the Bosnians to come over there, I did, and I negotiated a four-month binding cease-fire between the Serbs and the regime in Sarajevo, and all of that was done in the same year. And I was nominated. So I thought I was likely to get it that year. . . .

I’m completely reconciled now not ever to get it because I don’t have the opportunity to do things like I did.

Q: How do you think historians will judge your presidency?

A: I think there’s an increasing acceptance of it. I’m certainly prejudiced. . . . I feel quite at ease with it. As [former Vice President Walter F.] Fritz Mondale says, we’ve kept the mission of peace. We never violated the law and so forth. There are some things that we did that have not yet been acknowledged. . . . I was an outstanding small businessman. And I thought when I went to Washington that we should let free enterprise prevail, for instance, which is something that’s not truly remembered. We deregulated everything. We deregulated the railroads, the airlines, trucking, banking, television, radio, oil, gas, and all of the infrastructure of our nation economically speaking was deregulated by us, by me, with obviously full support from the Congress. But it was a transforming four years. We more than doubled the size of the nation’s parks, we tripled the size of the nation’s wilderness areas. We passed stringent laws on the environment, strip-mining and so forth. I never launched a missile, I never dropped a bomb on anybody, never fired a weapon in anger.

Q: What would you want your legacy as president to be?

A: I would like to be remembered for promoting human rights and maybe some of the things that I’ve done here at the Carter Center. I don’t feel I have to struggle to create an image. *