Legacy of a Crusader

The deacon is in a rush.

* Like he always is.

* He’s got diseases to stamp out, wars to stop, a vice-president to lobby, books to write, wooden furniture to sand and stain.

* And these days, as time ticks away like a stopwatch around his neck and age begins to overtake energy, he has a successor to find and a final transition to make.

* It’s a mountain of work. But this morning, “the deacon”--the Secret Service code name for Jimmy Carter--just needs to get to the polls in Georgetown, Guyana, and watch what’s going on.

* As he rides toward a voting center in a bumper-to-bumper column of some of the best-scrubbed steel in the country, everyone turns to look. They stare as four trucks pull up, a door is flung open, a pair of white Reeboks feel for the ground and the 39th president of the United States steps out.

“What’s going on here? Why aren’t you voting?” Carter asks after stooping through the doorway of the polling station and immediately sensing the idleness.

No ink, a poll worker mumbles. No ink to stamp ballots.

“Let’s make some,” Carter says, digging in his pocket for a ballpoint.

He hands a pen to a Secret Service agent, who chops it in half with a commando knife the size of a hacksaw and carefully extracts the goopy liquid that, from the size of the eyes fixated on the table, is as cherished here as light, sweet crude.

Carter then reaches back toward the door, grabs the first person in line--a 20-year-old man in a basketball jersey and dreadlocks--and says: “Young man, it’s time to vote!”

As a crusader for human rights, Carter has stooped through the slanting doorways of hundreds of polling places from Guyana to Indonesia to monitor elections.

He has stretched the cachet of the Oval Office to promote a mix of democratic values and Christian teachings, and no other ex-commander-in-chief has worked as doggedly after leaving the White House.

But at 76, Jimmy Carter is finally slowing down.

He and his wife, Rosalynn, are looking for high-profile successors to lead the Carter Center, their private peace-making foundation based in Atlanta. Bill Bradley and Robert Rubin are among the possibilities. One of the Carters’ projects now is to raise enough money to pay the salaries of such top-shelf talent.

The Carters spend more time at their peanut farm in Georgia than they once did, fishing, watching birds, hiking together and grilling quail and venison that come from the woods. They go on fewer trips. He makes fewer speeches.

Though he is healthy, motivated and as intense as ever, these days are the twilight of his career and the end of a uniquely ambitious ex-presidency.

“We’re actively preparing for the day when the Carter Center can proceed without us,” Carter says. “Whatever is the limit of our influence, I’d like to expand it with the remaining months or years that I have on this earth.”

*

THE ANXIETY WAS PALPABLE AS THE PRIVATE JET from Atlanta swooped down over the mango trees and rice paddies and landed at the Georgetown airfield March 16. Just three days before nationwide elections, the capital of Guyana was edging toward chaos. Helmeted soldiers patrolled the streets. Shop windows were covered with wood. The last time votes were cast here, the country’s two main ethnic groups, the Afro-Guyanese (descendants of slaves) and the Indo-Guyanese (descendants of laborers from India), clashed in the streets over election results and nearly drove the nation to civil war.

Carter would later say, “I’ve traveled to more than 120 countries and have never seen a society as divided as Guyana.” But upon arrival, he told a crowd of journalists: “This is a fine little country, with tremendous natural resources and human capital. We’re hoping it can pull off peaceful elections.”

Then he smiled his warm, toothy smile.

Guyana is one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, just a notch above troubled Haiti. Tucked between Venezuela and Brazil, it’s an obscure slice of the tropics many Americans know only by what happened in November 1978, when Jim Jones and 900 cult followers drank a cocktail of Kool-Aid and cyanide and killed themselves in the jungle.

The capital is a lazy, muggy, peeling-paint type of place with wide, quiet streets and a Caribbean sense of time--or lack of it. Sleepy-eyed vendors sell body-temperature Cokes along the curb. School boys drift home in happy packs while older ladies wilt under parasols. The city was built along the Atlantic Ocean, but the coastline here is muddy and coffee-colored from all the rivers that thunder through inland forests and drain into the sea. After the Carters went to bed that first night, three of his top Guyana advisors met by the hotel pool. While a reggae band sang and a dancer rolled her glossy stomach, the men hunched together and plotted out election strategy. They feared the losing party would riot.

“The question is: What can Carter do in three days?” asked David Carroll, the Carter Center’s No. 2 aide for election missions. “Do we want to go longterm or just see this thing through the election?”

They agreed to take this up with Carter in the morning. The threesome then turned back to the music and to Banks, the local beer.

*

REFEREEING ELECTIONS WAS NOT SOMETHING Carter set out to do when he returned to Plains, Ga., Jan. 20, 1981, humiliated by a landslide loss to Ronald Reagan. In one day the former Navy officer and moderate Democrat went from being the most powerful person on earth to a bankrupt peanut farmer. For the first time in his life, his future was completely uncertain.

“We didn’t ever anticipate monitoring any elections when we started the Carter Center [in 1982],” Carter said in an interview in Guyana. “We were just going to negotiate between warring parties. But we soon found out that holding an honest election could either resolve an ongoing war or prevent one.”

It didn’t take long to shore up finances (he published his memoirs) and get back to public service. A born-again Baptist who lives the way he thinks Jesus would, Carter takes great satisfaction in helping others. His parents showed him how: his mother, Miss Lillian, fixed sandwiches for hobos trudging past their farm, and his father, James Earl Sr., supplied seeds to sharecroppers during the Depression.

“Once you take the bold step, the difficult step, of reaching out to others,” Carter said, “it’s a very exciting thing.”

After observing a turbulent election in Panama in 1989 at the request of the Bush administration, Carter decided to add elections to his widening portfolio. It helped him spread democracy. And see the world.

“As you can see, it’s not only a challenge but kind of an unpredictable adventure,” he said in Guyana.

Rosalynn goes with him on every trip; they remain the tightest of partners. She is as engaged in his life and work as when she scribbled notes on a spiral pad during Cabinet meetings.

“When you travel to these countries and see how much others are willing to do to help, it just makes you feel so bad that our country isn’t doing more,” she said. “I mean, when you see these people sick and hungry and dying, and babies dying. I picked one up one day that died. And to think in our country foreign aid is a dirty word. It’s just very upsetting.”

*

IF ANYONE HELD THE JINGLING KEYS TO A SAFE AND FAIR election in Guyana it was Joe Singh, a handsome, sturdy former general and head of Guyana’s elections commission.

“Good to see you again, president,” Singh said as Carter, his wife and five advisors took their seats in a hotel room with an air conditioner so loud it sounded as if an old Chevy were parked in the room.

Carter wore a blazer, string tie, slacks and penny loafers. He skipped over pleasantries. There were just two days until the polls. He cut right to business, homing in on details, leaning into questions.

“How much does it cost per unit to make voter ID cards?”

“What would be the degree of authenticity that would necessitate a recount?”

“How many yards away should party operatives be from polling stations?”

Singh had all the answers. Carter looked pleased. But as the meeting broke up and people began to file out, Carter pulled the barrel-chested general aside for a private chat.

“Carter always likes to go a little one-on-one at the end of a meeting,” said Charles Costello, head of the Carter Center’s democracy programs, who has traveled with him on several missions. “It’s like putting the ball in Michael Jordan’s hands late in the game. That’s when he makes things really happen.”

*

WHEN HE’S NOT MONITORING ELECTIONS, CARTER IS woodworking, writing (he’s authored 15 books), building houses with Habitat for Humanity, fund-raising, chairing election-reform meetings, teaching Sunday school and doing a million other things. His schedule is so tightly choreographed it’s as if he’s still president.

A recent day at the Carter Center began with breakfast of fruit and cereal at 7:30 a.m., videotaping a statement for an economic conference at 9:15, meeting with students, lunching with professors, teaching a class at 2 p.m. and then at 4:30 rushing off to the airport to catch a flight to Dubai to collect an environmental award.

Why is he so busy?

Some say that, having been tossed aside by voters, he’s on a quest for redemption. Specifically, a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s been nominated more than 10 times, including this year, though the honor has eluded him each go-round.

“Sure, he’d want it, but I don’t think that’s what motivates him,” says Washington lawyer and close friend Terry Adamson. “He already gets great access to world leaders.”

Much of his work in human rights, energy conservation and spreading democracy are continuations of policies that he fashioned in the Oval Office. It’s almost as if parts of his presidency never ended. But his methods don’t always win praise. When he intervened in an escalating dispute between North and South Korea in 1994, he was criticized by Clinton’s inner circle for getting too chummy with North Korea’s dictator.

Friends like Adamson aren’t surprised when they call Carter in Plains and learn he’s boning up for the next mission or draining a pond out back or hammering shingles on the roof. He’s been a little less active since injuring a shoulder in December while jogging on the beach in San Diego. That meant he couldn’t finish a wooden chest he was building, which deeply frustrated him.

His obsession with achievement and his habit of squeezing the utility out of every minute lend a certain distance to him. It doesn’t jibe with his image as avuncular and warm. But he’s not one to schmooze. He rarely hangs out. He’s not great about laughing at himself.

“If he tells a funny story--which isn’t really him--it most likely won’t be about himself, it will be about you,” says Steven Hochman, a historian who has worked closely with Carter since 1981.

The simple explanation for his drive is religion. At the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, where groups of tourists come to listen to an ex-president teach Sunday school, Carter recently told the story of being born again.

After losing the race for Georgia governor in 1966 to segregationist Lester Maddox, he stumbled around the woods and found Jesus within the trees.

“I felt I had been betrayed by God, that he had let a racist beat me,” he told 150 churchgoers. “But it was then that I learned to turn tragedy into an expansive experience. I realized that there are times when God can give us heightened levels of eloquence and effectiveness. It’s in us, but it’s not ours. It’s God’s.”

*

IN GUYANA, A MEETING Carter hosted with nine religious and community leaders quickly splintered into a table-pounding, jaw-clenching spat. Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese shouted at each other from across the room as Carter sat in his shirt-sleeves at the head of a wooden table, blinking at first, reluctant to jump in.

Polls were opening in less than 24 hours. No trouble yet, but there was a buzz everywhere, like a cloud of thirsty mosquitoes, that violence was coming.

“I was beaten and jailed under one government and then beaten and jailed under the next,” said a union representative at the beginning of the meeting. “With all due respect to you, sir,” he said, locking eyes with Carter, “I feel this is a waste of my time.”

Carter handed the union man a chunk of silence. Then he called on someone else and the conversation plunged.

“The people in the poorer neighborhoods,” said a Hindu activist, thinly veiling a reference to the black areas, “they’ll line up outside and dance around after they voted and say they didn’t vote. This is how they are. They’ll lie and--”

“Doctor! I will not hear these things!” snapped one of the black representatives. “Don’t say such stupid things about my people. If this is true, prove it. Don’t divide us.”

“Me dividing you?” the Hindu man returned. “You must be foolish . . . .”

Then others jumped in. More shouts.

Carter let the moment reach its boiling point. When he spoke, his voice resonated with a timbre and his concentration and articulation were at game-day highs, helping him find all the sensible words and concrete suggestions for which his mind is famous.

“What you need,” he said, “are some traditions. This is difficult, I know. But you need fair ways to appoint a supreme court justice, an auditor general, a permanent election commission. You need to share power between the two ethnic groups. Other countries have figured out how to do this. Now you must.”

Shortly after, Carter adjourned the meeting. The people left the room nodding. Carter looked energized. Color filled his face.

“That hour was worth more than a hundred memos,” said Jason Calder, a Carter aide. “That’s how deep tensions are. I couldn’t have scripted it better.”

*

WHEN CARTER LEFT THE White House in January 1981, he computed his own life expectancy and figured he had 25 years left.

“He’s very practical like that,” says friend Terry Adamson, a trustee of the Carter Center. “We’ve had a lot of frank and open discussions about what will happen to the Carter Center when there is no Carter. He and Rosalynn don’t shy away from the topic.”

It’s not as if he is retiring tomorrow. He plans to monitor more elections this year. He is deeply committed to peace in the Sudan, still mired in an 18-year civil war. In April, Carter called Vice President Dick Cheney to volunteer his services in Sudan, and he has met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

But the center is moving ahead in the search for its next leader. With a staff of 150 and a $50-million annual budget, it needs someone who can raise money and network at high levels of government. In addition to peace and democracy programs, the Carter Center oversees dozens of agriculture, forestry and disease-prevention projects in 65 countries around the world. One of its greatest achievements has been nearly eradicating guinea worm disease, which used to cripple 5 million people per year.

Former Sen. Bill Bradley went to Atlanta last summer, after he lost the Democratic nomination for president, to talk about a leadership position. Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary and now co-chairman of banking giant Citigroup, is another person Carter hopes will play a key role.

“Bob’s interested in our work, but the spare time he and I thought he would have has not materialized,” Carter says.

Rubin sidestepped the question about his own plans but said it’s “very doable” to find a successor.

“President Carter has done so much to establish the center that the right person will be able to carry it on,” he says.

One idea is to have the center, located on a shady hill near downtown Atlanta, led not by one person but by a group of distinguished people with different regional specialties.

“This occupies a major part of my time,” Carter says. “Not only making preparations for the transition--which is going to come--but also having the Carter Center so financially sound that the work may continue in an unabated fashion.”

The inescapable truth is that Carter’s departure will leave a huge void. Even his critics give him that.

“He and I don’t always have the same view on the geopolitical side,” says Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Richard M. Nixon. “But it would be hard to find someone who is perceived to be so unselfish and so dedicated to the cause.”

*

FINDING THE INK SO THE people could be heard was the highlight of Guyana’s polling day. Afterward, Carter toured another two dozen voting places, striding into dusty rooms with a clipboard and a Secret Service entourage, sometimes questioning poll workers, sometimes squeezing the hands of voters who had spent hours waiting under a stinging sun to check a box on a ballot. By the end of the day, he was drained.

Violence came later, after the delayed election results were finally released and Carter had returned to Atlanta.

There wasn’t the widespread mayhem many had anticipated. Three days after the election, a crowd of disgruntled voters, mostly Afro-Guyanese, threw rocks at police. Their party had lost and soldiers with tear gas were dispatched to quiet a few neighborhoods.

Carter had seen this coming. An hour before he left Guyana, he drafted an agreement for the two sides to sign that would commit them to working together. Neither did.

But Carter doesn’t get discouraged. He doesn’t have time for it.

A few weeks ago he stepped into a class of beaming undergraduates at Emory University in Atlanta.

“How y’all doing,” he began his guest lecture. “Can anyone here tell me where Guyana is?”