Delta Air Lines Flight 701 from Washington`s National Airport to Atlanta`s Hartsfield is fully booked, the plane is still at the gate and the passengers are settling into the 171 seats in the coach section when a smiling man with slightly hunched shoulders starts walking slowly from the first-class section toward the back of the Boeing 757 airliner. At each row, three abreast on both sides, the man stops to shake hands, and he very quietly but firmly reintroduces himself, just as he did those 15 years ago in state after state, in airplanes and buses and trains, when nobody knew, much less cared.
”Hi, I`m Jimmy Carter.”
”Hi, I`m Jimmy Carter.”
”Hi, I`m Jimmy Carter.”
”Hi, I`m Jimmy Carter.”
Surprise and recognition sweep down the plane`s aisle like a stadium wave; some even stand to gawk at the celebrity, but most of the passengers on this late Tuesday afternoon flight are businessmen in suits who look rumpled and ready for home. Despite the cramped cabin, despite the humidity, they begin smiling, and when it becomes evident that Jimmy Carter is not going to miss anyone, a charm seems to suffuse the cabin. If it is vanity for a man to insist on introducing himself to 171 strangers who all happen to be going to Atlanta on a particular rainy Tuesday afternoon, there is also a fetching humility at work. His fellow passengers smile back and say hello, while others try a light banter, recalling a time they voted for him, a moment perhaps they saw him on television or at a rally.
”How do you like broccoli?” one man jokes, playing off President Bush`s decision to ban it on Air Force One. ”I like broccoli,” Carter says, taking the question, it seems, quite seriously, just as he approached questions during his presidency. He is being serious, even dour. Then, as Carter turns to work the opposite row, the white-haired former president looks back over his shoulder and smiles, ”If I didn`t, my wife would make me eat it.”
Jimmy Carter seems to have stretched the seasons of life just a little beyond the normal; at age 65 he is enjoying a new spring, both to his career and to his reputation. Almost a decade after he left the presidency, scorned and defeated by Ronald Reagan, Carter, or at least the image of Jimmy Carter, is undergoing a major transformation.
Of the 40 men who have been president, only a few have gone on for special recognition after leaving office. John Quincy Adams, for instance, was elected to Congress after the White House and showed an activist streak by defending a group of African slaves on trial for mutiny. Herbert Hoover, whose presidency also lasted only one term and was as disappointing as Carter`s, responded heartily after World War II when Harry Truman called on him to help reorganize the mushrooming federal government. The contrast for Carter, however, is not with those earlier presidents but with three other former chief executives who are still alive.
In the exclusive club of ex-presidents, Carter looks pretty impressive. His popularity now is higher than when he was president. More significantly, in an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, it was higher than Ronald Reagan`s, a man for whom Carter can barely contain his disdain. To some, such as Rep. David Obey, a powerful and principled voice in the House, Reagan is looking more and more like ”a man with his hand out,” trying to capitalize as much as possible on the presidency.
Gerald Ford has kept the lowest profile-golfing, serving in corporate directorships and, with a few exceptions, staying out of involvement in world affairs. Though he often speaks on college campuses, the enduring image of Gerald Ford is of a man in plaid pants moving from middle age to old age by walking the nation`s golf courses.
Richard Nixon has taken the more traditional role of elder statesman, writing books on foreign policy and, during trips to China and the Soviet Union, serving as an unofficial emissary for both presidents Reagan and Bush. During his presidency, Jimmy Carter was known for his born-again Christianity, but this secular rebirth of his image is part of a grander drama. Just as other events-the fall of the Shah of Iran and the 444-day U.S. embassy hostage crisis in Tehran-contributed to Carter`s political downfall in 1980, there is a confluence of people and attitudes in the nation and the world that is persuading people to re-examine the Plains, Ga., native.
The pro-democratic movements in Eastern Europe, in the Baltics and the truncated one in China, to cite only three momentous events, have focused attention on human rights, one of Carter`s most important concerns while in office. Rep. Dante Fascell, a Florida Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, recalls that until Carter championed human rights as a presidential issue, it ”had been buried in the bottom of the dustiest portfolio in international diplomacy.”
The release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa also suggested the possibility that confrontation could actually be replaced by dialogue, recalling another past and current interest of the ex-president. Even the stale antagonisms of the Middle East serve as a reminder, albeit a negative one, that Carter once had influence there, that 17 days at Camp David were able to breathe hope into the until-then-hopeless region.
Carter`s friend and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young believes that Carter is expanding on that theme again, getting ahead of the historic curve once more by extending his ideas of human rights to the very basic notion of a right to health.
GUINEA WORM DISEASE AFFLICTS SOME 10 million people a year, most of them living in a band that girdles the central portion of Africa. Though there are dozens of tropical diseases, the one Carter chose to focus on is not a romantic disease, if any could be described that way, because there is no dramatic onset or relief from the affliction. People of all ages ingest the larvae of Guinea worms by drinking from ponds and cisterns of stagnant, contaminated water, and their bodies become host organisms that continue the worm`s 12-month life cycle. During that cycle, the worm grows to nearly three feet in length and works its way out of the intestines and rests just below the surface of the skin until it breaks through, usually emerging around the ankles and feet. The Guinea worm ailment, Carter likes to speculate, may be the same one that the Bible describes as the ”fiery serpent” that the Israelites suffered on the shores of the Red Sea.
As the sufferers of the disease experience more worms, they are unable to function, work in the field or attend school. In a half-dozen African nations and in some isolated areas of India and Pakistan, young and old hobble along the dirt paths with multiple sores on the bottoms of their feet.
The disease spreads as those infected walk into cool water holes to relieve the burning feeling and release more larvae into the water supply. The disease, whose official name is Dracunculiasis, was prevalent in other peasant cultures, including 19th Century Russia, until local authorities dug wells and thus isolated the drinking water.
”There are 100 different problems, but we decided that something tangible could be done” in eradicating Guinea worm disease, Carter said on the morning he received a $2 million donation from American Cyanamid Co., the manufacturer of a larvacide developed 20 years ago to stop mosquitoes but that also turned out to be the ideal agent to break the Guinea worm`s life cycle.
Guinea worm disease can be wiped off the Earth within the next five years, Carter suggests with a familiar lilt to his voice, and he says after that he will go after river blindness and measles and yaws.
”It is doable,” Carter`s friend and former appointee, Peter Bourne, insists, and it is that resolve that suggests what Jimmy Carter is doing is perhaps more interesting than Jimmy Carter himself. For all those who disagree with him, those who resent his failure, those who just never cottoned to the man from Plains, there is perhaps this message that Carter embodies: Find something bigger than yourself, find something more interesting than your own life, have a mission, have a ministry.
Carter actually has several.
”It`s now a fact that almost every conflict in the world is a civil war, a domestic war, whereas years back the wars were between two adjacent countries. . . . A lot of it is based on ethnic conflict, religious conflict, competition, depletion of natural resources and the quality of life because of environmental depletion, no more wood to burn, no more clean water to drink.” Last year, by Carter`s count, there were 113 conflicts in the world; of those, 21 were major wars (which he arbitrarily defines as more than 1,000 deaths a year) and of those, only two were between nations. All the rest were domestic or civil wars. The United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Organization of African Unity, 39 Commonwealth countries and the foreign policy of the United States of America, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union preclude any communications with revolutionaries. ”This leaves a horrible vacuum in the world political system in dealing with wars,” the former president says.
He also believes another element is at work. ”There`s an innate racism that exists among us in this country that conceals from our awareness the devastation of those wars that are not being addressed.” He has tried to mediate in the devastating war between Ethiopia and the Eritreans, a separatist conflict that has claimed nearly a million lives over the last 29 years. He also cites the neighboring conflict between the government of Sudan and the Sudan Liberation Movement in which up to 260,000 people have died, mostly from starvation because each side blocks relief supplies to their enemy. ”Can you imagine if 260 people, instead of 260,000, had died in Eastern Europe? It would have permeated the headlines throughout the Western world,” says Carter, who is expected at the Organization of African Unity meeting this week in Addis Ababa.
”We call it the mediation gap, and it`s a significant gap,” says Dayle Powell, a former federal prosecutor in Alabama whom Carter recruited to direct what he calls the ”conflict resolution” program. ”Of these small wars,”
she says, ”three-fourths of them occur in Africa and Asia. What is most important is that four-fifths of the deaths are civilians. We`re not killing off soldiers in these wars; people are starving to death as a consequence of war, or civilians are dying for lack of a communicable-disease eradication.” These problems may increase in more familiar areas as well. As totalitarian domination collapses in Eastern Europe, Carter believes the ethnic divisions and conflicts are going to increase. He is enthusiastic about the idea of internationally supervised elections, with Panama, Namibia and Nicaragua being the most recent examples, and Kampuchea, Afghanistan and Ethiopia being the best examples of the need for some kind of outside mediation. ”I don`t see any other way to change from a revolutionary environment into a harmonious and peaceful environment except through internationally supervised elections,” he says.
While Carter associates talk about ”private diplomacy” and Carter recognizes he has no organized constituency, he does have one significant and almost unique advantage. ”I have the ability, as a former president, to get an appointment with almost any person in the world whom I want to see.”
Spoken with a kind of straightforward modesty, it gets an appreciative laugh from his audience one day at a class in Christian ethics at Emory University. He says it with an almost wide-eyed innocence, and though it is part of his stump speech about the workings of the Carter Center in Atlanta, he delivers it with just the right pitch, as if it just occurred to him the other day, and yes, by golly, he should admit such advantages.
Carter also consults with Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Americas Watch, Helsinki Watch, Africa Watch and some European groups that focus on human rights and the need to be vigilant against governments, totalitarian or otherwise, whose nature seems to dismiss human rights. These groups, Carter says, send him ”their most onerous or troubling cases of human-rights oppression, and I deal directly with the leader of the nation in which abuses are taking place. Sometimes with a personal visit, sometimes with a secret message and, always, with a threat that their oppression will be exposed by me.”
CARTER RETURNS TO THE THEME ONE morning at a breakfast gathering of businessmen and contributors. ”I don`t know if you realize it or not, but if I state that in certain countries human-rights abuses are taking place, it has a fairly significant impact,” Carter explains, using a matter-of-factness that emphasizes the impact, ”because in some of those smaller nations, their income, investment from Western sources and aid programs are heavily dependent on their reputation as not being a human-rights oppressor. So we are able to do something in the human-rights field.”
On return flights from his private diplomatic ventures, Carter says he takes out his portable computer and types up three letters. One is sent to the private sponsor who donated funds to pay for the trip; another, ”more secret,” letter is sent to President Bush; and a third letter is often addressed to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. ”Gorbachev is the most transforming political figure in history that I know about, in a positive impact and his influence, beneficial influence is hard to measure,” Carter says with an effusiveness he doesn`t easily bestow on anyone else.
