”President Reagan came into office, and his response to troubled areas of the world was to send in the military,” he says, citing Lebanon, the decision to organize a contra war, the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya. ”This very quickly aroused great patriotic fervor and popularity for him. But at the same time (that) it made him popular, it created a worldwide impression that the United States` solution for trouble is conflict, military action. Now, I think, the world`s not coming back to me, but the world`s coming back toward a more rational attitude toward a superpower that ought to use its influence, not for exacerbating death and destruction, but for finding a peaceful solution.”
Carter loathes Reagan, a feeling that is apparently mutual. Though Reagan traveled to Atlanta in 1986 and delivered a gracious speech to dedicate the Carter Center, a White House official who traveled with Reagan said it was delivered with actor`s skill and absolutely no conviction. The antipathy between the two men has endured well beyond the 1980 campaign because Reagan, in effect, campaigned against Carter for nearly a decade, first as a candidate and then when he blamed Carter for every flaw, every doubt, every failure in government policy. For all Reagan`s luck in having a ”Teflon presidency,”
Carter has described himself as being the ”Velcro president,” the one that attracted every problem.
The disagreements over policy and ideology even turned personal and nasty, and Carter recalls how during the Reagan years he would travel to some nations only to discover that the U.S. ambassador there had intervened and canceled most of his appointments with government officials. ”Which gives you more pleasure, good stories about you or bad stories about Ronald Reagan?”
someone once asked Carter, and he repeats the question with that Carter smile that is both wicked and angelic. But he won`t answer the question.
AFTER HIS DEFEAT, CARTER focused on his woodworking and cabinet-building and worked on his memoirs. He sold off the failing peanut warehouse and re-established his presence in Plains, where he still teaches Sunday school in the Maranatha Baptist Church. One week each year he and Rosalynn go to an inner-city area with their tools and blue jeans to help build houses for the homeless. Carter looks more relaxed now, happier perhaps than during most of his presidency. He also seems more rested than even a few years ago when he was establishing the Carter Center, raising the $25 million for the facilities, the library (now deeded over to the federal government, which operates it) and the museum of Carter`s life and presidency.
His hair is gray and thinner, with white highlights. What at one point looked like the beginning of a turkey-gobbler neck is gone now, along with any excess weight. After a decade, Carter still seems in remarkable condition; he is a serious runner, doing five miles without strain; he plays tennis with his wife on their back-yard court in Plains. Carter has told others that he cannot recall ever having a cold or the flu in his life. He also claims never to experience jet lag. When he returned from the Middle East earlier this year, he detoured to Hawaii to deliver a speech and the next day returned to Atlanta shortly after 1 a.m. At 4:45 a.m. he was up and ready to go turkey hunting.
If there is a sense of urgency to what he does, it could stem from his family`s medical history. His mother, Lillian, lived until she was 85, but Carter`s father died at 59, and his two sisters and brother all died at relatively young ages. The last was Gloria Carter Spann, who died last March at the age of 63. His other sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, died at 54 in 1983, and Billy, his often infamous brother, died in 1988 when he was 51. All died of pancreatic cancer.
”He feels it. He cries about it,” says Charles Kirbo, Carter`s friend and confidant. ”Everybody`s family dies sooner or later. (But) I know it hurts him.” Kirbo, who is 73, is Carter`s personal lawyer and was often described as a ”one-man kitchen cabinet” during the White House years. He recalls talking to Carter on the phone one day and telling him that of the eight children in Kirbo`s own family, only two of them were left. He recalls Carter`s friendly reply, ”Hell, there ain`t but one of me.”
Of course, ”Rosie” is there. Just as during the White House years, Rosalynn Smith Carter is very much in evidence. Mrs. Carter was
”inconsolable” for a long while after the election, according to people who know the family, but now she is as vigorous as her husband in creating this post-White House life. The couple`s small apartment within the Carter Center separates his and her offices, but any time during the day, she`ll quietly walk in and drop something on his desk. She not only travels with Carter through Africa and the Middle East but sits in on his luncheon and dinner speeches-even at the 7 a.m. breakfasts he is fond of conducting at the center. They co-authored ”Everything To Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life” and together they go fly-fishing (described in another book, ”An Outdoor Journal”) up at their cabin in the wooded hills northwest of Atlanta or in Pennsylvania (where he used to sneak away from Camp David and the press) and in upper New York State.
On the road in Africa and Central America, he is most likely to be seen in his simple white-cotton guayabera, but in Atlanta, Carter wears a blue blazer and gray slacks. It has become a signature outfit for him, relaxed enough for a Southern businessman, not too formal in a way that Washington-style pinstripes would make him look distant and vaguely out of place. Still, Atlanta is not really Carter`s town. Though he certainly is the biggest local celebrity, Carter remains a south Georgian, the man from ”below the gnat line,” a whimsical division that bisects the state at Macon, running east to the Atlantic and west to the Alabama state line. Atlantans and others in the hills of north Georgia feel superior to those from the south, and, of course, that feeling is reciprocated.
Some of that feeling also extends toward the Democratic Party. For years after his defeat, Carter was a pariah in national Democratic politics; few candidates looked to him for endorsements. ”They were dodging him, avoiding him for a long time,” Kirbo recalls with disdain. ”Oddly enough, he was the only one of them to get enough votes to get elected.”
Says Carter: ”I really haven`t changed my political analysis since 1976. I don`t think the Democratic Party as an organization has much to do with it
(getting elected president). I was much more effective as a candidate, much more attractive as a candidate, before I got the nomination than after I got it. I inherited the Democratic Party and had to carry it around on my shoulder. It was a burden instead of an asset. . . .” Though the rebuke of his leadership stung, it fit well with Carter`s goal of making the Carter Center nonpartisan.
The center seems to consolidate his postpresidential energy. It sits on the hilltop where Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman watched the battle of Atlanta during the Civil War. The center has 140 employees and a budget of $16 million. Much of the funding is from foreigners, Japanese and Pakistani, and it also includes a gift from an African living in London who sent a large donation out of gratitude after Carter personally intervened and asked the president of his home country to reverse death sentences against 30 citizens. Inside the four round buildings that house the center are mahogany-trimmed rooms with accents of peach and rose. Outside Carter`s personal office is an Andy Warhol triptych of Carter. Actually everywhere at the center, there are photos, busts, large and small emblems of Jimmy Carter. Despite the quiet manner, this is not a self-effacing man. Like other public men, he provokes strong feelings of either loyalty or disdain from those who see him as secular prophet and others who think he remains the charlatan they despised in the White House. While there are those who believe the grin is endearing, others are irritated by what they believe is his essential insincerity.
Despite a certain antagonism, President Bush is unfailingly polite to Carter, and he has made it clear to his subordinates that ex-presidents of either party deserve their generous respect. At the same time, Bush is leery of Carter, not only because he is a Democrat but because Carter feels free to be critical. Last fall, during a reunion of members of his administration, Carter remarked how Eastern Europe was speaking of freedom and democracy but Bush was responding ”with the language of a bookkeeper and bureaucrat.”
Other White House officials are wary because they think of Carter as a
”kiss-and-tell” kind of guy, pointing to his statement-which they wanted to remain secret-that he was authorized to make a deal with Noriega right up until last December`s invasion. Still, Bush and his deputies are pleased with Carter in Central America-indeed he advanced their own policies a year ago, first by decrying Manuel Noriega`s theft of the election in Panama and then this year when he affirmed the Nicaraguan vote and helped persuade Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to accept his electoral defeat. Carter told him he understood what it felt like to lose.
Current White House officials are less enthusiastic about Carter`s role in the Middle East and see him as a potential meddler there. If Carter has maintained a special role in Central America, he does not have the same cachet in the Middle East. Both Sadat and Begin are history, and Carter doesn`t have a special status. After returning from his most recent Middle East trip last March, Carter was criticized for speaking out publicly against Israel`s deportation of Palestinian women and children. Carter himself recognized that blame and counterblame are endless in that region, ”but this is a preoccupation with me,” he admitted in a Washington press conference, ”that I presume will stay the rest of my life (or) until peace comes.”
Others, too, have reservations. ”I got the impression his role in Nicaragua was useful,” says former ambassador and arms negotiator Paul Nitze, who opposed Carter`s second strategic-arms treaty with the Soviets. ”But the responsibility rests with the administration, and therefore he`s got to be careful not to get in the way.”
But that doesn`t seem to be Carter`s intention. ”The very thing that Carter was harangued for, a sort of naivete for pursuing human rights and not looking out for the sort of real political concerns, has made him credible to third parties and allows him to play a role,” says Thomas Mann, director of Government Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. ”What a great ex-president,” he adds affectionately. ”Why didn`t he just skip the four years in the Oval Office and go right to it?”
WHAT WILL CARTER have as his legacy? Certainly his efforts to keep Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat talking at Camp David created an achievement that literally changed the map of the Middle East. After those accords, Begin and Sadat both received the Nobel Peace Prize. And although he played the difficult role of peacemaker between two belligerent parties, Carter did not share in that honor. It is possible that someday he will, although that does not seem to be his overriding goal. Carter says he worked even harder on the Panama Canal treaties, and they are listed first in his own biography. Carter also concluded the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union and the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China. His own official biography says simply: ”He championed human rights throughout the world.”
Richard Nixon said Clare Booth Luce once told him that each person in history could be summed up in one sentence, and he acknowledged that his sentence would read, ”He resigned the office.” When asked what he thinks he will be remembered for, Carter says, a bit sadly it seems, though he does not allow any emotion to color his flat open-faced reply, ”I`ll be remembered as the man who didn`t get re-elected. . . .
”My reputation is much better in foreign countries than in this country,” says the former president, giving the distinct impression that he looks upon himself as the prophet without honor in his own land. ”What a lot of Americans don`t see clearly is that the things for which I stood in the White House have always been popular in other countries-peace, human rights, environmental quality, nuclear-arms control. We tried to work for these things. . . .” There is just the slightest tinge of a lament in his words.
When a woman asks him a familiar question, Carter responds without equivocation. ”The idea of running for office crossed my mind-for 10 seconds,” he quips to a luncheon crowd. ”I will never run for office again, under any circumstances. I don`t have any desire to. In the first place, I wouldn`t be elected. And the second thing is, I`m pretty advanced in age, and I don`t have many years to go, and I think what we`re doing now is so significant, and I think you can get a glimpse that what we are doing is something a president cannot do.”
