(Editor's note: Jimmy Carter, America's 39th President, died 29 December 2024 at the age of 100. We are reprinting a profile of him that originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of Esquire.)
“At the risk of antagonising you—” I began to say.
“There’s no way,” Jimmy Carter interrupted.
“You mean better men than I have tried?”
Carter smiled. The things he has won with that smile.
“Have you thought about the Nobel Peace Prize today, I mean before this very moment as I bring it up?”
“No. I haven’t thought about it today.”
On commercial flights, Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, and their Secret Service detail are the first to board the plane, from the tarmac, so they don’t make a fuss in the passenger’s waiting bay. If you fly out of Atlanta a lot, sooner or later you will see them on Delta, first class, bulkhead, starboard side, Rosalynn on the aisle, the two of them inconspicuous, heads down, reading. (On a long haul, Carter is a Louis L’Amour man.) Once things are pretty much stowed but before he can possibly get in the way of the operation, Carter rises and walks the length of the plane, shaking every hand. He used to say, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter,” as he did when he was a stranger campaigning for political office, but by now he recognises that introducing himself is an extraneous gesture. “Hello,” he says. Men who haven’t spotted him approaching swallow their Adam’s apples, and women gulp—they do, really.
Carter almost always wears a blue blazer and grey slacks—no necktie on airplanes—and he always looks you in the eye. He is seventy, and his face has lost some of its elasticity (it goes quite slack when he is tired), but otherwise his appearance hasn’t worn down in that rural way his mother’s did. He is fit, about five feet nine, 155 pounds, and he has boatish feet and masculine, tool-carrying hands that I suspect cannot tap or clap on the beat. His carriage is not musical. If a fellow pilgrim manages to engage him for a moment, you will overhear him say, “I enjoyed being president,” in the way another man would say he enjoyed the year he served as, oh, Tail Twister in his Lions Club. He regains his seat swiftly and resumes his reading. You are now flying with the 39th president of the United States of America, the first president to be born in a hospital and probably the last one to have slept only with his wife.
This February noonday, after a change of planes in Miami, Carter and his party were bound for Haiti. The Washington Post and The New York Times would make a splash of the chilly reception that awaited him there. Larry Rohter would report, accurately, on the front page of the Times that Carter “returned to the scene of one of his greatest diplomatic triumphs today. But instead of a hero’s welcome.... Mr Carter landed here to find the walls of the capital covered with graffiti insulting him and no official representative of the Haitian government at the airport to greet him.” The graffiti was rather sparingly brushed, I thought, in red on whitewashed walls, in the same hand or a forger’s. The politest of it called Carter a faux democrat, or it told him to go home, and the nastiest told him to fuck off, more or less. Carter shrugged it off, telling me later it was the work of the left wing of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s party, Lavalas, just venting a streak of rage at him for his work last September in engineering the comfortable removal of the despicable General Raoul Cédras and his epauletted circle.
As for the total lack of government welcome, Carter said, it would have been inappropriate for the Aristide administration to have polished the silver. He was here this time merely as “a college professor, in no official capacity.” So we drove on deep into Port-au-Prince as all college professors do when they land in the Third World, steering a broken-field run around potholes, goats, and pools of human misery, in a slab-sided, twelve-vehicle motorcade under the protection of the American Army and the American Embassy, Humvees taking the point and the drag, .50-caliber machine guns affixed to the roof.
The Carter party ascended John Brown Avenue to the higher ground and cleaner air of Pétionville and secured modest lodgings at a clean but dog-eared establishment called the Villa Créole Hotel, its breezeways banked and canopied by explosions of bougainvillea, frangipani, oleander, and hibiscus. Flowers hung like grapes from the eaves. In less than an hour, Carter had changed into a pale-yellow guayabera, the kind of tropical shirt that looks like a see-through dentist’s blouse, and was receiving a briefing behind opaque, jalousied windows in a room that the bed had been taken out of. Rosalynn Carter sat at her husband’s side, taking copious notes. When she concentrates deeply, she pooches her lower lip way out; when Carter fixes on a tight focus, he runs his tongue into the hollow of his cheek or along the picket fence of his bottom front teeth. Inside the spartan room, one informant after another sketched Haiti’s problems for the couple.
“With the return of Aristide,” said one of the speakers, “there was the belief that a miracle had occurred and the expectation that others were on the way.” He meant, of course, the miracle of financial assistance. The international purser’s office, he said, had “ossified.”
“Is it any more ossified than the government is in coming up with a plan for what to do with these funds?” Carter snapped. On reflection, it was more a snip—but it was quick.
“Well,” said the speaker, dropping his chin into his chest, “you have a government that has inherited a civil-service system that is largely inoperative. . . .”
Seeing that he had deflated the man, Carter said, “I’m not being critical. If I had a billion dollars to give them, could they show me what they would do with it?”
Carter knew all the answers would be negative. Because Haiti had nothing, needed everything, not much effort had gone beyond the wishing. “I’m looking for specifics, plans, the proper ministers, to see what we can do,” he said patiently.
Computers, one fellow volunteered, seeing a specific way to score points with the Great White Father from the Big Rich Nation. He said they needed fifty computers to assist with parliamentary elections. Not specific enough. “What kind?” Carter demanded. “Can they be American-made computers or European? They need the French language, right?”
“Jesus taught that the foundation of greatness is service to others,” Carter said. “If you try hard, God will understand when you fail.”
This went on for an hour, this tedium. Then the Carters walked a few steps to another meeting, this one in an airy open hall giving onto a coral-rock drop-off, swifts out there dive-bombing mosquitoes, geckos fly-catching along the walls, 27 representatives of 18 political parties waiting in a horseshoe seating arrangement to have a word with the former president.
“In Nicaragua, fourteen political parties came together to face the Sandinistas. It would seem to me that 18 parties would guarantee an extreme fragmentation of the vote.” He wondered if there had been any thought about forming a coalition or two. He was nicely told it was every man for himself until further notice. The afternoon wore away dully. Carter sat, listened. He was never impatient. His questions were clear. His attention did not stray. As a cock in the courtyard mistook sundown for sunup and crowed, Carter stood and said, “I know the pleasure of victory and the sadness of defeat, and I wish you all victory, at least in the establishment of democracy.” Then it was back down John Brown Avenue to the palace of the Duvalier Docs, Papa and Baby, for tea with Aristide before supper.
What Jimmy Carter does with his days would bore most men to tears. There is this perception of him dashing vaingloriously round the globe to save people from themselves as well as disease, all the while the grail of a Nobel in the back of his mind. But what he does by and large is go to meetings, one ass-numbing meeting after another, the preponderance of them at the Carter Center in Atlanta. If there were a going-to-meeting Nobel, Carter would get it. The sexiest, most sensational meetings he had last year, the only ones, in fact, that attracted headlines, were in North Korea, Haiti, and Bosnia. In each case, his vast body of critics cited naïveté, said he was sucking up to dictators or undermining American diplomacy or giving away the store. For example, any number of United Nations sources will tell you that last December the Bosnian Serbs used Carter mercilessly to trip a cease-fire: They were dead on their feet; winter was about to grip hard; they needed a break. Carter would say that if that is the case, they used him mercifully; let him be the beard if it stays but one itchy trigger finger. Besides, all he had to do was go to meetings, and that is what he does—when he is not off trying to inoculate some nation against everything but love.
On 1 October, Carter will be 71. Also in October, the Nobel-prize winners will be announced in Oslo. This year, the seventh year he has been nominated, the smart money—as well as some of my own—is already down on the Georgian. Every man has been slighted at least once in his life, turned out by an employer, handed his walking shoes by a lover, unfairly laid low. To the spurned, nothing could ever taste as sweet as proving that the rejection was wrong and stupid. For a one-term president who wasn’t through yet, who was dumped off an executive-branch chopper in a one-holer like Plains, Georgia, to get a life at age 56, a morose wife at his side, for a fellow like that to burst back from the wilderness as Schweitzer, Salk, Solomon, Joseph (the carpenter), Sunday (Billy, the preacher), and the State Department all in one, among others in there (Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas—Marshal Dillon, for all we know), is a pretty impressive act.
“I’d like people to know that we were right, that what Jimmy Carter was doing was best for our country, and that people made a mistake by not voting for him,” Rosalynn would later write.
“All the Carter haters are out again,” says Carter White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, “saying he has his own State Department down here, it’s outrageous what he’s doing, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. What he’s doing is showing people that he was the man they voted for in ’76. A lot was done to disparage the person that he really is, the farmer, the Baptist, the southerner. Those things were trivialised in Washington. And what people are seeing after the fact is that those things were real. The Sunday-school teacher, human rights, caring about poor people, the disadvantaged—all real.
“I never will forget, when Reagan was in office, fairly early in his term and the political and media establishment were falling all over him—Carter went with a bunch of people on a bus up to Harlem to build a Habitat for Humanity project. And I happened to be in Washington, which I try to be infrequently, and there were all kinds of cartoons about it, all kinds of comment. ‘Well, Carter is finally doing something he knows how to do.’ They were making fun of the fact that a former president was riding on a bus with a church group up there to build houses for people. It tells you a lot about where the values were inside the Beltway.”
Jimmy Carter will be recalled as the president who let inflation get out of control and as a totally moral man who didn’t know how to cope with the bestial immorality of the Iranians,” Theodore White said as 1981 began. “The combination defeated him.” On 4 January, 1981, Carter taught his last Sunday Bible class in Washington. “Jesus taught that the foundation of greatness is service to others,” he said. “If you try hard, God will understand when you fail.”
Nevertheless, the Carters came home sore losers, especially Rosalynn. “I’d like people to know that we were right, that what Jimmy Carter was doing was best for our country, and that people made a mistake by not voting for him,” Rosalynn would later write. Carter himself found the defeat “incomprehensible.” Not only had he been rejected, as he wrote in one memoir or another, but the country “had chosen a horse determined to run back as fast as possible in the opposite direction.” He got back to Plains to find that his peanut-related concerns had tanked. He was a million dollars in debt. And he had a thoroughly citified daughter, Amy, 12, who was having such a miserable time of the transition that she was outside, up in a pecan tree, and she wouldn’t come down for supper.
After they got Amy off to a school in Atlanta, and happier, Carter finished his book Keeping Faith, and Rosalynn worked on hers, First Lady from Plains. They talked about the presidential library and the “onerous responsibility” of raising money for it. Carter said he didn’t want a memorial or a monument—he kept saying he had more of a “teaching centre” in mind. They entertained architectural proposals. One novel proposition included a shrine visible all over Atlanta, featuring a spire that was meant to represent the Camp David accords; depending on your perspective, a cross held prominence or a Star of David or a Muslim crescent. You could have read contract agate by its light at night. Rosalynn thought that with some modification, she kind of liked it. Carter was so mad he couldn’t speak. A vein in his temple throbbed. “I’m not going to have a library,” he said.
One night, Rosalynn woke up in the wee hours and Jimmy was sitting up, something that never happens. (In bed, Carter sleeps; otherwise, why go to bed?) “What’s the matter?” she asked. “I know what we’re going to do with the library,” he said. Conflict resolution. Thirty-five acres on high ground two miles east of the bull’s-eye of downtown Atlanta. They say this is where Sherman watched the whole shooting match smoke down to cinders. When Carter saw the rendering that came up to his vision—four graceful, circular, interconnected buildings under dogwoods and pines, azaleas in springtime giving the grounds benevolent fire—the developer put on a background tape, music from Man of La Mancha, “To dream, the impossible...”
When Carter was a young midshipman at the Naval Academy, he read Tobacco Road by fellow Georgian Erskine Caldwell. It horrified him. The book offered a gross mischaracterisation of what he saw as the noble rural southerner. Then Carter read James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It became his favourite book, after the Bible.
“Agee’s book helps you understand Carter,” Carter biographer Doug Brinkley told me. “It’s Carter’s realistic compassion for these people in rural poverty. In Haiti. In Africa. He sees dignity in these people. In his 1976 campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, Carter begins by saying he is southerner and an American. But he is not a lost-cause southerner, out there cleaning the Confederate memorial.
“When he came back to Plains from the Navy in ’53, he knew Jim Crow had to die,” Brinkley went on. “He had been in an integrated military. He said, ‘This is the future for the South: We have to make it better.’ He looks around, finds a speed-reading course nearby, borrows ideas from an agricultural-efficiency station in Plains. He makes use of what he has around him. Put him in a room full of junk and he’d make a machine. Spanish on tapes. Lions Club meetings. You see him at the peanut festival, spinning the raffle wheel, fifty cents a ticket, for some charity. Never too big for it. Sure, other politicians will go to the Elks club for their own political purposes—Carter will, too—but he also believes in the Elks. He’s a proud Rotarian. You have to go back to Harry Truman for that kind of president.”
When I took these notes, Brinkley and I were driving together in late spring from New Orleans to Plains, Brinkley at the wheel, gushing like this stuff had been backing up too long in his pipes. He is the director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. He has published biographies of James Forrestal and Dean Acheson as well as an account of a mobile American-studies course he runs called The Majic Bus (a lot of Kerouac, a lot of dharma there). He is 34 years old, and like Kerouac he loves the road. We were living on heat-lamp chicken and M&Ms and pool-hall hot dogs, skirting the Gulf of Mexico with a wall of wisteria on our left, draped like a sweet purple curtain between Dixie and the North. I was bound for Jimmy Carter’s Sunday-school class.
For longer than this century, the Carter family has lived along the two-lane Georgia road that runs from Columbus, on the Alabama line, to Savannah, on the Atlantic seaboard. The mailing address for most of them has been the farming community of Plains, which had a population of 550 when Jimmy Carter was a boy, during the Depression, and has a population of 720 or 721 now, when statesmen and thugs come calling, in roughly equal numbers, looking for Carter’s appraisal, assistance, advice.
Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, is dead now 12 years, but I can still remember her standing in the door of her pond house, an ocher board-and-batten affair with a cedar-shake roof, on a bright, vernal morning in 1976. She told me to come on in, saying, “I have a hangover from wrestling.” I asked her to elaborate, and she said, “I love wrestling. I went last night, and I’m hoarse from hollering.” She had a Newsweek on her coffee table. Her son was on the cover. The headline said, CARTER’S SWEEP. “You just ask me anything and I’ll tell you the truth or nothing,” she told me. She took an overstuffed easy chair and swung her legs over one arm. I asked her about this thing Jimmy was up to. “The way Jimmy told me was, well, I have to go back a little bit. I had crushed my shoulder in a fall when I was in Hawaii. It was a painful thing and it still bothers me. I was in my room at the mansion in Atlanta, and Jimmy was in the rocker, beside my bed. I said, ‘Jimmy, what will you do when you’re not governor anymore?’ I know him so well. I knew he wouldn’t be content just to come back to Plains. “He said, ‘I’m going to run for president.’
“I said, ‘President of what?’”
The first few years the Carters were back to Georgia, it was as if they had fallen off the face of the earth. You rarely read a thing about them. Then, in 1986, Bill Kovach left The New York Times to edit the Atlanta newspaper. One of Kovach’s first moves was to go to Plains. He played Quentin Tarantino to Carter’s John Travolta; Kovach resurrected Carter, if only locally.
In 1989, the herd turned round in a good mood and struck. Said the Baltimore Sun: “Jimmy Carter is without question the best ex-president we have today.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune: “He may indeed be the best former president the United States has ever had.” The Washington Post: “Not that the competition is staggering, but Jimmy Carter is becoming the best ex-president we have.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, under the headline EXCELLENT EMERITUS: “Attention to detail. A distaste for politics. Above all, a commitment to doing the right thing. The qualities that hobbled Jimmy Carter in the White House seem to be making him a great ex-president.” And Time and Newsweek and US News & World Report pretty much said so, too. Then last year, everybody changed their minds.
By Christmas, when Carter got back from Bosnia, he was dangerous, a loose cannon, a freelance State Department. No review of his work passed without a mention of the Nobel motive. And when Carter published a book of poetry earlier this year, he may as well have been wearing a sign that said, KICK ME.
Michiko Kakutani of the Times was the fairest with criticism: “...well-meaning, dutifully wrought poems that plod earnestly from point A to point B without ever making a leap into emotional hyperspace.” She recalled an associate saying of Carter’s White House tenure that “he knew all the words and none of the music.” The Washington Post account, by Henry Allen, began: “Happy, happy, happy Jimmy Carter. So happy. More than buoyant. Delighted, even gleeful Jimmy Carter, with smiles that seem amazed and embarrassed at how happy he is, like a little boy with the Christmas puppy his parents had said he could never have.”
Well, there’s small minds carping at you, and then there’s the public: To date, according to Carter, his poetry book, Always a Reckoning, has sold more than any of his previous 12 books. The Carters earn about USD400,000 a year from their books, one source told me. Carter promotes tirelessly—he can sign 1,000 books an hour—but he will not sign books after church on Sunday. He will pose for pictures with visitors till the cows come home, but he won’t give you his autograph. There’s just something sacrilegious about it.
"President Carter has mastered the Bible,” Doug Brinkley was saying on the road to Plains. “When you go to his Bible class, you realise this is him. He begins and ends his week there.” I got to the Maranatha Baptist Church on an April morning. Brinkley said Carter is always energised on Sundays. He virtually bounded across the apron in front of the pulpit.
The lesson this day was from the Book of John. It was about Jesus going to see Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, his best friends. (My notes hit the high points but can’t reproduce Carter’s rapture perfectly.) “They were having their supper, having a good time. And Mary anointed his feet with perfume and wiped them with her hair. The perfume was worth the equivalent of a year’s wages. Maybe she had to take out the pins that were holding her hair bound. I would be embarrassed. It was a transcendent act, beyond boundaries. But the son of God, he’s going to die—I would probably do something dramatic.”
Carter was pacing. I had never seen him this animated. His soft monotone, such a liability for him in politics, had become an instrument; there was music in him.
“Mary did a good and lovely thing. What can I do that would be good and lovely? It doesn’t have to be great. If someone aroused our anger, hurt us, you could search for a way for reconciliation. It doesn’t have to be publicised. A phone call. A postcard. Go down the street and knock on their door.
“We shouldn’t carry our resources around in a jar and use a medicine dropper to expend them. We should give what we have for His glory, not for our own. That’s difficult for me. Mary did a gauche thing, an intimate thing, an embarrassing thing. She went too far. How can we break through our shell and do something good and lovely, reach out to another human being?” Afterward, if you brought a camera, you could go out into the pecan grove that surrounds the church and capture yourself for all time standing next to the only man who is said to have regarded the presidency as a stepping-stone. Invariably, while they are posing with him, people tell Carter he ought to be president again. He smiles the thought away. It is the last thing he would want. He was rid of it and its tethers the day we quit him. As Hendrik Hertzberg, a New Yorker editor and a Carter speechwriter, said in a talk at the LBJ Library in Austin recently: “We tried a saint. It didn’t work.”
I moved to Georgia from Tennessee in 1970. Compared with the rest of the region in those days, Atlanta was a mecca of liberal thought. The newly elected governor looked like the guy on the Kennedy half-dollar; everybody said so. The first sentence of his inaugural address was: “The time to end segregation is now.” Of course, the lieutenant governor was Lester Maddox, the old seg who had beat Carter four years before but couldn’t by law succeed himself. Carter himself hadn’t run the leftest campaign of the century—left of George Wallace, yes, but still there were racial edges. You needed them to win that capitol in 1970, even though the body of Martin Luther King Jr. lay entombed for two years in the red Georgia clay. There are no photographs of Carter with King (Georgia’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner, so far) because the two never met. They could have, easily, but Carter was white and politically ambitious. Well, sleeping dogs and all that. He did what he had to do. You knew he was a good man.
When Carter was governor, I was a reporter and had to deal with him now and again. Twenty-five years later, on my way to his office, the one thing I remembered was that when he says he will give you an hour, he might make it less, but he won’t make it more. As I sat admiring an Andy Warhol triptych of Carter on the wall outside his door, I heard:
“All the best! All the best! I’m off to the airport!” It is the cry of the Carter Center, as former diplomats, now employees, take their leave of the peach- and rose-hued walls. There are about thirty-one nasty conflicts going on in the world, all of them civil wars. The foreign policy of the United States does not allow conversation with revolutionaries. The same goes for Great Britain, the Commonwealth countries, France, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Organization of African Unity. That leaves a lot of armed young men looking to talk to Jimmy Carter. The man could have put his feet up (the presidential pension is USD148,400 a year, and it doesn’t cost spit to live in Plains), but he sensed a void and filled it. Earlier this year, to effect a cease-fire in the twelve-year-old civil war in Sudan, Carter gave the Sudanese his son, Chip.
Carter had just gotten off the phone with Chip when I was shown into his office. Chip told his daddy it was 119 degrees Fahrenheit where he was in southern Sudan and that he couldn’t understand why anybody would want such scorched earth, much less fight for it. Before hanging up, Carter had wished his son happy birthday. Chip was 45. He had a wife and two children and lived in Decatur, Georgia. He hadn’t asked for this assignment. He just woke up one day two weeks before his birthday and learned that his father had superseded any prosaic midlife crisis he may have been enjoying by giving him away to the Sudanese.
Carter had needed to get into southern Sudan during the annual two-month-long dry season to reach the last big concentration—about 150,000 cases—of guinea-worm disease. There were 3.5 million cases in 1986, when the Carter Center decided to eradicate it. The last disease the world eradicated was smallpox, 18 years ago. Typical Carter, as biographer Brinkley puts it—he can’t just settle for fighting, he has to eradicate. To get into Sudan and distribute the filters that will save the people from these disgusting, crippling worms, Carter had to stop a war between Muslim and non-Muslim that has claimed 1.3 million lives. To show how serious he was, Carter put up Chip. The culture was impressed. The war stopped.
I would get to Chip, but I didn’t want to peak early. I opened with a question that had nagged me since I drove west to east across Georgia to catch him in church. I had noticed every Georgian had a pond. People would dig a moat around a double-wide and call it a pond. “Mr. President, I will begin with what sounds like a frivolous question.”
Carter: “It won’t be the first.”
“What does a pond mean to a man from south Georgia?”
“If you flew over Georgia, say, at five-thousand-foot altitude, in almost any part of our state you would see almost one hundred ponds at any time. Because everyone wants to have access to a pond or proximity to a pond. And I never have had this question asked before, about why that’s true.”
I had intended merely to ingratiate, but, Carter being Carter, he reached into himself and responded with staggering seriousness.
He is just as thin-skinned as he ever was. He can cite you chapter and verse of criticism. He seems particularly irritated by the perception of him as a man who acts precipitously.
“In fact, it’s fascinating to me: The first thing I’ll do tomorrow morning when I get up is go out to my pond. We built this pond in 1937. I think one thing is that this is a major opportunity for us to fish. And there’s a fascinating culture of growing fish. And everybody brags on the quality of their pond, like we used to brag in the Depression years on the quality of our bird dog.
“Poor people all over the world have looked on fish as a major supplement to their diet. When I was growing up in the Depression years, every creek—even a creek as wide as that couch you’re sitting on—would have a clear, worn path on both sides, where fishermen walked up and down.
“And it’s an engineering challenge to find a nice place to build a pond where it’s least expensive and most beneficial. There’s a very strong element of cost-benefit ratio here. And I would guess that if you ever—I don’t know if you own any land or not—but if you ever own 25 acres or 250 acres or whatever, my guess is that before very many months go by, you would be contemplating working on building a pond.”
In his life, Carter must have given fifty thousand interviews. If you are going to open, then, with a question he has never been asked (implausible, you say, but it happens, as you see), you might want to consider a subject a little loftier than my choice. When Carter was done thinking through the meaning of ponds, we got back to his son Chip’s mission.
“I was afraid that he might be kind of disconcerted, but we called him and I explained that I had promised that he would go to Sudan.”
“What was Chip’s reaction?”
“He said, ‘You mean me?’ I don’t know enough about the culture of Sudan to understand how important a son is. In some cultures, it’s almost like me being there. So Chip is there. I think it is one of the more dramatic negotiations we have been in, and I think the Sudanese war is the worst one in the world. I’ve said this for the last five years. But the bottom line is the United States is not interested in Sudan. Once our country gets down on a leader or a regime, then nothing they do has any legitimacy, or anything they do is satanic and everything their opponents do is angelic. It’s a harsh, black-and-white delineation.”
“What would you do with you if you were president?”
“I would call on me more.”
He is just as thin-skinned as he ever was. He can cite you chapter and verse of criticism. He seems particularly irritated by the perception of him as a man who acts precipitously. “What I think people don’t want to understand is that I don’t embark on a sensitive mission without getting permission from the president. And everything I do to the best of my understanding and ability is completely compatible with US policy. And that puts a great restraint on us. It just happens that last year, contrary to our general inclination, those forays were highly publicised. They did involve our government. They were in the Western World. They were white folks. So people cared.”
But most of his missions are in places the United States doesn’t give a happy damn about. “In the Third World, I’m a hero,” Carter says. “I’m not bragging to you, but when I go to Africa, they know that I’m one guy they can depend on.”
Here is where I elected to bring up the Nobel. It is not preposterous to think that he is running for it. The second trip to Haiti, for example, was not entirely necessary; no one begged him to come, least of all Aristide. Even Doug Brinkley, an acknowledged cheerleader, was disillusioned as a witness. “This was a loss for Carter, wasn’t it?” he had asked me bitterly as we flew out of Port-au-Prince. “There wasn’t any great outpouring for the saviour, was there? And he doesn’t like losing. Look at what he’s done with a complete repudiation by the American electorate: He’s out there running his second presidency.”
Laureate Elie Wiesel nominated him for the Nobel this year. I asked him if he thinks about it much.
“I don’t. That’s not something that obsesses me at all. Although this is one of the things that people like to say, that I go to the jungles of Sudan to eradicate guinea worm so that I can get a Nobel prize. It certainly would be nice to get a Nobel prize, but that’s not a driving force in my life.”
Then Carter said, “I’ve got to go.” He rose, saying, “I’ve enjoyed this.” I had had him for one hour and thirty-eight seconds. He was on his way to Warm Springs, Georgia, to the house where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had complained of a “terrific pain in the back of my head” on this very day 50 years before and died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roosevelt was the last Democrat this country saw fit to reelect to the presidency. Carter was to receive an award this day, the Four Freedoms award. A last-minute speaker, just announced, was Bill Clinton.
President Clinton wasn’t there for Carter; he was there because his picture and the ceremony would be on the front page of The New York Times the next day. Carter was in the photograph, unidentified. When Clinton was introduced, everyone—about five thousand people—stood and applauded. After a suitable clap, Carter sat down, stage left of Clinton. The applause continued and continued. Everyone continued standing. Carter, seated before all, studied his notes, ran his tongue into the hollow of his cheek, looked at a squall line rolling in from yonder. He did not look at the president, and he did not stand again.
When it was Carter’s turn to speak, he was brief. He said the last time he was in Warm Springs it was to announce his own candidacy for president. He said he was a midshipman the day FDR died, and he cried. He said, “I was just a farm boy, but I can remember distinctly when hogs sold for one cent a pound. Cotton was five cents a pound. But perhaps most important, peanuts were a penny a pound.” Roosevelt, he said, “transformed my life.” He said he was “eternally grateful.” And he sat back down, five feet from the president of the United States of America.
That morning, Carter had told me: “I rarely talk to Clinton. Although I’m a loyal Democrat, one of the sterling requirements of the Carter Center is that we’re totally nonpartisan. I deal just as easily with Dole and Gingrich as I do with the Democratic leadership. Not because I need them. I don’t need anything. What could anybody do for me?”
