“Mr. President, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, what do you want your legacy to be?” When Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the president of the United States in 1977, the nation was still reeling from a period of political upheaval. “I came along at a time when Americans still remembered painfully the lies told and the debacle of Watergate. I was outside of Washington, I was not stigmatized by the mistakes that had been made in those previous years.” “It’s a long way from Plains, Ga., to Washington, D.C.” “And I brought a fresh face of a peanut farmer, a working man who swore never to tell a lie or make a misleading statement. Jimmy Carter from Georgia. I hope to be your next president.” “The president and his family surprise and delight everyone by walking the parade route down Pennsylvania Ave. up to the presidential reviewing stand in front of the White House.” But winning the White House at the height of the Cold War carried extraordinary responsibility. “The system is survivable. It’s verifiable.” The peanut farmer from Plains suddenly had his finger on the button to start World War III. “It’s a horrifying thought. If the Soviets launched a missile attack from Soviet territory, we had 26 minutes before the missile struck New York or Washington or whatever, for me to respond. And so I knew what — that I would have to respond, which may result in a holocaust.
So I went out of my way to understand the problems of Brezhnev. I used to sit by a globe and turn it to Moscow, and try to imagine how it looked out on the rest of the world with a formidable military force in NATO and tremendous challenge from China. And what would happen if the Soviets became convinced that they were in danger. Well, I tried to avoid all that, but it was a very, very terrible responsibility. To give our own and our nation’s security.” Carter took pains to keep the peace and to broker a nuclear arms deal. But when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he rolled out a covert mission to arm Afghan resistance fighters and announced a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. “With Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan, neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.” The goal, he says, was to pressure the Soviets to reform. “I wanted to change their system of government, but I also wanted to bring the Soviet Union into the international forum. The Soviet Union had, in effect, promised to honor human rights, and they had failed. But over a period of time, I think that may or may not have had an impact on Mikhail Gorbachev when he decided on glasnost and perestroika, and that in effect, resulted in the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, and also resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet invading troops from Afghanistan.” Despite his ongoing struggles with the Soviets, Carter forged major accomplishments in foreign policy: opening diplomatic relations with China, pushing through a Panama Canal treaty and brokering a historic Middle East peace deal. “Sun and tension on the Egyptian-Israeli border.” “I recognized before I was president the importance of the Mideast crisis between Israel and Egypt because there had been four major wars in the previous 25 years. I was able to bring Sadat and Begin to Camp David, and we had a very successful 13 days there.
And we came out with the Camp David Accords, which led six months later to a treaty between Israel and Egypt. Not a word of which has ever been violated since.” But the watershed agreement did not fix the problems dogging Carter’s presidency: runaway inflation. “We must face a time of national austerity.” The energy crisis. “All of us must learn to waste less energy.” And a management style that Americans found pessimistic and uninspiring. “It is a crisis of confidence.” The final blow for Carter’s re-election came in November 1979. “Good evening. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran has been invaded and occupied by Iranian students.” More than 50 Americans were taken hostage in Iran and held for 444 days until the final hours of Carter’s presidency. “We had adequate warning that there was a threat to our embassy, and we could have done what other embassies did — either strengthen our security there or remove our personnel.” Polls predicted a close race, but in the end, Carter won in just five states and Washington, D.C. “And this country is almost solidly in the Reagan colors tonight.” After leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter reinvented himself. And redefined the role of a former president, finding his new purpose and esteem as a freelance statesman. [speaking Spanish] Carter says even political rivals asked for his diplomatic help. “Ronald Reagan didn’t take an active interest in the Mideast. He disavowed many of the things that I had done, and to my surprise, he called me on the phone and asked if I would help draft a speech that he wanted to deliver on the subject. And I responded eagerly. So he sent his national security adviser or his speechwriter — I can’t remember which — down to my home, and in the front room of my house, we drafted the portion of his speech delivered in 1982 on the Middle East.” “With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we’ve embraced the Camp David framework as the only way to proceed.” “When George Bush senior came into the White House, they were interested in Latin America. They specifically asked me to get involved in holding an election that replaced the Sandinistas peacefully instead of by war, and ended the war. The Contra problem for Nicaragua will be solved by an honest election.” Carter’s diplomatic skills really got put to the test in 1994, when tensions between President Clinton and Kim Il Sung over North Korea’s nuclear program put the two countries on a collision course. “Kim Il Sung was giving me constant requests that I come to Pyongyang and help him resolve the impasse. I wrote President Clinton a letter and said, I have decided to go to North Korea. Al Gore, the vice president, was in the White House and he intercepted my letter and he said, ‘Mr. President, if you’ll change your letter to say I’m strongly inclined to go to North Korea instead of I’m going to North Korea, I’ll try to get President Clinton to agree to approve.’” Carter finally got the green light from the White House, or so he thought. “They didn’t think I had any chance to succeed. Good morning. I succeeded.” Key for Carter was having CNN camera crews broadcasting the historic negotiations. “I’m a nuclear engineer by training. I knew the intimacies of their nuclear power plant. I talked to their nuclear specialists and also directed to Kim Il Sung. And he and I agreed that he would not proceed with his nuclear program. The proposal was that there would be an immediate assurance that the I.A.E.A. inspectors would stay on site. When I got back to Seoul, though, I was told by the White House that they were dissatisfied. Al Gore was on the speakerphone. I said, I want to come to Washington and explain what I’ve done. And he told me, ‘Mr. President, you are not wanted in Washington. Our suggestion is you go directly back to Plains.’ Well, I was angry, put it mildly. I thought I had prevented a war. I thought I had worked out a satisfactory agreement for the future.” As soon as Carter touched down in the U.S., the press was filled with stories about how Carter had turned what was meant to be a private visit into a televised summit. “There were horrendous stories about me in The New York Times that I had exceeded my authority and that I had made false claims about the acquiescence of Kim Il Sung. That I was naive and ignorant and so forth. So I sent Kim Il Sung an urgent letter, and asked him to confirm to Clinton, not to me, all the agreements he had reached. I think there were 12 of them. And so that was adopted by the Clinton administration as their policy.” That policy did help to avert war. But critics say Jimmy Carter and President Clinton were wrong to appease a rogue nation like North Korea, which would later develop a nuclear arsenal in violation of the agreement he helped broker. In his later years, Carter traveled the globe with the Carter Center to fight disease and monitor elections in emerging democracies. “We believe that all of our questions have been answered.” Work that earned the former president a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, just as he was forging a very public campaign opposing the coming American invasion of Iraq. “Global challenges must be met by an emphasis on peace.” When we sat down with President Carter in 2006, he laid out his vision for America’s role in the future and his concerns about missteps in the post-9/11 world. “The announcement and practice of preemptive war, the complete abandonment of all the nuclear arms control agreements that were reached, the claim, in effect, that prisoners could be mistreated or tortured or deprived of habeas corpus, these are some of the things that I think has caused a deterioration in our country’s basic stature and integrity. I would like to see our country be the champion of human rights. And every American Embassy looked upon as a haven for those who suffer from human rights abuse. I’d like to see our country be the most generous on earth. These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our nation’s continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever expanding American dream.”
