TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT2342> <title> Sep. 11, 1989: Profile:Jimmy Carter </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Sep. 11, 1989 The Lonely War:Drugs </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> PROFILE, Page 60 Hail To the Ex-Chief </hdr> <body> Despite all his troubles in the White House, Jimmy Carter (yes, Jimmy Carter) may be the best former President America has ever had By Stanley W. Cloud In Ojubi, Ghana, on a sweltering African afternoon, James Earl Carter Jr. sits at one end of a large grassy field and acknowledges the applause of farmers gathered around the perimeter. Many of the farmers have samples of their harvest in baskets before them--corn, sorghum, squash, fruit. Large clouds play tag in the blue sky overhead, while at the opposite end of the field, the stern chiefs of several local villages sit dressed in traditional robes, each carrying a staff topped by a gilt talisman of his authority. On a platform in front of Carter, a local agricultural official in tan trousers and a T shirt bends to speak into a microphone. "President Carter," he says, "we are very grateful to you. Because of what you have done, for the past two years maize has been very wonderfully produced in this area. This is wonderful. In fact, we love you." Jimmy Carter grins. Jimmy Carter is a happy man. Despite everything--despite his disappointing presidency and the Iran hostage crisis, which helped deliver him into Ronald Reagan's eager hands; despite the scorn of various pundits and self-appointed guardians of Washington society; despite his own manifest and manifold weaknesses as a politician; despite "lust in my heart," "malaise" and "killer rabbits"--Carter has discovered life after the White House. More than that, he has redefined the meaning and purpose of the modern ex-presidency. While Reagan peddles his time and talents to the highest bidder and Gerald Ford perfects his putt and Richard Nixon struggles to gain a toehold in history, Carter, like some jazzed superhero, circles the globe at 30,000 ft., seeking opportunities to Do Good. And finding plenty of them. One moment he's in China, trying to mediate between the leaders in Beijing and their unhappy Tibetan subjects. The next he's in Panama, prowling the streets before dawn on election day, paying a surprise call on the vote counters--bellowing at them in his "modest" Spanish, "Are you honest people, or are you thieves?"--and emerging to denounce Manuel Noriega for "taking the elections by fraud." Then, almost before you know it, Carter is swooping down on sub-Saharan Africa, trying to help eradicate disease or persuade farmers to enlist in the Green Revolution. And this week, in Atlanta, the former President is to convene negotiations--after a year of personal diplomacy--between the Marxist-Leninist government of Ethiopia and the Eritrean rebels to end a quarter-century of civil war. With all this activity, Carter has emerged as the best ex-President the U.S. has had since Herbert Hoover, another one-termer whose failures in office did not prevent him from decades of productive public service afterward. In a way, Carter has used the White House as a stepping-stone to better things and better days. Says Carter: "As President, I wouldn't have had time to do all the things I'm doing now." Busy as he is, Carter, who will turn 65 next month, and his marginally less hyperactive wife Rosalynn, who turned 62 last month, do manage to find time for more traditional pastimes: tennis on their backyard court in Plains, Ga., for example, and early-morning jogs wherever they may happen to be. The Carters also still read a fair amount. He was so impressed with John le Carre's new novel, The Russia House, that he's rereading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and wishing he could meet the author; she has just completed Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. And there is bird watching in Africa, fly-fishing from Colorado to the Andes, and furniture making in Carter's home workshop in Plains, where he has turned out, among other handsome pieces, the canopied four-poster bed he and Rosalynn--whom he often calls "Rosie"--share. But leisure time has never been that important to Carter. If he and Rosalynn, having written no fewer than six books between them since 1981, are giving their word processors a rest for a while, both still teach Sunday school whenever they're home. And both periodically don their carpenter's aprons, pack up their hammers, saws and chisels, and travel to the South Bronx or Philadelphia or, next year, Tijuana, Mexico, to help build low-cost housing. More than anything else, the picture of Jimmy Carter wearing a baseball cap, faded jeans and running shoes, and helping build a new house, like a good neighbor at a Georgia barn raising, captures the essence of his ex-presidency. Not that he and Rosalynn haven't had their share of defeats and sadness: the closely spaced deaths in 1983 of his younger sister Ruth of cancer and his famous mother Miss Lillian, followed by the loss of his antic younger brother Billy last year. Even so, in the couple's 1987 book, Everything to Gain, Rosalynn wrote, "If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, then we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer. There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it." It is a lesson the Carters learned the hard way. After the dramatic improbability of Carter's victorious 1976 presidential campaign, losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan was a terrible blow. The incoming First Couple didn't make things any easier. During the transition, the Reagans suggested that the Carters should vacate the White House early to give Nancy more time for redecoration--a notion the Carters rejected out of hand. "We were elected to serve a full term," says a still angry Rosalynn, "and we were going to serve a full term." Carter was wounded again when he and fellow former Presidents Nixon and Ford, recruited to represent President Reagan at Anwar Sadat's funeral, were assigned to the relatively cramped tail section of Air Force One. So the three ex-Presidents, none of them then comfortable in the others' presence, sat in nervous silence for most of the long trip to Cairo. (On the way back, however, Carter and Ford began forming what became a close friendship.) Adjusting to life back in Plains was something of a trial as well. The Carters worked, successfully, to reverse the damage that hucksterism and celebrity had done to the tiny Georgia hamlet. And Jimmy puttered in his workshop and began organizing his papers in preparation for writing his 1982 memoir, Keeping Faith. Otherwise, there seemed little to do but brood. The famous Carter peanut warehouse had long since been sold, for $1.2 million. The 2,000-acre Carter farm--actually, it's two farms--was largely worked by lessees. With enforced idleness came more self-doubt and self-pity. Says a friend: "Carter was pretty much of a pain in the ass at that time. He needed a lot of hand holding and reassurance." The creation of the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta turned out to be crucial to his self-rehabilitation. With his usual obsessive attention to detail, he envisioned the center not just as another presidential library but as a clearinghouse of ideas and programs intended to solve international problems and crises. The idea became reality when the center was established at Emory University in 1982, and even more so when its permanent headquarters opened in 1986. Located on 30 acres of woods and gentle hills in the Virginia Highlands section of Atlanta, it consists of four low-profile, circular pavilions connected by interior walkways and exterior colonnades, all in a modern, neo-federalist style with faint echoes of the White House and fainter echoes of Jefferson's Monticello. Inside, the Carters have adjoining offices, plus a small but comfortable apartment. Apart from the library and museum, operated by the Federal Government, the Carter Center, with an annual budget of $16 million and a staff of 125, is financed by private donations, mostly from abroad. The center's many programs form the agenda of Carter's ex-presidency. Notable among them is Global 2000 Inc., an international aid organization aimed at improving disease control and agricultural productivity in Third World countries. The work is enhanced by the leadership of Norman Borlaug, an agronomist whose efforts to bring the Green Revolution to India and Pakistan won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and Dr. William H. Foege, the Carter Center's executive director, who played a major role in the worldwide eradication of smallpox. Global 2000's principal financial backer is Ryoichi Sasakawa, 90, a Japanese multimillionaire industrialist whose checkered resume features extreme-right-wing imperialist activities in Japan during the 1930s, but whose later years have been devoted largely to supporting charitable causes. The key to Global 2000 and the center's other programs is Carter himself. His hair may be thinner and grayer these days, his face more deeply etched, but he is plainly in charge. As a former President, he is able to gain access to foreign leaders, thereby often ensuring his programs the kind of high-level support on which success depends. On a ten-day trip to Africa in July, Carter--the first active U.S. President ever to set foot in the sub-Saharan part of the continent--swept from the Sudan to Ethiopia, back to the Sudan and on to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Nigeria and Ghana. The warm receptions he received from the heads of government were doubtless prompted in part by the many trappings of power he brought with him, including Secret Service protection and an opulent, private Boeing 727, complete with crew and a walnut-paneled double bedroom. (The plane is donated by the London-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International, another Carter Center backer.) Carter, the unassuming Plains populist who once banned Hail to the Chief and famously carried his own suit bag, retains a modest personal style but today seems far more comfortable with his perks. Still, as he said shortly after arriving in Africa, "I didn't come here in a position of leadership. I came in a position of follow-ship." In Addis Ababa, where he stayed in Haile Selassie's decaying old palace, he spent two hours with Ethiopia's President Mengistu Haile Mariam putting the finishing touches on arrangements for this week's peace talks. In the Sudan, Carter had an hour with Lieut. General Omar Hassan Ahmed el Bashir, who only four weeks earlier had overthrown the elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al Mahdi, to urge negotiations in that country's civil war. In Zambia, Carter lunched at the statehouse with President Kenneth Kaunda, one of the last of the old African independence-movement leaders, who hailed his guest as "not only a great person but a great servant of God and man," while, outside, impalas and peacocks roamed the grounds and private golf course. Four years ago, when Carter, Borlaug and Sasakawa began trying to bring the Green Revolution to Africa, they signed up a paltry 40 farmers in four countries--the Sudan, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. This year there are 85,000, plus uncounted others who, while not officially participating, have begun to use the same improved seeds, fertilizers and farming methods that have yielded such impressive results for their neighbors--300% to 400% increases in corn, sorghum and millet. Although Carter needs and seeks the support of the governments in the countries where his programs are established, his team stresses local administration and the direct involvement of small-scale farmers, whose minds have been focused wonderfully by recent African famines. At a 200-acre farm in Ojubi, about an hour's drive from Ghana's capital, Accra, Carter inspected a new corn crop literally as high as an elephant's eye. With a farmer's knowing touch, he plucked ears from the stalks, peeled back the husks and admired the golden kernels. This year 46 farmers are working the plot of dry yet newly fertile land. But Carter made a point of introducing one of only two farmers who were involved when the project began in 1987, a woman named Sarah Dazi. "As you know," Carter said with his large and famous smile, "in our country the women also take the lead." From there he proceeded to a nearby celebration of Global 2000's early success. He posed for pictures with farmers and their wives and applauded as brilliantly clad stilt dancers gyrated on their 15-ft. thin wooden limbs to the rhythms of a native band. Later, Carter was installed with great pomp as an honorary village chief. To signify his new office, he was given a chief's robe and a hand-carved wooden stool decorated with tribal symbols of nyansapow (cooperation). For Carter, improved agricultural output is closely linked to the disease-control measures he is also promoting. Seriously ill farmers, he reasons, cannot plant and harvest. Polio and river blindness are two major afflictions that the team hopes eventually to eliminate. But as a demonstration project, Global 2000 has first targeted the vulnerable life cycle of the Guinea worm. Once common in many parts of the world, the worm, which is ingested in drinking water drawn from ponds, is today confined to a belt across central Africa and the subcontinent, where it severely incapacitates some 10 million people each year. The Carter Center hopes to eradicate the Guinea worm in six years, mainly by educating villagers to filter or boil pond water before drinking it and by providing deep wells to replace freshwater ponds. Progress has already been made. Carter visited villages in Nigeria and Ghana that have, with Global 2000's assistance, virtually wiped out the worm. In a Nigerian village, he stood beside the local pond, under a canopy of lush green trees, and reminded the villagers that the pond was still infested with the worm's nearly invisible larvae. While photographers snapped pictures, he urged the villagers not to drink from the pond unless they first used the fine-mesh filters distributed by Global 2000. Beside him stood a small boy, his leg badly swollen with a Guinea-worm infection. Not all the villages Carter visited were completely satisfied with his help. In one, following the usual dancing and singing, the chief rose to speak. "You arrived last year from out of the blue," he said to Carter, "and you gave us a well and a pump." The village appreciated that. But there was this one small problem. Because the well is only 40 ft. deep, it goes dry three months out of the year. "We know that you, Mr. President," said the chief, "will not be happy with a half-measure solution to our problem." On the spot, Carter convened a meeting with his advisers and promptly announced that the well would be drilled to 70 ft. The chief smiled. The villagers cheered. Next morning the former President began the return trip to Plains. He was relaxed and voluble about his new life, about his future plans (he will never again run for public office, he insists), about the problems he had as President ("Ted Kennedy had a vendetta against me"), and about Africa. "I find Africa to be the most challenging and intriguing of any place in the world," he said. "It's fascinating to meet with so many first- and second-generation revolutionaries." Carter has no natural enemies anymore, which is liberating. If he sometimes accepts money from donors with dubious backgrounds--Sasakawa, for example, or the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which has been indicted on money-laundering charges--no one complains, at least not if the money goes to worthy causes. In many ways, of course, Carter is the same old Jimmy: still indiscriminate with superlatives ("very wonderful"), still using what a former aide calls his "One Hundred Ways to a Better Vocabulary" approach to public speaking, still wearing the same kind of seven-league, heavy-soled wing tips he always has. But he's lost the hard edge. He's productive again, and seems finally at peace with the conflicts between his well-known born-again Christianity and his life as a public man. Says he on that sometimes touchy subject: "My Christian faith is just like breathing to me or like being a Southerner or an American. It's all part of the same thing--the sharing, the compassion, the understanding, the dealing with the poor and the destitute and the outcasts." If there is a bit of the white man's burden in that and if Carter sometimes falls victim to Christianity's age-old Catch-22, the sin of pride, well, it doesn't seem very important in the scale of things. And you get the feeling that maybe this is what he thought the presidency would be like--all good works, no Ted Kennedys or Tip O'Neills or bureaucrats or special interests--when he set out from Plains many years ago, naively determined, against the odds, to make a difference. </body> </article> </text>