TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091189/09118900.018

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 17KB | 312 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 60

Hail To the Ex-Chief


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.