Jimmy Carter’s smile was a major presence in my childhood.
He is the first President of whom I have any memories—starting with the day he won the election. My uncle came to the breakfast table of our family home in India in November 1976 carrying the local newspaper and joyously exclaiming, “Carter has won!” I saw Carter’s face on the front page smiling in victory and I wondered who he was.
When I came to the United States as an eight-year-old in the summer of 1977, the beginning of my ceaseless childhood dance between India and the United States, Carter’s smile continued to regale me. He flashed it quite often on television. I returned to India on the very day in January 1981 that Carter left office, as the U.S. hostages in Iran were being released. I recall people at the airport talking about both events.
By the time I returned to the United States as a young man in 1990, Carter had settled into his post-presidential activities, which he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for a little more than a decade later. I briefly met him when he came to the Triangle, North Carolina, area in the mid-1990s to do a signing for one of the many books he had written.
Then in 2008, I got to interview him for The Progressive.
When I approached the Carter Center for an interview with the former President, I was told that in order to do a one-on-one interview, I would have to agree to write about a right-to-information conference that the center was organizing, with him at the helm. At the time, I found this to be an annoying imposition, as I had other topics I wanted to discuss, but in retrospect it was a great opportunity to observe Carter in action over a number of days.
Photo provided
Former President Jimmy Carter with Amitabh Pal, former managing editor of the Progressive.
Jimmy Carter still attended to the details well into his eighties. He was quite heavily involved in the conference, and even suggested a number of amendments for the final declaration that emerged from the gathering.
He got in some good lines, too. “As some of you may remember, I was the President once,” he deadpanned. He also took some jabs at the then-in-power George W. Bush Administration. “Under the present administration, the [need for secrecy] has gone to extremes,” he said. “They’re putting a secret stamp on almost every paper they can find.”
As soon as the conference ended, I was whisked into Carter’s office for an interview while the Secret Service waited outside. Carter and I sat on adjacent sofas. He was pleasant and warm and exhibited flashes of his memorable smile. He answered questions precisely and genially in that famous soft Southern lilt of his.
Some of the comments he made during the interview ring even more true today.
“The world community knows the basic principles of a solution,” he told me when I asked him about the Israel-Palestine issue. “It’s all been written out. The Arab countries unanimously—all twenty-two of them—have publicly announced that they would recognize Israel diplomatically and economically, if Israel will withdraw from the [occupied] territories and implement the basic United Nations resolutions. It will take a lot of influence—strong influence—from the United States to make both sides come to that point.”
And with Donald Trump poised to assume the presidency again, Carter’s excoriation of the Bush Administration’s inclination toward the use of torture is very timely.
“What we have done, through our own government, is to torture prisoners, to deprive them of their basic rights to legal counsel, even the right of prisoners to be acquainted with the charges against them,” he said. “Those kinds of things have been cherished as basic principles of American law and American policy for more than 200 years. To have them subverted and abandoned and condemned is just a travesty of justice and a very serious embarrassment to those of us who—as Americans and non-Americans—are committed to human rights.”
What came through especially was his justifiable pride at all that he had achieved after he left the Oval Office.
“The main thing that I’ve acquired in the last twenty-seven years has been access to the poorest and most destitute, forgotten, and suffering people on Earth,” he told me. “It’s not possible for a President to actually know them. But we go into the remote areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and actually meet with people who are suffering and find out why. Then we try to work with them, giving them maximum responsibility for correcting their own problems. So that’s the element that’s been most beneficial to me.”
A major aspect that distinguished Carter’s post-presidency was his willingness to critique U.S. policy.
“More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes,” Carter wrote in his book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, a few years after our 2008 interview. His dissection of U.S. foreign policy was bipartisan, since he also laid out his concerns with the Obama Administration’s use of drone attacks in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Most importantly, Carter kept up his commitment to the public good. Readers will be familiar with his lack of reluctance to get down and dirty, whether building homes through Habitat for Humanity or traveling around the world battling diseases and promoting democracy.
I’m not blind to Jimmy Carter’s flaws. His economic policies were in some ways the precursor to the Clintonian neoliberalism that later took over the Democratic Party, to its detriment. And he appointed Paul Volcker, an inflation hawk, as the head of the Federal Reserve, whose policies in the 1980s tamed prices but at a steep human cost.
What’s more, Carter’s inconsistencies on foreign policy—despite his stated adherence to human rights—have been well documented. For example, his Carter Doctrine—which I didn’t get a chance to probe him on during my interview with him as I had planned—declared that the United States would go to any lengths to protect its “vital interests” in the Middle East. And his attitude toward key U.S. allies such as the Shah of Iran and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua vacillated between indulgence and chastisement.
For all his flaws, however, it is hard to be too harsh on a man who tried in his own way to do the right thing and make the world a better place.
Perhaps the smile that captured me when I was a child continues to entice me even now.