What Did Jimmy Carter Tell Us About the Cold War? And When Did He See His Face Come Into The White House? — A New Face of a Peanut Farmer

“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 did not have to worry about the mistakes that had already been made in the 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 would like to be your next president. “The president and his family surprise and delight everyone by walking the parade route down Pennsylvania Ave. The White House has a presidential standing in front of it. At the height of the Cold War, it was important that the White House was won. “The system is survivable. It’s verifiable. The peanut farmer in Plains put his finger on the button to start the war. It is a horrifying thought. If the Russians launched a missile attack on us, we had 26 minutes to respond, and that was before the missile hit New York. So I knew that I would have to reply, which could lead to a holocaust. I wanted to understand the issues of Brezhnev. When I was in Moscow I would try to imagine how the rest of the world would view NATO with a formidable military force and a challenge from China. And what would happen if the Soviets became convinced that they were in danger. It was a terrible responsibility that I tried to avoid. To give our own and our nation’s security.” Carter tried to keep the peace and negotiated 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. The American people and I won’t support sending an Olympic team to Moscow with the communists in Afghanistan. The goal, he says, was to pressure the Soviets to reform. I wanted to bring the Soviet Union into the international arena, but also change their system of government. The Soviet Union failed to honor their promise to honor human rights. I think that may have had some impact on Gorbachev when he decided to dismantle the soviet union and also to withdraw troops from it. 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. There is 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 take Sadat and Begin to Camp David and we were there for 13 days. The Camp David accords led to a treaty between Egypt and Israel six months later. Not a word of which has ever been violated since.” Runaway inflation is one of the problems dogging Carter’s presidency. “We must face a time of national austerity.” The energy crisis is going on. All of us have a responsibility to use less energy. Americans found the style of management gloomy and boring. It is a crisis of confidence. Carter lost his re- election in November 1979. “Good evening. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran has been invaded and occupied by Iranian students.” More than 50 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Iran prior to Carter’s presidency. The embassy was warned about a threat and could have taken action like other embassies did, strengthen its security or remove personnel. Polls predicted a close race, but in the end, Carter won in just five states and Washington, D.C. The country is almost solidly in the Reagan colors tonight. Jimmy Carter changed himself after leaving the White House. A former president was found to have a new purpose and esteem for himself. Spanish is a language that many people speak. 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. He sent his national security adviser or his speech writer to my home, so that we could draft the rest of his speech 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 to the White House, he was interested in Latin America. They asked me to get involved in holding a election that replaced the Sandinistas peacefully, and ended the war. The issue of the contraceptives will be solved by an 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 directed them to Kim Il Sang. And he and I agreed that he would not proceed with his nuclear program. There would be an assurance that the inspectors would stay on site. The White House told me that they were not happy with the situation. Al Gore was on the speakerphone. I plan to come to Washington to explain what I did. He said that the President wasn’t wanted in Washington. You should go back to Plains. Well, I was angry, put it mildly. I thought I had prevented a war. I believed that I had finalized a satisfactory agreement for the future. The press was filled with stories about Carter turning what was supposed to be a private visit into a televised summit after he arrived in the U.S. The New York Times had reports of me overstepping my authority and making false claims about the will of Kim Il Sang. That I was naive and ignorant and so forth. I sent Kim Il Sung an urgent letter so that he could confirm all the agreements he had made with Clinton. I believe there were 12 of them. The Clinton administration adopted that as their policy. That policy did help to avert war. Jimmy Carter and President Clinton didn’t do a good job of brokering an agreement with North Korea, which later developed a nuclear arsenal in violation of the agreement. Carter traveled the globe with the Carter Center during his later years 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 need to be met with 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. People who suffer from human rights abuse were looked upon with care by every American embassy. I would like for our nation to be the most generous in the world. 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.”

Many of the celebration of Mr Carter’s legacy have been focused on his postpresidential work. The Carter Center, which he devoted himself to for the past 42 years, has worked with the US and others to eliminate river blindness in the Western. Mr. Carter founded the dispatch of teams of impartial observers, which have been used in 125 elections in 40 countries, to observe a free and fair election. And after leaving office in 1981, he lent his mediation services to successive administrations, defusing tensions in such places as Guyana, Liberia and Sudan.

As president, his foreign policy legacy was also consequential. The Camp David Accords negotiation brought about peace between Egypt and Israel, and later the establishment of diplomatic relations with China, after a rapprochement began under President Richard Nixon. Mr. Carter also negotiated the Panama Canal treaties and pushed them through the Senate, thereby removing a source of anti-American feeling in Latin America and showing that the United States, in Mr. Carter’s words, would “deal fairly and honorably” with smaller nations.

The former president’s regard for human rights was an outgrowth of his Christian faith — a faith so animating that he continued to teach Sunday school while president. He often quoted biblical passages in explaining why America had a responsibility to stand up for those being persecuted elsewhere. He quoted Jesus, from Matthew 25:40, that “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”