Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 18, 1990 TAG: 9003182546
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Art Harris The Washington Post
DATELINE: ESTELI, NICARAGUA LENGTH: Long
Up front, a battered green-and-yellow Sandinista police car, siren screaming, kicked up dust, scattering cattle and campesinos. Inside a blue Chevy van, behind dark, bulletproof glass, the former president stared out at this lush and lovely land of rolling pastures and bloody politics, where just a few hills away, Contra ambushes were reported to have killed five soldiers the day before.
Its landscape holds an enduring fascination for Carter, who presided from the White House during the fall of late dictator Anastasio Somoza. And it's where he chose to make his latest stand as a self-styled peace broker, attempting to resolve conflicts from here to the Middle East and beyond.
Last month he headed his own delegation of observers to referee the national elections here in his new life as diplo-evangelist and counselor to the world - a presence that carries certain risks for any host country. The standing of Panama's Manuel Noriega was seriously injured when Carter, the gringo who won hearts and minds south of the border when he repatriated the Panama Canal, declared that election a fraud; when Carter speaks, Latin America listens.
"We wanted to be able to certify this was an honest, fair election," Carter says. "We didn't want to have to say, `This was a fraud.' "
On this particular trip before Christmas, he was out to investigate dirty tricks, determined to persuade bitter rivals to play fair as his caravan rolled to a stop at a regional election office. A beefy Secret Service agent took up his post, his black nylon tennis racket case hiding an Uzi.
Carter, in slacks and sport shirt, hopped out and hustled inside with his wife, Rosalynn, shook hands all around, then plopped down at a table with stone-faced political enemies. Strong cafe negro was served.
For the next hour, much bitterness poured forth, as rival party leaders charged incumbent Sandinistas with dispatching thugs to threaten opponents, limiting access to government-controlled media, tarring the opposition party, UNO, unfairly with supporting the Contras. Not to mention the bloody dog's head found at the front door of one candidate.
Carter nodded, asked a question here and there, smiled, patiently heard them all out - including a white-haired UNO distressed to be facing the U.S. presidente who, in yanking the rug from under Somoza, created a vacuum that allowed Soviet-backed Sandinistas to take power and pilot the economy into a nose dive with 1,700 percent inflation.
"Ortega will listen to you," sniffed the man, his Spanish dripping sarcasm, echoing a sentiment held by many small-business men. "You are his great friend and protector."
Jimmy Carter smiled his trademark toothy grin, a firm gentleness in his voice. "I'm a friend of all the Nicaraguan people," corrected the Georgian in near-fluent Spanish.
It was typical James Earl Carter, 65, the one-term, 39th president of the United States, going forth to preach a passionate neutrality, insisting that his goal is to ensure that every vote is counted and the outcome respected by all.
"President Carter had tremendous moral authority to keep the Sandinistas honest," says Antonio LaCayo, 41, campaign manager for the leading opposition party that turned out to be the winner in what has been widely judged as a fair election. "He had power here because they invited him to observe, and if he found the elections weren't fair, he would have the courage to say it. We would have accepted his verdict."
President Daniel Ortega cooperated as well, welcoming Carter's bipartisan entourage. Ortega, meanwhile, did not welcome a group appointed by President Bush, who still backed the Contras.
In a sense, fair play at the polls - and the importance of Carter's verdict - is a measure of Citizen Carter's new moral clout in the world. In his capacity as election observer, he visited Nicaragua three times during the campaign, invited by both government and opposition leaders, alongside other monitoring teams from the United Nations and the Organization of American States.
"I have infinitely more freedom to speak now than when I was president," says Carter. "I wasn't representing President Bush," though Carter did report progress to Bush. "I could just speak for myself and tell [the opposition] or Ortega, `I think you ought to do this or that so the election can proceed fairly.' "
It's been 10 years since the peanut farmer and Navy submariner with a passion for detail abruptly jetted home to Georgia in a cold, sad rain, a victim of history, with hostages in Iran and double-digit inflation.
In retrospect, however, Jimmy Carter has become a moral presence, running harder than ever to recast his legacy with good deeds and making an impact in a way historians say few ex-presidents have even tried.
"Carter is the most successful ex-president in my lifetime," declares Stephen Ambrose, biographer of Nixon and Eisenhower. "There's not a lot former presidents can do for their reputations in the White House, but there's a lot they can do for their reputations as people."
"He's an extremely interesting and ethical man whose standing historically is going to increase steadily as time goes on," says Theodore Roosevelt biographer David McCullough.
Carter shuttles between home in Plains and an apartment in his sleek, flying saucer-shaped Carter Center in Atlanta. Not far from Emory University, the center's academic partner where Carter lectures as a professor, it houses the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum - and some 28 million White House documents and mementos available to scholars - run by the National Archives.
It's also home for an ambitious diplomatic and humanitarian outreach, an agenda that runs from "conflict resolution" to monitoring elections to world health and education programs - immunizing children, eradicating the parasitic Guinea worm, dispatching experts to teach new farming methods to Africans, fighting tobacco exports to the Third World, providing artificial limbs and special education teachers to China, and so on. And let's not forget human rights.
With little fanfare, Carter pores over reports from Amnesty International and letters from families of political prisoners and often personally intercedes. Frequently, his call - and the threat of public censure - is all it takes to save a life.
"It's amazing how many leaders will release someone about to be executed rather than be condemned as a human rights violator," he says. Curiously, he may have even more influence in some ways now than as president. "Now, if I criticize a leader's human rights policy, the world would generally assume it was justified, with no political overtones."
From his command post atop a quiet hill where Gen. Sherman watched Atlanta burn, he's been especially focused on taking the Camp David agreement a step further - and kicking off programs he thought he'd be able to tackle in a second term that never came.
Some say his sense of urgency stems from that letdown. While Carter and Rosalynn are in excellent shape, jogging regularly and eating health food, the specter of the pancreatic cancer that has claimed four members of his immediate family has led him to cooperate in a National Institutes of Health study of the disease. He says he expects to be around a long time; and he hopes to raise an endowment to keep his center going no matter what.
It took $30 million to build it all. "You think you all have a hard time raising money for your campaigns, try raising millions as a defeated Democrat during a Republican administration" that blamed Carter for every ill in the land, he joked.
With 100-odd wars classified as internal disputes outside U.N. and U.S. diplomatic jurisdiction, he's got plenty to keep him busy. "We don't want to duplicate what others can do," he said. "But there's a vacuum we are attempting to fill. It's very difficult, if not impossible for the U.N. or OAS or United States or Soviet Union to negotiate between a recognized government, say in Sudan or Ethiopia, and revolutionaries fighting that government."
But Citizen Carter can.
He can speak his mind, and does, calling, for example, the strategic defense initiative, or Star Wars, a Reagan "slush fund" for defense contractors, "an absolutely stupid waste of money. There's not a responsible scientist in the world who thinks it will work."
He can go where no American official dares to tread. In 1987, he was even encouraged, sources say, by a top Reagan official (in an administration that was against it) to visit terrorist havens like Syria, where U.S. diplomats had then been booted out. He spent 10 hours there with President Hafez Assad.
"Even though it was a country that hated the Camp David accords," says Ken Stein, an Emory professor who heads the Carter Center's Middle East program, "he was greeted with warmth. People were shouting, "Mr. Carter!' A former American president had never been to Syria. Of course, it's a culture that welcomes strangers, even if they happen to be enemies, but his presence still honored them."
Last week he was in Damascus again to discuss the plight of foreign hostages in Lebanon with Assad.
Last fall, he jetted between Nairobi and Addis Ababa to bring sides to the bargaining table in Ethiopia's three-decade-old war with Eritrean rebels. Military leader Haile Mariam Mengistu invited Carter to stay at the palace, the first American ever to do so. After talks stalled, Carter brought both sides to Atlanta last fall, and, a la Camp David, turned up the heat by summoning the press to hold feet to the fire. Nothing final was agreed on, but all sides were said to be impressed when Carter sat at his portable word processor to hammer out language for proposed accords.
"Most presidential historians," says Richard Norton Smith, a Herbert Hoover biographer and acting director of the Eisenhower Library, "in ranking presidents in their pantheon of greatness look for swashbuckling characters who put their larger-than-life stamp on their eras.
"It was once fashionable to sneer at Eisenhower as a man who learned more from battles than books," but compared with the turbulent '60s, Ike's low inflation and quiet '50s era of old-time values now seem appealing.
Like Harry Truman, who left office in the depths of public opinion, Carter was among the least popular presidents. Now, a decade out of office, he appears to be on a popularity roll.
"I did have an incompatibility with the Washington press corps that was distressing to me," reflects Carter. "But I always felt what I did as president was the best I could do. I've been relaxed about historians' assessments. There's an inclination with presidents who were not all that well respected when they left office to be refurbished over time: Truman, Eisenhower, Hoover. I was hoping that would take place, and it has begun to. And the fact is that what we've been attempting to do in post-White House years is unprecedented and worthy of commendation.
"That's not my motivation, but it's gratifying to get good publicity for a change, for what we are doing now." Carter had to build a library; it is expected of every former president. But he didn't want a "lifeless memorial." He bolted awake one night with the answer. "He always sleeps so soundly that I thought he must be sick," wrote Rosalynn.
So it came to pass. In the early '80s, as Carter raised money, symposiums were held at Emory, reports were issued. Unveiled, his dream elicited chuckles from Reagan's Washington as he began recruiting stars like William Foege, former chief of the Centers for Disease Control, as his executive director. Soon the staff included a Nobel laureate, Ph.D.s from Harvard, Emory professors like Stein, Carter's former national security deputy, Robert Pastor. After the Ethiopians landed in Atlanta last year, the press figured that something was really happening, and Carter Revisionism was born.
"A helluva lot of people feel guilty about what they once said about him," says Washington political analyst Bob Beckel, Walter Mondale's former campaign manager, who says he heard the confessions at a recent Georgetown dinner party. "You know what they were saying? "What a terrific mind he's got, what a wonderful job he's doing, what a humanitarian.' "
Carter has been invited twice to the Bush White House. "We have a good relationship," he says of the president. It's quite a turnaround from the Reagan years. On a trip to Turkey in the early '80s, Carter says, he was cold-shouldered by none other than the U.S. ambassador there. No longer. Not only does Bush call Carter and other ex-presidents to brief them on his diplomatic forays, but he also elicits advice. After each trip to Nicaragua, Carter delivers a written report to Bush, who last year dispatched Secretary of State James Baker to the Carter Center to announce an easing of Latin American debt.
And Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., a history buff, has written Bush urging him to recruit Carter to play some official role in much the same way Truman brought Herbert Hoover in from the cold after he outlasted FDR. Not that Carter would accept such an appointment; he's fully aware of his special status and his special relationship with some other world leaders.
"I met Gorbachev in Russia a few years back," he says. "He asked me, "How am I doing?' I said, "Not very well. You propose a lot of things, but you don't get anything done.' He said, "Give me a little time.' "
Addressing foreign students the other day at Emory, Carter sounds like a kind of '60s rebel, not only slamming America's attitude toward the underdeveloped world, but urging Third World students to report any recklessness in their countries by American firms. He even has in mind a sample letter to send major newspapers. "It should go like this," he says:
" `Dear Sir. I am a student from Zambia, and when I went home, I saw barrels of toxic chemicals stacked on the side of the road. Why does your country allow companies to send poisons outlawed in America to kill people in mine?' That kind of letter will cause outrage and change."
He shakes hands and is gone. Margaret Fogain, 38, a doctoral candidate at Clark College from Cameroon, waves a sheet of anti-American questions she had aimed to ask, but had no cause to. "Every time I listen to him, he hypnotizes me from speaking out to criticize the United States. As president, he was so far ahead of what the American people think, but he was restrained by the system. If he could have won another term, he could have been like Gorbachev. But he was too revolutionary for the people."
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