Jimmy Carter: American Hero
The Polemicist
by Michael House
LONDON England—(Weekly Hubris)—10/17/11—Jimmy Carter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. His religiosity is cloying, his smile is so cheesy you feel it must be insincere, and his all-round saintliness makes George W. Bush’s raffishness seem positively appealing. He is almost literally too good to be true.
But at 87, he can be said to have done more good in the world than any living American.
When Carter ceased to be the most powerful man on earth, he and his wife Rosalynn went back to live in the small ranch house they built in 1961, in the town (more accurately the street) of Plains, Georgia. They live there still.
Almost every ex-president, after leaving office, sets up a memorial library, a foundation, some sort of brick-and-mortar monument to his greatness. Carter set up the Carter Center in Atlanta, to advance human rights, peace negotiations and disease prevention and eradication.
The guinea worm is a debilitating parasite which affected 3.5 million people worldwide when Carter decided to eradicate it. Last year, there were just 1,797 cases. The disease is set to be the second ever to be eliminated, after smallpox.
The Carter Center also has in its crosshairs on river blindness, trachoma and elephantiasis. The Center targets problems that others ignore. So, while money is poured into HIV, AIDS and malaria research, unfashionable diseases that affect the poorest of the poor are off the radar.
Jimmy Carter has always lived up to his liberal and religious beliefs. The family housekeeper for 40 years first came to work for then-Governor Carter as a convicted murderer on day-release. She was tasked with looking after the Carters’ three-year-old daughter, Amy. A deeply religious man, Carter still teaches Sunday school most Sundays at the Baptist Church in Plains.
Not content with the Carter Center, in 1984, the couple set up the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project to carry out home-building in poor areas around the world. This autumn, Carter is in Haiti, helping to build 100 homes.
The energy of the man is prodigious. Perhaps he inherited it from his celebrated mother Miss Lillian, who became a Peace Corps volunteer at the age of 68. In April, he was in North Korea trying to negotiate an agreement on its nuclear program, following up on his visit in 1994, when he persuaded Kim Il-sung to agree to a nuclear weapons freeze.
Carter is a very persuasive man, as Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin found out when, at Camp David in 1978, he somehow secured the signing of the Peace Accords, only the second peace treaty that Israel had ever signed.
Other successes of his presidency were the Panama Canal Treaty, that probably averted war in South America by returning the canal to Panama, and reducing America’s dependence on imported oil by half—30 years before global warming gained real traction.
But the greatest triumph of his presidency was the avoidance of war, legal or illegal: during his tenure, no countries were invaded, no bombs were dropped, no service personnel killed, no civilians slaughtered. After the staff of the American embassy in Teheran were held hostage, Carter came under enormous pressure to retaliate militarily. If he had bombed Teheran, he would probably have been re-elected. But thousands of innocent civilians could have been killed as well as the hostages themselves. He did the right thing rather than the popular thing—and paid the price.
After leaving office, he pledged not to use his position to make money: no corporate directorships; no high-paid speechmaking. He simply set to work to make the world a better place.
Carter was the first high-profile individual to call for the closure of Guantanamo. He condemned the invasion of Iraq as “based upon lies and misinterpretations.”
In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No one has deserved it more.
A great president, and a great man . . .
Michael House
Michael House, FRGS was born, of rural, peasant stock, in Somerset, England. He read law at Exeter College, Oxford and was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1974, along with five colleagues, House started up a set of barristers' chambers in three little rooms in Lincoln's Inn, London, specializing in human rights and in representing the poor and dispossessed. The set now comprises 170 members and occupies a 17th-century building that was home to the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated (Spencer Perceval, 1812). In 1987, depressed by Mrs. Thatcher's third election victory, House fled to Greece for three years, where he was published in The Athenian and The Southeastern Review. He also there met his archaeologist wife, Diane. The pair returned to England in 1990 after a half-year, round-the-world trip, and settled in London and Northamptonshire. Since then, by way of escape from humdrum criminality, House has traveled in Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, Ladakh, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Mongolia, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, where only the stout walls of Galle Fort saved him and his spouse from being swept away by the tsunami. House returns to Greece, his second home, almost every year. He has written for, inter alia, History Today, the Universities Quarterly, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Rough Guide to Greece. House practices criminal defense law from Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in London, and hopes that if he keeps on practicing, he may eventually get the hang of it. His yet unachieved ambitions are: to farm alpacas; see Tibet liberated from the Chinese jackboot; and live to see Britain a socialist republic. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)