WHAT JIMMY CARTER MEANS TO ME

 

Today we said farewell to Jimmy Carter, perhaps the most underrated president, statesman and diplomat in the history of the United States. The former president died on December 29^th, at the age of one hundred, prior to which, he was the oldest living president in US history. His state funeral services were held today in Washington, although his mortal remains will now be returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, for burial there.

Even in dying, President Carter demonstrated his stubborn will and resilience. Lucid to the last, he had said he would live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris for president, and did. I can’t help but wonder if , given Vice President Harris’s loss, he didn’t also promise himself to give up the ghost before Donald Trump took office again. 

No matter how anyone views the thirty-ninth president’s single term in office, no one, even more or less in his or her right mind, can be dismissive of the superior moral, ethical and humanitarian standards that marked President Carter’s long and accomplished life and service. Not even President-elect Trump, who always seems ready and able to say something derogatory about some of America’s most admirable people. In the case of Jimmy Carter, Trump surprisingly wrote: “Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History… The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Of course, that hasn’t kept the president-elect from expressing his fury that, thanks to the timing of President Carter’s death, the flag will be at half-staff during the Trump inauguration on January 20^th. (I’m imagining Jimmy’s genuine, toothy grin and a cosmic onery wink to his most ardent fans as I write this). Perhaps that was something that crossed Trump’s mind when he decided, after ranting insanely about annexing Canada, buying Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, to also include “taking back the Panama Canal”, and not ruling out using military force to do so. It’s worth recalling that a major achievement of the Carter Administration was to sign accords with Panama to end US imperialism in the country’s Canal Zone, and to thus return full and effective sovereignty to that Central American nation, while ensuring unrestricted international use of that vital sea link between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

While historic, however, that was not the highest achievement of his brief presidency.  The greatest of his presidential accomplishments was his astute and persistent brokering of peace between Israel and Egypt, leading to the signing of the so-called Camp David Accords of September 1978. Prior to that time, the two countries had fought each other in four wars—the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-49, following which the State of Israel was founded, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973—while, in the meantime, barely maintaining a fragile suspension of hostilities.

An ever-stubbornly determined Carter’s peace efforts culminated in a summit between the Egyptian president, Field Marshall Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the Camp David Presidential Retreat. President Carter’s relentless diplomacy and vocation for peace led all three men to remain at Camp David for nearly two weeks straight until an agreement acceptable to both parties in dispute could be hammered out and signed. The agreement ended more than three decades of hostility between the two nations, with Carter negotiating a major commitment from Begin for the return to Egyptian control over territory that Israel had illegally seized on the Sinai Peninsula.

The peace treaty that resulted from the Camp David talks and accords remains in effect and without violation to this day, nearly a half-century later, maintaining a sound peace between those two Middle East neighbors. This, despite the fact that Sadat literally gave his life for that peace. On October 6, 1981, he was assassinated by extremist members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who had long opposed the bilateral peace pact. But his murder appears only to have fortified the resolve of both countries to keep the agreement for which President Carter had served as peacemaker.

The following year, President Carter sat down in Vienna with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to negotiate a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, better known as SALT II. Despite Brezhnev’s reputation as a hardliner, and largely thanks to President Carter’s diplomacy and understanding of positive compromise, an agreement was reached and an accord signed by the two men.

It was as that major agreement was being delivered to the US Senate for ratification, however, that the  Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. True to his staunch commitment to world peace and non-aggression, Carter withdrew the treaty from congressional consideration. But despite that ethical stance against Soviet expansionism, President Carter kept the lines of communication open between the White House and the Kremlin, and managed to broker an informal commitment for the superpowers to abide by the terms of SALT II.

In later life, Carter would express frustration that he had not had a second term in which to continue his work toward a lasting Middle East peace, by seeking a similar agreement to the Camp David Accords—in the form of a two-state solution—between Israel and Gaza-West Bank Palestinians. In this regard, in 2006, he authored a controversial book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he argued that Israel's continued control over and building of settlements on land rightfully belonging to the Palestinians have created the primary obstacles to a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement.

Based on what he posits in that book, the late president has been quoted as saying: “The book has nothing to do with what's going on inside Israel, which is a wonderful democracy, you know, where everyone has guaranteed equal rights and where, under the law, Arabs and Jews who are Israelis have the same privileges… That's been most of the controversy (about his book) because people assume it's about Israel. It's not.”

President Carter apparently saw Gaza the way many other clear-minded observers have. That is, basically, as an open-air prison, not unlike the so-called “townships” of South Africa before the dismantling of Apartheid, which was a repressive means of maintaining segregation between Native Africans and their European rulers.

He made it clear, however, that in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the separation policy isn’t about race, but about territory. In Carter’s own words: “I've never alleged that the framework of apartheid existed within Israel at all, (but) that what does exist in the West Bank is based on trying to take Palestinian land, and not on racism. So it was a very clear distinction.”

He went on to clarify, “When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the two hundred-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”

A series of international developments largely beyond his control had consequences at home that whittled away at the initial popularity of the Carter Administration. Adversaries were quick to claim that Presidency Carter’s “weakness” as a leader was solely to blame and managed to so undermine his popularity that he lost his bid for a second term to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 and left office in January of 1981. Far from considering that the end of his career serving his country, however, many of his truly greatest diplomatic and humanitarian achievements were yet to come.

Less than a year after he left office, President Carter, along with his wife Rosalynn, partnered with Emory University to found the Carter Center, located just minutes from downtown Atlanta. The NGO’s mission statement is to “advance human rights and alleviate human suffering” worldwide. The center, whose board is made up of  business leaders, educators, former government officials, and philanthropists, is currently managing projects in eighty countries, and its activities include election-monitoring, democratic institution-building, conflict mediation, and human rights advocacy. The Carter Center has also taken the lead in projects to treat long-neglected tropical diseases including onchocerciasis (a parasitic illness sometimes called “river blindness”) trachoma (a granular conjunctivitis that causes blindness), lymphatic filariasis (better known as elephantiasis), malaria, and dracunculiasis (parasitic Guinea worm disease).

The Carter Center’s work on such a wide variety of humanitarian endeavors has been so effective that Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee granted President Carter the award for working through the Carter Center  “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

But in closing this tribute to a truly great American patriot, humanitarian and world statesman, I’ll take a moment to express what Jimmy Carter means to me personally.

I had the privilege of working with award-winning international journalist Robert Cox at the Buenos Aires Herald during the dark days of the military dictatorship commonly known as “el Proceso”, that ruled Argentina with an iron fist from 1976 to 1983. In fact, it was Bob Cox who provided me with my first opportunity to work as a professional journalist, and he too who was not only my boss and friend, but also my mentor in those crucial early years.

Although others of us would follow in his footsteps—after the Proceso drove him and his family into  US exile in 1979—by continuing to bear the standard of democracy and human rights that he had raised, it was clearly Bob Cox, and Bob alone, who established our paper’s reputation as a bulwark of freedom and rule of law, and as a small but courageous voice against the gross abuse and state terror perpetrated by the regime.

That said, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to us in that little English-language paper had Ronald Reagan preceded Jimmy Carter as US president instead of the other way around. We’ll never know, of course, but I suspect that, had that been the case, the Herald might well not have survived the regime—and perhaps neither Cox nor James Neilson and I,  as the main editorialists who succeeded him, would today be celebrating a brand new year at ages ninety-one, eighty-four and seventy-five, respectively.

Indeed, those were dangerous times. Some one hundred journalists and writers who dared investigate, who dared dissent, were murdered or “disappeared”, along with tens of thousands of other people caught in the gnashing teeth of the Proceso, never to be heard from again. While it is true that the Herald was, for all intents and purposes, a lone voice in the local press, recording and reporting what was going on in real time, it is also true that, during the worst years of the regime, we had a friend in Jimmy Carter.

After decades of US policy that took a hands-off approach to “friendly dictators”, President Carter imposed a foreign policy whose key tenet was the protection of human rights through diplomacy. The dichotomy of US foreign policy up to then had always been that while Washington preached democracy, rule of law and the Bill of Rights as basic inalienable human and civil rights at home, it applied a double standard elsewhere. It was tantamount to saying that Americans were just a little more human than the people who had to live under the heels of dictators’ boots in rightwing regimes that posed as front men for the US in its war on communism.

Never, in modern times, had a US president emphasized as much as Jimmy Carter did the idea that US foreign policy should reflect the highest human ideals of the United States and Western democracy. And to make sure that his policies actually were implemented at a consular level, Carter’s State Department instituted what was basically a human rights section at the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, capably headed up by career diplomat Franklyn Allen “Tex” Harris.

Tex and Cox worked closely together during Tex’s tenure (1977-1979). It was a job Harris took seriously and one in which he went above and beyond the call of duty to fulfil. The regime was not only uncooperative, but often also obstructive. Still, Tex managed to save lives, using the power and contacts with which  his post provided him to track many of the same cases of “disappearance” as the Herald, and, as often as possible, trying to find out where victims were being held without charge and pressuring for their release. As such, he had a major influence on the Carter Administration’s foreign policy in Argentina.

But Jimmy Carter’s human rights measures didn’t end there. He also named staunch human rights activist Patricia Murphy Derian to be his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. As such,  she immediately took on the authoritarian regimes in places like Chile, Paraguay and Argentina, as well as in apartheid-era South Africa and elsewhere. President Carter’s focus in those years on cleaning up the human rights situation in Latin America and putting these countries on the road to democracy was clearly a question of starting in his own backyard and turning the Americas into a showcase for basic, traditional American ideals.

Assistant Secretary Derian proved a tenacious defender of that policy and of human rights in general. In the case of Argentina, she openly accused the regime of crimes against humanity and became instrumental in setting up an inspection mission that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IHRC) carried out in Argentina under authority from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1979. It was also in September of that year that she helped secure the release of Jacobo Timerman, former owner and publisher of the center-left newspaper, La Opinión, who had been imprisoned and tortured after being falsely accused of helping launder left-wing terrorist extortion money.

Through Cox’s numerous editorials and articles published in the news sections of the newspaper, the Herald had already mounted a two-and-a-half-year local and international campaign for Timerman’s release. But Patricia Derian’s  campaign for  Timerman’s freedom helped catapult his case to the forefront of international interest and put such intense pressure on the Argentine military that they finally had to let him go. Assistant Secretary Derian’s actions so infuriated the Argentine military that they internally declared her their Public Enemy Number One and are even reported to have entertained plans to have her killed. (Not surprising, since this was how they had been handling the opposition of every color up to then, and they were obviously arrogant enough to think they could get away with it).

With Ms. Derian leading the action, President Carter slapped sanctions on Argentina for failing to heed his demands that human rights be respected, alienating the leaders of the Proceso, but at the same time drawing ever-increasing international media attention to what was going on, and making it impossible for the military to operate with the same blanket impunity that they had early on after the coup. Suddenly, the Proceso was high-profile and its image was abysmal.

In Argentina, Assistant Secretary Derian would have to wait nearly three decades to receive the recognition she deserved for hobbling the dictatorship and very likely saving thousands more lives that would otherwise have been taken, but finally, in 2006, she was awarded the Order of the Liberator General San Martín, with the rank of Officer–the highest decoration granted by the Argentine government to foreign officials.

Following Ronald Reagan’s election win over President Carter, things turned dangerous again. Reagan’s old-time “anti-red” approach to foreign policy prompted him to almost immediately send his foreign policy architect, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to let the Proceso leaders know that the Jimmy Carter era was stone cold dead, and that from now on they would no longer have to fret about pesky human rights investigators out of Washington.

Dr. Kirkpatrick was a fervent anti-communist and the author of what came to be known as the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, one of the main principles of which was the exact opposite of the Carter policy of pinning US support to democratic government and, above all, respect for human rights.

The Kirkpatrick policy advocated Washington’s support for just about any kind of government, including harsh far-right dictatorships, with the only prerequisite for membership in the Reagan Administration’s group of ‘friends’ being hardline opposition to all things leftist. The Proceso was, obviously, a shoo-in. It had been so tough on reds that it had wiped out every opponent that ever even dared to blush. And the Proceso was more than willing to lend support to Reagan’s far-right Contra guerrillas in Central America.

My own theory about how the Falklands War between Argentina and Britain in 1982 took shape lays ample blame at the door of the Reagan Administration for coddling the Proceso,  prompting its leaders, erroneously, to believe that Washington would back Argentina’s long-standing claim to the Falkland-Malvinas Islands over that of Britain.  Had Jimmy Carter won a second term, I couldn’t be more sure that it was a war that would have been avoided, and that the regime would have fallen even earlier.

As such, President Carter will always hold a special place in my heart and mind. He represented everything that the United States should be, everything that the US should promote and defend.

May he rest in peace.