(Editor’s Note: Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week.)
All right I’ve got Jimmy Carter on my mind so look out.
For years Carter has been a thorn in the side of presidents acting as a kind of ”anti-president ” as Lance Morrow once put it in an essay for Time. You recall how Carter irked Clinton on Haiti and North Korea. His low moment however came during the run-up to the Gulf War when he wrote members of the U.N. Security Council — including Mitterrand’s France and Communist China — urging them to thwart the Bush administration’s effort.
Our government found out about it when the Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney called the defense secretary Dick Cheney and said ”What the . . .?” Some people actually allowed themselves to utter the word ”treason.” Sometimes Carter says he would never act at odds with the government; at other times he talks about a higher law a duty to conscience etc. Either would be fine: but the ex-president doesn’t stick to one or the other.
Carter has long enjoyed a reputation as a Middle East sage owing of course to his role in the original Camp David accords. That reputation however rests on shaky grounds. Truth is Sadat and Begin had their deal worked out before ever approaching Washington. And the facilitators they used were far from saintly Southern Baptists: They used the dreadful King of Morocco and the even more dreadful Ceausescu of Romania! When they had their plan essentially worked out however they called the White House.
Still Carter is proud-as-all-get-out of his rendezvous with Middle East history. He trades on it incessantly. I remember Mario Cuomo giving his famous (though ridiculous) keynote address at the Democratic convention in 1984. He went down a list of Democratic presidents lauding them: and when he got to Carter all he could think of apparently was Camp David — the ”nearly miraculous” accords he called them. Carter in the stands beamed and beamed and teared up badly.
The ex-president always considered himself cheated out of the Nobel prize and he and his Carter Center campaigned rather embarrassingly openly for it. He has won prizes however about which he crows: There was one named after his fellow liberal southerner Fulbright; there was one from the UN (natch); and there was my favorite: the Zayed International Prize for the Environment named for His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. Arabs are heavy-duty funders of the Carter Center and they get a lot for their money.
Arafat’s Public Relations Flack
No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that if he had a second term Carter would have sold Israel down the river. In the 1990’s Carter became quite close to Yasir Arafat. After the Gulf War Saudi Arabia was mad at Arafat because the PLO chief had sided with Saddam Hussein. So Arafat asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over with the princes and restore Saudi funding to him — which Carter did.
In The Unfinished Presidency historian Douglas Brinkley writes ”There was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know than Yasir Arafat.” The former president ”felt certain affinities with the Palestinian: a tendency toward hyperactivity and a workaholic disposition with unremitting sixteen-hour days seven days a week decade after decade.” Neat huh?
At their first meeting — in 1990 — Carter boasted of his toughness toward Israel assuring Arafat at one point ”. . . you should not be concerned that I am biased. I am much more harsh with the Israelis.” Arafat for his part railed against the Reagan administration and its alleged ”betrayals.” Rosalynn Carter taking notes for her husband interjected ”You don’t have to convince us!” Brinkley records that this ”elicited gales of laughter all round.” Carter himself according to Brinkley ”agreed that the Reagan administration was not renowned as promise keepers” (this to Arafat).
