Interview: Jimmy Carter
Nobel Prize for Peace

When you were growing up, what did you think you would do with your life?

Jimmy Carter: From the time I was five years old, if you had asked me, "What are you going to do when you grow up?" I would have said, "I want to go to the Naval Academy, get a college education, and serve in the U.S. Navy." My family had all been farmers for 350 years in this country. Working people, and no member of my father's family had ever finished high school, so this was an ambition that seemed like a dream then. It was during the Depression years, in the late '30s and '40s, and a college education was looked upon as financially impossible. The only two choices we had were to go to West Point or Annapolis, where the government paid for the education. I had a favorite uncle who was in the Navy, so I chose Annapolis. But that was my standard answer, from which I never deviated until I was 18 years old and went to college to prepare and then I went on to Annapolis.

Did you ever want to be anything else, like a policeman or a fire fighter?

Jimmy Carter: Not really. I always had a pretty singular commitment then, not knowing that I would serve a while in the Navy and then get involved in other things. But the college challenge, or dream, was very vivid to me. If I hadn't gotten into the Naval Academy, then I would probably have become a college professor and gone on to graduate work. But as a child, I had a single-minded commitment to go to Annapolis.

At some point you got out of the Navy and became interested in politics. What attracted you to that?

Jimmy Carter: I was in the Navy 11 years, counting the three years at the Naval Academy. And then when I did resign, I came home.

I was influenced by my father, who, in the tiny village of Plains and the surrounding farming community, played a very vital role -- in the church, he was on the local school board, he was on the local hospital authority. He had run for the legislature, served in the House of Representatives. When my daddy was dying, I got off from my work as one of the young officers working with Admiral Hyman Rickover in the nuclear program then. I saw that my daddy's life was very extensive and very valuable to people. So when I went home, I pretty well emulated what he had been doing. I got involved in a lot of things that I need not describe right now, one of which was to be chairman of the local school board -- the county school board -- during the integration years, very difficult times. And some of the major politicians in Georgia, even those that were looked upon as being moderate, were promising that if one black child went into the public school system, they would close it down. The main candidate for governor, his slogan was "No, not one," and he would hold up one finger to indicate this. So, I decided that I could, if I went to the Georgia Senate, which was reapportioned that year, that I might help protect the school system. So when I was finally elected and got to Atlanta, my only request in the Senate was to be put on the Education Committee, and I very quickly became the chairman of the University Committee. But it was because of that interest in education that I decided to go into politics.

Farming is hard work, and so is being in the Navy, but they must have looked pretty good when you saw how hard campaigning for political office was.

Jimmy Carter: People ask me, "How did you stand the long campaigning? How did you stand being charged with the responsibilities of a great nation, one of the most powerful and difficult jobs in the world?" It wasn't any more difficult than picking cotton all day or shaking peanuts. There is an equality there. If you have a task to perform and are vitally interested in it, excited and challenged by it, then you will exert maximum energy. But in the excitement, the pain of fatigue dissipates, and the exuberance of what you hope to achieve overcomes the reluctance.

Was there one experience or event that inspired you as a young man?

Jimmy Carter: My father, although admirable in many ways, measured by modern day standards, would have been looked upon as very conservative on the race issue, which was a way of life in Georgia then. Mother never paid any attention to that. We lived in a remote area outside of Plains, a little community called Archery. It was during the Depression years, as I've said already. Mother, being a registered nurse, acted almost as a medical doctor for the poor families around Archery. They would come to my mother, and she also did nursing duties in the hospital nearby. But she would help them with childbirth or with illnesses without any charge. I could see that my mother broke down the barriers of race discrimination at that time. I think that made more of an impression on me. My daddy was a very dominant person in the family, but in the relationship between mother and our black neighbors, which was quite startling for the Plains community of those days, my father could not dominate my mother, and I think that was an inspirational aspect of life that was very memorable.

Who influenced you the most?

Jimmy Carter: My mother in that way I've described. My daddy taught me how much a man could do in dealing directly with a multiplicity of responsibilities.

Outside my family, the main person, outside of my father, the main man who has had an influence on my life is Admiral Hyman Rickover. I was one of the two young officers in the program to build atomic submarines. There were two built: the Nautilus and the Sea Wolf. I was in charge of the crew that was helping to build the Sea Wolf and building the nuclear power plant that later became a prototype. Rickover was a man who demanded absolute excellence and total dedication from all those who worked under him. He demanded as much from himself. And so he set a standard of commitment and perfection in life that I had never experienced before. He really had a great impact on my life.

Were there particular teachers, or books you read as a young man, that stimulated or inspired you?

Jimmy Carter: We had a school superintendent in Plains named Miss Julia Coleman, who was honored in Georgia as the outstanding educator of the state. She was even invited to go to the White House to meet with President Franklin Roosevelt. We had a tiny school, and she would kind of adopt a few students as her special ones. I was one of those she happened to adopt. She would give me long lists of classical books of all kinds to read as a possible assignment. And she would always try to give more than anybody could possibly read. I would read almost all of them, sometimes all of them. Miss Julia introduced me to a gamut of books, most of them classical in nature. And on the side, I would read other books about cowboys and Indians and so forth. Obviously, in the community where I lived, the Bible was the center of people's reading. We never missed Sunday School. My daddy was a Sunday School teacher. I still teach Sunday School, and have since I was a college student. So I would say obviously the Bible.

When people ask me what's a favorite book that I've ever read, I used to say Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, who went in to a little remote area in Alabama during the Depression years, got a grant from I think the WPA (Works Projects Administration) or something, and wrote about the lives of people who lived in desperate poverty, and how they dealt with the exigencies of life, the challenges, the disappointments of life, and still had a coherent family environment. And the photographs in the book by Walker Evans are just works of art. That book is one of my favorites as well.

Is that because it gave you a sense of empathy with people who are struggling?

Jimmy Carter: It showed me that the experiences of our neighbors were not unique, that there were people all over the country who suffered. It happened then, during the Depression years, that all the families he analyzed in great depth were white families. We still have people like that living in our country. What impressed me with that book was a tremendous chasm between people who have everything, who have a house and a job and education and adequate diets, and a sense of success or security, who want to do good things, and the vast array of people still in our country who don't have any of these things, and whom we seldom, if ever, know.

I experienced the ravages of racial discrimination as a child, and even as an adult, and I've seen discrimination against women, and wars all over the world because of ethnic discrimination. The greatest discrimination in the world now, here in Atlanta or in New York is a discrimination against poor people. We don't even know them. We care in general about homelessness, or drug addiction, or school dropouts, but we don't know a homeless person, and we don't know a drug addict, and we don't know a school dropout or a teenage pregnant woman. This is not a deliberate discrimination, it's a discrimination by default. We tend to build a plastic bubble around ourselves so that we only have to associate with people just like us. And so, this suffering that still goes on in our country and around the world is very severe.

That book, among other things, just woke me up to the fact that we still have people like this next door, and we are not doing much about it.

The road to success is usually a winding one. What kinds of setbacks have you had through your life? And what did you learn from them?

Jimmy Carter: Well, sometimes dramatic changes in life take place because of a deliberate decision. Sometimes they are inadvertent or unanticipated, and certainly not desired. When I left the Navy, which had been my lifelong commitment, and came home to the little tiny town of Plains, my wife almost left me, because she could see that we were restricting our lives and not expanding them. But out of that tiny village of Plains, I learned to broaden my perspectives.

I ran for the governorship in 1966 and lost. It was the first real defeat in my life. At everything else I had been successful. Whenever I wanted something in the Navy, I got it because I was an outstanding officer. I worked hard. So that was a very serious blow to me. I was very distressed. And my sister, whose name is Ruth Stapleton, was a famous evangelist. She wrote four or five books, and she would give lectures to 50,000 people at a time. She and I had a long walk in the woods on my farm, and she said, "Jimmy, quite often, when you have a blow to your pride and a horrible defeat, you can either give up, or you can look on it as a way that God opens to you to do different and even better things." And I said, "Ruth, I've been defeated for governor in Georgia. My political career is over. I don't have any future." But it proved to be wrong. And then of course, I was defeated in 1980 again for re-election after reaching the highest levels of political achievement in the world. And I thought we were in desperate straits then. I found out I was in debt. I had put all my financial resources in a private trust. And I didn't let them communicate with me. After I was defeated for re-election, I found out that instead of being a fairly wealthy person, I was a million dollars in debt. And I thought I was going to have to sell all my farms and everything in order to pay off my debts. But I've managed to pay them off now, and we have as exciting and challenging and vigorous and adventurous and gratifying a life here at the Carter Center as I ever had before in my life.

One of your greatest accomplishments was the Camp David Accord and the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. It has become the model for peace settlements between Israel and its other Arab neighbors. What were the conditions that made Camp David possible, and do you see the same conditions present now (1991) that would make possible a broader peace in the Middle East?

Jimmy Carter: Let me answer that last question first. I don't see the conditions now that were there then.

We had two bold and courageous political leaders then. Particularly Anwar Sadat, combined with a very receptive leader in Menachem Begin, who was willing to make decisions very difficult for him within his own constituency in Israel. And I had done my homework. I had met with the Israeli leaders and the Egyptian leaders, and the Jordanian and Lebanese, and Syrian leaders. And so we were able to provide some means by which these two bold and courageous political leaders could come together. They were incompatible. We were at Camp David 13 days. They never saw each other the last ten days. Every time they got in the same room, we went backwards instead of forwards. So Begin and Sadat stayed separate. And I would go to one and then go to the other one, back and forth. And eventually, we came out with the Camp David Accord, which people forget is called "a framework for peace." It's a set of principles on which peace can be predicated in the future, and that framework is still absolutely applicable to any negotiations in the Middle East now. The people that rejected it then -- the Jordanians, the Palestinians and the Syrians -- are now willing to negotiate on the basis of Camp David. We used the Camp David principles six months later to conclude the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

Now we have a much more entrenched problem. Although the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, voted overwhelmingly for the Camp David Accords -- 85 percent voted for it, 15 percent against it -- those 15 percent are the ones that are now in charge of the Israeli government. Although they now profess to be in favor of the Camp David Accords -- the withdrawal from occupied territories, the granting to Palestinians of full autonomy, which Prime Minister Begin agreed to do and that the Knesset endorsed -- these are the basic principles now on which the Israeli leaders will not agree. But it would be a mistake to give up, because there is a bottom line factor that gives me some hope: the people want peace.

The Israeli people want peace. The Palestinian people want peace. The Jordanians do, God knows. The Lebanese people want peace. It's the political leaders who are the obstacles, because they are too inflexible, and they are looking at their own sometimes very narrow political constituency to give them restraints which they can't break. Someday though, there will be leaders there, like Sadat and Begin then, who will truly represent the desire of their people for peace, and then we'll have success.

One of the other successes that you were involved in is also one of the most controversial, the Panama Canal Treaty. There was a knock-down, drag-out fight in the Senate, but you were successful. The treaty means that the Canal will eventually be turned over to the Panamanians. A lot has happened since that treaty, but none of it has affected the status of the Canal, even though many critics at the time talked about the kinds of things that have happened as being the worst possible scenario.

Jimmy Carter: What people forget is that the original treaty with Panama was written and signed without any Panamanian ever seeing it. It was never fair to the Panamanians, and most people recognize that. President Johnson gave his word of honor to the Panamanians, "We will have a new treaty." So did President Nixon and President Ford. But it was only when I got into office that I was foolish enough to push it to a conclusion. The treaty is very fair to our country and to the Panamanians. It gives us first priority in using the Canal. It gives us the right to defend the Canal against external threats, not only in this century but even in the next century. And it forms a sharing partnership in operating the Canal. When I was there during the Panamanian elections, which we helped to conduct, I visited the Canal and the American leaders there, and they told me that the Canal was in better shape than it had been in many, many years. Because the Panamanians, knowing that they now have a share in the future of the Canal, were much more enthusiastic in upkeep and maintenance and learning how to be the leaders in ways that they hadn't been before. This was the worst political battle I ever got into. It was more difficult to get the Panama Canal Treaties ratified by two-thirds of the Senate of the United States than it was for me to get elected President in the first place. It was a very deep and bitter political battle, and many people still haven't gotten over it. I never go through a week of my life now that I don't get letters from people condemning the Panama Canal Treaties. Still, and this is I don't know how many years later. 1978? Thirteen years later. But it was a good thing to do.

It's surprising that people are still agitated about it.

Jimmy Carter: This is something that many people won't forget. It is the most courageous thing that the U.S. Senate ever did in its existence. They knew that it was politically unpopular, but they knew that it was right and needed. Of the 20 senators who voted for the Canal Treaties in 1978, who were up for re-election the next year, only seven of them came back. Thirteen of them didn't come back. And the attrition rate in 1980 was almost as bad. But it was the right thing to do -- an all-too-rare demonstration of political courage.

There was one speech that you gave that was also controversial and in some cases misreported. It became known as "The Malaise Speech" even though you never used that word. You talked about a crisis of confidence that struck at the heart and mind and soul of the national will. Do you still see that crisis in confidence?

Jimmy Carter: In some ways, the situation is different now from what is was back when I gave that speech. I think it was the best speech I ever made, and for the first few weeks, it was a very popular speech. But eventually it was attacked by Senator Kennedy, who ran against me. He said I was talking about the malaise of America, not the bright future of America, and then President Reagan adopted the same concept.

What I pointed out was that our nation had been faced in years leading up to that time with severe challenges and blows: the loss of the war in Vietnam, the assassination of President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Watergate scandals, where a president had to resign in disgrace; the revelations that the CIA had deliberately plotted murder. These were blows to our country. But I thought the resilience of our nation was sufficient to overcome that kind of difficulty, and that we needed to look at ourselves and see where is the strength of our country. And the purpose of the speech, I said that we are faced with an energy crisis. We are becoming increasingly dependent on foreign oil; our nation's security is in danger. It's not a politically popular thing to do something about this, to save energy, to conserve. But I believed that our country was strong enough to do it. And that was the purpose and the essence of the speech. But the political opponents just took the negative side, that we had serious problems, and characterized it as it never was, as a "malaise speech." We still suffer malaise in this country, and I'll use the word this time. But what gnaws at the vitals of our nation are the unsolved problems of juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy, school dropouts, drug addiction, homelessness, joblessness. We don't know in this country the extent of these problems, and we cover our eyes. It's more convenient not to look at them. I think this country obviously has the ability, as no other nation in the world does, to address those problems successfully. That's going to be a major part of my own work the next four, five or more years. Just to show that in Atlanta, Georgia, we can marshal all the resources in our community and bring about a simultaneous addressing of these human problems and see if we can do something about them. It's a kind of thing that is not only an affliction on a nation or in a community, but a wonderful opportunity to show the strength and idealism and benevolence of American people.

After all these years, what are your thoughts, views, and reflections on the presidency?

Jimmy Carter: I would say the main thing is that I didn't know the complexity of the global problems.

I'm the only president that's ever visited Africa south of the Sahara Desert. I went to two (African) countries while I was president, and I didn't know the potential of that continent, nor the challenges that faced those people. Now I do. To a much greater extent I didn't understand the [widespread] problems in our own country, from a personal point of view. I was dealing with billions of dollars that would be allocated for education or health or welfare or housing, or whatever. But I didn't know from a personal point of view the people that actually were in need or that were the recipients of those quite often inadequate and ill-designed programs. Another thing was that I didn't really see as clearly as I should have the perspective of the then preeminent Cold War. I think we could have reached out more to try to form some sort of working relationship, perhaps with people that we looked on then as adversaries. That was a potential there that may not have been adequately explored by me as a president. I've also learned since then the wide diversity of characteristics of nations in this hemisphere. We tend to look on South Americans as one kind of people, but I've seen that they are just as varied as are the differences, for instance, between the United States and Mexico. There is a tremendous fear of the United States as a dominant superpower that's always been too ready to send U.S. troops into their nations to act as superior, arrogant oppressors, under the guise of protecting liberty. We invaded Panama recently with what most Americans looked on as a glorious victory. We killed a thousand Panamanians unnecessarily, primarily to arrest the leader of Panama, who had been in bed with our own government, at least the CIA, up until shortly before that. And to us it was a great victory. We defeated Panama. But to the Panamanians, the people who died, it wasn't. So I see now much more clearly that our country can accomplish its goals, not merely through military action, but through the promotion of peace.

One of the remarkable things about you is that you seem to take the job of former president as seriously as being president itself.

Jimmy Carter: That's true.

People underestimate the potential of a former president. I happen to be one of the youngest ones who ever survived the office. And the access that I have to world leaders is unlimited. I don't mean just political and military leaders, but leaders in the field of education or health or agriculture, food production, environment. And so, this is one aspect of it. Also, the influence we have. We can bring together people who have a common goal, like immunizing children or planting trees or solving the starvation problem in Africa, where they're all working at the same target, but in different ways, and create a team effort that can be enormously more successful than any of them can be working independently. And I have some ability as a former president to dramatize a particular problem, and to reach the news media and therefore reach the consciousness of people.

Another thing I have as a former president is almost total freedom. When I was in office as governor or state senator or as president, I had voluminous responsibilities -- the details of government. But now, as a former president, I can pick and choose the things that have a particular interest to me, where I think that my contribution can be uniquely beneficial. I don't have to worry about the administrative duties of a major job. This makes it not only more fruitful, but also more enjoyable.

It used to be, when I visited the Middle East, for instance, I would fly to Tel Aviv, drive 30 minutes over to Jerusalem, meet with leaders in the afternoon, have a banquet at night and exchange toasts with Prime Minister Begin, or whoever happened to be in office. The next day I was gone to Cairo or Damascus or Amman. Now I go there, I meet with the leaders in all the different parties, and I get immersed in what they think about one another. I meet with the Peace Now people and with the human rights groups, and with the Palestinians in the West Bank, in Gaza, and go to the great universities in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem, and learn from scholars who devote their lives to the economic and water aspects, mining aspects, and agricultural aspects of the region. I can immerse myself much more deeply in an individual subject, once I take it on, than I ever could have when I had the multitudinous responsibilities of budgets and dealing with members of Congress, and things in the White House.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the nation in the next decade, in the next twenty years?

Jimmy Carter: I think it's a choice of what kind of leadership the United States wants to provide in the world. It's defining, in our country, the definition of greatness. What is a great nation? It's obvious that we are now the only superpower. There is no more Soviet Union as we've known it. We will have an unchallenged, open, panoramic opportunity on a global scale to demonstrate the finest aspects of what we know in this country: peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, benevolent sharing, love, the easing of human suffering. Is that going to be our list of priorities or not? I don't see any indication yet, after the Soviet Union has disintegrated, that our country is adopting these kinds of concepts as the thrust of our nation's influence. I hope that will come. And that's a challenge to our country that I see as greatest. What are the decisions going to be? We can drift along as though there were still a Cold War, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons that will never be used, ignoring the problems of people in this country and around the world, being one of the worst environmental violators on earth, standing against any sort of viable programs to protect the world's forests, or to cut down on acid rain or the global warming or ozone depletion. We can ignore human rights violations in other countries. Or we can take on these things as a true leader ought to and say, "This is the inspiring challenge of America for the future."

I don't hear any politician on the scene yet who's trying to explore these concepts.

What advice would you give young people who want to achieve something in their lives, want to make a mark, who may have a specific dream?

Jimmy Carter: The main thing that I tell young people -- I'm in my tenth year as a professor -- is that they're the ones that can change this country, can change the world. It's not an idle thing to say to students, but at the college age they have to realize that they have tremendous potential that they won't have five years later. For instance, they are in an environment, if they are in college, where there is a stirring of ideas and a balancing of different conflicting concepts. They have fellow students that might share a commitment to do something about, say, human rights, or environmental quality, or homelessness or whatever. They can seek advice from instructors, from professors, who are experts in those fields, or read. And another thing is that they have liberty that they won't have in the future. After they finish college, they're going to get married perhaps, or start making house payments, automobile payments, they'll have responsibilities maybe of a growing family. They will be employed by IBM or Coca-Cola Company or General Motors or maybe in a law firm or teaching school. They are going to be very reluctant to express ideas that would depart from the status quo, because they want to make sure that the principal of their school where they teach -- or their bosses at IBM or at the law firm -- don't think that they are radicals. So they are going to give up a lot of that freedom to say "This is wrong."

My three boys came up during the late '60s in college, when the young people changed this whole country in three major areas. One was the Vietnam War, the second was civil rights, and the third was the environment. Earth Day began when my three boys were in college. I saw there is no limit on what young people can do to impress on this country their idealistic or compassionate concern about issues that affect all of us.

We had a second generation of children. Amy came along as our only daughter, 20 years after my oldest son, in a fairly dormant college environment. Amy has been arrested four times because she feels very deeply about subjects. Three times she was arrested demonstrating against apartheid in South Africa. And she was just one of a group of students. Because she was a former president's daughter, her role was highly publicized. I don't advocate that young people get arrested, but there is still a time for -- a need for -- involvement.

In these areas of life where the suffering exists, the affluent children of our day should become involved with their fellow young people who are on the other side of the line between a good life and one that's not so good. We work in a program called Habitat For Humanity, where we build homes side by side with the poorest people on earth. And 195 college campuses now have Habitat organizations, where students themselves, 20 or 30 students, get together. They actually get acquainted with a homeless family, and they get to know all the people in the homeless family. They raise money to buy building materials, they design the house, they get an empty lot. They go around and beg for some concrete block or for some two by fours. And late in the afternoon and on weekends, they work side by side with those homeless people and actually build them a house. And then they see the family move into the home, it's a wonderful experience for them. It doesn't interfere with their college work, whether they are going to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. It's an additional dimension of life, which I think is as good a learning experience as what they might get in the classroom.

In short, you are saying, take a stand and get involved.

Jimmy Carter: Exactly. It's not restrictive when you adhere to these principles. It's a liberating experience. It's an expansive experience where both your mind and your heart might be stretched a little.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, Mr. President.

You're welcome.