A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (31 page)

The political fallout has persisted. When the 2008 Democratic Convention was held to nominate Barack Obama, I planned to attend and make a speech, as is customary for former presidents. I was contacted by his aides, who told me that neither Bill Clinton nor I would speak, but we were requested to make twenty-minute documentary films to be shown to the delegates, each film designed to be of most help to the current candidate. They wanted me to go to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,
where Rosalynn and I had visited five times to build Habitat houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and demonstrate how Republican leaders had failed to respond properly to the disaster. I spent a day in the area to carry out this assignment, but when we arrived at the convention in Denver, I was told that the film length would be only four minutes and I was requested not to speak, even to greet the delegates. (Clinton and his wife, Hillary, played major roles in the convention.) Obama’s top aide, David Axelrod, explained that he didn’t want to endanger his Jewish support. Unfortunately, this “estrangement” has persisted through his time in office, but our Center has continued our efforts to support U.S. and international policy and to encourage the Middle East peace process in every way possible.

The Carter Center monitored the parliamentary and presidential elections in Egypt from 2010 to 2012 following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. I was there to head our group of observers. In my meetings with candidate and then president Mohamed Morsi, I urged him to honor all the terms of the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty that I had negotiated in 1979, which has been carefully observed by both nations. He complied with this commitment while in office.

When Rosalynn and I went to Washington in January 2013 to attend President Obama’s inauguration, John Kerry and his wife, Teresa, came to our hotel room and spent two hours that morning talking about his goals as the prospective secretary of state. He informed us that he would make an all-out effort to conclude a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and that President Obama would be visiting the Holy Land early in his new term. Secretary Kerry has done his best to reach this goal. There was hope for some months that the United States would present a definitive plan, based on international law and long-standing policies of our country, and let this public proposal be considered by the disputants and the international community. With full involvement of President Obama, it would be difficult for either the Palestinian or the Israeli leaders to reject this all-out effort. Without overt assistance from the White House and direct involvement by the president, these hopes
have not been realized. The crucial relationships among Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States have deteriorated, and the Palestinians are now making efforts to refer the dispute to the United Nations.

In my mediation of civil conflicts, I soon learned that antagonistic military leaders would refuse to negotiate even through an intermediary, and I decided to rely on the premise of “political self-delusion” that motivates almost all candidates, who believe they will be chosen. I began to propose an honest election, monitored by The Carter Center, and to encourage both adversaries to convince themselves that they would be the winning candidate. Following this strategy, we began to monitor elections in Latin America and soon were being asked to work in other countries around the world. Our role is to help nations to develop democratic societies by empowering their citizens. We also are a leader in improving election standards. Our normal routine is to send from four to six long-term observers into a country for an extended period in advance of the election, to learn everything possible about the country’s history, geography, government, and politics, and to become acquainted with political parties, candidates, and issues. They assess the registration of voters and the integrity and competence of the central election commission. Several days before the election, we send between forty and eighty short-term observers, and they receive a crash course from the long-term observers and are dispersed to key voting areas in pairs, each with an automobile and driver, an interpreter if needed, and a radio or mobile phone. We visit as many polling sites as possible, and the observer teams make reports to me, Rosalynn, or our other leaders, who remain in the capital city.

The Carter Center has developed a handheld electronic tablet similar to a Kindle that permits each observer to make immediate reports on the situation at each site. We call the device ELMO (
el
ection
mo
nitor). After we consolidate and assess information from all observers, we make an announcement about whether the election process has been fair and free,
accurately representing the will of the people who voted. The Tunisia presidential election in December 2014 was the ninety-ninth we have observed, and we normally complete three or four of these assignments each year.

Rosalynn has been a full partner with me in establishing and governing The Carter Center, joining me as an observer of troubled elections, negotiating peace agreements, and making final decisions concerning our other projects. In addition, she has proceeded with her own agenda. She has maintained a commitment to mental health for more than forty-five years, including a superb program at The Carter Center after our time in the White House. In addition to annual meetings of representatives from all facets of mental health, Rosalynn recruits and educates leading journalists from America and foreign countries so they can report accurately on the subject. One recent project has been to train 144 psychiatric nurses in Liberia, where there was only one psychiatrist to serve people who have mental problems after decades of intense civil warfare. Rosalynn works to immunize young children throughout America and founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute at Georgia Southwestern State University to promote the status of caregivers. As she points out, “Everyone will be involved as a caregiver, either being one in the past, present, or future, or benefiting eventually from their services.”

Our work with Habitat for Humanity has been difficult, unpredictable, exciting, and gratifying. For thirty-one years, Rosalynn and I have led groups of volunteers for a full week of hard work, building and renovating homes for poor families who have never had a decent place to live. The families are required to pay full price for the houses over a period of twenty years, with no interest charges, and payments are invariably less than rental charges in the same general neighborhoods. The families are also expected to put in several hundred hours of labor on their own or neighbors’ homes. This has given us an opportunity to work with these ambitious and hardworking people, and to understand their plight and respect them as equals.

Installing siding on a new home during the 2014 Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project.

Habitat leaders and I approve the site location and basic design of the homes about a year in advance, and we attempt to simplify the proposed plans. Our normal project includes about one hundred houses, and the goal is to complete construction within five days, beginning on a Monday with just the foundation in place. We adjust the size of the work crews to make this schedule possible, and they range from twelve to thirty-five people, depending on the size of the homes and the type of construction. Our general policy is to alternate our annual work projects between the United States and foreign countries, and we have completed projects in many American states and in Hungary, South Africa, three cities in Mexico, South Korea, Canada, the Philippines, Haiti, China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and South Korea (including in the Demilitarized Zone). In 2015 we plan to build one hundred homes in Pokhara, Nepal.

After writing
Why Not the Best?
in 1974–75 for use in my presidential campaign, and
Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President
in 1981–82 to explain aspects of my presidency, I found that I enjoyed writing. My books have sold well and provided a much-needed source of income for my family. An ancillary benefit that I didn’t anticipate has been a unique opportunity to present my political views and describe our work at The Carter Center. Talk shows and interviews on television, radio, and in newspapers have provided much greater opportunities than my teaching at Emory University or making occasional public speeches.

My next major effort, in 1985, was
The Blood of Abraham,
which was based on my extensive travel in the Middle East, where I met with key
leaders, took careful notes of their personal opinions about the prospect of a comprehensive peace, and compiled this information from Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinians.

We had a major consultation at The Carter Center in 1984, which we called Closing the Gap. This analyzed the difference between what medical experts and individuals knew how to do and what they actually achieved. Afterward, Rosalynn and I decided to coauthor a book,
Everything to Gain,
focusing on personal health, and how the major determining factor was often a person’s own habits and success or failure in adopting universally accepted health information. Writing this book together evolved into the worst threat we ever experienced to our marriage. We divided the chapters between us, and each was to write the text and submit it to the other for editing. I write very rapidly, and Rosalynn treated my chapters as rough drafts. She writes slowly and carefully, and considers the resulting sentences as though they have come down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone. It is painful for her to see them modified in any way. Another difference was that we didn’t always remember events in the same way or treat them with equal importance. We had constant arguments and could communicate with each other only through harsh e-mails. When we decided to cancel the project and return the publisher’s advance payment, our editor came to Plains and proposed that he divide the controversial paragraphs between us—as unilateral authors without the other’s input. In the book, each of these paragraphs is identified by a “J” or an “R,” and our marriage survived.

My next book, in 1988, was a labor of love.
An Outdoor Journal
was about my experiences with nature, beginning with my boyhood and extending from our farm to trout streams and mountains in Alaska, Argentina, Japan, and Nepal.
Turning Point,
in 1992, described my first political venture, when an election was stolen from me by a dishonest official who stuffed the ballot box, voted dead people, and browbeat other local officials. That same year, Dutton requested that I write a book, which could be used as a textbook, about the causes of conflicts and techniques used to resolve them. I used some of my own experiences to illustrate the points I made in
Talking Peace: A Vision for the Next Generation.

Soon after I left the White House I met Miller Williams and some other poets from Arkansas, and they encouraged me to prepare some of my poems for publication. I did this over a period of several years, and
Always a Reckoning
was published in 1995. My poetry advisers were tough critics of my submitted lines, but our agreement precluded their making specific suggestions of a word or phrase. Both the publisher and I have been surprised at the book’s success.

My daughter, Amy, was enrolled in the Memphis College of Art in 1994, and one of her assignments was to illustrate a story for children. As a submarine officer with small boys at home, I had developed adventures of an imaginary sea monster called Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, which I recounted to them after returning from cruises at sea. I wrote one of the stories as a text, and Amy painted thirteen scenes in the book.

I was teaching Bible lessons every Sunday in my local church and decided to describe my religious beliefs and experiences in two books,
Living Faith
and
Sources of Strength,
which were published in 1996 and 1997.

By 1998 I was approaching my seventy-fifth birthday, and, considering how enjoyable and gratifying my experiences had been since my “retirement” from politics, I decided to write a book entitled
The Virtues of Aging.
Some jokesters commented that it would be the shortest book ever written. Describing how much unprecedented freedom we have to undertake new projects after we no longer have to meet a regular work schedule, the book has been quite popular.

I completed another book in 2001 that concentrated on how we celebrated Christmas over the years of my life, after having groups of black and white older people come to our home to share their own memories in
Christmas in Plains
.

I decided to write a book just about my boyhood on a farm, with almost all our neighbors being African-American, and was delighted when it was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
An Hour Before Daylight
has aroused more written and verbal comments than any of my other books, primarily from people who had the same kind of early life as children of farmers, whether in America or in other countries.