In what Carter calls “this difficult time of transition,” he would wake up in the middle of the night wondering how he could make himself useful. He would joke that he was too young to retire, and, besides, he needed the money. Out of those dark awakenings came the idea of a center that would be more than a memorial, that would give him and Rosalynn-always his partner–a way to build on the themes of his presidency. What started as midnight musings in the depths of his defeat became Carter’s obsession. He raised more than $150 million during the 1980s to finance his Presidential Library and Carter Center. He was thinking big: “I want to provide a place where conflicts around the world can be solved,” Carter announced at one early planning session. William Quandt, a Mideast expert who served on Carter’s National Security Council staff, remembers the reaction to the ambitious goal. “All of us sitting around the table looked at each other as if to say, ‘This guy doesn’t realize he’s a former president. This won’t work’.”
The center is now Carter’s Foggy Bottom South–a poor man’s United Nations with endless seminars, lots of talk and, until recently, not much to show for it. There’s a replica of the Oval Office, and projects like “Global 2000” and “The Task Force for Child Survival,” which convey the ex-president’s inexhaustible do-goodism. But the center has also served as a launching pad for Carter’s new career in ex officio diplomacy.
In this serf-appointed role, Carter has relied on the same techniques he used to obtain the Arab-Israeli accords, the triumph of his presidency-personal diplomacy, empathy and doggedness. Some of his missions have been unobjectionable, such as his mediation of the Eritrean-Ethiopian civil war. But his peacemaking zeal has also propelled him into more questionable efforts. According to The New York Times, Carter tried in vain to influence U.S. and U.N. policy prior to the Persian Gulf War. He wrote letters to U.N. Security Council members, urging them to oppose the use of force. (His aversion to force is so profound that when planning the Iranian hostage rescue mission, he asked if the guards outside the embassy could be taken out with tranquilizer guns .)
Determined to play a global role, Carter importuned the Clinton administration for a chance to get involved in Arab-Israeli talks earlier this year; the administration turned him down. Carter’s relentlessness finally began to pay off when Kim II Sung invited him to North Korea last June. At an impasse in the nuclear-proliferation show-down, he forged a diplomatic breakthrough. Given that success–and his carefully nurtured relations with junta leader Gen. Raoul Cedras–it was all but inevitable that President Clinton would turn to him for help in the Haiti crisis.
Through it all, Carter has retained the independence and the pious moralism that keep him from being a reliable team player in the eyes of the foreign-policy establishment. State Department officials lament Carter’s tendency to “go native” when dealing with foreign despots, and worry about his Lone Banget refusal to be fenced in by stated administration policy when representing the president abroad.
Last week Carter lived up to his “high-risk/high-reward” reputation once again-and marred what should have been the crowning achievement of his ex-presidential career, successfully averting the U.S. invasion of Haiti. The proximate cause of his embarrassment was an impolitic remark during a press conference after his return from Port-au-Prince. Describing his discussions with General Cedras and other junta leaders, Carter said he had told the Haitians he was “ashamed of my country’s policy.” In fact, Carter was only restating his previous objections to the U.S. economic embargo against Haiti, which he feels has punished ordinary Haitians without much affecting the junta’s behavior. But it sounded like disloyalty, or worse, and Carter’s critics in Washington leapt on it.
Administration sources said Carter had defied his orders and stayed beyond the deadline Clinton had imposed for the team’s own safety. They said he had blurred a crucial goal of administration policy, which was to force Cedras and the other junta members to leave Haiti and go into exile. And Garter looked naive and even gushy in his characterizations of the Haitian leaders- men whom Clinton had described as murderers, rapists and torturers. Critics mocked Carter’s description (quoted in The New York Times) of Gen. Cedras’s wife, Yannick, as “a slim and very attractive” woman: it sounded like lust in the heart. Some derided Carter’s motives, speculating that he was trying to salvage his political reputation or win the Nobel Prize he thought he should have won for the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. And the State Department, nervous about turf, saw him as an interloper and a meddler. “You can’t represent the president and be ashamed of his policy at the same time,” one official said. “Some tyrant will say, ‘I don’t have to listen to the American government representative, because I can always call Atlanta and get a better deal’ .”
Even conceding that Carter’s abhorrence of the use of military force is an unworkable and unworldly policy for an American president, some of this is unfair. In the Haitian venture, Garter and his fellow emissaries, former Joint Chiefs of Staffchairman Colin Powell and Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, accepted an extremely difficult assignment from Bill Clinton and accomplished it in slightly more than 80 hours. Clinton did not want to invade: neither did Congress, and neither did the voters. And Garter, building on his back-channel contacts with Cedras and other Haitian leaders, negotiated an agreement that for all practical purposes ceded control of Haitian affairs to the U.S. military. True, the agreement is messy; so is Haitian politics. But those who imply that Garter (and, by extension, Clinton) somehow gave away the store in Port-au-Prince ought to consider the alternative-that at least some Americans–and many, many Haitians–would have died. “Garter probably strayed from his mandate and created some problems, but in the end, he prevented an invasion of Haiti,” said Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “That’s the acid test.”
Carter conceded that his “ashamed” remark had probably been a mistake and told NEWSWEEK that he had actually expressed himself more discreetly to the Haitians. “I’d never say that in my life, to Cedras or any other Haitian,” he said. What he said in Port-au-Prince, he added, was that he had been “disturbed at my own nation’s policy, because the economic boycott . . . has cost your children their own well-being.”
He also expressed bafflement at the sniping within the Beltway, insisting that he has high regard for Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a longtime ally who served in the Garter administration. But the antagonisms run deeper than that. Garter has irritated both the State Department and some White House officials. In part, this antagonism stems from genuine differences on the best way to deal with recalcitrant foreign leaders: Carter, though criticized as soft, always opposes the tendency to demonize U.S. adversaries and always stands for peaceful conciliation. But the backbiting also stems from the perennial institutional rivalries that afflict the State Department. Like virtually all recent presidents, Clinton runs his foreign policy partly through State and partly through his NSC staff. And Garter, with his transparent zeal to play an active part in U.S. diplomacy, has stepped into what appears to be a power vacuum between Christopher and national-security adviser Anthony Lake.
Carter’s hopes for Haiti may be wildly optimistic. And it is perfectly true that he is trading on his status as a former president to meddle in the affairs of state. He has a cordial telephone relationship with Fidel Castro, and he continues to-have discussions with both the North and South Koreans and will head for South Korea again in a few weeks. He is preachy and subtly vain–nearly obsessive in the pursuit of what he sees as the one true path in international politics, and plainly concerned for his place in history.
Carter does want to be remembered for more than his presidency. But unlike Nixon, who sought rehabilitation as an end in itself, the preacher is simply a compulsive self-improver. He is, after all, the president who had signs placed on the trees on the White House lawn so he could learn to identify them, who had a Spanish-speaking barber installed in the White House basement so he could practice his Spanish while he got his hair cut. That kind of intensity can be grating. It’s easy to laugh at a man who established the International Negotiating Network, a kind of hot line between world leaders and their now unemployed counterparts. But it’s impossible to dismiss him. Establishment hands may call Jimmy Garter naive – but no one calls him a hypocrite.
Has former president Carter:
68% Been helpful to the Clinton administration as a freelance diplomat 18% Been dangerous to the administration’s control of foreign policy 6% Both equally THE NEWSWEEK POLL, SEPT. 22-23, 1994
Does having former president tatter take such a public role in sensitive negotiations make President Clinton look too weak?
38% Yes 58% No THE NEWSWEEK POLL, SEPTEMBER 22-23, 1994
After his return from Haiti, former president Carter met last week in Atlanta with NEWSWEEK’S Ann McDaniel and Vern E. Smith. Excerpts:
President Clinton faced vociferous objection to our going and the way we performed. And that’s why I think he made one of the most politically courageous decisions that any president has ever made. He didn’t have popular support of the country, he didn’t have support in the Congress, he didn’t even have support among some of his key advisers in the White House and the State Department. And he took a chance on us. Three guys that had disapproved of some facets of his Haitian policy.
The guidelines were that [the Haitian junta] would comply with the U.N. resolutions. . . It was clear they understood that anything we negotiated had to be approved by the president. We were not authorized to conclude an agreement. That was all. We had to have flexibility. President Clinton and I never disagreed on that.
I need to know frankly what is it about the Garter Center that displeases people. What can I do to alleviate their displeasure? Because it’s certainly to our disadvantage to have to come back from a crisis like this or the one in North Korea where war was imminent and find to my amazement that what we’ve done is considered by some people inappropriate….I feel, as a former president, that my obligation for accommodating feelings can be restricted just to President Clinton. If he says, “Jimmy,” or “President Garter, you’re authorized to do this, we know it might be fraught with the likelihood of failure, it’s a last-minute chance,” I make clear that I have adequate instructions and I go and carry out those instructions. There may be times when some of his subordinates don’t know what his instructions are. I don’t really know the identity of people that are most adamant against the role we play.
[On Tuesday] some American officials were saying that they were restrained from controlling the military because of the agreement we had worked out. I called Haiti and told the American military leaders that that was not the ease at all. That there was no insinuation in our discussions that the United States would have to stand back and permit the military of Haiti to perform as they wish. And I suggested that they meet with Cedras immediately and in the strongest terms issue an ultimatum to him to restrain the Haitian military.
There was never any question in my mind, never any discussion at all about whether the generals would have to leave Haiti. This never came up. In my reading of the Governors Island agreement, careful reading of Resolutions 917 and 940, from my instructions from the White House, no one ever said that the generals have to leave Haiti. It was just [that] they have to leave their offices. There’s some confusion when you say leave or depart; folks can interpret that any way they wish. But I can tell you that there’s no commitment made.
To me this is a very important humanitarian issue. We are now in control of Haiti and the people down there are looking at us as saviors. Before the embargo Haiti had an annual income of $850 a year. Now, according to the World Bank, the annual income- the annual income-is less than $200. So, for anyone – Aristide or a conservative or liberal member of Congress–to say let’s continue this embargo for one day longer, I think is an inhumane thing to do.
title: “A Man With A Mission” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “Jeremy Craft”
Sirota is the Internet child of the Clinton “war-room” generation. Intense, driven, even obsessive, he fills the gap left by a timid Democratic establishment, with his guerrilla strikes on the Bush administration. At a time when the party is torn between its presidential contenders and remains largely powerless in Congress, Sirota strikes a loud chord of Democratic frustration. Yet he is more than just an angry young man with an overflowing outbox of e-mail. A new hire at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank that launches this week, Sirota is part of an ambitious attempt to shake Democrats out of their stupor and reshape liberal politics. “The right wing is running a 24-hour-a-day campaign against centrist politics,” he says. “Our side isn’t necessarily used to that kind of intensity.”
Though young, Sirota is well schooled in the art of Washington warfare. After college at Northwestern, Sirota–who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs–worked for Rep. Bernie Sanders, the vocal independent congressman from Vermont, and then David Obey, the senior Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. There he started e-mailing his attacks on Bush, giving Democrats neatly packaged sound bites and journalists irresistible quotes.
One of those buried under Sirota’s e-mails earlier this year was John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff, who was just then setting up the Center for American Progress. “I didn’t know him,” says Podesta. “I just saw he had an eye for critique and the instinct for the jugular.” Podesta’s dream is to replicate the success of the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks, which act as incubators for Republican ideas. He gave Sirota a job, and a bigger platform–a new daily Web log called the Progress Report.
His missives now reach beyond D.C. It was Sirota who first calculated that the $87 billion for Iraq could be used to erase huge state deficits here at home, a line now parroted by Democrats nationwide. Dick Cheney claimed the Bush era would be the end of “the so-called war room and the permanent campaign.” Sirota, hunched over his keyboard, is out to prove him wrong.
title: “A Man With A Mission” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Elizabeth Hemingway”
Lucke is one of those can-do Americans who want to make a difference in Iraq, and who haven’t lost faith that democracy will prevail. The 24-year USAID veteran came out of retirement to begin planning the reconstruction effort four months before the invasion. His life has been one long scramble ever since. He and his staff work 16 hours a day, seven days a week, helping to fix not only the country’s phone system but its electricity, water and other vital services, all on an emergency schedule. Security concerns keep them mostly in the Green Zone, behind well-guarded barriers in Baghdad. “It’s certainly the most challenging thing I’ve ever worked on,” says Lucke, who has done development work in some of the world’s poorest spots, including Mali and Haiti.
Yet Lucke wishes there were more attention given to U.S. successes in Iraq. He just got back from visiting his wife and three kids in Texas for the first time since last November, and while he was there, he was upset by what he saw of the media’s Iraq coverage. “I don’t understand why they’re portraying the reconstruction effort as some kind of looming failure,” he says. “It’s not. There’s a lot of progress here that doesn’t lend itself to sound bites, the way attacks on convoys do.”
Lucke takes special pride in the revival of Iraq’s schools. When USAID arrived last April, they had no desks, no blackboards. Lucke’s goal was to reopen 1,000 schools before the end of September. “We ended up getting 1,595 done,” he says. “We kicked major butt.” The repair crews had to cut corners, and many of the jobs were done in slapdash style: no heat or air conditioning was installed, and even in the capital, many schoolhouses remain infested with termites. But that’s an improvement. “Saddam didn’t even renovate a school for eight years,” says Qusai Delbozy, a Baghdad subcontractor. “We never received a contract like this when he was in power.”
The dictator let just about everything fall apart, citing severe international sanctions on his regime even as he kept building palaces and monuments. “The electrical system was held together by Band-Aids and baling wire,” says Lucke. “The Iraqis are very capable people. They kept all these systems going for decades with very little outside assist-ance.” Such resourcefulness is exactly what the country needs now. But can the Iraqis create a working democracy? “The thing we have to struggle against is the American tendency to think this is like a baseball game, you play a few hours and you win or you lose,” says Lucke. “This is a long-term process–and that’s not in any way an excuse.” He clearly has the necessary determination. Whether the rest of America does is another question. As is how much longer the Iraqis’ welcome–such as it is–will last.
