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Interview of Jimmy Carter
39th President, United States of America

Mr. Hardin: I was especially touched by the Camp David episode where you talked so well about your experience of getting Mr. Sadat and Mr. Begin together at Camp David. I’m kind of a fan of history. I believe that this may be one of the great feats of the American Presidency, to bring two totally hostile countries together, and today we have a longer border, largely unfortified, between two countries. What was the role of the Lord in your experience at Camp David?

President Carter: It was not only a unique political event, but also a unique historical and even religious event in many ways. There were the three great monotheistic religions represented there: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. And Sadat always made the point when I was talking to him, Dave, emphasizing that we were brothers under God and that we were children of Abraham. And although we differed in our method of worship, that at least the Moslem faith emphasizes their reverence for Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. But he quite often called us “Children of the Book.” When we first got to Camp David, the first thing we did, as you may or may not remember, was to issue a worldwide plea for prayer for success of our efforts. The prospects then were hopeless. But I have always felt, as a devout Christian, that God heard our prayers and kept us together under very difficult circumstances.

Mr. Hardin: I want to step back a little bit from the presidency and start by asking you, how did you become a serious Christian?

President Carter: Well, from the time I was born, my mother and father always attended Sunday School and church in Plains. My mother had been a Methodist before they were married, and she joined the Baptist Church. Daddy was a Sunday School teacher. There was never any question on Sunday — are we going to church or not? But we were half-time church then. Every other Sunday we would go to the Methodist or Lutheran Church, and then the other Sunday we would go to our own church. So there was a very close communion among Methodists., Lutherans, and Baptists here in Plains.

And then in the evening I would probably ride my bike about two and one-half miles into Plains to go to what we called the BYPU, the Baptist Young Peoples Union programs.

And in the summertime, one of the most exciting events was a Vacation Bible School sponsored by the church, and the “Royal Ambassadors” was kind of like a Boy Scout troop within the church itself. Later, I was a “Royal Ambassador” director after I came home from the Navy. This affiliation with life, in a religious fashion, was an integral part of my growing up.

Mr. Hardin: Let me turn to your life in politics. What do you think are some of the challenges facing the committed Christian in political life?

President Carter: I would say the same challenges that face a person who teaches school, or who works in a factory, or who operates a service station, or who has a religious program. They’re not any different. There is an inherent conflict between the life and challenges of a human being grasping for worldly things on the one hand, and the demands of Jesus Christ on the other. And I think our standards are quite often different. But I never found any incompatibility between what I thought were my duties as a Christian, and what I thought were my duties after I took the oath of office as President of the United States. I have to say that with additional responsibility on my shoulders, I spent a lot more time in prayer in a tiny room just off the Oval Office than I had when I was running Carter’s Warehouse and dealing with peanuts and fertilizer, or even in the governor’s mansion. But there is no reason for someone in public office to lower their moral standards or to depart from their religious beliefs.

Mr. Hardin: When you think about the presidency and its impact on privacy, on family life, even on personal safety, you had to look at that when you made your decision to become available for the presidency in the primary races. What part did faith play in that dialogue that you must have had?

President Carter: Well, that was kind of an evolutionary thing for me because I was quite active in public affairs even before I ever ran for my first office. I was chairman of the local county school board, for instance, and I was a state president of the Georgia Crop Improvement Association, responsible for all the certified seed farm organizations, etc. I was head of all the Lions Clubs in this area. And then, when I ran for the state senate, we kind of gave up part of our privacy and became a public figure. And later I ran for governor twice and served in Atlanta in the governor’s mansion, so by the time we got to the presidential race, we had been able to accommodate as a family the giving up of privacy and the challenge of public life. There was an additional element, of course, in the presidency. Our country is terribly violent, even compared to most other countries on the earth in dealing with public figures. We have had a high number who were assassinated or who were the victims of attempted assassinations. But I never felt any qualms or concern about that. I felt adequately protected. There was never a challenge to my life.

Mr. Hardin: Your faith had to be very helpful in that situation.

President Carter: That’s true. There’s a certain element of trust in God that your life will be protected. But the length of a human life ought not be the paramount element in one’s existence.

Mr. Hardin: You mentioned how being faithful to the Lord and being involved in politics should not be in conflict. I would still like to ask you, how did being a serious Christian affect your behavior in the presidency in a way that might not have been true had you not?

President Carter: Well, when I say it ought not to be in conflict or it is not necessarily in conflict, that’s accurate. But there is always a conflict between the life of a private or public individual and the perfect example of Christ and the teachings of God. Well, in the presidency, to respond to your specific question, there are obviously some challenges. Because, quite often the things that you believe are right and decent and proper and moral are not necessarily popular. And the public responds favorably, sometimes enthusiastically, to the use of military force.

One measure of how strong a president is, is how willing he is to use American military troops in a troubled area of the world. My approach was one that I thought was better. When there was conflict involving our own nation and another country, a difference of opinion or potential bloodshed, or even between two adjacent countries where we were not directly involved, I thought we should use the power and influence of our nation to try to reconcile differences and to bring disputing parties’ borders to the negotiating table. And I refrained from injecting troops into those troubled areas. Well, I think this was right and was certainly compatible with my duties as a public official and a Christian, but was not always popular.

Mr. Hardin: Are there any times like that that you can think of where you might have been a more effective president if you had not also been a Christian?

President Carter: It depends on how you measure effectiveness.

Mr. Hardin: More popular, perhaps?

President Carter: More popular, there is no doubt about that. Had I taken military action in the hostage crisis shortly before the 1980 election, there is no doubt that that would have been a highly popular thing and might have gotten me re-elected, but that would not have been the right thing to do because I had two responsibilities then. One was to preserve our nation’s integrity and to honor its interest on an international basis. And secondly, to protect the lives of the hostages and to bring them home safely and to freedom. And I never saw any inherent incompatibility between those two things. And eventually we did both: we protected our nation’s interest and all the hostages came home safely. But there was a political temptation, I can’t deny, to use force which could very well have cost all of the hostages’ lives, and might have been popular for me to do.

Mr. Hardin: How did your spiritual life help you in handling some of the failures and some of the problems that you faced?

President Carter: Well, everyone in life, in business, or professions, or politics, has successes and failures. Sometimes you can’t reach all the goals you set in your life. I think the main thing that prevents a great achievement in life, the fullest use of one’s God-given talent or influence, is the fear that you might fail. So a timid life, one that never takes a chance on potential failure in striving for great things, is often a fruitless and wasted life. So, to try great things and to fail in some of them, has never been embarrassing to me. When I was embarrassed perhaps, in retrospect, was when I realized I didn’t try hard enough, or I didn’t set my goals high enough. Of course, those times of disappointment or failure as president never bothered me in my religious faith.

Mr. Hardin: A very wise and spiritual person once told me, “In God’s eyes he thinks the only failure is not to try.” Your efforts to insist on basic human rights for people in our foreign policy area was very touching to me at the time, and as I read your memoirs. Yet it brought you some real problems.

President Carter: Yes.

Mr. Hardin: Would you do it any differently today if you had it to do over again?

President Carter: If I had to change anything about my human rights policies as president, I would make it stronger, not weaker. The criticism came almost invariably because it was too strong a policy. It tended to alienate some of our friends around the world who were persecuting or abusing their own subjects, imprisoning them without trial, or sometimes even engaging in torture. On a few occasions even some of our supposed friends were committing murder against their own people.

I didn’t think it was right to remain silent in a case like that, and sometimes my importunities to them, my warnings to them, were very secret so it wouldn’t make it embarrassing for them to comply. Sometimes in the last case, I expressed my desires publicly to bring world-wide pressure on them. And I think, without attributing the success to me personally, literally tens of thousands of people were released from prison, maybe thousands of lives were saved, and there was an atmosphere around the world of knowledge that there was one country on earth, at least, that stood for human rights and basic freedom for a democracy, for an absence of persecution and torture and murder by government. And that was the United States. And I thought it was compatible with the original principles of our own country, and it was also compatible with my duty and with my religioius faith.

Mr. Hardin: What was the role or the place of faith as the Iranian hostage crisis developed and began to build up? How did you feel about what was happening?

President Carter: This was probably the biggest test of my religious faith and also the biggest problem that I ever had, and the worst year that I ever spent. My faith in Christ was a constant reassurance to me. And my prayer consistently revolved around bringing the hostages back safe and to free them, protecting their lives. And I spent a lot of time with the members of the hostages’ families. They would come to Washington en masse at times and I would meet with them and the Secretary of State to explain what was going on and some of the things we couldn't put in the newspapers, you know. And then at times when I was traveling around the country, if I knew that a hostage family was near where I was making a speech, we would invite them in, bring them in as a matter of fact, and I would talk to them. So I got to feeling almost as though I was a father of a big family of hostages. So by the time they were finally released safely, just as I went out of office, they were like my family members. And I think that a lot of their reports subsequently, and a few of the letters that slipped out of Iran during the hostage holding, were filled with profound reaffirmations of religious faith, because it not only tided me over as president but also tided them over as prisoners.

Mr. Hardin: I have felt a little bit the same way about the Watergate experience. I think that has created some very faithful Christians. Do you feel the same way?

President Carter: Yes, I do too. Charles Colson is an obvious example. I understand he has been on your program, has he not?

Mr. Hardin: He has. And Jeb Magruder has finished evangelical school.

President Carter: Well, those kinds of experiences can transform a person’s life and turn it toward God.

Mr. Hardin: Yes. At least take the “gods” out of your own life when that happens to you.

President Carter: That’s right. You know they’re not dependable, so you have to search for something that doesn’t change.

Mr. Hardin: Were there a lot of pressures on you to take violent steps during the Iranian hostage crisis, like bombing the various refineries?

President Carter: Oh , yes. Not only the refineries. There were people who advocated, very strongly, the bombing of Teheran, which would have killed the hostages. Their belief was that it was more important for our country to show its military power and strength in the face of a terrorist act than it was to save the lives of the hostages. And there were others on the far extreme who wanted me to apologize to Iran and to send the Shah back to Iran to be assassinated, murdered, or killed! I obviously couldn’t accommodate any extremes like that. So I tried to do what I thought best. We negotiated consistently to have the hostages released. We sent the Ayatollah Khomeini, within a couple of weeks, a very firm message that if he ever put one of our hostages on trial that we would interrupt all Iranian commerce with the outside world, and if he ever injured or killed a hostage in any way, that we would attack Iran militarily. So he knew, not only from us, but through the British and French and German and Japanese and Italian heads of state that I would do this. So I think this prevented their doing anything directly to injure the hostages.

Mr. Hardin: You were able to put a kind of security ring around them by making clear where we stood?

President Carter: Absolutely. And these messages were sent to Khomeini in very secret multiple channels, so he got it from a lot of different directions. It also insured that the Germans and the Italians and others were on our side more avidly than they would have been because they didn’t want to see their shipments of oil from Iran to them interrupted.

Mr. Hardin: How about the place of your faith on that terrible night in the desert?

President Carter: That was the worst night of my life , and obviously, what happened was just a complete accident. It could have happened at Fort Benning, or it could have happened at Fort Bragg, or anywhere else, where a helicopter was taking off and accidently ran into a C-130. Our rescue mission had an excellent chance to succeed. They had practiced. They had infra-red devices so they could see at night. We knew where all the hostages were located. We knew the character and identity of all the guards who kept them. We had the plans made very meticulously.

And then, of course, when the rescue mission failed, I had to notify the people of our nation early the next morning. And I let the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and Vice President Mondale personally notify the families of the servicemen who had been injured or killed. Then I went home, after preparing a few remarks, and went to sleep. And I slept for about three hours. Got up quite early, and I went on morning television and told the people that our rescue mission had failed.

So it was a wonderful experience to know that the people of our country understood my effort and supported it. But it was a terrible personal disappointment to see the rescue mission not be successful.

MR HARDIN: Knowing you and your prayer life, you must have wondered about how the Lord was handling this answer.

President Carter: I’ve wondered that many times in my life! But then I’ve come to realize, the older I get, and particularly so since I teach Sunday School every Sunday and I do a lot more studying than I used to, that the things that we set in our human lives as paramount in importance are not of paramount importance in God’s life, and his measure of our own life’s success. The most obvious example, I don’t want to belabor the pointis how long we live on earth. To us, that’s of paramount importance, the length of a human existence, But in God’s eyes, that’s not the most important.

Mr. Hardin: It’s a part of the adventure,

President Carter: It’s a part of the adventure and, of course, Christians believe that after death, with salvation, we are in God’s presence. It ought to be a reward. But that’s the kind of thing I have to accommodate as a person, and that’s the kind of problem I had to accommodate as President.

Mr. Hardin: I believe you and President Ford have sort of connected pretty well.

President Carter: Very well. He works with me closely at the Carter Center. He and I spent four days as cochairmen of a meeting a year ago when we had representatives from Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Soviet Union to debate and learn from one another about Mid-East questions. And then next April President Ford and I will be cochairmen again on a four-week analysis of U.S./Soviet relations with the emphasis on the arms control question. And we are doing a full year of preparation for that, both at my presidential library in Atlanta, and also at his presidential library in Michigan, so we have formed a pretty good partnership.

Mr. Hardin: I hope we all hear more about that conference. Discussions like that on peace are so needed. What would you like to accomplish from here on out? What are some of your goals?

President Carter: Those kinds of questions are still important to me. We’ve got a good family life, and I like the mundane responsibilities of a small community. We still own our farm land. This is the only house we have ever owned, and I hope it’s the only one we ever own. I teach Sunday School every Sunday. We have five or six visitors who come to our church each Sunday for every regular member of our tiny class, and I enjoy it very much. In addition, I am able to travel extensively. A former president retains the access to almost any leader on earth, not just political and military leaders, but leaders in the field of health care, agriculture, or education, human rights, etc. So, this gives me a great deal of influence, and I hope to use that kind of influence and knowledge and experience of being president to pursue the goals of our country.

Mr. Hardin: You mentioned the advantage of being a former president in terms of access. Are there any disadvantages? Are there some freedoms or some things that constrain you that would not be there if you weren’t a former president?

President Carter: Yes, obviously. You can’t go into a crowd or into a community incognito. And quite often I realize when I get to a place that what I wanted to see has been changed because I was coming. So that’s one of the disadvantages. But there are compensating advantages of being a former president compared to when I was president.

When I was in office, I had the ability to learn as much as I wanted to about, say, Israel and Egypt and Lebanon and Syria. But I didn’t have an opportunity to get acquainted with and learn about the Palestinians’ cause and what motivates them and what are their rationalities and what are their constraints. So the last time I went to the Middle East, I had an ability not only to meet with all the heads of state who welcomed me (I came at their invitation as a matter of fact), but also to travel quite freely in the West Bank and Gaza, and to visit with Palestinian leaders who were living in exile in Egypt, Jordan and Syria and Saudi Arabia. So I think I have a better concept now of the Mid-East situation as a former president than I could ever have gotten as a president. Not only that, but now I can concentrate for months at a time, with a few inevitable interruptions, on a single major issue to the exclusion of others, whereas when you are president, you have to deal simultaneously with dozens of important questions.

Mr. Hardin: I wonder sometimes if the presidency isn’t surrounded by a lot of people who are paid to produce bad news, and maybe hard news on the negative side, and that there is not enough good news and news about peaceful possibilities generated by the people who report to him. The CIA and others survive, to some extent, pointing out threats to our country.

President Carter: I think that is accurate because there is an inclination on the part of the Pentagon, for instance, to paint America’s military strength in its most dismal colors so they can get a bigger budget allocation next year. Quite often the president and the defense and military officials, if they are not careful, will damage our country by lying about our strength. This has been done lately, just in order to get a bigger budget allocation. Also, I think it is accurate to say that some president’s advisors try to keep from the president the facts of our complicated issues and try to address it in simplistic terms.

I spent a lot of time studying. In fact, some people said I was a president too much like an engineer, that I learned too much about subjects. But when I sat down in Camp David with Begin and Sadat, and sat across the table from President Brezhnev in Vienna to negotiate the Salt Il Treaty, I wanted to know what I was talking about. So I did a lot of studying.

And the other part of answering your question is the press treatment. I think some research that has been done on the subject since 1900 shows that my administration was treated most harshly by the press compared to any other administration in history, even including Richard Nixon’s during Watergate, probably because of the aftermath of the Watergate experience, and suspicion on the part of the press that someone was trying to mislead them, and that investigative reporters, like the ones who broke Watergate could be famous again. In general, the presidency was a very wonderful and enjoyable experience.

Mr. Hardin: I have a feeling that you are having the freedom to do some great things now.

President Carter: Well, I hope so.

Mr. Hardin: I want to thank you for all of us for taking the time, and it has been a real pleasure to be here.

President Carter: I’m glad you came down, Dave.

Mr. Hardin: Thank you very much.

President Carter: Good luck.    

 

The participants:

JIMMY CARTER
39th President, United States of America

DAVID K. HARDIN
President, Chicago Sunday Evening Club

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