Good evening everyone:

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With former-President Carter’s decision to live out his remaining time in hospice care, Christine asked whether I had any reflections about him that I might share. Although I have not spent time with President Carter, I realized that I had had conversations about him with four people who knew him well during his administration from 1976-’80. With advance apologies for both the second-hand nature of these stories and the name-dropping necessary to get there (and deep respect for four people who have passed), here are four glimpses into a president who will, I have no doubt, be treated well by history.

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Representative Don Fraser

My first glimpse into Carter was through my then-boss Congressman Don Fraser, of Minneapolis. In the early 1970’s, Fraser was the inaugural chair of the House Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements. Fraser and his chief staffer Bob Boettcher had pioneered inquiries into international human rights, including a dramatic and dangerous (Fraser’s house was bombed) inquiry into the alleged influence-peddling activities of the South Korean Unification Church founded and run by Hong Myung Moon. Fraser’s elevation of human rights was, for many of the early years of the subcommittee, a solitary crusade.

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That was until candidate Jimmy Carter seized on the issue. Fraser’s work had struck a chord with Carter, and Carter was intent on making it a part of his presidential campaign platform.

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Fraser, his wife Arvonne, and I were having dinner in the Fraser’s apartment in Southwest D.C. in early October of 1976 when the phone rang around six o’clock. It was Carter. He and President Gerald Ford would have a nationally televised debate in just a few hours and Carter wanted to push President Ford on human rights. He wondered if Fraser could help make last minute refinements to argument. They spoke for twenty minutes or so.

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Carter was true to his intention. The debate focused heavily on international human rights, with Carter asserting that the Ford administration’s foreign policy failed to reflect the ideals of the American people. He argued that the nation’s international legitimacy would flow not from brute military power, but from a moral compass consistent with the democratic principles of the nation’s founding. He ticked off example after example of the administration’s realpolitik – support for military dictatorships, for astronomical levels of arms sales, and for covert efforts to overthrow governments. Candidate Carter concluded that being tethered to a reliance on geo-political power politics was not enough to form an effective foreign policy – that strength ultimately derived from doing what’s right.

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As President, Carter embraced international human rights with an authenticity and ferocity not before seen in the White House. Fraser was not the origin of that embrace, but he certainly helped give it definition and fuel.  By the end of Carter’s term, it had become clear that the issue transcended political opportunism and instead reflected a bedrock personal morality.

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Secretary of Defense Harold Brown

The second conversation was with Harold Brown, Jr., who served as Carter’s Secretary of Defense, when I was traveling with Dr. Brown’s family (his daughter Debbie and I were an item at that point) to Egypt and Israel in the early 1980’s. We were there at the invitation of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and former Israeli President Ezer Weizman, all of whom had participated with Brown in the formulation of the “Camp David Accords,” which had emerged through President Carter’s mediation in 1978 and resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, the first ever between those two nations.

Brown had come to the Carter administration after serving as the president of Cal Tech, Secretary of the Air Force under President Johnson, and head of the Livermore Laboratory. A nuclear physicist who earned his Ph. D from Columbia at the age of 21, he was, without question, the most intimidating person I’ve ever met.

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I mention all of that because it was terrifying, and riveting, to be with him for three days in the self-contained space of a boat floating from Luxor to Aswan. We had met with Weizman, visited the museum and pyramids in Cairo, toured Jerusalem with its legendary Mayor Teddy Kollek,  and visited a military base on the Red Sea. Thrilling, eye-popping stuff. But the boat-ride was really the first time I had extended time with him – and nowhere to hide penetrating conversation.

Brown was not a chatterer, so one afternoon as we were sitting on the roof of the boat, I summoned all the nerve I could muster and asked him about the Camp David process. He gave me a side-look that pretty much made me wish I was somewhere in Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb, and not sitting across from him. But he nodded, gave me a half-smile, and launched in. With only the smallest amount of prodding, he spoke for nearly an hour.

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He described the mind-numbingly complex preparations that Carter had insisted on before anyone stepped foot in Camp David.

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Carter had had a productive meeting earlier in his presidency with Sadat, whose principal aim was peace for his country, accompanied by an insistence on the return of the Israel-occupied lands of the Sinai peninsula. Carter had also spoken with Begin, who didn’t seem inclined to slam the door on Sadat’s interests.

Although Sadat had rocked the world by making a dramatic visit to Jerusalem and addressing the Knesset a year earlier, no progress had subsequently materialized. Carter had initially thought that multiple parties – including Jordan, Syria, and the Palestinians – had to be involved. But Brown pointed out that Carter was sufficiently pragmatic and insightful to recognize that that kind of meeting would have become over-politicized and impossible to manage. He altered his approach in favor of a bilateral process.

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Brown said that Carter was like a sponge in the pre-meeting briefings. He would listen, prod, and synthesize. Points never had to be repeated. Nor did you have to worry that you were overloading his circuits. Carter’s mind welcomed layer on layer of detail, which was essential in deconstructing the complexity that was Mideast politics, history, culture, norms, and sensibilities.

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Brown told me that they nevertheless arrived at Camp David free of illusion – all the technical briefings and analysis in the world were likely to yield to politics, personalities, and interpersonal dynamics beyond anyone’s control. Or so he thought. Brown shook his head slightly at this point and said that Carter never believed anything was beyond one’s control if you could precisely articulate common purpose, adapt in mid-flow to accommodate hardened interests, and re-calibrate possible outcomes.

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Indeed, Brown told me, it was that belief that made the difference as the discussions stretched over two weeks. He laughed recalling how Carter had to adapt to the wildly different approaches of all the participants – the principals and advisers alike. Whereas Begin was exceedingly formal, guarded, and meticulous, Sadat was outgoing, relaxed, and focused on the big picture. And all the while the advisers, particularly national Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, were in constant motion to assert their influence. Only Carter, Brown observed, could take it all in and make it work.

When the process appeared fatally stalled, Carter was the one who drafted a now-famous memo that outlined a possible overarching solution, shuttling between the two sides to present it separately to Begin and Sadat until the issues were framed with ever-greater precision, and the interests of both sides weighted in delicate balance.  It worked. The impossible became the real. Brown said to me that he came away with the realization that only someone with Carter’s tenacity and stubbornness . . . integrity and authenticity . . . mastery of detail and mental flexibility could have accomplished what would become one of the seminal breakthroughs in post-war international diplomacy.

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General John Vessey, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army

The third conversation was with General John Vessey, who was the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army during the last two years of the Carter Administration and would go on to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan. Vessey was the father of a close family-friend, and we had the opportunity over a dinner many years after he left public service to discuss his impressions of Carter.

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Vessey was serving as the Commander of United States forces in Korea when Carter announced in 1977 that the U.S. would remove its ground forces from South Korea. Vessey didn’t agree with that decision. But it fell to him to reassure the South Korean government that America’s commitment to their protection would endure despite the withdrawal. He also sought quietly to convince the President that he should reverse his decision. Indeed, after Carter traveled to Korea two years later, he came to agree with Vessey’s position and did, in fact, suspend and then retract his original order.

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Vessey told me that Carter’s leadership was a model of integrity. Carter unfailingly listened to Vessey’s briefings, analyses, and recommendations, even when they pushed the president into territory that was uncomfortable. Like Brown, Vessey noted that the president had a steel-trap mind capable of absorbing, distilling, and re-articulating the most complex material. Vessey mentioned, for example, that after a particularly technical and lengthy briefing from Vessey and his staff on the intricacies of nuclear capabilities in Southeast Asia, Carter walked out of the room to take questions from the press corps – without notes, he not only accurately and exhaustively recapitulated the key arguments, but threw in observations above and beyond what he had been briefed on.

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Again, like Brown, Vessey remarked that Carter could be dogged. He wouldn’t let go of an issue until he had thoroughly taken it apart, reconstructed it in his own mental framework, and translated it into policy terms. What could strike others as stubbornness, almost arrogance, Vessey believed was instead confidence in conclusions long labored over and carefully formed. In Vessey’s view, Carter encouraged his subordinates to challenge his thinking – at least to a point. Vessey smiled as he said this – once that point was reached, however, Carter had a gracious, but firm, way of letting people know that the debate was at an end.

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Vessey remarked that Carter was the kind of leader you wanted in a crisis - the kind of leader you could trust to weigh the evidence, make a decision on the merits, and then observe carefully the consequences to ensure that the decision was the right one. He suggested that the long-view of history would treat his presidency well.

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Vice President Mondale

The final conversation was with Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice President. Vice President Mondale and I were asked by Congressman Fraser’s family to deliver eulogies at Fraser’s memorial service five years ago. He and I had the chance to talk briefly and reminisce not only about Fraser, but also about President Carter’s role in the enactment of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area bill in 1978, a legislative process in which Fraser, Mondale, and I had all played an active part.

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Over the course of three years – from 1975-’78 – the dispute over the future protection of the Boundary Waters, a million-acre wilderness area in northern Minnesota, tore apart the Minnesota political fabric.  Fraser had introduced a bill extending full wilderness protection to the area; his counterpart from Duluth had counter-punched with a bill to divide the area in half and permit mineral exploration, logging, motorboating, and snowmobiling in the southern piece.

The dispute would ultimately result in the electoral defeat of the Governor and a sitting Senator, destroy Fraser’s Senate candidacy, and pit the “Rangers” (from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range region) against the Twin Cities. As Vice President, Mondale had sought to stay above the fray and to keep President Carter out of the dispute. But the Secretary of Agriculture (which had jurisdiction over the forest in which the BWCA is located) was a Minnesotan, as was the Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior (which had jurisdiction over the national wilderness system). Both departments technically had to remain neutral on the legislation, but both were drawn in for their expertise and views on best wilderness practices, which tilted toward Fraser’s wilderness bill.

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I asked the Vice President how Carter had really felt. He replied that there had never been any question. He reminded me that the sweater-wearing Carter had asked Americans to turn down their thermostats . . . had appointed an ardent environmentalist, Cecil D, Andrus, as Secretary of the Interior . . . had championed and signed the Alaska Lands bill (protecting nearly 100 million acres) . . .  had killed dozens of federal water projects (i.e., dams) he deemed a threat to American rivers . . . and had designated nearly 60 million acres as off-limits to development under the national Antiquities Act. Mondale laughed and said that the only reason that Carter hadn’t taken the gloves off on the BWCA bill was because it would put him/Mondale – a former Senator from Minnesota with close ties to all the parties involved – in a difficult vise.

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Mondale suggested that Carter may rival Teddy Roosevelt as the most environmentally-oriented president of the nation’s history. He remarked that it was just another thing that history has overlooked in its assessment of Carter’s influence, effectiveness, and legacy.

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Others will write at length about Jimmy Carter’s moral rectitude, his dedication to public service after he left office, and other aspects of his character and career.  But these four conversations suggest that this was a president who deserves to be seen in a different light, one that will refract in increasingly positive hues over time.

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