Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 6, 1994 TAG: 9403090036
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL GALLOWAY CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Long
\ ``I'm not really a political animal,'' Jimmy Carter said. ``My wife and middle son are the two politicians in the family. They like politics. I never really liked it. When I ran for office, it was to accomplish things I thought were important.''
The 39th president of the United States was having breakfast at Lou Mitchell's, a popular restaurant in Chicago's Loop that's known for its hearty fare and home-baked pastries.
He arrived just after 8:30 a.m. to eat and be interviewed, emerging from a black Mercury sedan and entering to spontaneous applause from startled diners.
Seated in a booth near the coat rack, Carter was regularly interrupted by patrons who stopped on their way out to shake his hand and express their admiration of him.
Although he was resoundingly defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and left the White House under dark clouds of surging inflation, swollen interest rates and a draining U.S. hostage crisis in Iran, Carter today is basking in the sunshine of high public approval ratings.
Judging by the warm comments he received on this recent morning, the regard many have for Carter seems to arise more from a respect for his personal integrity and the way he leads his life than from time's healing, an awe of celebrity or traditional courtesy toward former chief executives.
Carter has chosen not to enrich himself by serving on corporate boards and making speeches for large fees, as have other members of the Past Presidents Club; he participates in community self-help projects for the poor, such as Habitat for Humanity; he promotes peace and dialogue among international adversaries through programs at his library complex in Atlanta, also representing the government on special missions to world trouble spots.
And he still teaches an adult Sunday school class at a Baptist church in his hometown of Plains, Ga., population 716.
``I'm there two of three Sundays,'' he said. ``We have a very small church, but we get a large number of visitors. One Sunday recently, we had people from 15 denominations, [including] a group of Catholics and Amish and Mennonites and six Jewish people.''
It's unclear what history will say in a century about his presidency, but much about the Carter years doesn't seem so bad from a distance of a decade and a half. From 1977 through 1980, for instance, the annual budget deficits ranged from $40 billion to $79 billion, relatively modest figures.
Carter said he is most proud of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the Panama Canal treaty, the recognition of China and passage of an energy policy aimed at lowering foreign oil imports.
Indeed, Carter's remarks about his distaste for politics were prompted by a person who asked, hopefully, if he might consider one more campaign. After all, he's eligible for another term, and he's a lean, vital 69, the age of the Republican who beat him.
``I wouldn't mind being president again,'' he said. ``I liked things like town meetings and press conferences, the give-and-take on issues and the analysis of issues. But no, I don't want to be involved in politics again.''
It's not the intense media scrutiny that repels him.
``I think anything that relates to a person's veracity or moral standards, legal or illegal acts, is a proper subject for discussion. I think what happened to Gary Hart, for example, was not excessive on the part of the press.''
Neither does he think queries about Bill Clinton's past are unwarranted. ``People can make their own judgments. Most of these allegations [about sexual improprieties] against him came out before he was elected. The people considered them and elected him anyway.''
He advocates full disclosure of the Whitewater and Madison savings and loan matters. ``The White House handled this ineptly. They would have been much better off to appoint a special investigator at the beginning, and make it obvious they have nothing to hide.
``Anyone who puts himself or herself in a public role, seeking the presidency or the governorship, has got to understand that everything they've done in the past, in business or personally, is going to be scrutinized.''
If sanguine about the Fourth Estate, he's unsettled by other aspects of political life.
``When I go to a reception now and stand up for an hour and try to make small talk at the top of my voice so I can be heard - it reminds me of those things I don't miss. I like solitude, the outdoors. And I like to write.''
It's his writing that brought him to Chicago.
He was here to promote the paperback release of his eighth book, ``Turning Point: A Candidate, a State and a Nation Come of Age'' (Times Books).
It is an absorbing account of his first political race, for the Georgia Senate in 1962, and it is filled with the elements of a potboiler.
The villain is a savvy, brazen political boss named Joe Hurst who engineers Carter's slim defeat by openly intimidating voters and engaging in ballot fraud outrageous enough to impress the most crooked functionaries of Chicago's old Democratic machine.
An examination of the list of voters in the election would reveal that 118 had somehow voted in alphabetical order, including several who were deceased, at least one in prison and some who had moved to California.
The heroes, in addition to candidate Carter, described by author Carter as ``a naive 38-year-old farmer and small-town businessman,'' included an investigative reporter from the Atlanta Journal, several judges and Carter's attorneys, who battled imposing deadlines and political intrigue to overturn Hurst's handiwork and win a special election.
``It was a turning point for me, because if I'd lost, I'd have quit politics,'' Carter said. ``It was a turning point for the nation because of the reform made possible by the `one-man, one-vote' decision.''
The landmark 1962 Supreme Court ruling in Baker vs. Carr required that the vote of every citizen have equal weight. At the time, 31 states had voting procedures designed to give rural areas and small towns influence beyond their numbers.
Candidates typically were elected by the number of counties they carried, rather than popular vote, a practice calculated to institutionalize white control in the South and work against the interests of black citizens and the more progressive urban areas. Under the Georgia system, a vote in Joe Hurst's small county was equal to 99 votes cast in Atlanta's Fulton County.
Carter has said that the most incredible part of the story is that he decided to run for office without consulting his wife, Rosalynn, who would become his most valued supporter and adviser.
His reluctance may have stemmed from an even more important turning point in their lives - in 1953, when Jimmy was 29, married to Rosalynn for seven years and a career naval officer, his dream since age 5.
``I had the best job in the U.S. Navy. I was senior officer of the crew building one of the first two atomic submarines. But my father had terminal cancer, and I went home while he was dying.
``I saw what his life meant to the people of Plains and that area. He was in the Lions Club. He was on the county School Board and the hospital authority. The farmers around there, both black and white, looked upon him as a leader. He was a Sunday school teacher. His whole life was immersed in the community, and people depended on him.
``I compared my life, if I could become the chief of naval operations, with what my father's life meant, and I decided my life would mean more in Plains.''
What was Rosalynn's reaction? ``When I told her what I was considering, she almost quit me. It was a horrible revelation to her. But I was insistent, and we went home, and I have never regretted it.''
Like his father, he became head of the Lions Club, the county School Board and the hospital authority; and he resisted pressure to join the racist White Citizens Council, surviving a boycott against the family business.
And did the time come when Rosalynn said she was happy with your decision? Carter smiled. ``No, I don't know she's ever said anything exactly like that.''
The price of reform, Carter writes, was the loss of a more personal relationship between people and their local government.
``In some ways Joe Hurst and his wife were good leaders because they knew every family in the county. They delivered every welfare check themselves. They knew when somebody was sick, when somebody was in need or when a school bus route needed to be changed.''
He sees a loss of the same sort in big cities. ``I was an admirer of Mayor Daley,'' he said, referring to Richard J., the father of Chicago's present mayor. ``He was a friend. I used to always call him when I came through Chicago.
``I thought there was a great deal of difference between New York and Chicago. In Chicago if a streetlight burned out, everybody knew who was supposed to replace it. It may have been Mayor Daley's cousin, but you knew.
``In New York, if a streetlight burned out, nobody had the slightest idea in God's world who was supposed to replace it.''
The civil rights bills that followed the one-man, one-vote ruling, he writes, lifted ``the millstone of official racism ... from the necks of Southerners, both black and white. Had this not happened, I could never have been considered a serious candidate for national office.''
Yet he decries what he sees as the increasing segregation and poverty of the inner cities.
``There are no easy answers. My own approach is to launch the Atlanta Project, which I talk about at the end of the book. We've identified the 500,000 poorest people in Atlanta, which is about 15 percent of the population.
``We've divided the area in which they live into 20 school districts. Each district has a major corporation as a partner, to help with employment and job training - Marriott, IBM, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines. Every Atlanta college and university also has one of those low-income areas for which it's responsible.
``We're trying to give these poor people, for the first time, control of their own affairs. Let them decide which programs work and which don't. One reason government programs don't work is that people who make the decisions about them don't even know a poor person.''
Carter looked at his interviewer. ``I'm not criticizing, but I don't know if you do. Do you know a poor person well enough to visit in their home? Or have a cup of coffee or to invite them to your home? Chances are, no.
``And the mayor probably doesn't either. And the members of the state legislature probably don't.
``In the Atlanta Project, we're trying to break the chasm between well-to-do people like you and me and poor people. It's the same thing we do in Habitat for Humanity.
``The point is to know these people you think are inferior to you. You'll say to yourself before you know them, `If they worked as hard as I do, they'd have a nice house. If they were ambitious, they'd have a good place to live. If they had good family values, they'd do the same as we do.'
``When we get to know these poverty-stricken people, we find they're just as ambitious as I am, just as hard working as I am, and their family values are equivalent to mine. They just need a chance in life.''
You don't know about his presidency, but you're pretty sure that Jimmy Carter, the human being, is going to look pretty good in the history books 100 years from now.
by CNB