Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 25, 1991                   TAG: 9103250239
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LAUD CARTER BY KNOCKING OTHER EX-PRESIDENTS?

After saying Carter deserves the prize for his Camp David accords, a view that I concur with, you feel compelled to strengthen your case by trashing other former presidents.

President Reagan deserved the Nobel Peace Prize last year instead of the Butcher of the Baltics, Nobel laureate Gorbachev, because of his determined "peace through strength" defense policies that helped unveil the Iron Curtain and lower the curtain on a despotic dictator in Baghdad.

Your knee-jerk anti-Nixonisms are devoid of thought. Richard Nixon has written six books since leaving the White House, most on foreign policy - a field in which he is an acknowledged master. Presidents Reagan and Bush have tapped his unique insights and expertise regularly, the most notable recent examples being U.S.-Sino relations in the post-Tiananmen period, recent upheavals in the Soviet Union, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Your dismissal of Nixon as "busying himself trying to clean his tarnished image" is classic Nixon-bashing.

I do not mean to attack Carter; I salute his achievements since leaving office. But I must ask you to consider why President Bush calls Nixon instead of Carter when he wants foreign-policy advice.

As for your put-down of President Ford, he deserves the gratitude of the nation for restoring calm in the wake of the Watergate wreckage and for speaking out, as he did recently at Roanoke College, on issues of national concern. He is a very fine man with rare talents for prediction, as we saw with his 1976 prescient observation involving Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. BEN HODGES FERRUM