The good White man

The news that former US President Jimmy Carter has been diagnosed with cancer which has spread to his brain was received with deep sadness in this part of the world. This is because Jimmy Carter, 90, was a good friend of African-Americans and of Africans during his presidency. Since he left office in 1981, Carter […]

The news that former US President Jimmy Carter has been diagnosed with cancer which has spread to his brain was received with deep sadness in this part of the world. This is because Jimmy Carter, 90, was a good friend of African-Americans and of Africans during his presidency. Since he left office in 1981, Carter has come to be seen here as the dattijon bature, the good White man.
I was in my early years in secondary school in 1975 when the former Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter began his quest for the American presidency. At first it looked like a tall order. When I first read in TIME that Carter was a peanut [what we call here groundnut] farmer, I wondered how a farmer could ever hope to become president. Here in our country, “farmer” is synonymous with poverty and illiteracy.
In all pictures and cartoons of him in those days Jimmy Carter spotted a very wide grin, which was part of his campaign strategy. TIME said he was a nuclear engineer and a US Navy Lieutenant who quit in 1953 in order to tend his father’s farm upon the latter’s death. The 1976 US presidential election was very promising for Democrats because the Republicans that controlled the White House were severely wounded by the Watergate scandal which led to President Richard Nixon’s forced resignation in 1974. Carter managed to win the Democratic ticket and was up against President Gerald Ford. Ford was America’s Goodluck Jonathan, if not more so. He became US President without standing for election. Ford was House Minority Leader in 1973 when Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign. Nixon nominated Ford to replace Agnew. The following year Nixon too was forced out and Ford replaced him. Early in his tenure, Ford committed a major political blunder when he granted Richard Nixon full pardon for Watergate crimes.
Still, Carter was so little known in national politics that US voters were asking the question, Jimmy Who? Carter wrote a book that year titled Why Not The Best? Weeks later when an auditors’ report of his peanut farm found that the accounts were muddled up, TIME magazine did a story on it with the headline Why Not The Best Accounts? Carter managed to defeat Ford by a narrow margin and took over as president in January 1977. Pictures were splashed of him, with his wife Rosalyn and daughter Amy, walking to the White House after the swearing in.
That same day, the White House announced that President Carter wanted to be known not by his formal name James Earl Carter but as Jimmy Carter. The announcement set off a storm of controversy in the world’s top newsrooms. The BBC Board of News debated the matter for ten hours and decided to follow the example of the New York Times. The Board of Editors of the New York Times debated the issue non-stop for 24 hours. The next day, New York Times referred to “President Jimmy Carter…”, and other newsrooms followed suit. That precedent enabled President William Jefferson Clinton to call himself Bill Clinton in 1993. During the name controversy, TIME did a story titled “Who Carter?”
Carter’s top level appointments were copiously reported in those days. He appointed his old Navy College classmate Admiral Stansfield Turner as Director of the CIA. TIME said then that Carter graduated 59th in their 1946 class of 820 cadets. Tuner came first. Carter’s Secretary of Defence, Harold Brown, was described as “the bookish son of a New York City lawyer” who scored 100% in his final year Physics exams. Most of Carter’s White House appointees were from his home state of Georgia and they were called “the Georgia Mafia.” They included his White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, his press secretary Jody Powell and his budget director, Bert Lance.
 Carter’s most controversial appointee was his Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, a black man from Georgia and top aide of Martin Luther King. Young soon became well known for his gaffes. I remember a Newsweek interview he did in 1977 in which he said, “[Somalia’s ruler] Siad Barre is a con man. So is [Ethiopian leader] Mengistu.” Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had nothing of his predecessor Henry Kissinger’s charisma. Much more visible was Carter’s National Security Adviser, the Polish-American professor Zbigniew Brzezinski who pushed a hawkish anti-Soviet line and repeatedly clashed with the liberal Vance. Brzezinski however had humour. In 1979 when Vance resigned and was replaced by the Polish-American Senator Edmund Muskie, reporters asked Brzezinski if he will also quarrel with Muskie. He said, “We are not Poles apart!”
Carter soon launched an international human rights campaign which emboldened Soviet dissidents such as Professor Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Schransky. Carter’s policy retained the normal American double standards; it overlooked human rights abuses by Latin American dictators, the Shah of Iran, Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Arab kings and pro-US African dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko, King Hassan and Anwar Sadat. Apartheid South Africa was hardly molested, though Andrew Young later teamed up with British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington to put pressure on Rhodesian rebel leader Ian Smith that ultimately led to the Lancaster House Talks of 1979.
Carter also made news with the Panama Canal treaties and with the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks [SALT II], proposing deep cuts in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals. Carter visited Nigeria during Obasanjo’s military rule in 1979 and TIME said at the time that White House aides didn’t want him to be caught on Lagos streets while they wanted him to speak on phone to a recalcitrant senator on the Panama Canal treaty. His biggest foreign policy triumph, from American viewpoint, was when he got President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign the Camp David Peace Accords in 1978. From our point of view, the accords neutralised Egypt and encouraged Israeli intransigence in the search for overall peace.
US allies General Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and the Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi were toppled under Carter’s watch, leading to Republican charges of “who lost Iran?” Carter’s worst foreign policy moment was when Iranian students backed by the revolutionary government occupied the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days. The episode only ended a day after Carter left office. That episode contributed greatly to Carter’s defeat by the far-right Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter had kept on campaigning until the polls opened in the eastern states. TIME magazine later reported that his pollster told him that Reagan was ahead, hence the last minute campaign. After Carter made his last campaign speech and retreated into his cabin in Airforce One, the pollster went in and told him that Reagan’s lead in the polls was unassailable. Carter and his wife held each other and wept. Days later Carter walked into his first cabinet meeting after the election and said, “Let me start by announcing the result of the election. We lost.”
So much for my Carter-era stories. Jimmy Carter became much more respected around the world from 1982 when he established the Carter Center in Atlanta. In addition to helping peace negotiations and combating diseases, the Carter Center also became the most credible election monitoring agency in the world. No election is free and fair until Jimmy Carter says so. In 1997 when General Sani Abacha was toying with the idea of contesting election here in Nigeria but was worried that the Western powers will reject it, I advised him [tongue-in-cheek] in an article in New Nigerian that all he had to do was to ensure that Jimmy Carter declared the results as free and fair. Trouble was, I wrote, “hell will freeze over” before Carter declared Abacha’s election as free and fair.
His international efforts were crowned in 2002 when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.  During the investiture ceremony in Oslo, CNN showed a short film clip of his tenure. The anchorman asked Carter what he thought of the clip and he said, “I will be kinder than that.” World history will be very kind to Jimmy Carter, dattijon bature, the good White man and best former President of the United States.