Carter Still Seeking Solutions

This column was originally published in The Guelph Mercury, February 10, 2009

He left office in the midst of a mortgage crisis and economic free fall. A deeply religious president, his most memorable legacy was a failed venture in the Middle East. If you answered, "Who is George W. Bush, Alex," you are wrong.

I am referring to Jimmy Carter. Arguably, his failed mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran was not his most memorable legacy. That was an interview with Playboy magazine conducted before he became president.

The then governor was asked a loaded and leading question: "How will you be able to relate to them (the American people), when you consider yourself to be so much better than them?"

Having been led to believe he was off the record (the reporter had quite visibly turned off his tape recorder and the parties were taking leave of one another at the door of the governor's residence) Carter replied in a religious context, something he strenuously avoided in public and official pronouncements, that he was better than no one, a sinner as he believes we all are.

He concluded his answer by quoting from the Sermon on the Mount: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery'; but I say to you, that everyone who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her in his heart."

The interviewer, smelling blood, pounced as any good reporter would, and asked Carter if he had ever committed adultery.

Carter replied truthfully and precisely, "Yes I have lusted. . . ." Saturday Night Live, just starting its first season, seized on that line and it came to define an idealistic, hyper-religious, pie-in-the-sky, head in the clouds president.

By that standard, which Carter applied only to himself, I have committed adultery (lusted) and every other one of the seven deadly sins (at least in my mind) in the 40 odd days since I last sang Auld Lang Syne. So much for the media brouhaha that almost cost him the presidency.

Since leaving office, Carter's largest contribution to media frenzy has been his stand on Palestine, particularly the title of his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The title alone inspired outrage among the pro-Israel lobby and right-wing commentators across the world. It also, apparently, affronted these groups so much that while they freely condemned it they refused to read it. A similar response has greeted his most recent book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Works.

The situation reminds me of a close friend, a retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, with a deep and abiding hatred of Carter. In 1994, his platoon was locked and loaded aboard their hovercraft on the verge of invading Haiti. Carter's diplomatic intervention in the crisis denied him the only opportunity in a long career to actually practise his craft, to lead his men and to play with his 'toys' -- an intrusion he continues to resent.

Carter's arguments are painfully simple. Israel continues to occupy or control by military force territories occupied as a result of offensive military operations in direct violation of UN resolutions and international law. The wall currently being constructed is not contiguous with the Green Line established after the 1967 war and amounts to de facto annexation of large portions of the West Bank.

Looking to the future these annexations, coupled with a higher Palestinian birth rate, mean that Israel will become a democracy dominated by Muslim voters or a Judeo-fascist religious state. Carter is averse to either one of these outcomes. A man deeply committed to the Biblical narrative, he believes a two-state solution is the only sustainable and morally acceptable resolution to this demographically inevitable conundrum.

In closing, this column would not be complete if I did not acknowledge a potential conflict of interest.

In the mid-1990s I had occasion to work with president Carter and developed a deep and abiding affection for him. I first met him in 1993 at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. We were standing in line in the cafeteria. He turned around, introduced himself and invited me to join his party for breakfast.

The following summer I spent a week with him, as his nominal supervisor, building a Habitat home in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. He is a highly-skilled carpenter. He worked long days and met autograph requests with an admonition that both parties had work to do.

At the end of our last day together, I presented him with a 1984 edition of Popular Mechanics with his photo on the cover and asked for an autograph. As he signed it I mentioned that I had only asked for two other autographs in my life, and asked if he wanted to know who the other two were. Having come to regard me as his 'crazy' Canadian, he deferred, but one of his bodyguards piped up and I responded.

Desperate to have this copy of Popular Mechanics signed and determined to have a Canadian politician's autograph before an American president's, I had asked former governor-general Ed Schreyer for his autograph as we surreptitiously smoked outside a Habitat function the year before.

The other was John Carlos. My father introduced me to the Olympic runner while he played a brief stint for the Toronto Argonauts -- fast as a bullet, he never learned how to catch the football. Alone among our small group, only Carter also remembered the incident that made Carlos my idol.

As a seven-year old, I had watched him stand on the Olympic podium in Mexico City in 1968 with his black-gloved hand raised in a black power salute.

Four years later, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I wrote Carter and requested that he send a signed copy of his most recent book, Sources of Strength, to my father.

Within a matter of weeks it arrived inscribed, "To Donald Gordon, best wishes, Jimmy Carter."