I saw Jimmy Carter sink a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale and promise to change the world
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Version 0 of 1. As a rookie reporter in the 1980s, I was sent to interview the former president. He watched cricket on a village green, then bowled us all over with a speech Trump could never give On American Independence Day 1987, I found myself sitting opposite former president Jimmy Carter, by then six years out of office, in a beautifully tended garden in the rural Tyne valley, home of a chartered accountant called Tony Coates. Coates’ two daughters – Amy, nine, and Charlotte, six – sat on his knees. We were to discuss Carter’s vision for his post-presidential years and the ethos of his visit: the 10th anniversary of Friendship Force, which he introduced in 1977 soon after becoming president, to connect people across the world with home exchanges between Americans and others – including citizens of communist China and the USSR. They had begun between 381 Americans and 381 Geordies, including Coates. The day had dawned with a press opportunity for the (oddly) small assemblage of interested journalists: Coates, Carter and his security detail out jogging. My one-to-one with the former president was arranged for an hour later, once he had showered, changed and broken fast. I was a rookie at the Guardian, a refugee from television, but the deputy editor assigned me, rather than his political staff, to conduct the interview because he considered me “Carter’s kind of guy”. The thought that I could be the same “kind of guy” as a man who had held the world’s most powerful political office was as gratifyingly burdensome as it was bewilderingly flattering. I was dutifully nervous, but once we got talking, I was infected by Carter’s inner calm – the purposeful kind that makes for straight talk in earnest rather than posturing. The interview became a conversation. Here was a man entirely free of airs and graces, let alone the narcissistic pomposity that defines power; a humility that was not contrived. I noted in the article his “characteristically pensive gentleness, for which many Americans are said to yearn again”. As they soon will yet again – more of that later. President Carter had a smile like honey – but how on earth had he climbed the greasiest of poles to the apex of power? The answer: what you’ve been reading all week. Carter won, lost and rose again out of office by plain speaking his beliefs in what binds us rather than divides us, in the possibility of good, in the achievability of peace and the promise of social justice – with disarming decency, in his case propelled by religious conviction. Hearing and heeding Carter was a case of belief in the belief of others. He was young: a jogging-fit 62, with nearly four active decades ahead of him. He spoke in more detail than my assignment could contain about what he wanted to achieve – and did – during those decades. About how famine was preventable, as were diseases among the poorest in the world. He talked about the rights of Palestinians to sovereignty, about arms reduction and detente with the Soviet Union; he spoke with passion about security for children around the world. Demands of himself and others that would take him around that world thereafter – wearing jeans, as we both did that morning – and position him in righteous opposition to all his successors. The day in Northumberland proceeded as a demonstration of these beliefs by way of personal deportment. Carter was ill at ease in the pomp of a parade through Newcastle, shouting “Howay the lads”, swapping places in the mayoral carriage with a footman, then stepping down on to the street to chat. The little press pack followed him to see Hadrian’s Wall, a visit cut short as we doubled back, at Carter’s request, to watch a few overs of cricket, which intrigued him, on a village green. Most importantly, by the time he reached the gala dinner (at which he gave a moving speech) the former president had already, at his insistence, sunk a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale in a pub, having been coached how to order it: “Give us a broon.” By the time I met Carter, Ronald Reagan’s America was involved in wars that killed thousands of Salvadorans and indigenous Guatemalans. The opposite column on the page where my article was published was a story about ColonelOliver North wheeling and dealing with Iran (the regime that helped bring about Carter’s political downfall) in guns and cocaine to wage those wars. While Britain was committing industrial suicide, America was back in the hell from which Carter helped drag it after the debacle in Vietnam. But Carter was heading out across the planet to lead the opposition to this kind of abomination, morally armed with what he talked about that day. In contrast to the lucrative guff and bluster of other post-political careers since, Carter’s actually made a difference for the better to the way the world turns. Carter the anti-Reagan, Carter the anti-Trump. What timing, this sad news of his passing. No two holders of the office could be further apart from one another: the peanut farmer who won by preaching “compassion and decency and openness and honesty and brotherhood and love” (his words, not mine, from a campaign speech); and the convicted felon and sexual abuser soon to be inaugurated for preaching stupid but rabid hatred, and impunity of the bully. I write this on New Year’s Day in Ojai, California, a (privileged, paradisiacal) bastion of civility and liberalism, awaiting the deluge to come. How ironic that Carter was deposed by a deluge from California. But this is a different state from that which launched Reagan against Carter, and will be a stockade in the forthcoming resistance to Trump, as testified by this week’s missives of menace to its governor over migration and sanctuary. On what principles will California – and anyone else, anywhere else – resist what is to come? Exactly those principles advocated by Carter that morning in Northumberland. And that was before his bottle of broon. Ed Vulliamy was the Observer’s US correspondent from 1994 to 2003 |