In recounting the history of the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute, I would describe how, at its inaugural session in 1994, former President Jimmy Carter was one of three heroic hunger-fighting Nobel Peace Prize laureates with whom the 14 Iowa high school students had the unique privilege to interact — the other two being Norman Borlaug and Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh.
In retrospect, the title of Taylor Swift’s number one pop hit “Anti-Hero” seems the most appropriate appellation for Jimmy Carter, at least when I first encountered him at a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House almost 48 years ago.
It was March 1977, just two months into his presidency. As a career State Department Foreign Service Officer with six years experience in Vietnam, I had been selected to be a member of the first post-war mission the new president was sending to Hanoi.
The West Wing was not new territory for me. The previous three years, I had been in and out of the White House on a regular basis, as a member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff.
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Under both Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, I was used to seeing an ever-changing array of glossy photographs of each man that were displayed along the hallways of the West Wing, leading from the Situation Room up to the Cabinet Room and Oval Office. These images invariably showed the president at a variety of magisterial moments, highlighting the impact, power and heroic stature of that highest office in the land.
I was, therefore, taken aback when I walked in the side entrance of the West Wing to find those previously ubiquitous photos missing, with nothing but empty blank walls in their place. Their absence made the West Wing and the presidency feel bland and devoid of its prior grandeur.
That impression was reinforced when Carter came to the meeting dressed more casually than the dark business suits that Nixon and Ford always exhibited. It seemed to fit with the photos of him wearing his trademark cardigan sweaters. That unpretentious, down-home image seemed to reinforce the stories about Carter carrying his own luggage while campaigning in the Iowa caucuses.
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As the meeting with our delegation got underway, I recall wondering whether Carter’s election reflected the letdown that the country felt it needed after a tumultuous decade of protests, assassinations and Watergate, and/or projecting the diminished stature of the country following the inglorious ending of the Vietnam War.
But then Carter’s inner character came to the fore, as he outlined our mission. With a deep empathy, Carter articulated the pain and suffering that the families of those more than 2,500 American military personnel who were still missing in Vietnam were enduring.
We were to begin this accounting, and, in fact, returned 10 sets of remains from our mission.
Over the next several years, I had the opportunity to observe that Carter’s inner motivation to alleviate pain and human suffering was matched only by his drive to promote peace. As special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at the State Department, I was privy to the details as the decision was taken to alter 30 years of foreign policy by establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. In October 1979, I traveled to Beijing with a delegation of American governors as part of that Carter administration’s transformational diplomatic achievement.
Carter’s instincts led him to other dramatic achievements, including the Camp David Accords to bring Israel and Egypt together, work that contributed to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and his presiding over the return of the Panama Canal to Panama.
Later, as a Pearson Fellow, I joined with Iowa Gov. Robert Ray to urge the president to re-open America’s doors to rescue the “Boat People” refugees, who were tragically dying at sea as they were desperately seeking freedom. I will never forget witnessing the spontaneous standing ovation that America received at the U.N. conference in Geneva, when Vice President Walter Mondale announced Carter’s decision to accept 168,000 Indochina refugees a year, thus saving the Boat People.
Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, speak on foreign policy and international affairs to students at Drake University on Sept. 14, 2012, at the Cowles Library.
In 1986, five years after leaving the White House, Carter traveled to Africa as part of a delegation that included Nobel Peace Prize laureate Borlaug, the Iowa native and “Father of the Green Revolution,” to endeavor to bring the Green Revolution to that continent.
To pursue that great humanitarian goal of ending hunger and starvation, a few months later Borlaug founded the World Food Prize. Carter became the first member of his council of advisors. Borlaug would subsequently join in nominating Carter for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Two decades later, as president of the World Food Prize, I had the enormous privilege to solicit Carter’s input as a member of the Council of Advisors on critical issues about eradicating hunger and poverty, particularly in Africa.
My conclusion from all of those experiences is that Carter’s reserved, almost self-effacing, anti-hero demeanor, is obscured and overridden by his “heroic legacy” reflecting his deep personal concern about, and multiple successful efforts to, “alleviate human suffering and promote peace.”
Ambassador Kenneth Quinn
Kenneth Quinn, a career Foreign Service Officer, served as U.S. ambassador to Cambodia from 1996 to 1999. In January of 1977, he was special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at the State Department as part of the Carter administration.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Jimmy Carter was an ‘anti-hero’ with a heroic legacy | Opinion
