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It was the spring of 2014 and I was at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington to interview Jimmy Carter. The former president had just published a new book on women’s rights and was keen to make his case. The abuse of women and girls was, he believed, the worst human rights violation of the time and he was determined to issue a global call to action on the subject.
He argued passionately and eloquently, rolling though a litany of abuses women and girls around the world face: rape and violence in war, trafficking, infanticide and, in his own country, an epidemic of sexual assault at universities.
“This is something on which I’m going to continue to work with a very high degree of my priority for the rest of my life,” he said.
It was typical of a man who, more than any other US leader, showed that the crowning achievements of a career could come after having the most powerful job in the world rather than during it. And they were no small achievements: Carter was, by general consensus, a tireless campaigner for human rights, democracy and, perhaps most significantly, global public health.
His Carter Foundation, set up by the former president and his wife, Rosalynn, in 1982 – a year after he left the White House – has worked for nearly four decades to eradicate the painful and debilitating Guinea worm disease. An estimated 3.5 million people in 20 countries were afflicted in 1986 when his foundation launched the campaign. Last year, 14 human cases were reported.
Yet, even as the then 89-year-old Carter determinedly and convincingly spoke to me about his latest campaign, what stood out most was his humility and lack of ego.
We were in one of the US capital’s grandest hotels with Secret Service agents stationed all around, the trappings of the office he vacated 30 years before, and Carter was still very much visible. But as I sat down to interview him, the peanut farmer turned president was quickly finishing up a snack of, well, nuts, before standing up to greet me warmly as if the suite were his own living room.
By all accounts, that luxury suite was notably grander than his own living room: he famously moved back to the modest home in his childhood town of Plains, Georgia, that he built with Rosalynn.
“It’s where our family has always lived. It’s where we own our land, our home – the only home we’ve ever owned,” he said. “It’s where our church is, it’s where our friends are. It’s a haven for us.”
That church, Maranatha Baptist, was where Carter taught Sunday school for more than three decades, into his 90s, attracting an international congregation not often seen in rural corners of the American south.
“If I get home at midnight on Saturday, I still teach on Sunday morning,” Carter said.
His undiluted devotion to Rosalynn was abundantly clear. He delighted in revealing that she was in the neighbouring half of the hotel suite as we spoke and that she had been the driving force behind his campaigning for women’s rights. Looking slightly awestruck, he insisted that Rosalynn was “probably the world champion of human rights now”. Overblown though that assessment may have been, it spoke to Carter’s commitment to his wife, to whom he was married for 77 years and whom he will be buried alongside next week at that very same family home in Plains.
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True to his younger days of working on the family farm, Carter spoke about how he rose with the sun and would be ready for action, while exhausted younger aides were still bleary-eyed. He had been in interviews since 7am on the day we met, I was told.
Later that day, he said, Rosalynn and he were planning to meet their grandson Jason, who was standing at the time for governor of Georgia in the 2014 midterm elections. (In the event, Jason lost to the Republican incumbent, Nathan Deal.)
Although Carter took the decision to make his mark outside politics and often in other countries after leaving office, it was clear that the state of his home nation still mattered deeply to him. He was frank in his view that the US had a long way to go on women’s rights (“it’s an embarrassment to our country, but it’s not changing”). And though he tried to be generous to his successor of the day, Barack Obama, it clearly rankled that he had not sought Carter’s advice more generally.
“I’m not complaining … It’s natural for a president to call on someone who’s been there more recently,” he said diplomatically. Yet, with a twinkle in his eye, he added: “That’s what I prefer to think,” before confirming that the other presidents who succeeded him had called for his guidance. “Oh yes. All of them.”
In the end, though, it is Obama’s own tribute to Carter that ultimately seems to do a more than reasonable job of capturing the man.
“He believed some things were more important than re-election – things like integrity, respect and compassion … Whenever I had a chance to spend time with President Carter, it was clear that he didn’t just profess these values. He embodied them.”
