Reflecting on Jimmy Carter
When the 2007 Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-telling awarded its Courage Prize to President Jimmy Carter, we were honored that a president of the United States had agreed to accept it. Carter had just published Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. Previous winners of the Courage Prize had been Daniel Ellsberg, Seymour Hirsh, and Gloria Steinem.
The Prizes memorialize my friend Ron Ridenhour, noted whistleblower and George Polk Award winning investigative reporter who died suddenly in 1998. Like Ron Ridenhour, Carter was a truth-teller.
My co-founder Ham Fish served as MC that day. Ham took the podium at the National Press Club with a gleam in his eye. “On a personal note, Mr. President," he began with a smile, “I am struck by many of the parallels in our lives."
We of the Ridenhour Prizes looked uncomfortably at one another. Where’s he going with this?
Ham continued: “Thirty years ago, for example, you and I embarked on new careers. I became publisher of The Nation magazine, which at the time had a circulation of about 6,ooo nursing homes. You became president of the United States.”
We were thankful for the laughter that greeted him.
"You gave us the indelible image of the accords at Camp David, where you tenaciously forged a peace between Israel and her neighbors. I attended camp in the Adirondacks. You won the Nobel Prize, which stacks up nicely with the marksmanship medal I won at that same camp.
"For years, you and I have shared the premier literary agent, Lynn Nesbitt. You have published twenty-one books together, many of them bestsellers. Lynn is here today, and she just reminded me she is breathlessly awaiting my first manuscript.
“My family helped start the Cold War. You did your part to end it.”
The laughter broke over the room as the 400 in attendance stood in tribute to the 39th President.
We at the Ridenhour Prizes breathed a deep sigh of relief. One of our most momentous award ceremonies was off to a great start.
Late in the program when President Carter received the Courage Prize, our highest honor, he mounted the dais with a similar gleam in his eye. Eighty-two years old at the time, he was fully self-possessed.
"I won't go down the litany of things that bind Hamilton and me together in such an intimate way (laughter), but I would like to express my compatibility with Randy, We are both happily married to beautiful women and we share something in common, Roslyn and I will soon be 61years together and you and Bernadette will soon be 15 days together, so congratulations on that.
Yes, we had just been married and it was like receiving the Pope’s blessing, had there been a Southern Baptist Pope. Carter was utterly gracious.
At the press conference that followed, the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s John Pope asked how he would have “done things differently” after Katrina.
Carter’s response surprised many. “FEMA was the creation of my administration,” Carter explained. “It was the effort of four years and a response to the fact that the duties we assigned to FEMA had been split among thirty-three government agencies. We founded FEMA,” he continued, “with ‘three mandatory characteristics’: 1) that FEMA’s director would report directly to the president; 2) that it would be well funded; and 3) that it would be “headed by the most outstanding experts on disaster relief that we could find in America.” “So,” he summed up, his famous smile returning, “I think everything that was done in the New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama area after Katrina was a disaster as far as FEMA was concerned because it did not have a competent person in charge, its finances had been reduced dramatically, and it reported not to the chief executive but to the new-founded and still-struggling Homeland Security.
A fine man. A fine president. With a sense of humor. RIP.
For the 10th anniversary of the Ridenhour Prizes we screened this compilation, which includes part of President Carter’s acceptance speech (Carter begins at 5:12):
