President Jimmy Carter’s work making the world a better place will continue because of his faith, a dogged determination to leave a mark on the planet and a curious late-night dream.
He left the White House in bitter disappointment and frustration in early 1981 at not having a second term because of the ascendance of Ronald Reagan. The ambitious Carter was not content to build a presidential library and rest on the laurels of a Mideast peace treaty, a nuclear arms deal with the Soviet Union, expanding national parks and reemphasizing human rights in American foreign policy.
There was much left undone, in his estimation, but how to go about it now that he was out of the bully pulpit? He and his wife Rosalynn decided to leverage the prestige of his being a former president into opening doors and continuing work addressing poverty, illnesses and democracy around the world. Carter said in a 2009 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that they realized there could be advantages in working without the shackles of congressional approvals, presidential protocols or inter-party politics.
He and Rosalynn would later talk about whether he was able to accomplish more in the world through the Carter Center than he would have as a second-term president.
“I think yes,” Carter told the AJC.
He reemphasized his satisfaction with his decision during an August 2015 press conference. He said, in retrospect, given the choice between winning a second term or founding the Carter Center, he would have chosen the Carter Center.
The well-funded and globally respected nonprofit will carry his work and ideals well into the future. The Carters dived — freelance and sometimes to the chagrin of the White House — into brokering peace between warring groups, addressing global health, shoring up human rights, freeing hostages, spreading democracy and increasing food production. It led to a passel of recognitions and awards — including his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
The idea for the center came to him in a night-time dream of cabins built on a patch of wooded land, incongruously, within the shadows of Atlanta’s skyline, Carter told the AJC. His center was to be a re-creation of the wooded presidential retreat at Camp David, the location where he orchestrated, through stubborn refusal to accept “no” from either side, the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. He found a patch of land east of downtown, but he had to plead with his former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, who was then mayor of Atlanta, to spare the land from a proposed highway project.
The Israel-Egypt peace deal was a foreign-policy coup in the Mideast that no one has come close to replicating, and Carter’s hopes of re-creating the highlight of forging peace between implacable enemies grew into the ever-evolving Atlanta institution.
The Carters wrestled with what the center’s other roles should be before turning to their personal experiences with poverty in south Georgia during the Great Depression. They recalled small-town values of neighborly help and their deeply held Christian values and applied those to Carter Center work.
At the center’s founding, his work focused on mediating peace between warring groups, such as helping end a conflict between Ethiopia and its breakaway region of Eritrea.
Credit: The Carter Center
Credit: The Carter Center
“And we still do some of that,” Carter said, but the focus of the center’s work changed and shifted with world need.
They looked for causes few others were working on and used their status to leverage donations and attention, ultimately tipping the balance in battles against various human ills.
The Carters’ work moved into fostering democracy by monitoring national and village level elections. Carter and his staff monitored more than 113 elections in 39 countries. As president, he helped normalize relations with China, and its government invited him in the 1990s to help standardize the vast array of electoral procedures in rural areas.
The Carters adopted mental health issues, something Rosalynn had worked on since their days in the Georgia governor’s mansion, as well as press freedoms, human rights and government transparency. They threw themselves into food production programs in African villages, something Carter had worked on as president.
But it was a visit from an old Georgia friend and former White House staffer Dr. Peter Bourne that opened the former president’s eyes to the issues on which a lion’s share of Carter Center money is spent: the eradication of little-known but devastating diseases.
Bourne continued working on world health issues after leaving the White House, but the former president had him come to the Carter Center in May 1985 to talk about Guinea worm disease. Bourne and others believed it could be wiped out, which would make it the second human disease in history to be eliminated, after smallpox.
Later that year, Bourne and the Carters were together in Wales indulging in one of their favorite pastimes, fishing.
Bourne told them that others had some success eradicating Guinea worm at local levels in Africa and south Asia, where about 3.5 million people were affected. They knew that once the parasitic, water-born cycle was broken, it would be wiped from the earth. But those working on it didn’t have the political clout to convince countries to get involved at the highest levels. Carter could bring that, Bourne told them.
Carter thought about it a few weeks, then called Bourne to say he was in.
“He has been the driving force in getting the political will necessary ever since,” Bourne said.
With Carter raising the profile of the illness and money — the center’s assets were more than $925 million according to its 2020 annual report — governments and nonprofits got behind it. Guinea worm was down to 14 reported cases in 2021 in four African countries, the center said.
“We analyzed every human illness on earth to ascertain which ones of those might theoretically be … eradicated,” Carter said.
And they chose four others in addition to Guinea worm.
River blindness was found in Africa and parts of Central and South America. By 2015, the center’s work coordinating nonprofits and governments pushed the disease into a few isolated deep-jungle spots in Venezuela and Brazil. With a great deal of optimism, the center moved in 2014 to declare a war on eradication of river blindness in Africa, where more than 100 million people are at risk.
The center also began programs for trachoma, an infectious eye disease causing blindness; two diseases carried by parasitic worms, elephantiasis and schistosomiasis; and malaria in the Caribbean.
The center will carry the couple’s work well past their demise.
“I think 100 years from now we will still have the Carter Center as an independent entity,” Carter said. “I hope they are still doing the kinds of good things we have done so far.”
Credit: Branden Camp
Credit: Branden Camp
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