The accolades for President Jimmy Carter have touched on some of the truly important things he did as president and in the 44 years since he returned to Plains, Georgia.
I had a chance to see some of his daily challenges and opportunities. It was intriguing to watch the life of a polymath, someone interested in everything and becoming an expert in so many fields — from farming to nuclear physics, writing, woodworking, fly-fishing, geography, theology and global health.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
When he asked me to become executive director of the Carter Center, his side of the bargain was that he would become interested in global health. Interested was an understatement. He went from interest to expert. A request for information on onchocerciasis (river blindness) led to a second request the next day for more information. Then he went from interest to expert to activist.
Having Carter, as a politician, become interested in global health changed the field. He would meet with heads of state and with their cabinets and discuss an array of neglected diseases and possible solutions. If the head of state became interested, both the minister of health and the minister of finance would become interested. Carter demonstrated that improvements in public health require the input of politicians working with public health experts. Today, several dozen neglected diseases have their own programs at the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta and at the Carter Center.
He inspired African leaders to engage in health projects. Jerry Rawlings, as head of state in Ghana, toured the country, giving demonstrations on how to avoid Guinea worm and how to improve nutrition with corn that contained all the essential amino acids. Gen. Mahamane Touré in Mali and Gen. Yakubu Gowon in Nigeria, both heads of state, also became active health workers.
Carter and his wife Rosalynn worked as a team. At meetings, Rosalynn Carter would keep notes, which he would use when he wrote in his journal. He kept precise notes on the people they met and subjects discussed. Mrs. Carter was not only the scribe but also the corrector if he said something she regarded as incorrect. I can still hear her saying, “Jimmy, you know that is not how it happened!” And he would accept her correction.
Some of my minor observations remain most vivid. President Carter never wasted a minute. Most of us, if faced with 10 minutes free before an event, waste those minutes. Not Carter. He would read the list in his mind of things that needed to be done and make a phone call, dictate a note or ask a question.
Such use of every minute adds up in a century of living, but he combined this with technological developments that allowed him to do things impossible for even the best organized polymath in the past. Not held to the limitations of a quill and ink, he could write as much in a year as Shakespeare did in a lifetime, authoring more than 30 books in his spare time. He could visit and study as many cultures in a year as Marco Polo did in a lifetime, and he could be exposed to as much information in a year as Aristotle in a century. His functional life expectancy far exceeded his chronological life expectancy.
Carter’s time efficiency was evident in his trips to Africa. His staff would be exhausted from activities that started with breakfast meetings and went until after dinner. The Carters, however, would have already gone running and birding by that first breakfast meeting. And, at the end of the day, they would multitask, practicing theology and linguistics by reading the Bible in Spanish.
President Carter revealed to me that his ability to speak without notes was the result of a trick he had learned. He would make an outline on a 3x5 card and place it in his pocket as insurance if needed, but he would visualize what was on that card as he spoke.
One example: On a ride from a New York hotel to the United Nations, where he was about to give a talk on child survival, he asked if there was anything I wanted him to say. I mentioned three things — all of which he elaborated on as he spoke, without notes.
He might have been the most competitive person I have known. Even a practical joke would be met with an escalation. And that provided much satisfaction in the daily work environment.
Despite the frequent press coverage of Carter’s activities, some things were never the subject of reports. After leaving the Carter Center, he invited me to Plains for a planning session to outline future global health activities. His upper lip was swollen, and he dismissed my questioning by saying he had hit it. I later discovered he had been cutting the church lawn on a riding mower and ducked when a tree limb snapped back, hitting his upper lip on the steering wheel. I didn’t think the world would believe an ex-president was taking his turn to mow the church lawn with no publicity. But I learned that when Jimmy Carter was cutting grass, Rosalynn Carter was inside the church cleaning the bathrooms.
The world would never know.
How could we have been so fortunate as to have this humble leadership for a great country?
William H. Foege is a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a physician and epidemiologist whose global health contributions led to the eradication of smallpox in the late 1970s. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
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