Books
Thoughts from the peanut-farm
William Shawcross
Keeping Faith: The Memoirs of a President Jimmy Carter (Collins £15)
T immy Carter insists that he wants his J memoirs to give readers 'a more accurate picture of the kind of person I am'. I think they succeed in that — but only in the sense of confirming that he really is a rum cove. Deep or shallow? It is hard to fathom — the soundings are all over the place.
When Carter was running for President he published a campaign autobiography en- titled modestly Why Not The Best? This rather engaging book was notable for at least one true-life confession. He wrote that he was extremely worried that he might not meet the physical requirements of Anna- polis Naval Academy. The first problem was his buck teeth, which of course were very visible. 'There was another require- ment which caused me to worry, one called "retention of urine". I was always ashamed to ask whether that last clinging drop would
block my entire naval career!'
Clearly he exaggerated the difficulty because after due inspection of the prob- lematic parts Annapolis admitted him and he went on to become submariner, peanut entrepreneur, governor of Georgia and President of the USA. But such matters continued to interest him. On a state visit to Mexico while President he declared in a for- mal speech, with a very broad grin, that since his arrival he had been suffering badly from 'Montezuma's revenge.' His audience was stunned into shoeshifting silence.
Neither of these references appears in his memoirs. But there are some pretty odd things, nonetheless. One is his habit of dot- ting the text with short but hardly pithy ex- tracts from the daily diary he kept while in office. Thus 'I went over the complete in- ventory of US nuclear warheads, which is really a sobering experience', Diary December 28 1977. What, you may well ask, is one to make of that?
In this country Carter was much abused while in office. His indecisiveness, often ap- parent, sometimes real, was contrasted un- favourably by people who should know bet- ter (it's astonishing how rarely they actually do) with what they saw as 'the smack of firm government' administered by the likes of, God save us, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. This earnest and naive young Georgian was said to have none of the understanding of the world that graced the work of his two predecessors, let alone of their house genius, Henry Kissinger. (One of the few members of the British establish- ment who saw good in Carter was the then British ambassador, Peter Jay, who seemed to have to spend an inordinate amount of his time and HMG's money defending the poor unfashionable president to fashionable hacks of media and govern- ment making their stopovers in Wash- ington.)
There was a lot of solid achievement to the Carter years and, sensibly enough, the memorialist makes the most of it. For ex- ample, Carter negotiated with great skill the Panama Canal Treaty against passionate, indeed hysterical, opposition led by Ronald Reagan. When one considers the way in which the Reagan administration has dealt with Central America one can only thank God for the Carter interregnum. Had he not forced the Treaty through, the US would probably now be at war with the Panamanians. (Lest we forget, Reagan's Latin American policy is conceived and ad- ministered by a pretentious popinjay named Thomas Enders whose claims to fame in- clude running the bombing of Cambodia for Henry Kissinger and later behaving so arrogantly as ambassador to Canada that the Canadians were moved to protest.) Carter made human rights for a time a central issue of much of American policy. This commitment, casually derided in draw- ing rooms of the West, was of im- measurable but immense importance to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who languished under the neglect which Carter's predecessors and his suc- cessor have displayed. American champion- ship of human rights makes it an issue and that is only helpful to those whose governments wish it were not.
Carter also had a genuine commitment to strategic arms reduction and, after false starts, negotiated the Salt Two treaty which was then shelved because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then, of course, there was Camp David, which was perhaps of questionable long-term value but was for the time an extraordinary achieve- ment. The most interesting section of the book is Carter's second by second reconstruction of the excruciating, ex- hausting negotiations between himself, Begin and Sadat in the various log cabins of Camp David. Sadat and Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize for the accomplishment, but the skill of it was all Carter's. Far too much of the book is devoted, as was far too much of Carter's last year in office, to the crisis of the American hostages. But, as throughout the book, Carter demonstrates his extraordinary industriousness and his capacity to absorb detail, an obsession with minutiae which sometimes blinded him.
Carter has never been a bundle of laughs but he has a chillingly funny description of his attempt to brief President-elect Reagan on such simple matters as nuclear manage- ment under attack. To Carter's astonish- ment Reagan took no notes and asked no questions. 'Some of the information was quite complex and I did not see how he could possibly retain all of it merely by listening.' It was only when Carter raised human rights in Korea that Reagan 'made his first real comment. He expressed with some enthusiasm his envy of the authority that Korean President Park Chung Hee had exercised during a time of campus unrest, when he had closed the universities and drafted the demonstrators.'
Amongst those who decried Jimmy Carter there are many today who see Ronald Reagan as a benevolent if slightly dim old gent. He is not that at all; he is idle and his ideas, such as they are, are remarkably unpleasant. Graham Greene wrote in The Quiet American of the 'insani- ty of innocence' which Americans displayed in Vietnam. Reagan has the insanity of ig7 norance and very frightening it is too. All the evidence shows that he is neither capable of nor interested in what actually happens in the world. Even Time magazine recently concluded he was 'losing touch with reality'. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, worked extraordinarily hard and his in- stincts were infinitely better than Reagan's. It is a great misfortune that he was defeated in 1982.
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