Memories of Jimmy Carter
An unpretentious man with incredible drive and perception did good in the world’s toughest places
I interviewed Jimmy Carter twice. Once in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in 1997 when I was a foreign correspondent covering that country’s struggle to hold a democratic election after seven years of coups, assassinations and civil war. The second time was in 2006, at the Carter Center in Atlanta, about his drive to eradicate a terrible disease: dracunculiasis, or infestation with yard-long guinea worms that live under the skin and must be painfully rolled out, inch by inch, over the course of weeks.
In Liberia, what most struck me about Mr. Carter was how unpretentious he was. The assistant who arranged the interview referred to him as “Mr. Carter” and didn’t speak in the half-fawning, half-bullying tones you hear from media staffers to some once-high officials who insist on being eternally referred to as “the President” or “the Ambassador,” betraying them as closet egomaniacs even when they affect an “aw shucks” demeanor with voters. We met across a scarred table in an empty primary school with a blackboard, a few desks and no glass in the windows. Another thing that struck me: he was 73 years old, and still willing to bounce along dirt roads or ride dicey planes and helicopters to get around rural West Africa in the service of an ideal he believed in: free and fair elections.
My notebook from that day is somewhere deep in a storage bin, so I can’t quote him. I remember him carefully avoiding comment on the candidates and emphasizing that he was just part of a large mission of international observers. He spent his time, he said, touring voting and vote-counting places to see that nothing looked amiss. He was so good at avoiding controversy that I ended up not quoting him in print, other than to record that he and other observers judged Liberia’s election fairer than ones they had overseen in Bosnia and Haiti.
(My stories were relatively brief because the foreign desk was only mildly interested. In retrospect, that election — which ended years of fighting and starvation that, by some estimates, killed 10 percent of the population — was a strange interlude of peace and quasi-democracy in the bizarre and violent history of 20th century Liberia. Their dominant figure was a Nigerian general, Victor Malu, commander of a West African peacekeeping force who told reporters he would “pour fire” into any militia that tried to disrupt the voting. Thirteen parties fielded candidates. The warlord Charles “Ghankay” Taylor ran on the slogan “He kill my ma, he kill my pa, but I vote for him.” People I interviewed on the street quoted that back to me, saying chaotic Liberia needed rule by a strong man. They also feared Taylor would reignite the civil war if he lost. Taylor, who also controlled the best-known radio stations, won 75 percent of the vote. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who came in second, got less than 10 percent. But history is full of unexpected twists. Within two years, Taylor had triggered a second civil war along with one in next-door Sierra Leone. In 2003, he fled to Nigeria, which later extradited him back to Liberia to be tried for war crimes; an international court sentenced him to 50 years in a British prison, where he is now. Ms. Sirleaf served as president from 2006 to 2018, becoming Africa’s first female head of state, and shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.)
During my second encounter with Mr. Carter, he described how he picked eradicating dracunculiasis as one of his life’s goals. A New York Times video crew later re-interviewed him on camera, so you can see him here describing his first encounter with the worm: in Ghana in 1988, in a village where 300 of 500 inhabitants were infected, he met a teenage girl whose breast was so swollen by worms that he at first thought she was cradling a baby. He arranged for a well to be drilled, and cases fell to zero within a year. But drilling is prohibitively expensive; from parasitologists, he learned that the simple act of pouring pondwater through a mesh filter could strain out the tiny copepods containing the worm larvae. He described the technique at a lunch with the Seagram’s liquor heir Edgar Bronfman by pouring water through a napkin. Bronfman, a major shareholder in the Dupont chemical company, had its laboratories develop a tough porous fabric and donated vast amounts of it to the effort.
One element of disease-fighting Mr. Carter understood better than anyone else: Poor nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America can be touchy about being handed aid by rich donors and told how to spend it. Also, their bureaucracies can be torpid, and the temptation for mid-level officials to rake off dollars as they wind their way down to the village level is huge. In countries like those, eradication efforts only keep grinding forward if the president relentlessly demands progress. The presidents of poor countries are just as proud as those of rich ones and want to be treated with respect. Well into his 80’s, Mr. Carter would personally go visit them, stand in the hot sun through ceremonies, risk malaria and occasionally get food poisoning, thank them for their work and urge them to keep pressing on. Every dinner by an in-country Carter Center team begins with a toast: “To the demise of the worm!”
One question I do remember asking him in 2006: Given that he was then 82, was he confident that he would outlive the worm? “I don’t have any doubt that it will be eradicated during my active service,” he said. “The discouraging thing is the extreme cost. I have to keep explaining to donors why it costs so much for these last few cases.”
He seemed right to be upbeat. His center’s efforts had driven cases down from an estimated 3 million in 1986 to fewer than 12,000 when I wrote that story. But the last 100 yards proved the hardest and the worm outlasted him. For years, case numbers have been below 100, and there were only 14 human cases last year. But they occurred in five countries, and a few years ago, it became clear that dogs, baboons and some other animals can also host the worms, which may make eradication impossible.
Nonetheless, the amount of effort he put into the fight was magnificent, and if victory is finally achieved, it will have to have his name on it.
