Meeting with President Carter, November 7, 1989
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- Extent (Dublin Core)
- 4 pages
- File Name (Dublin Core)
- lead_395_044_all
- Title (Dublin Core)
- Meeting with President Carter, November 7, 1989
- Date (Dublin Core)
- 1989-11-07
- Date Created (Dublin Core)
- 1989-11-07
- Congress (Dublin Core)
- 101st (1989-1991)
- Policy Area (Curation)
- Government Operations and Politics
- Creator (Dublin Core)
- Dole, Robert J., 1923-2021
- Record Type (Dublin Core)
- correspondence
- attendance lists
- newspaper clippings
- Names (Dublin Core)
- See all items with this valueCarter, Jimmy, 1924-2024
- Rights (Dublin Core)
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/
- Language (Dublin Core)
- eng
- Collection Finding Aid (Dublin Core)
- https://dolearchivecollections.ku.edu/index.php?p=collections/findingaid&id=26&q=
- Physical Location (Dublin Core)
- Collection 007, Box 395, Folder 44
- Institution (Dublin Core)
- Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
- Archival Collection (Dublin Core)
- Robert J. Dole Republican Leadership Collection, 1985-1996
- Full Text (Extract Text)
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{page 1}
Cochran
Thurmond
Armstrong
Simpson
Nickles
Senator Lugar
did not make it
{page 2}
October 19, 1989
Joyce
TO: Senator Dole
FROM: Betty
RE: Courtesy visit by former Pres. Carter Nov. 7
Former President Carter will be in town on Tuesday, November 7, and will be on the House side for a coffee meeting and will be at the Democratic luncheon that same day. He has asked for a courtesy call on you (and {circled: any Republicans you} wish to invite) at 11:30 that morning.
O.K. to set meeting at 11:30?? :selected: Yes :unselected: No
Contact: Jim Free 393-4760
Joyce {arrow pointing to circled text: any Republicans you}
Mrs. Mondale
Mrs. Carter
V-P Mondale
Suggested Senators:
:selected: {circled: Simpson} - OK
:selected: Lugar - w.c.b. - ok NO
Hatfield
Chafee
Kassebaum
McCain
Mack
{circled: Cochran} <> OK
{circled: Thurmond} - OK
{circled: Armstrong} - wcb.
{circled: Nickles} - TRY - senatorial trust
{page 3}
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Charls E. Walker Associates, Inc.
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Per our conversation, here follows a copy of the Time Magazine article
The creation of the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta turned out to be crucial to his self-rehabilitation. With his usual obsessive attention to detail, he envisioned the center not just as another presidential library but as a clearinghouse of ideas and programs intended to solve international problems and crises. The idea became reality when the center was established at Emory University in 1982, and even more so when its permanent headquarters opened in 1986. Located on 30 acres of woods and gentle hills in the Virginia Highlands section of Atlanta, it consists of four low-profile, circular pavilions connected by interior walkways and exterior colonnades, all in a modern, neo-federalist style with faint echoes of the White House and fainter echoes of Jefferson's Monticello. Inside, the Carters have adjoining offices, plus a small but comfortable apartment. Apart from the library and museum, operated by the Federal Government, the Carter Center, with an annual budget of $16 million and a staff of 125, is financed by private donations, mostly from abroad.
including secret Service protection and an opulent, private Boeing 727, complete with crew and a walnut-paneled double bedroom. (The plane is donated by the London-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International, another Carter Center backer.) Carter, the unassuming Plains populist who once banned Hail to the Chief and famously carried his own suit bag, retains a modest personal style but today seems far more comfortable with his perks. Still, as he said shortly after arriving in Africa, "I didn't come here in a position of leadership. I came in a position of follow-ship."
In Addis Ababa, where he stayed in Haile Selassie's decaying old palace, he spent two hours with Ethiopia's President Mengistu Haile Mariam putting the finishing touches on arrangements for this week's peace talks In the Sudan. Carter had an hour with Lieut. General Omar Hassan Ahmed el Bashir, who only four weeks earlier had overthrown the elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al Mahdi, to urge negotiations in that country's civil war. In Zambia, Carter lunched at the statehouse with President Kenneth Kaunda, one of the last of the old African independence-movement leaders. who hailed his guest as "not only a great person but a great servant of
62 TIME. SEPTEMBER 11. 1989
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XEROX TELECOPIER 295 ; 10-20-89: 5:40 PM; 202 393 5728 > 334 ; # 2
Charls Walker Associates TEL: 202-393-5728 Oct 20,89 17:42 No.010 P.02
Profile
God and man." while, outside, impalas and peacocks roamed the grounds and private golf course.
Four years ago, when Carter, Borlaug and Sasakawa began trying to bring the Green Revolution to Africa, they signed up a paltry 40 farmers in four countries -- the Sudan, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. This year there are 85,000, plus uncounted others who, while not officially participating, have begun to use the same improved seeds, fertilizers and farming methods that have yielded such impressive results for their neighbors -300% to 400% increases in corn, sorghum and millet. Although Carter needs and seeks the support of the governments in the countries where his programs are established, his team stresses local administration and the direct involvement of small-scale farmers, whose minds have been focused wonderfully by recent African famines.
At a 200-acre farm in Ojubi, about an hour's drive from Ghana's capital, Accra, Carter inspected a new corn crop literally as high as an elephant's eye. With a farmer's knowing touch, he plucked ears from the stalks, peeled back the husks and admired the golden kernels. This year 46 farmers are working the plot of dry yet newly fertile land, But Carter made a point of introducing one of only two farmers who were involved when the project began in 1987, a woman named Sarah Dazi "As you know," Carter said with his large and famous smile, "in our country the women also take the lead." From there he proceeded to a nearby celebration of Global 2000's early success. He posed for pictures with farmers and their wives and applauded as brilliantly clad stilt dancers gyrated on their 15-ft. thin wooden limbs to the rhythms of a native band. Later, Carter was installed with great pomp as an honorary village chief. To signify his new office, he was given a chief's robe and a hand-carved wooden stool decorated with tribal symbols of nyansapow (cooperation).
For Carter, improved agricultural output is closely linked to the disease-control measures he is also promoting. Seriously ill farmers, he reasons, cannot plant and harvest. Polio and river blindness are two major afflictions that the team hopes eventually to eliminate. But as a demonstration project, Global 2000 has first targeted the vulnerable life cycle of the Guinea worm. Once common in many parts of the world, the worm, which is ingested in drinking water drawn from ponds, is today confined to a belt across central Africa and the subcontinent, where it severely incapacitates some 10 million people each year. The Carter Center hopes to eradicate the Guinea worm in six years, mainly by educating villagers to filter or boil pond water before drinking it and by pro- viding deep wells to replace freshwater ponds. Progress has already been made. Carter visited villages in Nigeria and Ghana that have, with Global 2000's assistance, virtually wiped out the worm. In a Nigerian village, he stood beside the local pond, under a canopy of lush green trees,
and reminded the villagers that the pond was still infested with the worm's nearly invisible larvae. While photographers snapped pictures, he urged the villagers not to drink from the pond unless they first used the fine-mesh filters distributed by Global 2000. Beside him stood a small boy, his leg badly swollen with a Guinea-worm infection.
Not all the villages Carter visited were completely satisfied with his help. In one, following the usual dancing and singing, the chief rose to speak. "You arrived last year from out of the blue," he said to Carter, "and you gave us a well and a pump." The village appreciated that. But there was this one small problem. Because the well is only 40 ft. deep, it goes dry three months out of the year. "We know that you, Mr. President," said the chief, "will not be happy with a half-measure solution to our problem." On the spot, Carter convened a meeting with his advisers and promptly announced that the well would be drilled to 70 ft. The chief smiled. The villagers cheered.
Next morning the former President began the return trip to Plains. He was relaxed and voluble about his new life, about his future plans (he will never again run for public office, he insists), about the problems he had as President ("Ted Kennedy had a vendetta against me"), and about Africa. "I find Africa to be the most challenging and intriguing of any place in the world," he said. "It's fascinating to meet with so many first- and second-generation revolutionaries." Carter has no natural enemies anymore. which is liberating. If he sometimes accepts money from donors with dubious backgrounds-Sasakawa, for example, or the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which has been indicted on money-laundering charges-no one complains, at least not if the money goes to worthy causes.
In many ways, of course, Carter is the same old Jimmy: still indiscriminate with superlatives ("very wonderful"), still using what a former aide calls his "One Hundred Ways to a Better Vocabulary" approach to public speaking, still wearing the same kind of seven-league, heavy-soled wing tips he always has, But he's lost the hard edge. He's productive again, and seems finally at peace with the conflicts between his well-known born-again Christianity and his life as & public man. Says he on that sometimes touchy subject: "My Christian faith is just like breathing to me or like being a Southerner or an American. It's all part of the same thing-the sharing, the compassion, the understanding, the dealing with the poor and the destitute and the outcasts." If there is a bit of the white man's burden in that and if Carter sometimes falls victim to Christianity's age-old Catch-22, the sin of pride, well, it doesn't seem very important in the scale of things.
And you get the feeling that maybe this is what he thought the presidency would be like-all good works. no Ted Kennedys or Tip O'Neills or bureaucrats or special interests-when he set out from Plains many years ago, naively determined, against the odds, to make a difference
He's productive again and seems finally at peace with the conflicts between his born-again Christianity and his life as a public man
TIME, SEPTEMBER 11.1989 63
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