HEATHER CAMPION: Good afternoon. I'm Heather Campion, CEO of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, and it's my pleasure to welcome you, along with my colleague Tom Putnam, Director of the Kennedy Library, to the Forum this afternoon.
These Forums are free and open to the public, both in this room and online, as they're now all being livestreamed, thanks to the generous support from our leading sponsor Bank of America, as well as the Boston Foundation, the Lowell Institute, Raytheon and Viacom, as well as our media partners, the Boston Globe, Xfinity and WBUR.
This afternoon we're deeply honored to welcome the 39th President of the United States,
Jimmy Carter, to the Library of our 35th President, John F. Kennedy. [applause]
It is remarkable to think that these two Presidents were contemporaries, born just seven years apart. Both served in the Navy. And as President Kennedy remarked in his inaugural, which I'll paraphrase here, they were of a generation of Americans tempered by war and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.
Much like John F. Kennedy, President Carter's Presidency was guided by his fundamental belief in human rights and in peaceful resolution to conflicts. His foreign policy achievements were notable – a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel; the Panama Canal treaties; the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union; and the establishment of US diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.
President Carter has recently said that he believes his human rights policy was mistaken during his Presidency as a sign of weakness. Instead, he argues, "It takes a lot of courage," one of the qualities President Kennedy most admired, "for a leader to insist on peace instead of war and to emphasize the rights of people who are not influential."
As President, Jimmy Carter stood firm in his beliefs about finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts, and he paid the price for it. During the Iranian hostage crisis, his peaceful efforts to get our hostages home certainly contributed to his not being reelected in 1980 but his legacy now is that he kept our country at peace for four years as President. [applause]
As the longest serving former President – I understand he surpassed Herbert Hoover in 2012 – the world has been the beneficiary of his and his wife Rosalynn's extraordinary work through the Carter Center to wage peace, fight disease and build hope around the world. In 2002, for his decades of untiring efforts, President Carter became only the third United States President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. [applause] In giving him this honor, the Nobel committee noted that, "He's one of the most deserving and least controversial Laureates for a long time."
President Carter is the author of 28 books and he's here today to discuss his most recent one, entitled, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power, signed copies of which are on sale in our Museum store outside.
The book is a powerful study of what President Carter calls the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge that we face today, the discrimination and abuse of women and girls. As a woman who began her career working for President Carter in the White House, I'm very proud to welcome you here on this topic today.
Joining us to moderate the conversation with President Carter is another dedicated activist for human rights, a contributor to NBC and host of his own show on MSNBC,
Ronan Farrow. Ronan began working on human rights issues when he was a student at
Yale Law School and worked on international human rights law at the US House
Committee of Foreign Affairs. He has served as UNICEF's spokesperson for youth,
where he helped combat the AIDS epidemic in Nigeria and advocated for children living in Darfur. He founded the State Department's Office of Global Youth Issues under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and in 2008, was awarded Refugee International's
Humanitarian Award for his service of refugees and displaced people around the world.
Please join me in welcoming Ronan Farrow and the 39th President of the United States to our Forum.
RONAN FARROW: Thank you so much. Thank you all of you for your time. I was just saying I was so excited to bask in this legacy and all of your intelligent company here. This'll be a fascinating conversation. Thank you for that introduction. And thank you to everybody here at the JFK Library, as well as everybody at the Carter Center. And I want to talk about that as a first note.
I'm just going to give you a quote from this extraordinary book, which I share the commendation to everyone on, talking about building latrines in Ethiopia. You say, "We were hoping that a few thousand latrines would be built during the first year" – of your work with the Carter Center there – "but the word spread from village to village as Ethiopian housewives adopted this as a practical move towards liberation. And the total number of latrines built that year was 86,500. By the end of 2012, we had seen 2.9 million latrines built as more wives and mothers demanded this beneficial addition to their freedom and health. I am proud of my growing reputation as the world's more preeminent sponsor of latrines." [laughter/applause] I love that!
So I ask you this: As we contemplate a past legacy of a President and your own legacy after leaving office, what has surprised you and Rosalynn and the Center most about crafting a career after the White House?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, we've had programs from the Carter Center in 80 different countries and these 80 countries have been the poorest and most destitute, the most needy people on earth. At the same time, we have promoted peace and human rights and democracy and freedom. We originated the idea of monitoring troubled elections. This week, we're doing our 99th election in Tunisia, where Tunisia's electing a president.
So what I've learned most -- and to my surprise -- has been how pervasive is the horrible abuse of women and girls. I've seen it more, I would say, in foreign countries, where if a family has two children, a boy and a girl, the boy gets the best food and the girl quite often works in the field with her mother. And if only one of them can go to school, it's the boy.
In some countries, there is a misinterpretation of the Holy Scriptures that causes parents, particularly mothers, to circumcise their girls at birth. This is genital mutilation. For instance, in Egypt, where I've been a lot of my adult life, 91% of all the females that live in Egypt today have been genitally mutilated. Their sexual organs are removed, all of the exterior parts of it. And in an extreme cases, the so-called cutters sew up the remaining orifice so the girls can only urinate and menstruate. Later, when she gets married, the orifice is cut open so she can have sexual affairs with her husband or bear children. This is very prevalent. I didn't know about it ahead of time. If you go to Somalia or Djibouti, 97% of all the females are mutilated and over 50% in about 30 countries in Africa.
This is just one of the examples. As I mentioned already, girls are deprived of equal opportunities if a family is very poor. In some countries, notably in China and in India, there's a requirement on the size of families. My mother served in the Peace Corps; she was in India when she was 70 years old. She was a registered nurse. And Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, required my mother to work in family planning by performing vasectomies on men, and so forth.
In India now, for every 100 girls, there are 112 boys. What happened to the other girls? In
China, for every 100 girls, there are 118 boys. And so, at this moment, there are at least 160 million girls missing from the face of the earth. They have been strangled at birth by their parents or aborted now that sonograms are prevalently available. These other kind of crimes that go on in foreign countries, about which people are not aware, and which slowly but surely in our Carter Center programs I have learned about.
So that's why I wrote this book. It's just horrendous, what happens. The same kind of things happen in the United States that we can discuss if you want to. The two more revered institutions in America are the military and the great universities – including Harvard, at Emory, where I've taught now for 33 years – where sexual assault is prevalent, but concealed. The president of a college or the deans don't want it to be known that sexual crimes take place on the campus. So the girls are discouraged from reporting to any officials that they've been raped.
In public life in America, for instance, in an average community in America, 35% of all the rapes are reported. On college campuses, not 35%, but less than 5% are ever reported. And the Justice Department reported last month that 90% of the rapes on college campuses are perpetrated by 4% of the boys who get on college campuses as serial rapists and they discover they can do it with impunity.
So these are the kind of things that go on in our country and around the world that are horrendous in nature and, as I said, often concealed or denied by people in authority.
RONAN FARROW: One of the things that is most moving in this book, and a reminder of why it's such an honor to have this conversation with you now, Mr. President, and why I think we can all learn so much from what you have done with your life, especially since leaving office, is how vividly you talk about learning the lessons of growing up in the segregated South. What lessons can the women's rights movement learn from that civil rights movement?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I grew up about two-and-a-half miles from Plains, Georgia. Plains has grown; we have 630 people living in Plains now. [laughter] But I lived two-and-a-half miles from Plains in a rural community called Archery, and we didn't have any white neighbors. All my neighbors, all my playmates, the people with whom I worked in the field were black people, African Americans. And this was during the time that lasted 100 years after the Civil War, when the Supreme Court of the United States and the Congress and the American Bar Association and the religious leaders all maintained that it was American law and Christian law that white people were superior to blacks. Even the white people who disagreed with that stayed quiet, because they benefited from the discrimination against black people. Exactly the same thing is taking place now about women where we benefit from the fact that men are given superior positions in this country and around the world. And we use Holy Scriptures, carefully selected, to show that women are not equal in the eyes of God.
This distortion of Biblical Scripture, and sometimes in other religions as well, causes men who want to be dominant or superior -- a husband who beats his wife or I'd say an employer who wants to pay men more than women for the same work -- they have the justification for it. And that's where religion comes in and the title of my book.
RONAN FARROW: I want to talk about that religious rationale that we see over and over again for this kind of discrimination and discriminations of different types. You talk in the book about Jesus Christ a lot. And you say, this is one quote, "He treated them and his women as equal to men, which was dramatically different from the prevailing custom of the times," you go on to say, "dramatically different from a lot of organized religion that draws on His teachings today."
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: That's right.
RONAN FARROW: As someone who is still such a man of profound faith, how do you keep that from being shaken when looking at this wide swath of religious scripture that is taking out of context, distorted, used as a weapon against women?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, I had a confrontation about this now 14 years ago. I had been a Southern Baptist since I was born. My daddy was a deacon in a church; my daddy was a Sunday school teacher and I was later when I grew up. In the year 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention changed their previous policies. They ordained, the leaders did, that women were inferior to men and had to be subservient to men. They ordained that a woman could no longer be a pastor, and no longer could be a deacon, no longer could be a chaplain. And that women who taught in some of the Southern Baptist Conventions, seminaries where pastors are taught, could not teach a class if a boy was among the students.
So my wife and I found that contrary to our beliefs, so we retired from that Baptist church. We now belong to a little Baptist church that's had women pastors. And my wife has been a deacon. So that was just a choice I made. But it shows that still some major religious organizations do not permit women to be treated equally as men.
I'm a great admirer of the Catholic Church, although I happen to be a Protestant. When I wrote my book, I sent a copy to Pope Francis and I wrote him a letter as well. And he responded quite promptly.
RONAN FARROW: What was in that letter to Pope Francis? [laughter]
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I just hoped he would read my book. He claimed he did and that he would help me with this project of bringing equal treatment to women. He responded in a very nice way. He said in his opinion, even in the Catholic Church – I don't think he used the word even – but in the Catholic Church, he thought the future would bring women into much more authoritative and prominent positions, and I trust him to carry out that promise.
I noticed though the other night on, I think 60 Minutes, Cardinal O'Malley was on and he was questioned about women being priests. And he said, "Well, there has to be some difference." And when he was asked a further question, he finally said -- I think fairly weakly if I can criticize the Cardinal [laughter] -- he said, "Well, women can have children and men can't." [laughter] As though – I'm not criticizing him [laughter] – as though God ordained that women have children and men couldn't. And God also ordained that men be priests and women couldn't.
I don't agree with that. From my interpretation of the Scripture – I'm not a theologian; I teach Bible classes every Sunday in my local church in Plains, and I know that, as I said in the book, that there's no verse in the Bible at all that ever insinuates even that Jesus Christ ever treated a woman as inferior to man or secondary to man. So some verses can be interpreted that way, and they are.
RONAN FARROW: And while we're criticizing people [laughter] …
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I'm not criticizing, but you go ahead.
RONAN FARROW: He doesn't criticize. While we're commenting on people.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: All right, commenting.
RONAN FARROW: When you hear in other sectors – say, in academia – intimations that this is down to intrinsic differences between the genders, Larry Summers saying "Here's why women aren't in STEM, there's some kind of an innate basis for this …"
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I heard about that. He was wrong, but go ahead. [laughter/applause]
RONAN FARROW: Not a criticism, a comment. So I guess you've answered the question. What do you say to that?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: If you look at what– I think now there's a surge of women in educational institutions. There are more women now in college than there are men, except in the so-called STEM things. But I hope that …I'm an engineer; I studied nuclear physics as a graduate, and I believe that women in the future will play an equal role in engineering and mathematics and all the sciences. Anyway, I don't think there's any difference.
But if you go to the corporate world, for instance, let's say the Fortune 500, out of those 500 corporations, 23 have women CEOs and those 23 chief executive officers who happen to be female are paid considerably less than the average of what the male CEOs are paid. That ought not to be. When women and men both work full time in America, men are paid on average 23% more. For a particular job, that doesn't quite apply, because in a particular job, men get paid only 8% more. But men have more of the high-paying jobs. Anyway, that's the kind of thing that still goes on in our country.
I mentioned the military a while ago. Early this year, the Department of Defense reported that in 2012, the last data that were available, there were 26,000 cases of sexual abuse in the military. Of those 26,000 cases, only 310 – about 1% – ever resulted in punishment of a rapist, and the reason for that is very clear.
By the way, in the last chapter of my book, I've got 23 things we can do. One of those things that we can do is to remove chief executive officers or commanding officers in the military from having the right to abort or prevent any prosecution of a sexual offender.
[applause] That's the unilateral right of any commanding officer now.
So Gillibrand and others tried to get that changed this year and the Senate lost that by five votes. So now commanding officers can still decide whether or not to prosecute a proven rapist in the military and they can pardon that rapist if he ever should be found guilty.
That ought to be changed.
RONAN FARROW: Talking about that culture of impunity in the military and on college campuses, in the book you say there's a strong reluctance by responsible leaders to admit that such abuses exist within their institutions -- even for good leaders, that this is a hard admission to come to.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: It is.
RONAN FARROW: Do you see that in our cultural institutions as well, in Hollywood right now, as we deal with one iconic figure, Bill Cosby, beset by accusations of this type?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I don't know anything about that particular case, but I would presume that a very prominent and very popular, well-deserved, comedian would have a special influence within the legal profession if an allegation was made against one of his cameramen or something like that. Then it would be much more likely to be prosecuted. But I don't really know enough about that case to comment.
RONAN FARROW: And pulling back beyond our borders, you write in the book that in 1948, eight Islamic states signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which explicitly talks about gender equality. And this is the interesting part: You say that wouldn't happen today. Why?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: It would be impossible today to pass the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. The US Congress wouldn't vote for it. [laughter]
RONAN FARROW: The US Congress wouldn't vote for it?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: No.
RONAN FARROW: Who would strike that down in the US Congress? [laughter]
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, I'm not going to call names, but, for instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed in about 1948. It was passed unanimously. But Russia had a caveat or a proviso that they didn't accept the premise that people could emigrate out of a country, because they wanted to keep Soviet Jews in Russia. And South Africa had a caveat or proviso: they denied the equality of black and white people. But, in effect, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.
I wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times last year and reported that of the 30 paragraphs in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that the United States was now violating ten of them. I point out in this book how many of the Universal Declaration paragraphs apply to equality between men and women.
Since 9/11, of course, we've also begun to violate the rights of Americans to have privacy in our communications and so forth. I won't go into detail about that. But these are problems. And when we try to get the equal rights amendment passed among threefourths of the States, when I happened to be President, it had passed the House and Senate of the Congress then by a two-thirds margin, to give equal rights guaranteed to women. We couldn't get it approved in three-fourths of the States. My wife and I made hundreds of telephone calls to leaders and state legislatures. But the women rose up, Phyllis Schlafly and others, and they basically said, "We don't want women to have equal rights, because that means they won't be protected," and so forth. So it's very difficult now to get the basic premises of human rights approved by legislators.
RONAN FARROW: You mentioned in passing privacy rights and you said, "I'm not going to talk about that now."
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I thought we were going to talk about the book, but I don't mind talking about it. [laughter]
RONAN FARROW: That's very gracious of you. So may I ask, do you think that this administration has eroded privacy rights?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: This one and the one before it, yes. It just happens that they have come after 9/11. But there's no doubt that the basic law that I got passed, the so-called FISA law -- I was concerned even back in the time when I was President about the intrusion on private American rights -- so I sponsored a law that passed that required that before the FBI or anyone else could look into an American's private affairs, they had to get a direct order from a judge to do it. That law has now been completely abandoned. It was violated when George W. Bush was in office. As you know, he interpreted that the Geneva conventions don't even apply to the United States and we could torture prisoners if we wanted to with waterboarding, and so forth.
So we have lost that protection of privacy in our country, maybe quite often with acquiescence or approval of the American people. I think we've exaggerated the danger to
Americans in order to overemphasize the right of the federal government to intrude on us.
When I have a private message to send to a foreign leader, who might be unpopular – I write every now and then to the Maoists in Nepal, and to the Castros in Cuba, and to the president of Sudan, and to sometimes the leaders even in North Korea – I handwrite the letter and I mail it through the Post Office. [laughter]
RONAN FARROW: So that it won't be intercepted.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Yeah, right. Because I don't have any doubt that every message that I send is recorded. I understand that officials deny that they read your mail. But they don't deny that every email sent in this country is recorded and if they want to, they can go back and read it.
RONAN FARROW: And you don't want your communiqués being read by the NSA.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: No, I don't, now. That's right, I don't want my communications to be read.
RONAN FARROW: There are those who credit Edward Snowden with exposing some of those changes. There are those who say he's a traitor and a criminal. Do you think charges against him should be dropped?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: No, I don't think charges should be dropped, and he hasn't requested that either. I just read an extensive interview with Snowden, I think in Nation magazine. It was multiple pages. In effect, Snowden says that he's willing to come back to the United States to face his accusers, which is a violation of secrecy, if he could have a right during his trial to express his views about why he did what he did. But the United States government is not willing to do that, because he might reveal what we consider to be secrets. So I presume that he'll stay in Russia or somewhere else outside the country until that premise has changed.
RONAN FARROW: Given all of that, is he correct to do that, not to come back?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I think what he did has been beneficial to our country, yes. I think it's made Americans aware of the, I think, illegal intrusion on our privacy. I think it's good for Americans to know what's going on. I don't believe there's been any evidence that our own security has been endangered or any foreign operative has been put in danger because of his revelations. If what I just said is incorrect, then I would change my mind. But that's my understanding at this point.
RONAN FARROW: This book is full of heartrending stories of what you describe as forgotten diseases that don't get enough attention, that don't get enough funding. Jon Stewart recently told a joke about you personally going to pull guinea worms out of people, one by one, to the last one and a lot of that is in here. So I'd be curious to get your take: One of the few things that Congress and this administration have rallied on productively and poured more resources into in a rapid fashion is the Ebola scare.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Yes, that's true.
RONAN FARROW: Do you think that it's regrettable that we can't seem to muster the same attention for other illnesses? And what is the lesson we learn from that comparison, between, say, the resources to malaria and the resources to Ebola?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: As you know, we have for AIDS. I would say that what George W. Bush did with the PEPFAR program has been very good and I've seen it all over Africa. We have 35 programs in different countries in Africa. But the Ebola effort has not been adequately financed. I think it's not been adequately staffed. But I think it's changing. The Carter Center, for instance, has three different programs in Liberia dealing now with the Ebola crisis. I need not go into detail about that, but my wife is a world champion of mental health. She trained through the Carter Center 144 psychiatric nurses, who had some medical training, but there's only one active psychiatrist in Liberia with millions of people. So she thought, and I thought, that we needed more nurses trained. So we trained 144 psychiatric nurses. All of those nurses are now working on the Ebola crisis and not on psychiatry. Three of them have contracted Ebola; one of them, a male nurse, has died. So we're doing all we can to help in Liberia, with which I'm very familiar. But I don't think the world has harnessed enough effort now on the Ebola crisis.
But when you look at the millions of people who die with malaria and millions of people who suffer from schistosomiasis, or lymphatic filariasis, or dracunculiasis, or trachoma, or onchocerciasis, those kinds of diseases, then Ebola is not as fatal as some of those other diseases. But I think we should have devoted more time to it and more effort and I think we are doing it now.
RONAN FARROW: So speaking of things that Congress devotes time to and things that they do not devote time to, a quote from you. This is what you said at the beginning of President Obama's second term: "I think the next thing that's going to be achieved is finally a partisan approach to alleviating the problems of illegal immigrants and giving them a chance to have self-respect and be legal in their presence here and have movement towards citizenship."
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I haven't changed my mind.
RONAN FARROW: So when you look at, right now, the President rolling out executive action on immigration was he right to go around Congress?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Yes. [applause] To expand on that, I think he has tried every possible way to get Congress to pass a reasonable bill. And as you know, the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, Republicans and Democrats, overwhelmingly supported the
Senate version of a reasonable approach to the problem that I just described. I think
President Obama has worked as well as he can with a recalcitrant House of
Representatives and since they have failed now to pass any reasonable bill, I think he's justified to take the action that he's going to describe tonight, which I don't know obviously what it will be, but I think he is quite justified in doing this.
RONAN FARROW: Was he justified in waiting to reveal what he was going to do until after the midterms?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: My grandson was running for governor of Georgia,
and I'm a little bit biased on that subject now, because although all the Democrats lost all over the nation, as you know, including your governor in Massachusetts, I think from a partisan point of view he was justified to wait till after the election. But he was mistaken in thinking it would make a difference. Is that fair enough?
RONAN FARROW: It's interesting.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: [laughter]
RONAN FARROW: I spoke with Mitt Romney at the height of the midterms – you can see where this is going …
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Yeah.
RONAN FARROW: And he said, "This is cynical, this is disingenuous; the President is deceiving the people." Is there something to be said for honesty even when it's politically disadvantageous?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I don't think it was dishonest. The President considered when it would be best, the most propitious time to take unilateral executive decision action, and he decided it would be now. And I don't question his judgment or his honesty in doing that.
RONAN FARROW: In 1977, you sent a letter to Congress proposing various ways you would tackle immigration reform. You were rebuffed by that Congress at that time, but you didn't pursue executive action to go around them. You just said you supported President Obama doing so. Why didn't you?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: We didn't have nearly the problem that we have now, and we didn't have the infusion of people across the border so drastically. We didn't have 11 million so-called undocumented aliens in the country then. I had a quite harmonious relationship with the Congress, Democrats and Republicans. I got equally as high percentage of support among Republicans as I did Democrats.
And my predecessors, who are Republicans, there was only two that I had then, was
Presidents Ford and Nixon, they helped me with the most critical issues that we faced. The most difficult was the Panama Canal treaty ratification, which was a very unpopular thing to do. In fact, it was the most courageous action that Congress ever took. Of the 20 members of the Congress who voted for the Panama Canal treaty in 1978, only seven of them came back to the Senate the next January. So I got wide support on both sides. I didn't have the polarization, partisan polarization that we have now, so I think it's quite a different situation.
RONAN FARROW: And, in general, on the subject of executive action, you signed 320 executive orders. In his first term, President Obama signed 147. Different times or different kind of leader?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, part of those executive orders that I signed were with the prior permission of the Congress. The first bill that I had introduced when I became President was to let me reorganize the federal government to make it more efficient with the understanding that it would prevail, my executive order would prevail, unless it was overturned by both houses of Congress. And the Congress approved that. It was quite controversial, but they did. So I issued 28 directives to make the US government more efficient and the Congress never did overturn those. So none of them were nearly so controversial and charged with partisanship as the immigration is. I'm not apologizing for it. I think most other Presidents have also signed a lot of executive orders.
RONAN FARROW: As you know, on that very subject of executive power, the
President's getting sued right now by House Republicans, specifically for delaying the employer mandate of Obamacare. Do you think President Obama's overstepped his executive powers?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Under the circumstances, I do not. I think he's been well forced into taking more executive action than he would have taken if he had had a reasonably cooperative Congress. So with a recalcitrant, polarized Congress that he's got, I think he's not resorted to executive action too much.
RONAN FARROW: One of the things that that very polarized Congress just shot down is the Keystone pipeline. You've written about that extensively. You've said that it's a product of "a dangerous addiction to oil in this country," that it would detract from
pushes towards alternative sources of energy. What do you say to claims that the pipeline would have a lot of positive effects, like creating a large number of jobs?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: The only jobs the pipeline would create would be just during the construction phase itself. Once you make this big pipe and put it in the ground and cover it up with dirt, that's the end of the jobs. [applause] And as you know, the production of the kind of tar sands oil that would come through our country, with no income to our country at all, is horribly polluting, just the process itself. Some of the major owners of the tar sands area is the Koch brothers. And of course, they plowed millions and millions, I guess hundreds of millions of dollars into the most recent campaign on behalf of candidates who would support their XL pipeline. So I think that this is the wrong step to take since the United States and China and other countries must move to correct the horrible threat of global warming.
RONAN FARROW: What about the argument that it would reduce our reliance on some of those foreign sources of oil?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, we're already making good progress on that without Canadian oil. We're producing more oil now in our country than we did before with fracking and so forth, also using a lot more natural gas. So I think we're becoming already much more self-sufficient without the pipeline coming from the tar sands.
RONAN FARROW: This past summer, we watched John Kerry fail, pretty miserably by most accounts, at bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the table. One of the sticking points, apparently on the Israeli side, a complete refusal to budge on the issue of settlements. This is an issue that you know very well.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I do.
RONAN FARROW: Why can't we crack that nut? And what will it take to change the stakes in that relationship with Israel?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: There are some basic international principles that have never been abandoned, and one basic one is two states with a Palestinian state and an Israeli state living next to each other in peace. The other premise is the inviolability of the 1967 borders with minor modifications brought about by good faith negotiations. Those two principles are the ones that must be accepted, and they're not accepted at this point.
The Carter Center continues to work on this problem. We have a full-time office and maintain full-time offices in Jerusalem, and also in Ramallah in the West Bank and in Gaza. I have a full-time office in Gaza that stays there all the time, so we know what's going on in that area. I get a weekly report from my people on the ground.
My prayer is -- I'd say my foremost commitment as a public official in foreign policy -- is to bring peace to Israel. That's my first priority and my still remaining prayer. But you can't bring peace to Israel without bringing peace and justice to the Palestinians and other neighbors of Israel and that's what I hope can be resurrected.
John Kerry has done the best he could. But I know from experience that you cannot bring two recalcitrant groups – that is, Israel and the Palestinians – together without exerting the utmost influence of the United States of America, which means the President of the United States. That's my fairly brief answer. [laughter]
RONAN FARROW: Another foreign policy challenge you know all to well, how to deal with hostage situations. The President's reviewing our hostage policy right now, he said, in the wake of this latest American killed by ISIS. What is the answer there? Is it worth reconsidering our stance on negotiating?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I guess the basic thing you ask about is whether we should pay the captors ransom to release the hostages. I say no. Because I think that would make it much more likely that the captors would resort to more capturing and holding to ransom if they knew they would get paid for it. The United States has been trying now, for I guess 20 years, to stop France and others from paying ransom. So I think that's the right policy for the United States.
The only time we've ever paid ransom was while President Reagan was in office with the Iran hostage crisis and the Iran-Contra arrangement, where we did pay some. But anyway, that's beside the point. I think what you ask, my answer is we should not pay ransom and we should discourage others from paying ransom.
RONAN FARROW: On the ISIS threat in general, should the President have struck a year ago in Syria? And would that have stopped them?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I don't think it would have stopped them. We have a difficult time now, because the American people are firmly against so-called boots on the ground, sending large numbers of American troops back into another war in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria. And we are resorting just to aerial bombardment with drones and with missiles and with bombs dropped by planes. I think we are suffering at this point from an absence of on-the-ground information. Because we don't know really what to hit, or where to concentrate our firepower and we need people on the ground to tell us where to direct that power. I don't think the use of drones is adequate. So that's one area that I think that President Obama is moving toward and I think that is almost inexorable. But to send troops back in to Syria would be unacceptable to the American people, and I'm sure to President Obama. He's said it often.
RONAN FARROW: You had an on-the-ground view of these midterms. You mentioned your grandson and his run. What do you say right now to a Democratic Party that is scrambling in some ways to reassert leadership? What needs to change in terms of Democrats' ability to connect with voters? Does anything need to change?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Something needs to be changed. Well, I'm not involved in politics anymore, except when I support my grandson, who's running for governor. I just think we need to continue to fight in the courts to – this is just one of many things – to prevent the Republicans' successful effort to deprive young people and old people and black people and Hispanics from voting. [applause] This is a deprivation. And this is prevalent in Georgia and North Carolina and Texas and so forth. And the lower courts have ruled that this is acceptable. I'm not sure how the Republican-oriented Supreme Court would rule. They made a stupid decision in Citizens United, which has contributed to the problem. [applause] And sometimes they act in a partisan way instead of a judicial way, which is unfortunate.
But I would hope that they could rule, for instance, that so-called ID card requirements with a photograph on an identification card is necessary for people to register to vote. Because a lot of young people in metropolitan areas or in college don't have automobiles and so they don't have a driver's license; and old people in nursing homes don't have driver's licenses; and very poor people don't have driver's licenses; and in Georgia, Hispanics who are there on a green card can't get a driver's license. So the Republicans use this very wisely to deprive people of a right to vote who they think might vote Democratic. That's one thing that we could change.
RONAN FARROW: We all clap for the principle of the right to vote. Do you though attribute these losses in this past midterm to people being denied access to the polls by Republicans?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Partially, yes. One of the main efforts of two
Democrats running in our state, one for the US Senate, Sam Nunn's daughter, Michelle
Nunn, and my grandson Jason, was because we made a fairly futile effort to get African Americans to vote. And there were 50,000 people who signed up to vote and were never approved to vote on Election Day by the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia. So that is pervasive. And right before the election, as you know, in Texas and in North Carolina, the ID card requirement was approved by the lower courts. So that's just one of the factors.
I don't think there's any doubt that the element of race is still prevalent in many places in
America. This is always a sensitive subject; I'm not calling everybody that voted
Republican to be racist. But there's no doubt that since Nixon's time, since Strom Thurmond's time, since Harry Truman's time there has been an inclination in the South to vote Republican because the Republicans are more likely not to get the black vote. So it's a subtle, but, I'd say, kind of obscure, but prevalent factor in the South.
The South used to be solidly Democratic. When I first came to campaign in
Massachusetts, for instance, I was asked by the first two TV cameras I ever got to follow me [laughter], for an interview and first thing they asked, "Why should we vote for you, coming from Georgia up here to Massachusetts?" And I said, "Well, when John Kennedy ran for President, he got more votes in Georgia on a high percentage than he did in Massachusetts, and I expect the people in Massachusetts to do the same thing for me." [laughter/applause]
RONAN FARROW: Love that.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I think when everybody has a right to vote that's qualified, that would be a major step forward in Democratic resurgence.
RONAN FARROW: So as we talk practical solutions for the future, I want to bring in some of the practical questions from the audience; a lot of really great questions have been coming in. One is about Malala Yousafzai. I interviewed her recently. She was outspoken about a lot of the same subjects you cover in this book, as she so often is. One member of the audience – Rob Morrison, from the Fenn School, thank you – asks this: How can the worldwide attention that Malala raised be translated into meaningful change for women in the Middle East and Southeast Asia? How do you make that real and specific?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: That's very difficult. But one of the ways that perpetuates the subservience of women in very poor countries and in prejudiced countries, like you just mentioned, is to deprive women of an equal right to education and that leads to horrible crimes like honor killings. Just a few months ago, there was a woman in Pakistan, in Lahore, Pakistan, who had married a man that her parents didn't approve of. She was on her way into the parliament in Pakistan, and she was attacked by her own family and killed with stones, bricks. We were afraid there would be no punishment, but I just read in the newspaper yesterday that her father and her uncle and two cousins were sentenced to be executed, because of murder. That's a rare thing in that part of the world.
To deprive women of an equal way to be educated and to hold future jobs is one of the things that makes parents strangle their daughters at birth, because they feel that a son will be better able to take care of them in their old age. I don't have any doubt that a daughter, if educated, would be much more likely to take care of her parents than a son would. [laughter]
RONAN FARROW: And on that subject of championing human rights and women's rights, here's a quote from you: "Some women when they are elected become champions of human rights. I've seen other women who are elected who didn't pay any attention. But in general, I think it's helpful to have women in public office." Interesting thing about this quote is it was in response to a question about whether you would support a Hillary Clinton Presidential run.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: [laughter] Well, I wasn't referring to Hillary Clinton.
RONAN FARROW: Really?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: No, I was not! No!
RONAN FARROW: So is Hillary Clinton a champion of human rights?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I think so. Hillary Clinton, I think, proved with one of her major speeches a number of years ago in Beijing– the United Nations convened a special conference just on women's rights and Hillary Clinton made a notable speech on behalf of equal rights for women.
RONAN FARROW: A real landmark moment.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: It was a landmark moment, yes. And I look on Hillary Clinton as a champion of women's rights around the world.
RONAN FARROW: On another subject we've discussed here today, here's Hillary Clinton just this past summer in response to this staggering number of dead in Gaza: "I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets. Israel has the right to defend itself." How does that make you feel about a potential Hillary Clinton Presidency's foreign policy?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: That concerns me to some degree. I just said earlier that my main prayer is to bring peace to Israel. But you have to do it with justice and fairness to the Palestinians, and there's not any equality in military power between the Palestinians and Israel.
I've been to Gaza after the attacks in 2008 and 2009. Every school in Gaza was completely destroyed, including the American school. Every hospital in Gaza was destroyed. Eighteen thousand homes were destroyed. And I think that to strike back at this isolated place, one of the most densely populated places on earth, completely enclosed in a fence that's impenetrable is not an equal chance to defend one's self.
Obviously Israel has a right. I've been to the areas in Israel that have been struck by the missiles from Gaza, which is a deplorable crime and which I condemned on the site. These are mostly homemade missiles. I think three children in Israel were killed, which is a crime and which I condemn and deplore. Several thousand children were killed in the bombardment so the equality is not here. But obviously the only way to do this is by what I mentioned earlier, to have two nations, side by side, a Palestinian state and an Israeli state living in peace, and to have justice for both sides with peace.
RONAN FARROW: This is an apropos moment to bring in a question that Jerry Ward– and thank you, Jerry, also of the Fenn School -- a lot of good candidates for questioning here in the Fenn School. Is there a sports team where I can say go, go Fenns? [laughter]
He says: “Thank you for your service, first of all. And secondly, is it possible to conduct foreign policy that protects our national interests, yet is guided by a moral and ethical framework?”
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: I think so. I don't think there's any doubt about that.
Yes. I don't think there's any incompatibility between our basic religious values, moral values, ethical values, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, and our conduct of foreign policy.
RONAN FARROW: But do you feel you were burned in your attempt to conduct an ethical body of foreign policy?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: No, I don't think so. I was stigmatized because I didn't attack Iran with military force when they were holding our hostages. That was a factor, but it was not the only factor, in my decision to be reluctant. The Panama Canal treaty and other things were very unpopular. And we had a divided Democratic Party, as you might know, and so forth. Butm no, I don't think it was inimical to have basic foreign policy based on moral values. One of those moral values is peace and one of the greatest violations of human rights is absence of peace. If I asked the average college student in this audience to write down the main human rights values, they would write freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, trial by jury. All those things are very important.
But if I ask a destitute family in Africa what are your main human rights, they would say, "I would like to live in peace and not war. I would like to have a decent home in which to live. I would like to have food to eat. I would like to have at least a modicum of education and healthcare." Those are the basic rights for people that don't have them. So I think that you can have a foreign policy that provides those things and still be more attractive in those countries by insisting on those human rights and those moral values than if you violate them.
RONAN FARROW: You used the word stigma. It pains me to read this quote, but it sums up some of that stigma.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: It's all right. Go right ahead.
RONAN FARROW: John McCain, reaching for the worst possible insult for President Obama earlier this year, said this: "I have never seen anything like this in my life. I thought Jimmy Carter was bad, but he pales in comparison to this President, in my opinion." The serious question out of that is what does it feel like, and what is your response to these moments of being used as an insult, your legacy being used as an insult?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: That's a compliment to me coming from a warmonger. [laughter] [applause] [cheers]
Let me say, I have a great admiration for him. Senator McCain was a hero. He was in the
Navy like I was, like John F. Kennedy was. And he suffered terribly as a prisoner of war. But in almost every debate in the Senate, and when he's on public television and so forth, he always makes a choice of the most violent response to any challenge to our nation's security or to implement our policy. He wants to go to war in Syria. He wants to go to war in this country and that country. And when President Obama refrains from taking the most extreme military action, that's when John McCain compares him to me.
I was lucky enough when I was President to keep our country at peace and to provide peace for others. I was lucky enough to go through my four years and we never dropped a bomb; we never fired a missile; we never shot a bullet. [applause] I'm not bragging about it, I'm just trying to respond to your question. But I think that we can put war as a response to a challenge at the bottom of our priority list and resort to violence only when it's justified instead of resorting to it as a first priority.
RONAN FARROW: Another terrific question from the audience and this one's anonymous. It's a great question; you shouldn't be anonymous on this, whoever you are.
What is your proudest accomplishment since leaving office?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Since leaving office? Well, what the Carter Center does in 80 countries, I mentioned earlier, our primary goal now is to deal with what the World Health Organization calls neglected tropical diseases, and we deal with diseases that are not even known by medical doctors in our country – dracunculiasis, onchocerciasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis, and so forth. These are diseases that afflict hundreds of millions of people, in Africa particularly, and sometimes in Latin America. And we have at the Carter Center the only international task force on disease eradication. We have a task force that analyzes every human illness constantly to see which ones can be eliminated from a country or eradicated from the whole world. So we targeted guinea worm, dracunculiasis, as a major disease to be eradicated. We found it in 20 countries in Asia and in Africa and three-and-a-half million cases, 26,500 villages. We started working on it, and we dedicated it to be eradicated. We now have reduced the three-anda-half million cases to 116 cases. [applause]
RONAN FARROW: I'll clap to that. And what's your advice to our current President as he leaves office.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: So that's my number one achievement.
RONAN FARROW: What's the lesson for the next President leaving office, for Barack Obama as he embarks on this journey?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, I think that other Presidents have done great things since they left office. President Clinton has done wonderful things. And some of the things I've done have been satisfactory. [laughter] But I would hope that President Obama will be very active in pursuing the things he wants to pursue, the things that are most interesting to him.
We monitor elections. This week we're doing our 99th election in Tunisia. We negotiate peace agreements. We deal with tropical diseases. And I think that each President kind of has to decide what their primary interest is and also what they feel they're best qualified to do that's not being done. So I'm sure that President Obama is going to be very active when he eventually retires.
RONAN FARROW: The fine folks, both at the Library and on your team, are circling like hawks. We've monopolized too much time of your time already. So the last question that I promise I will ask is looking at this wonderful sign behind us, this wonderful legacy represented all around here, how does President Kennedy's legacy echo, in your mind, today?
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Well, I wish that some of you would go to Google and look up the speech I made here when the Kennedy Library was dedicated. I was President of the United States, and I came here to Boston with my heart filled with emotion. I was a peanut farmer when President Kennedy was shot, and I heard about it from one of my customers. I went outside and sat on the steps and wept. To me, that was the greatest blow that I had suffered since my father died. Because I felt that he epitomized, with his words and with his actions, the finest aspects of my country. And I guess I felt closer to him because he and I were both in the Navy. I was on two battleships and three submarines.
It was one of the most grievous blows I ever felt. And I expressed those sentiments to some degree when I was the main speaker at the dedication of this Library. And I still feel that way. It's a great source of pride to me whenever I might be compared in some ways with him.
RONAN FARROW: And I think that is a moment and a legacy that still echoes, even for people at the opposite end of the age spectrum who shouldn't remember. It still looms so large in this country.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: That's true.
RONAN FARROW: And that's a moving take on it. I want to close with one final comment from the audience. I love this: I was born October 1, 1924. Happy birthday to us, Big 90. [laughter/applause]
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: All right!
RONAN FARROW: That's from Sylvia. Thank you, Sylvia. And happy birthday, Sylvia. There's Sylvia! Thank you, Sylvia. And much respect for those 90 years. [applause]
And I want to echo that to you, Mr. President. Thank you so much for all that you do.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: It's nice to be 90 years old. And it's doubly nice to be married to the same woman for 68-and-a-half years. [applause]
RONAN FARROW: I will clap to that. And my deep respects to Rosalynn Carter as well. You used the word satisfactory about your legacy. You are doing so much more than satisfactory work.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you.
[applause]
RONAN FARROW: And thank you everybody here today for your time. This was a real honor and a pleasure. [applause]
THE END