A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (24 page)

We established websites (in Chinese and English) that posted analyses and assessments of these elections. As the websites became more popular, students and scholars of Chinese government, as well as ordinary citizens, submitted articles and commentaries on the necessity of more political reform. The websites were transformed into something of a platform for democracy debate in China, and the government began to impose restrictions.

Many disturbing altercations have arisen between freely elected village officials and Communist Party leaders regarding use of land, routing of roads, and location of factories. Our role in promoting village elections was slowly but steadily rolled back. As Chinese leaders grew distrustful of activities designed to expand the debate on democracy, we have turned our attention to enhancing bilateral relations, encouraging exchange of students and tourists, and working with the government on common interests in developing countries, especially in Africa.

As I write this, in September 2014, I have just returned from a ten-day visit to Beijing, Xi’an, Qingdao, and Shanghai, for conferences with business and political leaders and students from four universities. The year 2014 was the thirty-fifth anniversary of normalized relations between our countries, 110 years after Deng was born, and 65 years after my first visit to China and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China.

One of the most surprisingly controversial presidential decisions I made was to return the Crown of Saint Stephen to the people of Hungary. It
was said to have been given by the Pope in the year 1000 to Stephen, the first king of Hungary, as a symbol of political and religious authority and was worn by more than fifty kings when they were vested with power. A distinctive feature was that the cross on top was bent. As Soviet troops invaded Hungary, toward the end of the Second World War, some Hungarians delivered to American troops the crown and other royal regalia, which were subsequently stored in Fort Knox alongside our nation’s gold. The Soviets still dominated Hungary when I announced my decision to return the crown. There was a furor among Hungarian-Americans and others, and I was denounced as accepting the subservience of the occupied nation. I considered the crown to be a symbol of the freedom and sovereignty of the Hungarian people. I returned it in January 1978, stipulating that the crown and insignia must be controlled by Hungarians, carefully protected, and made available for public display as soon as practicable. A duplicate of the crown was brought to The Carter Center as a gift for me in March 1998 and is on display in our presidential museum.

Rosalynn and I led volunteers to build Habitat houses in Vác, Hungary, in 1996, and we were treated as honored guests of the government and escorted to the Hungarian National Museum to see the crown and the stream of citizens who were going past it, many of them reciting a prayer as they did so. We were told that more than 3 million people pay homage to the crown each year. A few years later it was moved to its permanent home, in the Hungarian Parliament Building.

During my administration there was another serious controversy over an environmental issue where resolution was long overdue. This may have been the most significant domestic achievement of my political life. Alaska had been admitted to the Union as the forty-ninth state in January 1959, when a debate began over how some of its vast federal lands should be divided among the indigenous Indians and Eskimos, deeded to the state government, or retained as national forests, parks, and wilderness
areas. President Dwight Eisenhower and his successors avoided the controversial issue, and the discovery of oil and the growth of commercial fisheries had added an important factor: the contention over enormous wealth. I decided to begin discussions that might resolve the issues, but I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times.

Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates.

My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which set aside an area larger than California, in December 1980, doubling the size of our national parks, tripling wilderness areas, and protecting twenty-five free-flowing streams. At the same time we clarified ownership of remaining lands and opened all offshore areas and 95 percent of land areas to oil exploration, excluding a pristine area known as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. After several decades, the decision has become increasingly popular in the state.

My last year in office was the most stressful and unpleasant of my life. From November 4, 1979, American hostages were held captive by Iranian militants, supported by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his government. This crisis was of overriding importance for me, and I severely restricted my travel and met frequently with families of the captive diplomats to share whatever information we had. I sent a warning to the Ayatollah during the first month that I would close all access by Iran to the outside world if a hostage was harmed and would attack militarily if one was killed. He took my warning seriously and was careful with the well-being of the Americans. One of them was quickly released when his arm seemed to become paralyzed, and he was returned to his home in Maine.

Our goal was to free the hostages through diplomacy, but we believed we needed to be prepared for other alternatives. We began planning how to rescue the hostages after they had been in captivity for about two months. Our special forces practiced and refined the process in the American desert. Final plans were to fly seven large and long-range helicopters from an aircraft carrier to an isolated place in the Iranian desert, called Desert One, where they would be refueled from a C-130 airplane. The rescue team would then fly into Tehran at night, overwhelm the captors with as little violence as possible using night-vision equipment, and the hostages and rescuers would helicopter to a nearby airport, where a large passenger plane would land and bring them to safety. Our regular observations from space revealed the captors’ habits, so we knew which ones were on duty at any time by the parked cars. A cook from Greece had been working in the embassy, and he gave us information about the location of the hostages and their daily routine. It was imperative that
we have six helicopters to bring out all the hostages and the rescue team, because any left behind might be executed. Everyone on my national security team agreed to these plans after we studied and improved them during meetings in the secret “situation room” of the White House.

We were ready to proceed when the rescue team was trained, the desert landing place had been surveyed by sending a small airplane to land there, and the weather was right. In early April 1980, the Iranians failed to follow through with an agreement to transfer the hostages, and on April 11 I called my advisers together and we agreed to move ahead with the rescue mission. My last suggestion was that we add another helicopter, giving us two more than necessary. Secretary Cy Vance and all others had participated as we planned the rescue procedure, step by step. However, Cy was on vacation when the final date was set, and on his return he expressed his disapproval. I called another meeting on the issue. He explained his objections, we had a thorough discussion, and all other participants again voted to proceed.

Everything went as planned, except that one helicopter inexplicably returned to the aircraft carrier and another went down in a sandstorm, which left us with the required six at Desert One. After refueling, one of the helicopters swerved on takeoff and ran into the C-130, damaging them both and killing eight crewmen. I was forced to order the team to abandon the rescue attempt. It was a tragedy and a bitter disappointment, which I reported on television after sleeping a few hours.

Vance resigned from our administration after the effort failed. Although Cy was closest to me in overall policy toward peace and human rights, he was very protective of the State Department and had threatened to resign on three previous occasions when he thought that the White House staff exerted too much authority or that I did not implement his recommendations. He explained that he objected to the rescue attempt because it involved excessive risk of armed conflict and loss of life, but I felt that his resignation was the result of pent-up complaints. We maintained our friendship, and I spent several nights with the Vance family in New York City after I left the White House.

The failed rescue attempt had terrible political consequences for me. Senator Ted Kennedy mounted a major challenge to me during the Democratic primary campaign, and Ronald Reagan also raised the issue strongly in the general election. Since I had refrained from exerting military force to punish the Iranians, the failure to secure the freedom of the hostages made me vulnerable to their allegations that I was an ineffective leader.

While Iranians were weakened by the international sanctions imposed on them because of their illegal act, they were attacked by forces of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. I condemned the invasion because it interfered with my efforts to free the hostages, but it caused additional problems as the substantial oil exports from both countries were cut off, causing skyrocketing oil prices and global inflation, and high interest rates resulted.

During the hostage crisis we sent a number of secret delegations into Iran, which was fairly easy to do because the Iranian leaders wanted to maintain as normal an environment as possible and relished all the favorable publicity that resulted from visits by foreign news media. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini gave personal interviews to American journalists. On one occasion we had a few CIA agents in Tehran who were traveling with false German passports, since many Iranian leaders had been educated in Germany. As our people were leaving, one of them had his credentials checked and was waved past by the customs officials. He was called back, however, and the official said, “Something is wrong with your passport. I’ve been here more than twenty years and this is the first time I’ve seen a German document that used a middle initial instead of a full name. Your name is given as Josef H. Schmidt and I don’t understand it.” The quick-thinking agent said, “Well, when I was born my given middle name was Hitler, and I have received special permission not to use it.” The official smiled, nodded, and approved his departure.

My commitment to human rights was derogated by many Republicans and some foreign leaders as naïve and a sign of weakness. One of my primary concerns was with the military dictators in Latin America and their fervent American supporters in the commercial sector, along with congressional lobbyists and key people within the State Department and other branches of our government. For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities.

When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.

I had a diverse group of key advisers in the White House, State Department, Department of Defense, and the CIA, and I wanted to be sure that we were all working harmoniously on the same agenda. There were never any serious congressional obstacles to most decisions I made on foreign policy, but I saw the need to avoid misunderstandings and potential conflicts among my National Security team by assembling them on a regular basis. I began having breakfast meetings each Friday when I was in Washington with Vice President Mondale, Secretary of Defense Brown, Secretary of State Vance, National Security Adviser Brzezinski, Hamilton Jordan, and sometimes Jody Powell and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. We covered an agenda open to all of us in advance. Brzezinski took notes, recorded our common decisions, and during the following week consulted with Brown and Vance to assure that my decisions were implemented. If cabinet officers could not attend, their deputies were sometimes included. This procedure worked very well for us and helped ensure that we were working as a team and addressing issues in the same way. This is an inevitable challenge for American leaders, because there are influential people in every department who want to shape policy that affects the rest of the world, and sometimes this desired unity is not achieved.