Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

JOHN RABE: It's all things considered, I'm John Rabe. Former President Jimmy Carter is touring the country for the paperback release of his most recent book, and is in the Twin Cities today. He joins us in the studio to talk about the book and some other topics in the news. Mr. President, welcome.

JIMMY CARTER: I'm glad to be with you. Thank you.

JOHN RABE: Before I ask you about the book, I did want to cover some other items that are in the news now. First off, with the renewed threat of airstrikes in the former Yugoslavia and the movement of relief convoys toward a Muslim enclave that has been cut off for some time, I'm wondering if you're seeing any reason to be more optimistic about a settlement there.

JIMMY CARTER: No, except if there ever is a settlement, we'll be closer to it now than we were yesterday. That's the only thing. But I haven't seen any evidence that the combatants in the former Yugoslavia are under any real genuine pressure or threat or award from the international community for compliance with the peace efforts.

I think we lost our chance really at the very beginning of the war when President Bush was in office and when the Yugoslavia was fragmented to move in forcefully and say, this is the boundary that you must honor in order to have the approbation of the international community.

And I think now the different combatants have seen they can do almost anything they want to, and without any adverse consequences. I would like to see NATO led by the Europeans, but supported strongly from the United States to take a much stronger stand in that area.

JOHN RABE: On another topic, it looks like the US is being pretty careful about speaking out on the rebellion in Mexico's Chiapas state. Do you think this is an area where we should be more involved, or should we let the Mexican government take actions on its own before we decide to get more involved, to apply some pressure, if that's necessary?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, the Mexicans, perhaps more than any other people on earth, are extremely sensitive about US interference in their internal affairs. They've always been this way, and I think they are even more so since they've had this crisis with the Indians.

Mexico has a crucial election coming up this summer, 1994. And at the Carter Center, we've been working fairly harmoniously with the Mexican government, and particularly with the two opposition parties, to ensure that there would be some kind of monitoring of the integrity of the election this year.

I don't know yet what will be permitted, but we have helped to train, for instance, Mexican observers. In fact, in the last governor's elections, we went down and observed the observers, although they wouldn't permit us to observe the election itself.

So I think that this crisis that's come about may have put some pressure on the Mexican government to prove that they are able to deal satisfactorily with human rights.

One of the human rights issues, obviously, is freedom and democracy. And I know that the fairly abusive leader who was responsible for what I think is serious human rights abuse of the Indians has now been removed.

JOHN RABE: Taken out of the cabinet.

JIMMY CARTER: Taken out of the cabinet, and one on a much more moderate and respected leader has replaced him. So this might be a move in the right direction for the entire Mexican society as it struggles to become another democracy in this hemisphere. It is not yet a democracy.

JOHN RABE: And on the domestic front, yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking. And you've joined the past Surgeons General in urging stricter controls on the sale and advertising of tobacco. And one of your recommendations is to raise the federal cigarette tax from $0.24 to as much as $2 a pack.

JIMMY CARTER: Exactly.

JOHN RABE: What's the rationale?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, cigarettes is still the number one killer of American people. This year, there'll be more than 420,000 Americans who will die just from the smoking of cigarettes. And for us to condone this self-inflicted poison or this self-inflicted suicide on people, I think is a tragedy.

One of the things that has happened that particularly grieves me is that in the last few years, as cigarette sales have gone down in our country all too slowly, I might say, the cigarette companies have almost criminally moved their unobstructed advertising campaigns to the least suspecting nations on Earth and are inducing young children and everyone else that they can to take up smoking. So they are shifting the death imposition from this country to foreign countries.

I would like to see us be much more forceful from the White House and from all the agencies of government in constraining the sale and use of cigarettes with increased warnings, with a prohibition against, say, Virginia Slims endorsing an athletic event. And I would like to see the cigarette tax increased $2 a pack.

JOHN RABE: Sometimes irksome as an announcer to announce the Virginia Slims Tennis Championship, for instance.

JIMMY CARTER: It's embarrassing for me to watch it. I think it ought to be against the law. It's against the law to advertise on television the use of tobacco for very good reasons. And to have Virginia Slims go in and sponsor an athletic event, I think is a travesty.

JOHN RABE: Let's turn to the book, which is coming out now in paperback. It's called Turning Point-- A Candidate, a State and a Nation Coming of Age. It's printed by Times Books. It covers your run for the state senate in Georgia in 1962.

And it outlines the old system of voter representation there, which gave-- and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it gave Georgia's rural voters the advantage in elections and kept rural whites in power over the growing number of people in the cities. Of course, fewer conservatives, more Blacks. Would you tell us the story of how the county unit system got started?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, let me point out, first of all, that it wasn't just Georgia. In 1962, when the Supreme Court ruled that counties could no longer vote, that people had to vote, it applied to 30 states in addition to Georgia, I think including Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Because when the early settlers came to this nation, they were mostly rural and they wanted to orchestrate laws and state constitutions to make sure that the rural, more conservative voters, retain control of the political system. So 31 states were affected.

In Georgia, though, it was particularly obnoxious in that the county unit system was used to perpetuate the control of the political system by rural voters who were white and democratic.

And this new ruling by the Supreme Court struck it down and said that from henceforth, in 1962, each vote has to count approximately the same as every other vote within the state.

As a matter of fact, this was so bad in Georgia that this little county where I had so much trouble in equipment county, a vote there, one vote there counted as much as 99 votes in Atlanta in electing off a state officer, the governor, lieutenant governor, a judge, and so forth.

So this was quite a transformation in Georgia. I had never been interested in running for office before this. But when this new ruling came down, I said, boy, a breath of fresh air has come to Georgia.

The Georgia State Senate will now be a substantive organization. So I decided to run, not particularly to hold public office, but to try to protect the public school system integration years.

And I found to my dismay that in this little county, incredible things were done to steal the election. Voters were intimidated. There were no voting booths. Everybody was forced to cast their ballot in the presence of and under the close supervision of a county boss. Dead people voted. People in prison voted.

JOHN RABE: And not only did the dead people vote, but they did one up on Philadelphia. I think they voted alphabetically.

JIMMY CARTER: Yeah, 118 people voted alphabetically down to the fourth or fifth letters in their names. And there were 333 people that voted in this town, and there were 420 ballots in the box at the end of the day. There were eight ballots folded up altogether in one wide where the county boss, Joe Hurst, had thrown the ballots in the box.

I watched him do these things, and he was not at all intimidated by my observations. He would freely reach into the voting box, ballot box and pull out ballots and look at them while I was observing him, change them if he wanted to, put extra ballots in the box. He would blatantly tell the voters, you've got to vote for this man and not for Carter. Vote for my opponent.

And when I confronted him, he just said, this is no business of yours. This is my county. You stay out of it. And I said, well, this is my business because it's my election. And he said, well, you can't come over here and tell me how to vote in my county.

So it was a horrible and shocking example to me, and I went through an almost unbelievable ordeal in the legal system at that time to try to prevail in this first challenge. If I had lost this election, I never would have run again.

JOHN RABE: You grew up with this system, though. Did it always strike you as wrong? Was there a point when it dawned on you that this was a grossly unfair system? And I mean, even just starting at the county unit system.

JIMMY CARTER: Well, when I was 18 years old, I went into the Navy, and I was going to make the Navy my career. So I came home from the Navy, not particularly interested in politics.

But, no, I didn't really see the county unit system as being a travesty of justice or a violation of my basic human rights until it was exposed. And then it was a shock to the Georgia people, this is the way things were done. It was the way my grandparents did them.

JOHN RABE: One of the turning points in your campaign and your fight to get elected was when Judge Carl Crow ruled in your favor, and he decided that the votes from Georgetown shouldn't be counted.

JIMMY CARTER: That's right. He made an honest and very courageous decision in that respect. And then after he ruled that I had won the election, this ballot box was thrown out.

My opponent's lawyers found a very strange and ancient law that said that if there was a judicial decision on a county election, that the final judgment would be made by the local democratic committee and not by the court system. And of course, the local democratic committee was controlled by this political boss who had stolen the election in the first place.

JOHN RABE: Joe Hurst.

JIMMY CARTER: Joe Hurst. So we went around and round about that. On the other hand, Joe Hurst was not all bad. His wife was a county welfare director, for instance.

It was the only county in the nation where all of the welfare checks came to the same post office box. And Joe Hurst and his wife would personally deliver each welfare check every month to people who were on the welfare rolls, and they were quite benevolent about it.

The only thing is, on election day, Joe Hurst requested or required that everybody that was on the welfare rolls voted the way he told them to. And if they didn't vote how he said, they would no longer on the welfare rolls.

JOHN RABE: I was very interested by the way you describe the community in rural Georgia at that time. It was a type of community where families had known each other for four, five, six generations. They'd all lived together.

They were people who knew that you were against segregation, and yet they were segregationists themselves. And yet they seemed-- the way you described it in the book, at least, they seemed to relate to you in a friendly manner for the sake of either kinship or friendship.

Homer Moore, who was your opponent in the senate election, went on to help you in New Hampshire, right? Joe Hurst took care of your lawyer's son during a court hearing. He took him out to lunch. It seems like everybody was pretty friendly, even though there was all this animosity.

JIMMY CARTER: Well, there's an element of politeness. And as you say, this is a fairly stable community in plains, for instance. Not the main reason, but one of the reasons that I married my wife, Rosalynn, who was Rosalynn Smith, was because she was one of the few girls in town who wasn't kin to me, and I was one of the few boys that wasn't already kin to her.

And so we had an intimate relationship. For instance, this particular county, equipment county, was about 50 miles away from plains where I lived. And I had never had been there, but once or twice in my life.

But when we started the campaign, we discovered, to my surprise, that the county school superintendent was my wife's first cousin, and he's the one that called me on election day and said even more peculiar things are going on here today than I've ever seen before.

JOHN RABE: Get over here and take a look at it.

JIMMY CARTER: Get over here and take a look at it. But that was the time. And when I was finally in the senate, I wanted to revise the state's election code to prevent the same thing happening again.

So although I was not a lawyer, I helped draft the new election code. And one of the things I mentioned in the book is an amendment that was put in by a senator named Bobby Rowan, who came from the intriguingly named town of Enigma, Georgia.

And Bobby Rowan's amendment was that no one in the future could vote in Georgia in a general election or a primary election who had been dead more than three years. So this was kind of at least a step in the right direction of election reform.

JOHN RABE: This story, the 1962 election, touches on a lot of things that are current now. Touches on, well, not so much vote fraud, although you're watching that internationally, but here in the United states, civil rights and franchise of voters, rural America, cities in America, civil rights in general, racism, all that.

And you speak as if the 1962 were one of the turning points where there was this new kind of people coming in. Do you think for the most part, were the dreams of that time fulfilled?

JIMMY CARTER: No, it was a turning point in the history of our country in that the county unit system was stricken down. And although the original votes to integrate schools had been ordained by the Supreme Court eight years earlier, nothing had happened until this new law came into being. And then the legal racial discrimination in the South and in other places was abolished to some degree, by this law.

But I would say that our society now is just as segregated as it was 30 years ago. It's not segregated because of legal racism, but it's segregated because of societal divisions.

The powerful people in our society who make the decisions, who have the good education and good houses and good jobs, and so forth don't even know their next door neighbors, our next door neighbors who don't have any of those things.

And I describe in the back of the book, the Atlanta Project that we've originated. We identified the 500,000 poorest people in Atlanta, about 15% of the total population, and divided that up into 20 different communities, depending on which high school they attend.

And in those ghetto areas of Atlanta, and the same way with Minneapolis and Saint Paul, or Chicago, or New York, or wherever, they are incredibly destitute and their lives, the quality of their lives is going down very, very rapidly. And they live like a totally different culture.

One of the things, for instance, that I noticed is that in those low-income neighborhoods, the school teachers don't live there. They live in a nice house. They commute into those neighborhoods. They teach and go home. The same way with welfare workers, the same way with health workers, same way with policemen.

There are large schools in Atlanta, which is a fairly enlightened city with African-American mayors for a long time, and so forth. Large schools with eight or 900 students.

Some of the families are fairly affluent. There's not a single white kid in those schools. And they don't have playgrounds, they don't have little league, they don't have the normal things that we take for granted. This is in Atlanta, Georgia, and it's in cities all over the nation.

But quite often, the problem is that the ones who make decisions don't even know these people. And I don't know how many listeners to this program actually know a poor family that doesn't have a decent home, doesn't have a decent job.

JOHN RABE: They don't even have a Joe Hurst to help out.

JIMMY CARTER: They don't have a Joe Hurst whom to turn. And we certainly don't know them well enough to go to those poor families and have a cup of coffee in their kitchen or get to know the names of their teenage sons or, heaven forbid, invite them to come to our house to have a cup of coffee. We don't know them that well.

And another thing I point out is that with this so-called reform of politics, which is obviously beneficial, there's been an element of sterility injected into the political scene.

Joe Hurst and his wife knew every family in that county. If a family had a problem, if it needed a state job, if their roads needed to be scraped, if the school bus didn't come close enough to their home, Joe Hurst knew about it and they knew where to go to get at least an answer to their question. But nowadays, that's gone.

JOHN RABE: The way I understood it in your description of the Atlanta Project was that it tried to coordinate all of the great society institutions that were set up, for instance, tries to coordinate all those that are now working oftentimes at cross-purposes.

Or redundantly, it tries to coordinate all those and get them working together, and tries to coordinate these communities so that they can finally get some help.

JIMMY CARTER: Yeah, that's part of it. What we're trying to do too, though, is to get the people who are in a position of leadership to get acquainted with at least these deprived families.

For instance, every one of the 20 communities in Atlanta Project now has a major corporation that has joined in that community as a full partner, not as a sponsor looking down on them, but as an equal partner.

For instance, Marriott Hotels that have 15,000 employees in Atlanta, they have formed a partnership with one of these communities. So has Delta Airlines, so is Coca-Cola company, so is IBM, so is NationsBank.

So now there's at least a corporate interrelationship with these poor people to offer them a chance to get the jobs that the corporation has to offer, and to help them form committees and to help them improve their recreational facilities.

Also, we have about 25 colleges and universities in Atlanta, in Atlanta area, and every community has a university that's also its partner. So now at least these poor people have a way to turn if they do have a hope or a dream or an ambition or fear. And we are giving them maximum control over the program itself, let them decide which programs work and which ones don't work.

JOHN RABE: How long has it been running?

JIMMY CARTER: We've actually been functioning about a year. It took us about a year to get organized and financed and to get some headquarters. So we've been in operation about a year.

JOHN RABE: Can you gauge any kind of success now? Do you know?

JIMMY CARTER: I think very successful. We've had more than 100 communities around the nation that have sent delegations to Atlanta just to find out what we are doing.

We've made some mistakes, but I think there's been an arousing of hope or confidence among these people who in the past really didn't have any reason to be hopeful and whose lives were blighted not only by poverty and homelessness, but also by hopelessness.

The thing that we don't realize in this country, many of us, is how rapidly the quality of life is going down. For instance, when I left the White House, 13 years ago now, there were about 1,200 homeless people in Atlanta. There are now 15,000 homeless people in Atlanta.

I was in Washington recently and there's been a 700% increase in the last five years in murders committed by juveniles. In Atlanta, the violent crimes has increased 300% in just five years.

So the number of school dropouts, the number of teenage pregnant girls, the crime rate, the drug problem has increased rapidly. And I hope that in the Atlanta Project, we can at least bring about some reversal of this trend and working with other cities around the nation, learn how we can cooperate.

Government at all levels has to play an important role. The corporations who provide the jobs have to play a role. The universities that can help influence the general educational attitude in those communities have to play a role.

And individual volunteer organizations and people need to inject themselves into improving the quality of life among our next door neighbors. If those things can happen, joining with churches and others, I think we can make a difference.

JOHN RABE: Well, thanks for joining us.

JIMMY CARTER: I've enjoyed it.