Carter Center

In 1996 Phil Wise called to request my help with a couple of projects at The Carter Center.  I began to organize an event called the Winter Weekend which was a 4-day ski trip to Crested Butte, Colorado and had been going on for a few years with President and Mrs. Carter and about 200-250 supporters.

I was also asked to manage the Carter Administration 20-year Reunion of the 1976 election:  a 2-day schedule of Carter Center briefings and events. I coordinated speeches by the principal Carter Administration alumni extolling our achievements, made a 10-minute music video on the administration, and booked 800 guests for the event.  Because of the limited budget, we worked many long hours, had to secure the help of volunteers, and had to ask for donations and event ticket sales to cover all the costs of the event.

I developed a long, scheduled script for everything that happened and later published a 32-page memento of the event.  Shortly after this time I was put in charge of staying in touch with all the Alumni of the administration and to help the Center raise money from them.  

My attachment to the Center was not because anything I did was special.  It was that the place, and the idea of the place was special. The Carter Center positively affected the lives of millions of the most destitute people in the world on a daily basis.   All of the work at the Center came from President Carter’s drive to help others. He has always had a singular persistence to make any place the world better, and he has the special ability to motivate everyone to join him in this task with the energy well beyond the norm of vastly younger men.   

One of the amazing aspects of being at The Carter Center and of observing President Carter himself over the years was to see time and time again how the work there was done without seeking credit or glory, but with a spirit of charity that seemed to come deep from President Carter’s Sunday school lessons.  It was like the Center, through the determination and values of Jimmy Carter, tried to implement the Beatitudes outlined in Chapter 5 of the Book of Mark in the Bible, but with no postulating or false religious overtones.

From the first time, I heard them taught in Sunday School this passage had been my favorite in the Bible.  It spoke to me of God’s commitment to compassion, understanding and faith in the people of the earth and of his pledge to be their friend and partner in seeking better lives.  Here is the tone of some of them that seem to define the work of The Carter Center and the people we help:

 

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,

    for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you…

The Carter Center works to help the neediest people in the 70 poorest and most undeveloped nations on earth to have greater peace and better health.   It has cured millions of people from debilitating diseases and taught sanitation and basic healthcare in places where those were unknown. It has helped nations emerging from totalitarian rule to understand, implement, and value the concept of democracy.  It has worked to resolve conflict and rancor from squabbling families to warring nations. It has conducted over 100 democratic elections in emerging nations. And it has exposed the uncharitable stigma and need for mental health, and it has given value to people struggling with the many of the complex issues of life.

To do all these things The Carter Center sometimes has had to overcome and circumvent the egos and pomposity of worldwide organizations and people in positions of leadership, ones that never dirtied their hands with the details of caring, and, in fact have extracted a toll to allow outsiders the opportunity to benefit their people and their nations.  

The Carter Center does all these greatly needed things by following the personal commitment of the Carters themselves who employ people motivated by the same values as them to rise above their limitations and achieve their full potential.  The title to President Carter’s first book was a question asked him by Admiral Hyman Rickover when Carter worked for him on the Nation’s nuclear submarine program. Rickover motivated the young officer Carter to reach his full potential by asking him, “Why do you not do your best?”   Jimmy Carter was able to pass on that question implicitly to others by his example and expectations.

One requirement of the Carter Center staff is that they have the patience to sort through the clutter of self-centered and ignorant minds they encounter all over the world and to enlist the support of local people who most embrace an appreciation for good results.  The Center leaves behind networks of doers, of problem solvers, of local native people empowered with the knowledge and the confidence to help themselves. The Center understands that most people in the world want their lives to be better, to improve their families’ status, and to have a sense of pride and hope in their own lives.

My first exposure to the work of the Carter Center was in the Panama elections of 1984 when I worked for one of the candidate and also happened to be the Carter Center’s first act of election monitoring.  The Center and President Carter rightly called the election fraudulent. Thirty years later in 2015, I was still working for the Carter Center, raising money and helping out in a variety of supporting roles when the Center monitored its 100th election around the world.

Moral integrity and international condemnation are the carrot and stick of international election monitoring.   Even the worst despots understand the loss of face in being judged by the world as corrupt and unworthy of governing.   Democracies are fragile and imperfect, but working for 30 years to teach their values and techniques to many emerging nations has made the Carter Center’s reputation the gold standard of judging fairness in elections.  And the Carter Center staff has brought value to the world by teaching our system of government to dozens of nations searching for a better way of life.

The Winter Weekend began to expand and change as we tried to improve the presentations and bring an increasingly diverse group of Carter Center donors to the event each year.

Over time the attendance climbed to over 350 yet still maintains some feeling of an intimate gathering similar to a high school reunion.   At the end of the 4-day event we always held had an auction on the last night. Over time we improved revenues from the auction from about $200,000 a year to over $ 3 million and have raised over $30 million for the work of the Center.

 

The best part was the people.  We worked with a team of volunteers from Delta Airlines and the Carter Center staff to manage the event.  In the early years, we brought 10 different teenage kids each year who were a legacy of a Carter Center program to improve the inner city of Atlanta.   We took them snow skiing, which was the first time many of them had done that or even been on an airplane. I met with them and their parents and encouraged them to use this association with wealthy white people to overcome their trepidation in communicating with the kind of people they would likely be working for as adults.  Many of them got summer jobs from our guests, and this experience helped them in their later lives.

 

I became friends with many of the wonderful donors whose generosity and kind hearts gave hope that the world could be a better place.  We all were swept along by the idea of a dedication to fairness and the belief in humanity’s better instincts.

KOJI

Out of all the many wonderful experiences and people I have encountered during my Carter Center days I will choose just one to illustrate the many important memories I have from this important time in my life.

One year at the Crested Butte location something unusual and wonderful happened.  We had a visiting mayor from Konu Township, a small town in Japan about 45 miles from Hiroshima where because of an affinity between the Carter Center and that Japanese town a center for the promotion of peace had been built.

The mayor spoke almost no English and had a translator, Koji Kopbayashi, who later became a friend.   The mayor had offered to play the wooden Japanese flute for President Carter, and as he was very nervous.   I suggested that he practice in the spacious dining room where he would play that night.

There was just me, Koji, and the mayor in the large room that opened along one long glass wall to view the large mountain when it started to snow in those large drifting flakes that take their time to reach the ground.  It was quiet except for the sound of his breath flowing through the carved wood. The Japanese flute seems sharply tonal and dissonant to what our ears are used to hearing in the West. But it is organically pure and dominates the space in the air around it like a mantra, and it allows other nuanced sounds and feelings to fade.  Each note the mayor played echoed into the start of the next, and the sounds filled the empty space carrying everything toward the window and the snow.

I recognized this as one of those occasions that are special, and realized that I needed to stop my typical obsessive behavior to rush to the next task and take it all in.  I did so for about an hour, and this remains as one of the best experiences of my life – simple, detached, and effortless.

The Interpreter, Koji, was a Hiroshima baby.  He was one of many small children found in the ruins after the bomb who survived, and as an adult and had many kinds of cancer and other health issues.  It made him an avid pacifist. He came back to the Carter event several times, making the long trip from Japan for a few days of to be with us between 2001 and 2009.   He later brought with him other Hiroshima babies, now adults, some with stunted growth or other ailments, but all with a humility and quiet nature that seemed typical in many older Orientals of that time.   

Koji had a difficult time articulating his passion for peace, but his own experience spoke much for him.  He gave me the impression of someone who would go anywhere and do almost anything to add his presence to the prayer for civility.  Unfortunately, over time he had developed a drinking problem and we assigned staff to look after him and to try to limit his excesses.  Somehow that fragility managed to enhance rather than diminished his attempt to make a personal statement, halting and inarticulate as it might have been, that the world owed itself the debt of trying a better place.

As I enter into a sort of semi-retirement, I plan to continue to help at The Carter Center for as long as I can, particularly by staying in touch with the hundreds of Carter-Mondale alumni.   I’m always overjoyed at listening to the stores of the staff telling what they do to improve the far-flung corners of the world. They do their work without arrogance, but because it is in their DNA and they do it to honor the spirit of Jimmy Carter.