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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone. As many of you know if you've been listening, we've been playing some short excerpts this week from former President Jimmy Carter's appearances on the show. This, of course, is to honor his life. Now, that Carter has announced that he has entered hospice care, refusing any more medical treatment. He's 98 years old, the longest-living president in US history.

President Carter came on this show four times between 2010 and 2015. We've played excerpts so far in which he talked as a devout Christian about Jesus loving the outcast in one appearance, and yet in another appearance two years later, Christianity as a prime culprit in discrimination against women in the world, even the death of women in the world. We also sampled in yesterday's excerpt from Carter's take on Vladimir Putin, after Putin's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

From Carter and Russia, we move to Carter and China. I mentioned that Carter is 98. In 2015, he released a book called A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, and he came on the show to talk about it. He, of course, tells many stories about his life and his work. I asked him here about one of the stories that surprised me. This runs about three minutes.

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One that surprised me in the book was about China, that you helped to set up local democratic elections in places around the country. The Chinese government let you do that?

President Jimmy Carter: Well, I didn't do it, the Chinese government did it. Deng Xiaoping thought that it was best to let local people elect their own officials. The local people, the cities, the small towns are not part of the communist party system, which starts with big cities, and then it goes to counties and provinces. He thought that it would be better to let them handle their own local affairs potholes in the streets and collection of garbage and running the schools and that sort of thing.

He has a quarter Senate to monitor the process of holding local democratic elections. We did that for 12 years and we actually put forward proposals and let them be as pure a democratic process as we could possibly envision. Everybody would be registered to vote automatically when they reached the age of 18, both men and women. Anybody can run for office, whether they were a member of the Communist Party or not. There would be a secret ballot, they were served for a limited amount of time, they could run for reelection if they wanted to.

We monitor that process and report it on the progress that was made toward pure democracy and more than almost a million small communities 650,000 still. That's what the quarter senate did for a long time in China. Eventually, our website, which got to be extremely popular were a measuring stick on how well China itself was moving toward democratic principles. We've been subject of tightening up lately and we don't have nearly as much freedom to run our websites and have thousands of hits on every minute as a matter of fact like we did before.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think that is, did Beijing feel burned or threatened by the results of your work with local democracy?

President Jimmy Carter: Yes. Deng Xiaoping was completely in favor of it. In fact, he induced the government to pass all the laws I just described to you. Jiang Zemin who followed him was also quite progressive on that issue. Hu Jintao, the one that was last has been much more restraining on that process and Xi Jinping, the current President of China is much more recalcitrant about this issue. Also, there's been a lot of conflict between the Communist Party officials who look on putting themselves as ultimate authorities, and the local people who elected their own local officials.

They're all going back and forth about what to do with surrounding land and taxation and things of that kind. There've been a lot of dissension within China, as inevitable clash comes forward between the old Communist Party officials on the one hand, and the newly elected [unintelligible 00:04:23] and local governments. That's why it's much more tight now and much more reluctant to make, I'd say democratic progress than it was before.

Brian Lehrer: Jimmy Carter here in 2015, on China, which of course, it's so fun. Senator to US policy today. It was surprising to me to hear because I'd never known that story that China had been experimenting with local elections. Unfortunately, Carter saw already in 2015, as he said in that clip, that Xi Jinping was becoming a different kind of leader, one who had less tolerance for experiments with democracy.

What about human rights? Which Carter was so well known for advancing during and after his presidency? What about sanctions in pursuit of human rights, which the US increased again this week? Sanctions are in the news this week on Russia for its crimes against humanity in Ukraine. Well, we'll reach back to Carter's first appearance on the show in 2010, for a book called White House Diary and he surprised me here too when I asked him about sanctions. This is just a minute and a half, at the very end of the interview.

[audio recording]

What do you think the US goal should be with respect to some of the world's worst human rights violators like North Korea? Should it be a normalization of relations or more pressure to see a regime like that full?

President Jimmy Carter: I don't think the sanctions work. I think, in generic terms, sanctions against the people of a country like Cuba, for now, more than 50 years on North Korea, and so forth, I think they're counterproductive because they strengthen the regime with which we disagree. Now, the Cuba dictators, Raul and Fidel Castro can blame all of their economic problems on the American sanctions. The same thing is the case in North Korea, where the sanctions are preventing our working toward a goal that all of us want that is a denuclearization of the entire Korean peninsula and a peace agreement or peace treaty between or among the United States and North and South Korea to replace the temporary ceasefire.

Which legally means that we are still at war and just suffering on a ceasefire. I think we ought to be much more accommodating, much more reaching out to find a common ground on which we can resolve these differences.

Brian Lehrer: President Carter, I know you have to go. Thank you so much for your time today.

President Jimmy Carter: I've enjoyed talking to you. You have some good questions, and you knew what you're talking about. It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, sir, my great pleasure. Jimmy Carter here in 20-, let's see, that one was in 2010. Joining me now for a few minutes to wrap up this short series is Jonathan Alter, veteran journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author of books about FDR, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter. His Carter book, which just came out in 2020, is called His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Jonathan, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with the excerpts we just played. Did you know China under communist rule, held democratic elections for local office, and did Carter had any involvement in that?

Jonathan Alter: I did but I also know that it was a relatively short-lived experiment. Unfortunately, as President Carter indicated, it didn't last as long as one would hope. In my book, I'm much more focused on Carter's normalization of relations with China in 1979, which few people remember, but had long-lasting effects. In fact, Carter told me at one point that he thought that normalization would have the longest-lasting effect of anything he did as president and he did a lot.

Before normalization, just to give you some idea, China had the GDP of a Sub-Saharan African country. After normalization, when Deng Xiaoping returned from a meeting with President Carter in Washington, the first thing he did was legalized private property. Then over the course of the next few decades, as we know, a billion people came out of poverty in China, and the bilateral relationship that we have, as a result of Carter's normalization, generates more than a trillion dollars in trade and is the foundation of the global economy.

What Carter did in 1979, was just of huge importance and some other people have argued that, "Oh, it would have happened anyway," but actually, Gerald Ford wouldn't have done it if you'd beaten Carter in 1976. Ronald Reagan was against it. It would have been several years at a minimum before we had the global economy that we have today, for better or worse.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I think this goes to a large theme of your book and I was going to ask you about that normalization piece because you argue in the book that Carter's reputation as a failed president, but a very successful former president is unfair to what you think was actually a very good presidency. Thinking about this normalization with China that was so historic, as you were just describing. People who think about this period think, "Oh, Nixon went to China." Nixon in China, John Adams even wrote an opera about it, [chuckles] but not Carter goes to China and normalizes relationships. Would you put that in the context of good presidency, not just post-presidency?

Jonathan Alter: Yes. Jimmy Carter was a political failure as president. You could argue he was a stylistic failure compared to Ronald Reagan, but I argue with what I really think is a tremendous amount of evidence that he was a substantive and often farsighted success. As journalists, we tend to view presidents by how they do politically, and he didn't stack up that well. He made a number of political mistakes, he was crushed by Reagan, but historians need to look at presidents on how they changed the country and the world and in that area, and China is just one of many examples we could talk about, he really set us on the right path.

Unfortunately, some of that path, there were steps backward. Just to give you maybe the best-known example, he put solar panels on the roof of the White House and Reagan took them down. A different kind of solar didn't go back up until Obama. He wanted to address climate change, Jimmy Carter did, but his successors didn't. The list, particularly on the environment where he signed 15 major pieces of legislation, doubled the size of the National Park Service, introduced the first fuel economy standards, the first support for clean energy, the first toxic waste cleanup.

I'm just scratching the surface here of his accomplishments, just in that one area. Then in foreign policy, as you suggested, China was overlooked but I think even the human rights policy and what that accomplished, and certainly the Panama Canal treaties, which prevented a major war in Central America, and of course the Camp David Accords, which made peace between Israel and Egypt.

Even there, again, I'm just scratching the surface. We could tour the globe and we could talk about what he did with policy in Africa and Asia and Latin America, the human rights policy helped lead a number of countries to move from autocracy to democracy. Even in the areas of his well-known failures like the Iran hostage crisis, people forget that after the election, all 52 of the hostages came home safely.

As Carter told me, his mother was urging him to bomb Iran. If he had bombed Iran, he probably would've been re-elected, but the hostages would've been killed, and Carter--

Brian Lehrer: He talked about that on the show one time, I didn't pull that clip, but how he thought that in a way his management of the hostage crisis in Iran, even though it was a big factor in him getting not reelected was a success because they never hurt the hostages and they never killed the hostages. He thought, yes, if he had listened to the right-wingers and bombed Iran, they probably would've killed the hostages.

He resisted, as you say, even though it wasn't in his immediate political interest. Jonathan, I want to play one final clip. This is from an appearance by Carter here in 2012. He was already 87 at that time, and already thinking about the potential end of his life and his relationship with Christianity through his life. You'll hear here, I ask him if he believes in an afterlife.

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We just have a few minutes left. I'm curious, as a Christian, do you believe in an afterlife?

President Jimmy Carter: Yes, I do. I believe in an afterlife. I don't know what form it would take and so forth, but I believe in it. We are taught, in my Sunday school class, and I think in most churches that we don't believe in Christ and try to exemplify the life of Christ in our own actions just so we'll have an afterlife. We do it because we are blessed by the knowledge of Jesus and we are blessed by the love of God.

An afterlife is there, but it's not the motivation for us to accept Christ. It's a reward that we have and nobody knows who will be there. Jesus said that in the final judgment, there'll be sheep and goats and some will be chosen to their surprise, some will not be chosen to their surprise. I think it's an unpredictable thing, but I believe in it.

Brian Lehrer: Jimmy Carter here in 2012. Jonathan Alter, before you go, one of the things that emerged for me as I listened back to these four appearances of Carter on the show was a kind of tension that I thought I heard between his deep devout Christianity and the ways that he was very critical of things that were done in the name of Christianity.

There, he suggests that people in the church, in various churches, use belief in an afterlife to coerce people into one kind of behavior or another that they want to control them into doing. He rejected that even though he said he believes there is some kind of reward or punishment of life after death. Is that typical of Carter as you hear him?

Jonathan Alter: Absolutely. We had a number of conversations about this Brian. Toward the end of his life, starting when he was in his 80s and early 90s, he broke with the Southern Baptist Convention over their treatment of women. He also got into a series of, I guess you could call them theological disputes that last clip suggested over what the Bible says about homosexuality.

He has a much more liberal biblical interpretation and his knowledge of scripture is extraordinary. I think everybody knows he was a Sunday school teacher, and I attended some of those sessions. The thing to understand about him, and I think it's clear from the clips, is that he brings extraordinary thoughtfulness and obviously intelligence to everything he does and effort.

My book is called His Very Best because he has always been all in, and this includes religion. He was the most religious man ever to hold the Oval Office. I go through his born-again experience and when he's going door to door for Jesus in 1968, but he always does it with the questioning spirit of the enlightenment. It's this fascinating blend of faith and reason and enlightenment.

Of course, he's an engineer, and the way those play out across his epic life, hugely eventful and colorful life, starting out in the Jim Crow South, and the way he resolves all these things and his concern about how religion has been used to hurt Black people and to justify slavery and all kinds of other things, this all comes into play. He never wants to be Pollyannish about things when he can get to the deeper complexity and humanity below.

Brian Lehrer: Jonathan Alter's biography of Jimmy Carter released in 2020 is called His very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Jonathan, thanks for giving us a few thoughts at the end of this series. We really appreciate it.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Brian.

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