Interview with President Jimmy Carter: Free Elections

In the second episode of a five-part series, former President Jimmy Carter details the Carter Center's work supporting free elections and fighting disease across the globe. Listen in and learn more in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you Stuff you missed in History class from
how Stuff Works dot com. In celebration of the reopening
at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and the
former president's eighty fifth birthday, we sat down with Nobel
Laureate Jimmy Carter to talk about the highlights of his

(00:21):
presidency and his hopes for the Carter Center m How
did your post presidential career emerge? Well, my post presidential
career was forced on me because I was involuntarily retired

(00:42):
as a result of the elections when I was not
re elected. And at the time that happened, I was
one of the few, one of the youngest survivors of
the White House, and I realized just from you know, statistics,
that I had twenty five more years of active life
in prospect. What am I going to do with twenty
five more years. I didn't want to be involved in

(01:04):
commercial affairs. I didn't want to go on a lecture
circuit and just make a lot of money making speeches.
I didn't want to work on for corporate boards. So
what I am I going to do? And I knew
that both I and my wife had a great potential
influence around the world. Having been president of the Greenist
Nation on the War Earth, we obviously add access to
everybody we wanted to meet, famous scientists, famous doctors, political leaders,

(01:30):
educational leaders. So we had a potential of really helping
in many parts of the world in ways that were
I would say unpredictable and adventurous and exciting, uh, sometimes disappointing,
but most of the time gratifying. And we decided to
start with by helping people end or prevent wars. That

(01:56):
was the original concept of the Court of Center. We're
going to form a place here where people that had
a conflict going on in the country, or they were
threatened with the with the conflict or war could come
here and I would help negotiate between them and maybe
prevent a war. And that was the original idea. And
so when we got started with that idea, it soon

(02:16):
became clear to us that a much greater and more
all pervasive need was helped people with combating diseases. And
these are diseases that are not known anymore in the
United States or in Europe or Japan or any rich country.
They've been gone for a long time. Diseases that with
which you probably never have heard dracune collissis, uncle psychisis

(02:42):
and fathic for aris. It's just so surmises tracoma. But
these are diseases we don't know about anymore, but they
afflict hundreds of millions of people still throughout Africa and
in Latin America and in the poorest and most isolated
country in Asia. So that's what we found was the

(03:03):
greatest need that existed among the first and most neglected
and suffering people in the world. And nowadays three fourths
of the Quarter Center's work, in both money spent and
personnel effort, is in the dealing with what we call
neglected tropical diseases. That's the name that the World Health

(03:26):
Organization has given these diseases because they have before the
Quarters sound been neglected. They're not any more elected neglected
because we vote had time to try and to address them.
What about the carters that are worked with free elections.
You know, when we started trying to end wars and

(03:47):
prevent wars, we found it quite often inside countries where
the civil war is about to emerge, that you would
have maybe two armies headed by two generals fighting each
other in the same nation and so we soon discovered
that having an election was better than negotiating because I

(04:11):
could go to both presidents, both of the generals, they say, look,
why don't you let the people of this country decide
who should be their next leader instead of you fighting
for it, because we believe that the people will choose
the best person to be the president. And this is
a part of politics, it's kind of politics of self delusion.

(04:34):
Both of those generals would think, well, I'm certainly the
best person, and if you let the people vote, I'm
sure they will choose me. So the Carter Center began
to go in and put together a system whereby the
people could have their first democratic election in history. And then,
of course, one of those generals was disappointed in the election,

(04:55):
so we had to get other people to help us,
the United Nations and so forth, to make sure that
the loser would accept the results of election graciously, and
also the winner would accept the results of election graciously
and not try to punish once in office their opponents
that used to be their battlefield adversaries. So that's the

(05:17):
way we got involved in the election process. And after
that we got involved too in countries that have already
had democracy. But had a real problem on their hands.
Sometimes the ruling party who was in office would so
dominate the whole process and put their own people in

(05:37):
to run the election that the opposition parties would say,
we don't have a chance to win, why should we
get involved. So quite often those opposition parties we come
to the court of Center and say, will you come
into our country and make sure the election is honest,
and we would agree to do so, and they let
the people stir up such a fual The ruling party

(05:59):
would all so agreed to let us come in. Being Finnish,
sure they were gonna win. But quite often the ruling
party doesn't win. So we've now been through I believe
seventy five elections throughout the world, in Asia and Africa
and that American and so forth all over the world.
Every one of them difficult challenge, but everyone very important

(06:22):
to the people in the country involved, and we've been
able to promote democracy and freedom and the right of
people to make to make their own choice about who
should be there political leader. Be shorter to tune in
every Wednesday in September for more of our interview with
President Carter to learn more about the Carter Center and
its mission of waging peace, fighting disease, and building help

(06:45):
visit www dot Carter Center dot org and, as always,
for moral myths than thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com