The highly publicized activities of Carter and his wife
Rosalynn with Habitat for Humanity make the couple an icon of volunteerism
and an invaluable advertisement for the program that helps the poor.
Furthermore, the former president's efforts as a peacemaker
in several trouble spots around the globe earned him bipartisan admiration,
some of it given grudgingly.
His private diplomatic effort in North Korea posed a
dilemma for the sitting Democrats in the White House, who clearly didn't
want his help but nevertheless praised his humanitarian activity with an
inkling of disdain for someone who actually believed human values could enter
negotiations with a war-mongering and hungry Communist nation.
Carter also has proven a prolific
writer, having produced 11 books, including one co-written with his wife
as a guide to successful living and another especially for children, co-written
with his daughter, Amy.
The former chief executive also has produced a memoir
of his truncated White House tenure, a highly personal book of poems, a
reflection on the outdoor life, and -- most recently -- an insightful presentation
of his spiritual journey of 73 years.
This last book provides readers with a genuine picture
of a man struggling with the negative aspects of being: his selfishness,
his aloofness, his failings as a husband and father and his penchant for
rugged independence, which many commentators see as having contributed to
his failure to retain the White House in the election of 1980.
Most reviewers saw Carter's last book, "Living Faith,"
as an honest and open self-revelation mingled with wise and experience-tempered
admonitions and encouragements from the nation's best known Sunday School
teacher.
In contrast, Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior editor of
Commentary magazine, writing in "The Wall Street Journal" at the end of
last year, proves an outstanding -- indeed, some might say an outlandish
-- example of a Carter naysayer.
Schoenfeld trashes Carter's book
as "sap and sermonizing," and characterizes Carter as "an excruciatingly trite
thinker" and "arguably one of the worst presidents of this century."
The critic blasts Carter's work with Habitat for Humanity
as "a sustained public-relations campaign to repair his tattered reputation."
Schoenfeld writes from his own biases, which obviously
do not cut any slack for people such as Yassir Arafat, Fidel Castro, Syria's
Hafez al Assad, North Korea's Kim Il Sung and Nicaragua's Sandinistas, all
of whom Carter sought to draw into dialogue with the larger world of democracy.
Schoenfeld's review is mean-spirited and decidedly unfair
to facts that run counter to his thesis.
The best counterattack came from
a letter writer to the Journal who castigated Schoenfeld for his "diatribe"
and his "hysterically jaundiced and generally inaccurate opinions."
The writer, Marc S. Herlands of Encinitas, Calif., reminded
Schoenfeld that Carter "engineered the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty; that
the Iranian hostages were released unharmed only a few minutes after President
Reagan's inauguration;" and that Carter "took a highly moral and rather unpopular
stand against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by forbidding U.S. athletes
from participating in the Moscow Olympic games."
Reading carefully, one detects an overriding economic
cynicism in Schoenfeld's attack combined with an obvious distaste for any
politician who introduces questions of values and morality into the national
discussion.
Unfortunately, Schoenfeld seems to have spoken for a
large mass of economic determinists.
In fact, the dividing line may be clearly drawn: Economics vs. human values.
Schoenfeld clearly favors the former, and Carter clearly comes down on the
side of the latter.
Perhaps the clearest word presented lately that favors
Carter's viewpoint over the certainly more widespread view espoused by Schoenfeld
can be found in the words of Pope John Paul II.
According to a Reuters report
of several months ago, the Pope told an audience of distinguish bankers and
university professors that the human person is more important than profit.
"There are still too many poor people around the world,
who have no access to the least share of the opulent wealth of a minority,"
the Pope wrote, in words that easily could have been lifted from Carter's
musings.
In these days of record-breaking Dow averages and a
robust economy that has the United States once again being admired by the
financiers of the world, Carter's stance -- as well as the Pope's -- is
not popular.
Carter and his wife have tried to bolster their convictions
through the Carter Center, a non-political think-tank and social activist
center that operates out of Atlanta on a $27.6 million annual budget supporting
programs around the world aimed at easing the pain of war and poverty.
Earlier this year, Carter, talking
to Houston Chronicle reporter Cecil S. Holmes, said humanity seeks something
unchangeable to rely on and that he believes -- with St. Paul -- those things
cannot be seen.
"You can see a bank account," Carter said. "You can
see a new house. You can see a new automobile. You can see your name in the
paper."
Then he added, "You can't see justice or truth or compassion
or service or humility."
In his book, Carter traces his thinking on justice and courage and faith to Soren Kierkegaard, the melancholy Danish philosopher, and to Paul Tillich, the American theologian, hardly the stuff -- as Schoenfeld would have us believe -- of trite thinking.
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Allan R. Andrews can be reached at allan.andrews@reporters.net