| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN is your unfiltered view of government. | |
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Charter Communications. | ||
| Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers, and we're just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. | ||
| Charter Communications supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Yet again from the C-SPAN Archives, former President Jimmy Carter spoke about the situation in the Middle East during a discussion in 2011 from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. | ||
| This is an hour, 15 minutes. | ||
| Good evening, everybody. | ||
| My name is Tom Johnson. | ||
| I am a friend of the LBJ family. | ||
| 16 years ago, the first Harry Middleton lecture took place in this auditorium. | ||
| The next day, Lady Bird Johnson, who had established the lectureship to honor the man who was then library director, wrote to him to express her pride and her gratification that the event had been, and these were her words, a watershed day in the life of the OBJ Library. | ||
| She was moved by what she felt was the chemistry that the speaker had created between himself and his audience, which was heavily composed that day by students. | ||
| Contrary to the fog of cynicism and gloom we seem as a country to have been wrapped in for some time, she wrote, the atmosphere, the chemistry of that day was so upbeat and so hopeful. | ||
| The speaker that day, the creator of that chemistry, was President Jimmy Carter. | ||
| President Carter returned to this library a few years later in another unforgettable appearance. | ||
| He and President Gerald Ford, once foes in a political war that they had waged, met on this stage in exchange of very common discourse with a disposition to seek common ground on the issues that were confronting this nation. | ||
| It was a display of the American political system at its very finest. | ||
| No one who was here that day will ever forget it and how we so need that civility and that respect for each other in the politics of today. | ||
| So it is a great honor for us to welcome this splendid man back here once again. | ||
| I say it from the memory of the risk, the very rich distinctions that he has already conferred on this library and this school by his visits. | ||
| 39th President of the United States, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, a tireless global traveler for the cause of justice, the provider of homes for the homeless, a man who made Lady Burt Johnson proud of the lectureship she created in the name of Harry Middleton. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President Jimmy Carter. | ||
| Interviewing President Barbara tonight is the outstanding new executive director of the OBJ Library. | ||
| Not quite so new anymore, but a person we are delighted to have in that position. | ||
| Certainly a worthy successor to Harry Middleton. | ||
| Welcome, Mark, up to Grove. | ||
| Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. | ||
| Welcome to you. | ||
| Thank you so much for being here, Mr. President. | ||
| We are delighted to have you back. | ||
| And you come at a very fortuitous time in the sense that I think all of our minds are on what's going on in the Middle East right now. | ||
| There is no one, no one U.S. president more associated with the Middle East than you. | ||
| You, of course, brokered the historic 1978 peace accord between Israel and Egypt. | ||
| And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you view the situation in the Middle East currently. | ||
| Thank you, Mark. | ||
| It's good to be here again and to be in the library of a man who helped shape my life and for whom I have the greatest admiration and appreciation. | ||
| When I was governor, and after Lyndon Johnson left office, I wrote him a personal letter, a handwritten letter, and sent it out here. | ||
| I don't know if you still have it or not, but if you don't, you might want to look it up. | ||
| I don't imagine they threw it away, but I'm not sure about that. | ||
| But if you find it, I'd like a copy of it because I just handwrote it on an airplane trip. | ||
| Well, I think the Middle East is still the tenter box for the whole world. | ||
| And I say that, recognizing that there are other places that are threatening to erupt. | ||
| And I include the Middle East in its totality all the way, including Lebanon, of course, but also Pakistan. | ||
| But I think that what you refer to primarily was between Israel and its neighbors. | ||
| And when I became president in ancient days, there was no effort for me to begin trying to negotiate for peace. | ||
| Nobody put pressure on me. | ||
| There was nothing going on. | ||
| And there had been four major wars in just the previous 25 years, all of them led on the Arab side by Egypt, who was then in bed with the Soviet Union. | ||
| And all of Egypt's military capabilities, including 12,000 advisors, were from Russia. | ||
| And of course, we were supporting Israel. | ||
| So when I became president, I wanted to try to bring peace to the Holy Land about which I had taught in my Sunday school class since I was 18 years old. | ||
| And so I began to meet with the major leaders and met with Menachem Begin and others. | ||
| I won't go into detail about that, but the finest person I ever met who was a foreign leader was Anwar Sadat. | ||
| And because of Sadat's courage and intelligence and generosity, we were able, as you said, Mark, to get an agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978 that Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories and give the Palestinians full autonomy and let them run their own affairs. | ||
| And six months later, after intense negotiations, we had a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in April of 1979, not a word of which, by the way, in 32 years has ever been violated. | ||
| And after I left office in January, involuntarily retired by the election results of 1980, Sadat and I were still close friends. | ||
| And we visited him in Egypt, and his wife and my wife were friends, and his children and grandchildren were friends, and even our grandchildren, great-grandchildren, were friends. | ||
| So we were very close to each other. | ||
| And in October the 8th of that year, Sadat was assassinated. | ||
| Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak, was the vice president and immediately took office. | ||
| And he was Sadat's anointed successor. | ||
| Since then, for 30 years or so, Mubarak has chosen not to have a vice president. | ||
| And although she started out as a very enlightened leader, following in Sadat's footsteps, after a while, Mubarak became so infatuated with power and his family became more and more powerful in addition to him, his son, and others, and they became very rich and investing heavily in the future money-making schemes in Egypt that he decided not to let anybody challenge him for president. | ||
| So for 30 years, you might say, they had no elements of democracy or freedom and became increasingly abusive. | ||
| And then, of course, came the demonstrations in Tunisia that were successful, and then they began about three weeks ago, I think yesterday, in Egypt. | ||
| Not organized by any particular group, not the Muslim Brotherhood or anyone else, because all the political parties had been kept under wraps out of existence by Mubarak. | ||
| But they grew and eventually, as you know, Mubarak was forced to leave. | ||
| I don't know what's going to happen now. | ||
| The Qatar Center has been deeply involved in internal affairs in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and also in Syria as well as Egypt for a number of years. | ||
| We have full-time offices in those places. | ||
| And I have been negotiating primarily with a man named Omar Suleiman, who was chosen by Mubarak two weeks ago to be his vice president, which he had never had before. | ||
| And Suleiman was head of the intelligence services for Egypt. | ||
| And when I went to the Middle East, which I do several times a year, I always try to have supper or lunch with Omar Suleiman because he knows more about the Middle East than anyone else he did because he has intelligence capabilities in every country there, including spies and others. | ||
| So what's going to happen now, I don't know. | ||
| But as you all realize, that the effort by the United States to bring peace between Israel and its neighbors is completely at a stalemate. | ||
| Nothing is happening. | ||
| And that's not an exaggeration. | ||
| It's completely dead in the water. | ||
| Because what President Obama demanded in Egypt, in Cairo, shortly after being inaugurated about ending the settlements, was completely ignored by the Israelis. | ||
| They're madly building settlements now in all of Palestine, except for Gaza, of course, and nothing is happening. | ||
| So I think that in the future we'll see maybe more flexibility at least in dealing with the primary interest that I have and that is bringing peace to Israel and its neighbors. | ||
| The Carter Center will be involved as much as possible in helping to orchestrate another successful election in Egypt, which will be their first one since Sadat's death. | ||
| And I'll be sending a delegation over there within the next week to meet with the military leaders and also the opposition to see how we can help them formulate a new constitution and also to have successful elections probably next September. | ||
| That may be more than you wanted to know about it, but that's some of the things. | ||
| I don't think we know enough yet. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We need to know. | ||
| The Egyptian military currently holds power in Egypt. | ||
| And they've said that they would yield to the democratic process. | ||
| Can we trust that the junta will, in fact, make good on their promise? | ||
| They have deep economic interests in Egypt and ostensibly an interest in protecting the status quo. | ||
| What are your views on? | ||
| Well, as you know, when Mubarak decided to step down, he said that Omar Suleiman, his vice president, would take over. | ||
| He was in bed with Mubarak. | ||
| And that was not satisfactory to the freedom demonstrators. | ||
| And so they refused. | ||
| And the military has been very congenial and helpful to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and other places. | ||
| And they protected them against the very abusive police and others. | ||
| And so I think that many of the young people had confidence in the military in generic terms to protect them. | ||
| There is a junta or a conference that the military has now. | ||
| They had only met twice in history. | ||
| And now I think they've met four or five times since Mubarak left office. | ||
| And it was their meeting together after Mubarak said he would stay in office. | ||
| And they passed word to Mubarak, you have to step down. | ||
| And he did what the military told him. | ||
| As a matter of fact, the military have been in power now for more than 50 years. | ||
| Sadat was a product of the military as well as NASA before him. | ||
| So the military will be in charge of Egypt's security and a lot of other factors in Egypt in the future. | ||
| My guess is that the military leaders don't want to give up their political influence or power, but they have seen what the demonstrators have done, and I think the demands of the demonstrators will not permit the military to keep charge of the political situation. | ||
| They'll still be in charge of the military. | ||
| They still have a lot of financial investments in various aspects of Egyptian life, but I don't have any doubt much that the demonstrators will not accept anything except honest and fair and open elections with the formation of political parties permitted for the first time and maybe a competitive election both for the parliament of Egypt and also for the presidency. | ||
| As you know, yesterday I believe the military junta dissolved the parliament which was elected under Mubarak's leadership without any real opposition except for his own political party. | ||
| So I believe it is a good chance now that the military, despite the fact that they would rather stay in power, will give up political power, that is with honest elections and freedom for the people the rest of this year. | ||
| Mr. President, how should we view the Muslim Brotherhood? | ||
| I've known members of the Muslim Brotherhood because when I go to Egypt and other places, I try to meet with all the political people. | ||
| And they have played a small role. | ||
| They are well organized. | ||
| They have ties to Hezbollah in Lebanon and also to Hamas, whose headquarters are in Syria, in Damascus, but who also have ties with Gaza, they control Gaza. | ||
| I think that the Muslim Brotherhood are not anything to be afraid of in the upcoming political situation or evolution that I see as most likely, because they will be subsumed in the overwhelming demonstration of desire for freedom and true democracy, and I would say a secular or non-religious government that we saw in the demonstrations in the last three weeks. | ||
| And although the Muslim Brotherhood might put together a party, public opinion polls that I have seen show that only about 15% of Egyptians would support the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| And so they'll be one of many parties to run, and I don't think there's any likelihood at all of them prevailing and establishing Sharia or Islamic law that would prevent the demonstrators' desire for peace and freedom from be realized. | ||
| There's clearly been a domino effect in the Middle East, principally through social media. | ||
| I'm wondering, what should the U.S.'s role be now? | ||
| How do we balance our security and financial interests with our role in fostering democracy in that part of the world? | ||
| Well, we've come a long way in recent years, and although we have been very close to Mubarak and we've been close to other dictators in the Middle East that don't permit any kind of freedoms as we cherish them, we used to have the same arrangement in South America. | ||
| For instance, when I became president, the previous presidents, including President Johnson and others, had been very close to the dictators in South America. | ||
| Most of the countries in South America were military dictatorships. | ||
| And our business community in America formed partnerships to make sure they got first choice at iron and steel and bauxite and pineapples and bananas or anything that might be attractive coming out of South America. | ||
| And what our business community wanted and what our political leaders wanted too, and that included political leaders on both sides in the Congress and in the White House, was to have stability. | ||
| And stability is quite often incompatible with freedoms. | ||
| So whenever any demonstrators like the ones we saw in Tunisia and Egypt rose up, began to rise up in South America, we would say they are communists, they're all communists, and we've got to stamp them out because that might be a threat to us. | ||
| And we would even send in Marines in the Army to back up the dictators in holding down any sort of freedom fighters. | ||
| And a lot of them were indigenous Indians and just poor people looking for better lives. | ||
| That changed. | ||
| And I was part of that change when I became president. | ||
| And by within five years after I left the White House, every country in South America had become a democracy, and they still are, by the way. | ||
| Although some are not quite friendly with us, like, for instance, say Venezuela. | ||
| But anyway, they're democracies. | ||
| So I think that this will be a signal to the United States that, like we did in South America, to start doing the same thing in the Middle East area, particularly in the Arab countries, and permit freedom of increasing freedom of elections. | ||
| Some countries like Jordan, which we visit regularly, have something of an election for parliamentary members. | ||
| And the three elections that we have monitored in Palestine, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and East Jerusalem, have been completely open, free, democratic, and safe. | ||
| So it's almost a pure democracy, although they are not in existence right at this moment. | ||
| And we had a very good election in Lebanon this past April. | ||
| I was there and the Cordova Center monitored that election as well. | ||
| So I think that there's some kind of breaking the groundwork, even in some of the Arab countries with control from the center, of opening up, and I think the United States will be much more cautious in the future of taking sides overtly or openly with the military dictatorships, including Arab leaders who are friends, if there is an honest exhibition of desire for more democracy. | ||
| Even in Saudi Arabia, there have been 10 leaders, most of them professors, by the way, who have formed a political party. | ||
| That's as far as they've gotten. | ||
| They've asked the king to approve their party. | ||
| And I'm sure that if King Abdullah says no, then they will disband immediately. | ||
| But there are glimpses of what freedom means now. | ||
| And I would guess that in Yemen might be the next crucial area. | ||
| Bahrain lately has had pretty large demonstrations. | ||
| Syria is fairly stable. | ||
| They have a young, fairly progressive president who inherited the office from his father. | ||
| But I think that the United States in the future will be much more amenable to democracy taking over even in the Arab countries where their leaders are our close friends. | ||
| What about Iran, Mr. President? | ||
| We've seen there that there's been a severe reaction against the opposition among the leadership, significantly different than Egypt. | ||
| What do you think will transpire there in the coming days? | ||
| Well, you remember about eight or nine years ago, there was an honest and fair election in Iran, and a very moderate president was elected. | ||
| And he served until Netanyahu became president. | ||
| Probably Netanyahu was elected fairly the first time when he took office. | ||
| But then in this last election, there's great doubts about whether it was an honest election. | ||
| The ultimate power in Iran is obviously religious. | ||
| The Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran makes the ultimate decisions, even vetoing what Netanyahu, the elected president, says he would like to do on many occasions. | ||
| So I don't really see any prospect at this time as much as we would like to see it of a president being elected that's not approved directly by the religious leaders. | ||
| As a matter of fact, even in previous elections that I just described in fairly complimentary way, the Ayatollah and his religious leaders, they can decide if a candidate can run or not run for the parliament and for president. | ||
| So they have veto power over any candidate. | ||
| So they make a very good, careful screening process to make sure no radicals would be elected who might be a danger to the present Sharia law and the leadership of the Ayatollahs. | ||
| How has President Obama done in handling the Middle Eastern situation? | ||
| I think he's done quite well the last three weeks in handling the Egyptian situation. | ||
| At first, he and the Secretary of State and the Vice President were saying that Mubarak was our friend, that we needed to have stability and that someday there might be a change there and we trusted Mubarak to make the changes. | ||
| That was the first series of statements made by the president and all of his subordinates. | ||
| But as the times changed from one week to another, they became more and more supportive of the dissidents who were demonstrating against Mubarak. | ||
| And then finally, the president announced that he wanted to see the changes made to a democracy and freedom now. | ||
| And that's when Mubarak responded very angrily that he wouldn't respond to outside pressure. | ||
| So I would say that in general that Obama has handled Egypt very well, about the same way I would have handled it if I'd been in office. | ||
| I would probably have been loyal to Mubarak at the beginning. | ||
| Because the United States doesn't want to send signals to all of our other friends in the Middle East that we will abandon you the first time demonstrators go public. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so we had to show our friends and allies in Saudi Arabia and other places that we will back you as long as you meet minimal standards on freedom and democracy. | |
| But once it became clear that Mubarak would not do so, then we did the right thing in giving our support completely to the revolutionaries. | ||
| And I would say that they didn't want it. | ||
| They did not want American support or need it because they didn't want to be branded accurately by the allegation that they were being controlled from Washington. | ||
| They wanted the world to know that there was a self-originating effort for freedom and that they didn't depend on Washington to let them be successful. | ||
| More broadly, Mr. President, how do you think Obama has done since stepping into office in January of 2009? | ||
| Well, I think he's done the best he could in domestic affairs, dealing with problems that President Johnson and I and none of the predecessors of Obama ever had to face. | ||
| That is a completely polarized nation and a completely polarized Congress. | ||
| You have to remember that the major things that Obama advocated when he came in office after he promised them in his campaign, sometimes on those major issues that the Republicans had supported earlier, he couldn't get a single vote among Republicans in the House or Senate. | ||
| So they made a determination at the beginning, the Republicans did, that they wouldn't support Obama on anything. | ||
| I think after the election in November, during the so-called lame duck conference session, they moderated their position a little bit. | ||
| But he was faced with opposition in the Congress that I never experienced. | ||
| In fact, my main challenge in the Congress when I was president was the liberal Democrats. | ||
| Because after the first year I was in office, Ted Kennedy decided to run for president against me, and he garnered a lot of support from the more liberal Democrats. | ||
| So I had to turn to the conservative Democrats and the moderate Republicans to help me. | ||
| And that's why we were very successful. | ||
| And in fact, nobody since in this last 50 years has been more successful at the Congress than I was, except one, and that was Lyndon Johnson, as you all know. | ||
| So I would say that on domestic affairs, he's done the best he could, and he's prevailed on a number of issues for which he hadn't got much credit. | ||
| As far as the Middle East was concerned, I was very pleased when President Obama made his speech in Cairo calling for an end to the settlements, because I and almost all Obama's predecessors until recently have said that every settlement built in Palestine was both illegal and an obstacle to peace. | ||
| And when he made his speech in Cairo, he said that all the settlements had to cease. | ||
| But under great pressure, which I have experienced myself, both before I was president, before I graduated from the presidency and after I left, I know what that pressure can be. | ||
| And so he's completely backed down. | ||
| And he's now more recently been more accommodating to the demands of Netanyahu and the Israelis even than George W. Bush was. | ||
| As a matter of fact, a few months ago, the Obama administration spokesperson was Hillary Clinton made an offer to the Israelis of things that no previous president had ever offered them just if they would stop building settlements for three months. | ||
| And Netanyahu turned him down. | ||
| And so as a result of that, I think President Obama has basically given up on peace in the Middle East. | ||
| So we don't have anything going on now as far as bringing peace between Israel and the Palestinians is concerned, or between Israel and the Syrians on the Golan Heights, or between Israel and Lebanon. | ||
| Nothing's going on. | ||
| And in the past number of months when Omar Suleiman, who was Mubarak's vice president, was negotiating between one group of Palestinians, Fatah and Hamas, to bring them together with a reconciliation so they could have another election, the United States basically vetoed that whole process because Israel preferred that they not be reunited. | ||
| So I don't have any feeling of success in what President Obama has done in the Middle East. | ||
| I'm not here to criticize him, but you asked me, and I've told you the truth. | ||
| My hope is, as I said just in passing earlier, that the shake-up in Egypt and the potential shake-up in other countries will cause some new flexibility, at least in addressing the issues on which the entire international community agrees, that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, | ||
| except to modify the borders where the main settlements are, and that the Palestinians should be given the right to have their own elections and choose their own people, and that Palestine, if it's the name of the nation, and Israel should leave in peace and harmony with a two-state solution. | ||
| The impending threat now is a one-state solution, which means just one Israel all the way between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. | ||
| And at this moment, Jews are in a minority. | ||
| There's a majority of non-Jews living in that one state right now. | ||
| Israelis still have the more number of votes because many of the Arabs who are a lot of Christians and Muslims are not yet old enough to vote. | ||
| But it's obvious that in the future, there'll be a majority living in that one state who are not Jews. | ||
| So Israel will have to make a choice then of persecuting the Palestinians so they can't vote or permitting a vote where the Jews might be in a minority, where they would no longer have control of the whole government. | ||
| And that's something that nobody wants. | ||
| So what we want is a two-state solution with Israel living in its present country with modification of the borders and the Palestinians living in their country alongside both deeply committed with international supervision to live in peace with each other. | ||
| Mr. President, you mentioned something that bears repeating, and that is that you had the best legislative batting average among modern presidents with the exception of Lyndon Johnson. | ||
| And you also talked about the divisions in Washington. | ||
| Can they be repaired, in your view, and if so, how? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think one encouraging factor, you might be surprised at this, is the taking over of the House of Representatives by the Republicans. | ||
| Because I'm speaking as a completely objective Democrat. | ||
| In the last two years, in my opinion, the Republicans have been completely irresponsible because they didn't have any responsibility in the White House, the Senate, or the House. | ||
| And now they do have a major part of their political responsibility. | ||
| That is how they run the House of Representatives. | ||
| So I see in the future maybe when there are serious disagreements, that Obama will make his proposals. | ||
| It'll go to the House of Representatives. | ||
| They will vote it down or amend it. | ||
| And then it'll go to the Senate, maybe with a stalemate, because there'll be very frequent filibuster rules, as you know. | ||
| And then Obama can take his position to the public of the United States and say, this is specifically what I advocate in the field of welfare or health or education or budgets or military or whatever. | ||
| And this is what I think is right, and this is what the majority of senators say is right. | ||
| And this is a specific position that the Republicans in the House take. | ||
| So let the public make a choice. | ||
| Do you approve? | ||
| Do you agree with me or agree with them? | ||
| It'll be a new era in the Obama administration in presenting two opposing views where both sides have some responsibility. | ||
| I don't know if you follow me or not. | ||
| It's kind of complicated. | ||
| But I think that's what is likely to happen in the future. | ||
| So I think we'll see more cooperation in the next two years on key issues than we've seen the first two years, except for the Rain Leibniz session. | ||
| Mr. President, the image behind us is, as you pointed out, from the 1976 Time Man of the Year covers, a rendering of you by Jamie Wyeth. | ||
| And about half of our audience is students here, all of whom were likely not born until after you stepped down from office. | ||
| Much later. | ||
| You talk in your most recent book, White House Star, you talk about the improbability of you becoming president in 1976. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about that race and how you eventually got the nomination and ultimately the presidency itself? | ||
| Well, I was just a governor of Georgia. | ||
| There hadn't been any person from the Deep South. | ||
| I'm including Lyndon Johnson, not being from the Deep South. | ||
| There hadn't been anybody from the Deep South except since the 1840s. | ||
| Because of the race issue, primarily, because we were looked upon as the primary preservers of separate but equal or racial segregation. | ||
| And our top leaders in the Congress and in governorships and so forth were all determined to preserve racial segregation. | ||
| And so there was a stigma on the Deep South that was very deep. | ||
| Because Lyndon Johnson became president and because he passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it liberated me to overcome that stigma, potentially. | ||
| And I saw that as an opening, a very small opening, that I might fill. | ||
| So I began to campaign when I left the governor's mansion. | ||
| And I didn't have any money. | ||
| And almost all of the Democratic Party leaders, I don't know of any exceptions, were for some of the nine or ten candidates running against me, including Lloyd Benson from Texas, as you remember. | ||
| And so I didn't have much of a chance. | ||
| I campaigned by myself with just one assistant, Jody Powell, who later became our press secretary. | ||
| We never stayed in a hotel or motel. | ||
| We couldn't afford it. | ||
| None of the people that worked for me in the campaign were permitted to stay in a motel unless they paid their own way. | ||
| And when we went into a town, we would try to find somebody to let us spend a night with them. | ||
| And I would have to stay up all night listening to their stories or questions. | ||
| But we made an impact, and so when we left, they supported us. | ||
| So I was kind of, I hate to say this in a way, but I was kind of like the Tea Party has been the last year. | ||
| Because the people that supported me were so fed up with Washington that they were looking for somebody to represent non-Washington politics. | ||
| And we were in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. | ||
| We were in the aftermath of Watergate. | ||
| We were in the aftermath of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy and also Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| And we were in the aftermath of the church investigating committee in the U.S. Senate that showed that the CIA, particularly under Kennedys, had committed serious crimes, even of assassination. | ||
| So there was a disillusionment on the part of the American people with Washington. | ||
| And that was the main thing that I emphasized. | ||
| I told them I would never lie to them and so forth. | ||
| And I emphasized the fact that I was from the deep south. | ||
| I had been out of politics and all of my predecessors had, that I was a peanut farmer and that sort of thing. | ||
| And so it was because of those volunteers in Texas and other places that I never had before, that never had been involved in politics before, that I was finally elected. | ||
| As a matter of fact, amazingly, still to me, I ran against one of the best men I've ever known in Texas, and that was Lloyd Benson. | ||
| I beat Lloyd Benson 2-1 in Texas, which was amazing even now to me. | ||
| But I had a kind of a groundswell of support among people who had not been involved in politics before. | ||
| And that's really how I was able to prevail. | ||
| But you knew that you would be the first president from the deep south to be elected since Zachary Taylor. | ||
| You were one-term governor from the state of Georgia. | ||
| What made you think you could win? | ||
| Well, I wasn't sure, but I told Rosenman again, my wife, that if I only got two votes, I was going to stay in until the end. | ||
| And my, this is kind of bragging now, but my tenacity was one thing. | ||
| I was not about to back down, even when I had disappointments. | ||
| And I had several disappointments and embarrassments where I made some mistakes, but I stuck with it. | ||
| And at first, my only potential opponent that was well known were two. | ||
| One was Ted Kennedy, who was running for president, and the other was George Wallace from the deep south, a segregationist. | ||
| And my idea when I first began to think about running was that I would get in between Kennedy and Wallace as a moderate, and that would be my avenue to the White House. | ||
| So that's why that's what I happened. | ||
| But then when Ted Kennedy withdrew from the campaign after Chappaquittick and so forth, I saw a lot of very wonderful people, most of them out of the U.S. Senate and from the House of Representatives like Mo Udall and two or three governors, enter the race against me. | ||
| And so I was disappointed, but I kept going. | ||
| And so the reason I first got in it, though, to answer your question, was I thought it would be between me and George Wallace and Ted Kennedy. | ||
| What is your proudest accomplishment as president? | ||
| I think the proudest accomplishment in general terms is maintaining peace. | ||
| We never dropped a bomb, we never fired a bullet, we never launched a missile while I was president. | ||
| And the main thing is that we tried to bring that sort of relationship to other countries. | ||
| I spent a lot of time negotiating between Israel and Egypt to prevent another war and to normalize diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and working in Africa with Zimbabwe and South Africa to try to bring democracy. | ||
| Those kind of things. | ||
| So I would say to preserve peace for us and maybe enhance it for others. | ||
| And then the number one thing of which I'm most proud, I guess, would be the treaty between Israel and Egypt, which has been precious even to today and in the future. | ||
| Which still remains in effect after all these years. | ||
| Not a single word's ever been violated. | ||
| You and I have talked at great length about your post-presidency, which you have talked about as being your most satisfying chapter in your life. | ||
| Talk a little bit about the work that you've done at the Carter Center and its impetus upon leaving the White House. | ||
| Well, when I left the White House, I was fairly young. | ||
| I was just 56 years old. | ||
| I had a life expectancy of 25 years, so my first question was, what am I going to do the next 25 years? | ||
| And I had already been an accomplished peanut farmer and a good fertilizer salesman. | ||
| So I didn't want to go back to that. | ||
| I made a foolish statement right after I was defeated by Reagan that I wouldn't serve on corporate boards or spend my life making public speeches for money, which was not a wise thing to say. | ||
| So I didn't know what I was going to do. | ||
| And so I had the horrible responsibility of raising money and building a presidential library. | ||
| And that was not good for a defeated Democrat who has no plans to run for future office. | ||
| And I had the same problem that Gerald Ford faced. | ||
| And so as we approached the planning stage of the Court of Presidential Library, I wanted to form a Carter Center, separate. | ||
| And my first thought was that I would just have a place like Camp David, where people that had conflict on their hands, say from a foreign country, could come to the Carter Center and I could negotiate between them. | ||
| Oh, I would be glad to go to their country. | ||
| So that was the whole idea. | ||
| But later we adopted a policy of filling vacuums in the world. | ||
| We decided not to ever duplicate what the United States was doing or the United Nations or the World Bank or Harvard University or anywhere else, but just to do things that nobody else wanted to do. | ||
| And that got us more and more deeply involved in health care in Africa. | ||
| So now 75% of our total budget and personnel, and our total cash budget each year is now about $100 million, is devoted to health care in Africa and to some degree in Latin America. | ||
| So we address diseases that are not any longer known anywhere in the rich world. | ||
| Diseases like dracuncoli. | ||
| dracuncoliasis, onchocasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, and to some degree, more lately, malaria. | ||
| And so that's what we do in countries all over Africa. | ||
| We also had a major agricultural program for about 15 years where we'd go into small farmers' operations. | ||
| They had an average of only two acres of land. | ||
| And we would teach them how to increase their production of basic food grains, just corn, wheat, rice, sorghum, millet, and so forth. | ||
| Nothing of a cash crop like cotton. | ||
| And we educated 8 million farm families on how to double or triple their production. | ||
| And we looked on that as part of health care, like it would increase nutrition because everything they grew they could eat or sell the surplus. | ||
| So that's how we got started in the outside world. | ||
| And as we went in those countries and became involved deeply on the village level of eradicating diseases and controlling diseases, giving people medicine, teaching them how to do better in agriculture, if they had a conflict, like a civil war, threatened or underway, they would ask the Carter Center to help them resolve it. | ||
| And I was eager to do it. | ||
| And if they had maybe the first election for a democratic election, the last thing they want was for the United States or the United Nations to come in. | ||
| And since we were already there and knew the leaders and knew the people, they asked us to do it. | ||
| So now we just finished holding our 82nd election that's troubled or uncertain. | ||
| It was in southern Sudan for a referendum and they voted to become an independent nation. | ||
| And I'm sure that later on this year would be in Egypt. | ||
| So that's how the Carter Center has evolved over a period of time. | ||
| So we still negotiate for peace agreements and we still hold elections and promote democracy and freedom, but primarily deal with health care. | ||
| And the most important aspect of our health care work, I would say, is Rosen's commitment to mental health, where she's devoted her whole life. | ||
| And she's now the world's leader in trying to remove the stigma from mental illness and to promote mental health, not only in this country, but around the world. | ||
| You talked about tenacity as being one of your virtues. | ||
| And anyone who knows about your career knows that that is certainly true, but no more so than when you took aim at two particularly insidious and little known but pervasive third world diseases, guinea worm disease and river blindness. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about how pervasive those diseases were and why you decided to take aim at them? | ||
| Well, guinea worm is in the Bible. | ||
| It's called the fiery serpent in the Bible. | ||
| You might remember that reading about it. | ||
| And you know the symbol for a doctor is a staff with two things wrapped around it that most people think are snakes. | ||
| Those are actually guinea worms. | ||
| And guinea worm is a horrendous disease. | ||
| It's caused by drinking impure water out of a stagnant pond. | ||
| So in most places in many places in Africa, they just have a pond that fills up during the rainy season. | ||
| And then they drink the water out of that during the dry season. | ||
| They don't have any wells and running water. | ||
| So breeding in those stagnant waters is the guinea worm eggs. | ||
| And if people drink the water and it has guinea worm eggs in it. | ||
| A year later they have a guinea worm growing in their body. | ||
| And they get to be about 30 inches long. | ||
| And when they get ready to emerge, they sting the epidermis or the skin from inside and make a horrible sore that destroys muscle tissue. | ||
| And the guinea worm emerges from the human body and it takes about 30 days to come out. | ||
| And while they're coming out, that's what they're females and they lay eggs. | ||
| So if the people don't know what causes the disease and they wait out in their pond to get more water to drink, then the guinea worms lay hundreds of thousands of eggs and that keeps it going around. | ||
| Well, we found out about this in 1985 and nobody wanted to fool with it because it's such a horrible disease and it's just in isolated villages that don't have any kind of running water or deep wells and they're scattered all over Africa and in three countries in India. | ||
| So I adopted the total eradication of this disease as our first major health project. | ||
| We started doing a survey in every country that had guinea worms, starting out in Pakistan, by the way, and also in Yemen and in India and all the way across sub-Saharan Africa. | ||
| And we found guinea worms in 23,600 villages. | ||
| Decarter Center has been in every village. | ||
| And we had 3.6 million cases of guinea worm. | ||
| And we began to treat the problem by giving people very fine nets of filter cloths that they could strain the water through. | ||
| And in some cases, we dug some deep wells, but primarily filter nets. | ||
| And we've reduced now from 3.6 million. | ||
| Last year we had less than one-tenth of 1%. | ||
| We only have 1,600 cases in the whole world. | ||
| I don't want to take too much time, but river blindness is the most prevalent disease in arid countries of Africa because when you have a rapid stream that bubbles over rocks like a trout stream... | ||
| little tiny black flies breed in the water and they sting people. | ||
| We've done tests on it, the Sunnis for Disease Control has, and they find an average young child gets stung 30,000 times a year. | ||
| The stings are not very painful, but you can feel them. | ||
| But anyway, they lay eggs inside the body that becomes small worms, and those worms over a period of about 12 years travel through the bloodstream and wind up in the eye, and they attack the eye and they cause blindness. | ||
| It's called river blindness. | ||
| And what's happened over the centuries is that people move away from those little running streams to get away from the flies, and they move up on the arid, steep hillsides and they move out of the bottom land that's productive. | ||
| And that's happened all over Africa. | ||
| So we decided that we would also address that. | ||
| And luckily, Merck and Company, the CEO of Merck and Company, developed a dog medicine called Heart Guard. | ||
| Some of you use it. | ||
| And a Turkish scientist at Merck and Company found that this heart guard, which is called albumectin or mectosan, would also do away with guinea worm microworms. | ||
| And so he came to the Carter Center and said they would give us the medicine free of charge in a few countries if we would deliver it to the people and help control the disease. | ||
| So later I went to Africa with the CEO for Merck and we got on television. | ||
| We were standing on a dam and his name was Roy Vajilos. | ||
| And I said, Roy, you give us medicine to us in a few countries now. | ||
| Would you be willing to give it to us all over the world? | ||
| And he was on television. | ||
| And he finally said yes. | ||
| So last year, the Carter Center treated 11,300,000 people with free medicine from Merck and Company. | ||
| And none of those people will have rubber blindness. | ||
| The problem is, though, that the parent worms that live in sores on your back still breed the tiny little micro-microscopic worms. | ||
| So we get rid of the microscopic worms. | ||
| Nobody ever goes blind. | ||
| But we have to do it every year. | ||
| And so we've started in South America giving the medicine twice or four times a year. | ||
| And now we're in the process of doing away with river blindness in South America. | ||
| And we're now trying this also in Africa. | ||
| So it's a major thing for us. | ||
| But the problem is that you can't send the pills to villages and ask the people to give it to each other. | ||
| Because if you have river blindness, you would rather have this little Mectazan pill than a diamond the same size. | ||
| So the pills are very valuable if somebody steals them from us and sells them. | ||
| So we have to go into the villages and deliver the pills directly in the mouth of people. | ||
| And we train people how to do this. | ||
| They all work for the Carter Center. | ||
| So it's a very interesting challenge for us to undertake. | ||
| I'm going to ask that the questions that you all wrote out for President Carter be brought to me at the convenience of my staff. | ||
| But let me go back to, thank you very much. | ||
| Let me go back to your just leaving office, Ms. President. | ||
| Your post-presidency is now considered the most remarkable of any president in American history. | ||
| But it did not begin particularly auspiciously. | ||
| Can you tell us about those first days after office and the questions that you and Mrs. Carter were asking yourselves about your future? | ||
| Well, we really didn't know what to do. | ||
| I was in debt. | ||
| I didn't make any money when I was in the White House. | ||
| We spent what we had. | ||
| And after I was defeated in November of 1980, my representative, who was a blind trustee, came and told me that I was a million dollars in debt. | ||
| That the previous business that I had, that my brother had been running, we had four years of drought in Georgia, and Carter's warehouse, which was our major source of income, was almost in bankruptcy. | ||
| So I was a million dollars in debt. | ||
| I had to build a presidential library. | ||
| I didn't know what I was going to do. | ||
| So luckily, Archer Daniel Midland Company, ADM, decided to go into peanut business and they bought my warehouse for enough to pay off the debt. | ||
| So I didn't have to lose all our farms. | ||
| So I started out from, you might say, from scratch. | ||
| And so we began, you already know about the history of the Carter Center. | ||
| And this was a challenging time for me and Rosen. | ||
| I was invited to be a college. | ||
| In fact, I had two offers to be presidents of universities. | ||
| But I wanted to get out of politics. | ||
| And I didn't want to spend the rest of my life raising money, but I found I have to do that now. | ||
| But anyway, I was also invited to be a professor in the University System of Georgia. | ||
| They have 33 universities and colleges, and I was supposed to be a university lecturer and go around to different ones and make speeches, but I didn't want to be controlled by the Georgia legislature either. | ||
| So Emory University president, whose name at that time was James Laney, invited me to teach at Emory. | ||
| And they promised me complete freedom of speech and that sort of thing. | ||
| So I decided to go. | ||
| And I've been a college professor now. | ||
| This is my 30th year that I'm finishing. | ||
| And every month I teach in a different part of the university. | ||
| In the whole year, I teach in every major department for Emory in law, in history, political science, theology, religion, English, medicine, and so forth. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| And so I've done that now for 30 years. | ||
| And so I've enjoyed that very much. | ||
| So we've had a very full life in relationships with Emory University teaching and with Rosen's mental health programs and with our Carter Center programs. | ||
| We had a difficult time the first two years in getting the Carter Center started because the Reagan administration was determined not to give us any support. | ||
| And so sometimes we would arrange to go to a foreign country and not only would the ambassador leave the country, but the ambassador would also sabotage our whole trip and tell none of his people to even meet with me, Rosen. | ||
| So we had that problem until George Schultz became Secretary of State and then it changed. | ||
| So we had a hard time at first. | ||
| But we've prevailed and we've had a wonderful relationship with, particularly with the Centers for Disease Control, which is right next door to us. | ||
| And so we deal with presidents and kings and also with ministers of health, ministers of agriculture, and so forth, ministers of finance. | ||
| And so one of the things that made it possible for the Carter Center to be successful is that I'm still looked upon with respect in foreign countries, particularly the poor countries. | ||
| And so when I go in, I can meet with the president. | ||
| And if I come to eradicate Guinea Worm, about which the President has never heard if he hasn't been from a Guinea Worm Village, he doesn't know what I want. | ||
| And I say, well, why don't you invite your cabinet in and let me tell you so I can get the president and his whole cabinet to support the Carter Center in our project that we carry out. | ||
| So that's been the source of our strength and influence. | ||
| I never have been overseas to a sensitive area without getting permission from the White House. | ||
| Sometimes reluctant, but I've always managed to get permission or either not go. | ||
| And I always make a written report to the President and the Secretary of State, and usually the Secretary General of the United Nations when I come back from a trip. | ||
| So when I go to a sensitive area, I like to meet with Hamas or to meet with Syrians or to meet with the North Koreans and so forth. | ||
| I always give a report to the White House. | ||
| RubyH10 asks, what's the funniest thing that happened to you in the White House? | ||
| Well, it wasn't funny to me, but it was funny to everybody else. | ||
| One time when I was on vacation from the White House and went down the plains, I went fishing in one of our fish ponds. | ||
| We have four fish ponds now. | ||
| And Rosen and I are avid fishers. | ||
| Now we do fly fishing all over the world, but then we were committed to our farm ponds. | ||
| And while I was fishing, Jody Powell, my press secretary, was there. | ||
| He was fishing on the bank, and Rosen and I were out in the boat. | ||
| And a bunch of dogs were chasing a rabbit. | ||
| How many of you know about this story? | ||
| Yeah, I see, okay. | ||
| So the rabbit jumped in the water, and rabbits can swim very well, as can all other wild animals. | ||
| They have to cross creeks and so forth. | ||
| But the rabbit swam toward my boat. | ||
| And I just took my paddle and splashed water on the rabbit, and the rabbit turned and went to the bank. | ||
| That was all there was to it. | ||
| Unfortunately, about two years later, Jody Powell was drinking, Jody Powell was with some other people, newspaper, in one of the taverns in Washington, and he embellished his story enormously just to get a local appreciation of maybe a free beer or something. | ||
| And it was a wild rabbit that tried to attack me in my boat, and I was saved by the skin of my teeth from being bitten, and he thought the rabbit was probably mad, had rabies. | ||
| Well, this became the number one story in the whole world, was that President Carter, who's already beleaguered, he can't get everything he wants, is even afraid of rabbits. | ||
| So, see, all of you are laughing. | ||
| I'm not laughing still. | ||
| And you can't imagine, I probably got, I don't know, I still get about 3,000 letters a week, but I don't know how many letters I got about rabbits. | ||
| And people wanted to know, they had pet rabbits. | ||
| If I throw my rabbit in my swimming pool, can he swim out? | ||
| Things like that. | ||
| So I had to write people and explain the fortitude and capabilities of rabbits for a long time. | ||
| So that's one of the funny things that happened that a lot of people remember. | ||
| This is known infamously as the killer rabbit story. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Maybe a cautionary tale about the excess of alcohol. | ||
| Who's your favorite president? | ||
| Well, I can't change my story just because I'm in this library. | ||
| I've always said my favorite president in my lifetime was Harry Truman. | ||
| And I can explain that. | ||
| And that is, I was a submarine officer. | ||
| I was in the Naval Academy when Franklin Roosevelt died, and Harry Truman became president, almost completely unknown. | ||
| Kind of taken on the ticket by Roosevelt just to throw a fig leaf to some people that he wanted to support him. | ||
| Roosevelt never did confide in Harry Truman, and he was on the outside looking in. | ||
| And when Roosevelt died, I was a midshipman. | ||
| I cried because I had the prospect of Harry Truman being my commanding officer, my commander-in-chief. | ||
| Later, when I was in submarines, I began to appreciate what Harry Truman stood for and what he did. | ||
| I think he was honest to a T. | ||
| I doubt if he ever used a three-cent stamp that he didn't pay for. | ||
| And he was under tremendous pressure from the same people that tried to prevent President Johnson putting in place the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| He was under the pressure of my senator, Dick Russell and Strom Thurmond and many others. | ||
| I won't name them. | ||
| And Truman, already unpopular, he went out of office the most unpopular president in history, ordained as commander-in-chief that all racial discrimination in the military forces was over that day. | ||
| And he was condemned severely by all his generals and admirals and overwhelmingly in the Congress and by many other people in America. | ||
| But he did it. | ||
| And so my life on the submarine was changed by that decision. | ||
| And it affected my whole future. | ||
| And then after Truman left office, there wasn't much progress made on civil rights. | ||
| It was eight years later before Rosa Parks sat in the front of a school bus or Martin Luther King became active. | ||
| Truman was eight years ahead of them. | ||
| And it was later before President Johnson finally was the ultimate hero in successfully ending legal civil discrimination. | ||
| And so Truman was my favorite because of that. | ||
| And I would say that the most successful president in my memory was Lyndon Johnson, who had his great society program, the Civil Rights Act, only one part of it. | ||
| And with Medicaid and Medicare and the massive program for poverty, war against poverty. | ||
| And I was governor when he put into effect the Elementary School Act. | ||
| And I went up and testified in favor of that act as a governor and Head Start. | ||
| All of those things transform the life of America. | ||
| And he was courageous enough to control budget deficits even when he was faced with terrible threats to the budget. | ||
| During the Vietnam War, which is very costly, he imposed taxes and other things to make it possible. | ||
| So he's been the most successful president by far. | ||
| And one of the main reasons, except for his family who are present, that I'm here. | ||
| This question comes from one of our students, Mr. President. | ||
| How can young people be a positive force in the political process today? | ||
| Well, I must say some things that some of you may not like. | ||
| I don't mean to say this is the first thing I've said that you didn't know. | ||
| I would like for the young people of the coming generations to strive for transcendence in political affairs, | ||
| for superlative accomplishments, not just in your own profession, but in the political life of America. | ||
| I would like for our country to become a real superpower. | ||
| And I realize that now our military is larger than the budgets of the next 20 nations in the world, almost equal to all the other defense budgets on earth. | ||
| And I know that we are still the most powerful economic system on earth with the dollar prevailing everywhere. | ||
| And culturally, we're still the number one with Facebook and Twitter and that sort of thing and Google and our music and so forth. | ||
| So we're still the most powerful and influential country on earth. | ||
| But superpower, in my opinion, for the young people only, ought to be a characteristic of a nation that would emulate the highest ideals of a human being. | ||
| I happen to be a Christian. | ||
| And I talk quite often of the Standards of Jesus Christ. | ||
| We know him as a prince of peace. | ||
| We know that he espoused justice and he reached out to people who were in need. | ||
| He was forgiving and so forth. | ||
| I don't see why the young people of this nation can't set as your goal that our country would be a superpower in every respect. | ||
| What would this mean? | ||
| Well, one thing is whenever people in a foreign country were faced with a civil war, I would like for the first thought that came to our mind: why don't we go to the United States? | ||
| Because the United States is a world's champion of peace. | ||
| The United States resorts to conflict in extremely rare occasions and tries to resolve disputes peacefully. | ||
| I would like for people who want democracy and freedom to say the United States has the best democratic electoral system on earth. | ||
| It's not shaped by how wealthy a candidate is or how much special interest money can be garnered into a very expensive campaign, but it would be open to anybody qualified to serve as president who could present their platform planks on an equal basis. | ||
| I would like for the world to say the United States is a champion of environment, in the forefront of the move to prevent global warming, for instance. | ||
| I would like to see the United States be the most generous nation on earth, sharing our wealth and resources with other people who are in need, like Norway or Sweden or Denmark or the Netherlands. | ||
| So I'm not criticizing my country, which I love, and as I said to begin with, it's still the greatest nation in the world. | ||
| But there are aspects of basic morality based on the principles of Christianity and other religions as well, where the United States is not the leader. | ||
| We are not the leader in preserving peace. | ||
| The Carter Center has programs in 73 countries. | ||
| I would say in most of those countries, if you say which is the country on earth most likely to go to war, most of them would say the United States. | ||
| And we are not in the forefront of environmental issues, but Linda Johnson was. | ||
| And the elections that we had in the year 2000, the elections we had in the year 2004, showed increasingly that the outcome of the election depends on money. | ||
| It would be impossible now for anybody to be the candidate of the Democratic or Republican Party that couldn't raise, I would say, $100 million in advance or $200 million. | ||
| So we have not Stigma on ourselves, but the point is, we have opportunities to improve in the future. | ||
| And it requires some thoughts that are independent and innovative, and I would say idealistic. | ||
| And it's going to be the next generation that would have to bring this about. | ||
| What will history say about Jimmy Carter? | ||
| I think a lot of people say he only served one term, he got defeated the first time. | ||
| That's not my preference. | ||
| I would like for people to remember that I kept the peace and that I promoted human rights almost without hesitation and without too much equivocation. | ||
| We had some leaders on earth that were not true Democrats, but what I explained in South America is one example I think our human rights policy, followed up by others, helped to bring freedom. | ||
| So I would say peace and human rights. | ||
| That would be my preference. | ||
| Before we came on stage, Tom Johnson said to me in front, Tom Johnson said, Jimmy Carter is one of my heroes. | ||
| And I can say without equivocation that you are truly an American hero, Mr. President. | ||
| This has been our great honor having you here tonight. | ||
| We very much appreciate you being with us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's been a pleasure. | ||
| Have a good session. | ||
| Thank you all. | ||
| C-SPAN is your unfiltered view of government. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including WOW. | ||
| The world has changed. | ||
| Today, a fast, reliable internet connection is something no one can live without. | ||
| So WOW is there for our customers with speed, reliability, value, and choice. | ||
| Now more than ever, it all starts with great internet. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| WOW supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Following more than a year of diplomatic negotiations to achieve Arab-Israeli peace, former President Jimmy Carter announced the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1978. | ||
| He was joined by the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, both of whom signed the agreement. | ||
| Former President Carter talked about the framework for peace in the Middle East and the future of the West Bank in Gaza. | ||
| When we first arrived at Camp David, the first thing upon which we agreed was to ask the people of the world to pray that our negotiations would be successful. | ||
| Those prayers have been answered far beyond any expectations. | ||
| We are privileged to witness tonight a significant achievement in the cause of peace. | ||
| An achievement none thought possible a year ago or even a month ago. | ||
| An achievement that reflects the courage and wisdom of these two leaders. | ||
| Through 13 long days at Camp David, we have seen them display determination and vision and flexibility, which was needed to make this agreement come to pass. | ||
| All of us owe them our gratitude and respect. | ||
| They know that they will always have my personal admiration. | ||
| There are still great difficulties that remain and many hard issues to be settled. | ||
| The questions that have brought warfare and bitterness to the Middle East for the last 30 years will not be settled overnight. | ||
| But we should all recognize the substantial achievements that have been made. | ||
| One of the agreements that President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin are signing tonight is entitled, A Framework for Peace in the Middle East. | ||
| This framework concerns the principles and some specifics in the most substantive way which will govern a comprehensive peace settlement. | ||
| It deals specifically with the future of the West Bank in Gaza and the need to resolve the Palestinian problem in all its aspects. | ||
| The framework document proposes a five-year transitional period in the West Bank in Gaza, during which the Israeli military government will be withdrawn and a self-governing authority will be elected with full autonomy. | ||
| It also provides for Israeli forces to remain in specified locations during this period to protect Israel's security. | ||
| The Palestinians will have the right to participate in the determination of their own future in negotiations which will resolve the final status of the West Bank in Gaza and then to produce an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. | ||
| These negotiations will be based on all the provisions and all the principles of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. | ||
| And it provides that Israel may live in peace within secure and recognized borders. | ||
| And this great aspiration of Israel has been certified without constraint with the greatest degree of enthusiasm by President Sadat, the leader of one of the greatest nations on earth. | ||
| The other document is entitled Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty Between Egypt and Israel. | ||
| It provides for the full exercise of Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai. | ||
| It calls for the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai and after an interim withdrawal, which will be accomplished very quickly, the establishment of normal, | ||
| Peaceful relations between the two countries, including diplomatic relations, together with accompanying letters which we will make public tomorrow. | ||
| These two Camp David agreements provide the basis for progress and peace throughout the Middle East. | ||
| There is one issue on which agreement has not been reached. | ||
| Egypt states that the agreement to remove Israeli settlements from Egyptian territory is a prerequisite to a peace treaty. | ||
| Israel states that the issue of the Israeli settlements should be resolved during the peace negotiations. | ||
| That's a substantial difference. | ||
| Within the next two weeks, the Knesset will decide on the issue of these settlements. | ||
| Tomorrow night, I will go before the Congress to explain these agreements more fully and to talk about their implications for the United States and for the world. | ||
| For the moment and in closing, I want to speak more personally about my admiration for all of those who have taken part in this process and my hope that the promise of this moment will be fulfilled. | ||
| During the last two weeks, the members of all three delegations have spent endless hours day and night talking, negotiating, grappling with problems that have divided their people for 30 years. | ||
| Whenever there was a danger that human energy would fail, or patience would be exhausted, or goodwill would run out, and there were many such moments, these two leaders and the able advisors in all delegations found the resources within them to keep the chances for peace alive. | ||
| Well, the long days at Camp David are over, but many months of difficult negotiations still lie ahead. | ||
| I hope that the foresight and the wisdom that have made this session a success will guide these leaders and the leaders of all nations as they continue to progress toward peace. |