Carter's diplomacy and White House security - 23 December 1994

At the beginning of last week to the well disguised fury or distress, say, of the White House, former President Jimmy Carter offered his services as a peacemaker in Bosnia. That's not quite right, it suggests he asked President Clinton if he could be of any help. He doesn't work that way – he first offers his services to the party who is seen by the rest of us as the bad guy, the dictator of Haiti and the dictator of North Korea. Now Mr Carter wangled an invitation to Mr Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serbs and then called the White House and said he was thinking of moving in on the Bosnian catastrophe. Of course, the President's hands and willpower were tied.

Two days later, Mr Carter was on his way to meet the man who has seen his armies fire on United Nations convoys, has held UN troops hostage, closed the Sarajevo airport, banned military escorts for humanitarian convoys, denied fuel to the United Nations mission, exulted in the impotence of the West and make a mockery of the word peacekeeping. Just the sort of situation, which stirs Mr Carter to believe that his personal intervention and his winning way with tyrants will succeed. His aim, he said, was to arrange a ceasefire and then leave the way open for peace negotiations based on last July's peace plan, the one that some called a Munich agreement. But wait, haven't we heard this formula before? How many times have the Serbs solemnly agreed to a ceasefire and negotiations and then started up the artillery almost at once?

An old state department friend speaking for himself, but I'm sure for many more of the uncomprehending American people, almost shouted: the gall, the ego of the man is titanic. So short, however, is our public attention span through any series of international crisis that already intelligent people are beginning to say "give Carter a chance, look what he did in North Korea".

What Mr Carter did was to comment at first on the charm and intelligence of the dreaded opponent, he said the same about General Cédras in Haiti and then helped to seal an agreement that the United States rather shamefacedly ratified. To make North Korea a present of $4 billion as a reward for not building nuclear weapons in the next four years. After that, presumably, they can ask for more or get busy on the weapons, a wretched outcome to a quarrel over North Korea's long run refusal to stop making nuclear weapons.

Soon after Mr Carter arrived in Sarajevo, he announced for whose enlightenment I don't know that the people of the United States did not understand the Bosnian Serbs. I have a piece of paper in my hand, which I think provides a useful warning to all of us about not the motives of voluntary emissaries, which maybe as pure as Galahad's, but the danger of accepting their missions at face value.

And the piece of paper is a letter from an Ethiopian lady protesting the New York Times's account last September of a defensive piece about Mr Carter who you may have forgotten brought his personal diplomacy to bear on Ethiopia. The Times's piece was entitled, Despite Role As A Negotiator, Carter Feels Unappreciated.

Well, before he went off to Addis Ababa, Mr Carter had called the tyrant Mengistu a terrible dictator who killed people. On a personal acquaintance, Mr Carter found him to be a charming man and, he cooed, his wife was one of the most beautiful women I've seen in the world, she was like King Solomon's daughter. For the record continuously unimpressed Ethiopian lady, Mengistu's regime which seized power in 1974 produced 17 years of bankruptcy, rape, plunder and devastation, the killing and maiming of thousands of innocent Ethiopians including women far more beautiful than his wife. A murderer is a murderer no matter how charming; there is more to diplomacy than embracing tyrants.

I'd like to add the brief reminder that nobody in Europe could be more charming than Hitler when he wanted to be and that according to an old friend of mine who worked in Berlin through the 1930s one of the most devoted and kindly fathers he ever knew was Dr Joseph Goebbels. Yet, Mr Carter detractors are reminded only a month or two after his intervention in Haiti none of the predicted dreadful consequences from parleying with the tyrant has come true. The dictator and his cronies fled, rather nice luxurious fleeing I have to admit, his mansion and his flight into a comfortable exile being paid for by the United States, but he did not mount an insurrection, his army was disarmed.

The invading Americans do appear to have trained a police force able to keep general order and in spite of the island's all embracing poverty and disease, there is a remarkable new sort of reluctant harmony among the previously murderous factions. Aristide has been accepted and his old enemies are subdued for the present, though he is fenced in everywhere with a security guard as tight and elaborate as any in this hemisphere, which brings uncomfortably close to home a security question that has come up insistently in the past week or two and that's because gunshots have crackled outside the White House and bullets gone in three times in the past two months.

In September an unemployed drunk crashed a private plane into the White House walls just under the President's window. A week ago, a man fired several shots that pierced a wall and broke a window luckily away from the Presidential private quarters and last Tuesday a man with a criminal record who'd been sleeping in the park opposite the White House since the summer jumped up from the ground threw off his jacket and waving a hunting knife chased a policeman who'd been going about his usual early morning chore of rousing the homeless who live in the small park. Two other policemen came to the rescue, the man was apparently not to be subdued and while a bunch of tourists gaped on an officer ordered the man to drop his knife, he refused and in the subsequent scuffle one officer fired and wounded him gravely.

Two facts about the daily scene at the White House might seem bizarre and contradictory to a stranger, the fact that a small pack of the homeless live in that park which is a stone's throw from the White House grounds. Second fact, let every morning hundreds of ordinary citizens troop calmly into those grounds and are taken on a tour of the White House. It's an old custom and one every President has been proud off. The park has its own little police force that helps the Secret Service patrol and protect the White House and its inhabitants.

Naturally, the old question has been revived about how tight security ought to be in and around the president, heaven knows it's tight and glaringly visible every time the president goes anywhere, his bulletproof car for the most part doesn't cruise along the street, it whizzes, every place, street, building, alley, manhole he passes is scrutinised beforehand.

So it's now being debated whether the whole stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs alongside the White House should be cleared and banned to the public, it would be a lamentable rejection of the boast that the White House belongs to the people and not to its present tenant and should be seen by anyone of them who wishes to go there.

I suppose the security problem will never be solved once for all, everything depends on what has happened lately. When the Second War was over, President Truman was up as old farmers are at five in the morning and by about six he was out striding along Pennsylvania Avenue greeting passers by waving at children with a couple of secret servicemen trying to keep up with him on his morning walk. The very thought of Mr Clinton doing likewise makes the blood run cold.

But shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, the secret service prevailed on the new President Lyndon Johnson to stay put. It was Christmastime at his range on the Pedernales River in Texas. We, the White House press corps and me the only foreign correspondent were parked in a hotel 30 miles away in Austin, the capital of the state. We had no access to the president for several days till we mocked up a petition for the president's press secretary suggesting that this was a preposterous situation, he agreed and President Johnson had us all to a BBQ on the grounds of the ranch. It was a [inaudible] occasion but once over, we had no promise of being close to him again let alone of having a press conference, we were all driven back to Austin.

A few days later, two or three of us were bemoaning this strange exile of an incumbent president when a reporter came running into the hotel lobby and said, come and see a miracle. We hustled out onto the main street of what was then a small city marching down it like the Pied Piper with a trail of skipping children behind him was President Johnson large as life, he was in fact larger than life. He carried a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth and if every there was a target for a lunatic he was it, he dropped in to surprise old friends, a grocer here, a barber there, he waved at everybody and the two secret servicemen, he would allow no more, were visibly shaking. That broke the strain and the new rule.

The next day we had drinks with him in the bar of the hotel and he said quite simply, "John Kennedy knew and said if a man is determined to kill the president of the United States he'll do it. The president is the president of the people and his job is to get out among them and from now on that's what I'm gonna do, I don't care if the secret service has conniption fits so gentlemen 'salu' as we say in Texas and also a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

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