The sad news of the passing of 39th US president Jimmy Carter, which came between Christmas and New Year, brought back memories for me of the day he visited Newcastle and Washington Old Hall.
Jimmy Carter’s visit
The Civic Centre, Newcastle, was the site of a speech by US President Jimmy Carter on 6 May 1977, in which he famously used the Geordie cry of “Howay the lads”. I vividly remember being able to see from my classroom, the American secret service cars on the closed off Central Motorway East flyover, which could help us to imagine for a moment that we part of an edition of Starsky and Hutch…
Looking back 40 years after the event, in the Chronicle, David Morton noted that. “the Democrat governor and so-called ‘peanut farmer from Georgia’ had assumed the role of the world’s most powerful man in January of that year, and an official visit to Tyneside formed part of his first foreign trip. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, had launched the Friendship Force to build bridges between the US and the rest of the world.”
Those involved stayed in each other’s homes, experienced each other’s jobs, and generally learnt about life in a foreign country. Newcastle, true to its proud history of internationalism, had become an important centre of this initiative.
The Chronicle reported: “They packed the airport. They packed the streets. They packed the area outside the Civic Centre and they opened their arms to him. And he loved it. A great smile spread across his face at the airport as he was greeted by crowds waving both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.”
President Carter then did something which truly endeared him to the people in and around Newcastle. David Morton takes up the story: “After the Lord Mayor, Coun Hugh White, conferred the Freedom of the City on him, the President delighted the 20,000-strong crowd as he began his speech by simply smiling and saying: “Howay the lads” in a passable Geordie accent.
“I am very grateful to be a Geordie now,” he added, before mingling with the crowds, much to the consternation of his security team and aides.
The sixteen cars in the Presidential cavalcade then made the ten-mile journey to the stone-built mansion that was the ancestral home of America’s first president, George Washington; Washington Old Hall. President Carter planted a tulip tree on Washington Green as again huge crowds looked on.
Humanitarian work
Since his trip to Newcastle and Washington in the late spring of 1977, Jimmy Carter has in many ways become more famous for his humanitarian work since his presidency ended in January 1981.
During his presidency, in 1978 Carter was able to bring together Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland. Here, Carter was able to secure their agreement to the Camp David Accords. These ended the state of war that had existed between the two countries since Israel’s founding in 1948.
Carter did make one serious foreign policy error during his presidency; selling arms to Indonesia and supporting their occupation of East Timor, which was ultimately to lead to genocide in the 1990s. Indeed, Carter later expressed deep regret in an interview with Democracy Now. when he said:
“Well, as you may know, I had a policy when I was president of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world, and some of our allies were very irate about this policy. And I have to say that I was not, you know, as thoroughly briefed about what was going on in East Timor as I should have been. I was more concerned about other parts of the world then.”
However, Carter did step up his human rights work after losing the presidential election of 1980, beaten by Ronald Reagan in an election dominated by the Iranian hostage crisis abroad and high fuel prices at home. serving as what has been described as a sort of diplomat without portfolio in various conflicts in a number of countries These included, “Nicaragua (where he successfully promoted the return of the Miskito Indians to their homeland), Panama (where he observed and reported illegal voting procedures), and Ethiopia (where he attempted to mediate a settlement with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Force).”
In 1994 he played a major role in negotiating with North Korea to end their nuclear weapons development while also arranging a peaceful transfer of power in Haiti and was able to broker a short ceasefire in the war between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims.
It has been said that, “his efforts on behalf of international peace and his highly visible participation in building homes for the poor through Habitat for Humanity established in the public mind a much more favourable image of Carter than had been the case during his presidency.”
Whatever failures might have accompanied Carter’s presidency, there can be no doubt that of all the US presidents in my lifetime, Carter has made by far the best use of his time after the Presidency in serving humanity and defending the poor and marginalised. That is another reason why we should remember Carter here in the North East, the Georgian from Plains Spring, who became a Geordie for a day in May 1977.
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