Remembering Jimmy Carter, an Engineer for Peace
The Atlanta-based Carter Center was founded in 1982 by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter. In partnership with Emory University, the Carter Center was and still is committed to advancing human rights and alleviating unnecessary human suffering, with major programs that work toward waging peace, fighting diseases, and building hope. In 1987, it established the International Negotiation Network (INN) under the umbrella of the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program (CRP). INN would be a flexible, informal network of eminent people. Through INN, CRP would coordinate third-party assistance, expert analysis and advice, workshops, media attention, and other means to facilitate constructive prevention or resolution of international conflicts. In the year INN was established, there were 111 armed conflicts in the world, and only 10 percent of them could be addressed by international agencies. The rest of these conflicts were domestic struggles, such as civil wars that did not fall within the jurisdiction of organizations like the United Nations. The purpose of INN was to end civil conflicts and wars by filling this “mediation gap.”
I became affiliated with the Carter Center through Dayle Powell (later Dayle Spencer), who was a trial lawyer for ten years before she became a fellow and then the director of the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program (CRP) in the 1980s. I do not remember the exact date, but it was in the very late 1980s when I first met Dayle at a meeting in Washington, DC. She asked me to be a consultant to INN’s executive council members. At that time INN’s executive council members included, aside from President Carter, about a dozen well-known individuals, including former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1987) Oscar Arias Sanchez; former president of Nigeria General Olusegun Obasanjo; the widow of the assassinated Swedish prime minister Olof Palme and member of the Swedish Committee for UNICEF (later chairperson of UNICEF), Lisbet Palme; Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa, also a Nobel Peace Prize winner (1984); and Elie Wiesel, still another Nobel Peace Prize winner (1987). (Jimmy Carter would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.)
I accepted Dayle’s invitation and began visiting Atlanta and meeting other INN consultants, who were all new to me, with the exception of Hal Saunders, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs who assisted in drafting the Camp David Accords. As a process-oriented psychoanalyst with my own center at the University of Virginia interested in understanding the psychological dimensions of large-group conflicts—and as someone who had been involved in unofficial dialogues (track-two diplomacy) between Arabs and Israelis as a member and later chairperson of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs—I believed that finding solutions to large-group problems would involve individuals and groups going through psychological journeys beyond any real-world economic, political, and security concerns. Most of the other consultants’ orientation, I felt, was to utilize logical thinking in order to get to “yes” on these types of “real-world” issues as soon as possible, solutions that I believed would not take into consideration strong psychological obstacles to peacemaking.
Dayle and her husband, William Spencer, did their best to help the consultants get to know one another. I was willing to learn more about how official and nonpsychoanalytically oriented unofficial diplomacy was generally practiced. These methods used “psychology” to enable one party to obtain the upper hand in dealing with the opposing party, or, when a facilitating team was involved, to enable the team leaders to manipulate the parties involved. Often, we had lunch with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. My initial impression of the 39th President of the United States was that he was a very intelligent person with high idealistic expectations for the world’s well-being. I sensed that he and Rosalynn were in a kind of “twinning”: they seemed to be a very close, almost inseparable couple, doing most of their thinking and activities together. I knew that Jimmy Carter had deep religious beliefs and was a devout Christian, but not once during our “formal” or social meetings did he refer to his or anyone else’s religion. His spiritual convictions most likely played a role in his personal thinking, activities, and motivation to become a leader, but unlike other leaders I would meet in other countries, especially in the Middle East, Jimmy Carter, in his conversations with INN members or diplomatic guests, never used religion to justify his political thinking. I also never heard him refer to his loss of a second term as president, although Rosalynn Carter now and then would make direct or indirect references to it. I thought that the 1980 election represented a great personal loss for both of them, but I was impressed by how they used his postpresidency to turn this loss into a personal investment in improving human affairs. I liked them both.
In January 1992, President Carter asked me to give a paper that approached ethnic conflicts from a psychological point of view at a conference titled “Resolving Intra-National Conflicts: A Strengthened Role for Non-Governmental Actors” and to conduct two workshops. This conference brought together over two hundred invited guests from forty countries and more than 150 international organizations and governments. Among the participants were influential persons from eight selected conflict areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Cyprus, the Korean Peninsula, Liberia, and Sudan. Different INN members conducted workshops on these eight regions. One of the workshops that President Carter wanted me to lead was on the Cyprus problem. High-level participants had come from both the Greek and Turkish sides of the island, from Turkey, and elsewhere. As a Turk born on the island of Cyprus, I was reluctant to try this since I was concerned I would not be able to maintain my neutrality. But I sensed Carter’s genuine interest in observing a meeting directed by a psychoanalytically informed person instead of watching another meeting where the facilitator would help the opposing parties to bargain. Carter was an engineer, and I was a psychoanalyst. He told me that he was accustomed to getting results by pushing a button. But he was also very much aware of the psychological aspects of negotiations. He described to me how he worked with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978 and how important an understanding of human emotions had been during the intense negotiations of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Could we learn useful ways of thinking and conducting dialogues between “enemies” from one another? I ended up conducting the Cyprus workshop. Afterward, President Carter offered to go to the island and help both sides of the conflict negotiate a peaceful solution, but no invitation came from either side.
I would get to know President Carter even more closely when the INN held a regional meeting of NGOs in Dakar, Senegal, in September 1992. By then the former consultants to the executive council of the INN, myself included, had become full members; there would be no more consultants. About a dozen of us joined President Carter and Rosalynn Carter in a Dakar hotel, which had been built (or paid for) a year earlier by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia for a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. There were no guests besides the Carter Center people and the security staff in the entire hotel for the duration of our gathering. I wanted to learn as much as possible about certain large-group problems in Africa, but those who presented papers focused on statistics, charts, and logical mechanical ways for ending conflicts. I concluded that questions such as “who are we now?” and border issues could not be handled as easily as the statistics, charts, and mechanical measures suggested.
In the evenings we would gather around the hotel’s big swimming pool, which was filled with hundreds and hundreds of frogs. In this setting Jimmy Carter and the rest of us were able to relax, tell jokes, drink beer, and take a break from the seriousness of Africa’s deadly large-group issues. One evening Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn left our gathering by the frog-filled swimming pool early. We learned the next day that they and Dayle had flown to Liberia in a small plane, landed near a place where a deadly struggle was taking place, and tried to talk people from opposing parties into stopping the bloodshed. I do not know many details of this mission, but I do recall our worry for their safety until we heard from them a couple of days later. I recall having a visual fantasy of a small airplane landing on a river and Jimmy Carter coming out of the airplane to step in a little boat while bullets from both sides of the river zoomed above his head. It was a relief to finally hear from them. Although the INN as I knew it would end a few years later, I always appreciated the former president’s personality—one that led him to commit to building a better world.
This essay is excerpted from Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone, and “Remembering Jimmy Carter and His Contributions to the Role of Psychoanalysis in World Affairs,” an essay published in International Psychoanalytic Quarterly (2023).
Vamık D. Volkan, MD, is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia and an Emeritus Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center. He is the Emeritus President of the International Dialogue Initiative and a former President of the Turkish-American Neuropsychiatric Society, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society and the American College of Psychoanalysts.