Larry Wilson: Carter did us proud on human rights

I was among those who had forgotten, amid all the single-minded focus on his “malaise” speech and its televised, cardigan-sweatered dourness, that the late former President Jimmy Carter was actually among the funniest of our nation’s chief executives.

He was a lot of other things, too. He was an actual Christian, who lived his faith in extraordinary ways, rather than a pretend Christian who sells branded Bibles he hasn’t read, in a quest for votes, and cash.

He was easily the most rock ‘n’ roll president, who forged a genuine, decades-long friendship with his home state of Georgia’s Allman Brothers

Band, and installed a turntable and stereo in the Oval Office so he could listen to “Eat a Peach,” and later hung with and supported other great Peach Staters such as REM.

He was certainly, as the last president to be born in the early years of the 20th century, the last one to grow up in a South so undeveloped that his family’s home didn’t have indoor plumbing when he was a child

When he went on David Letterman’s show, the first president to do so, he engaged in a sustained schtick with the late-night TV host, deadpan-pretending for minutes on end that he had no memory of the time they had met before, and causing band leader Paul Schaffer to do a spit-take when he tells “Regis” that he’s very excited to appear on the show.

He also for sure could come across as sanctimonious. I once took great pleasure in an editorial board meeting with Susan Ford telling her that this Sunday school-teacher side of Carter was what caused my liberal Southerner mother — she had previously voted for Benjamin Spock, because of her opposition to the Vietnam War — to vote for her father, the only vote for a Republican she ever cast in her life.

But a certain, if you will, genuine sanctimoniousness in international affairs can actually be a good thing — a great thing — in a president of the United States.

Carter was the first American president in the post-war world order to refuse to go along to get along with dictators around the world on the pretext that they “supported” our country’s foreign-policy goals.

There’s nothing American about cracking down on a free press, jailing political rivals, waging unjust internal wars against opponents.

In his Jan, 20, 1977, inaugural address:  Carter said: “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.”

Along with harsh criticisms of the human rights record of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc Communist allies, Carter did not hesitate to use U.S. soft power to work for freer peoples in our country’s allies of South Korea, the Shah’s Iran, Argentina, South Africa, and the then-Rhodesia , now Zimbabwe. He ended more than 30 years of U.S. political and military support to one of Central America’s most authoritarian of leaders, President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua.

As he began his presidency, Carter said, “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is sometimes best quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.”

A president, Carter proved, can not only hold but exercise high-minded views on the world stage while at the same time pursuing practical engagements involving compromise. His brokering of the Camp David Accords signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, which involved 12 days of secret negotiations at Camp David, showed that a president can still use American strength while promoting American values.

May some future president make us proud by governing from this core diplomatic principle.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.