January 6, 2025

CIE President Ken Stein is interviewed about Jimmy Carter by Foundation for Defense of Democracies Executive Director Jonathan Schanzer on the “FDD Morning Brief” on January 6, 2025.

Jonathan Schanzer: It’s now time for my conversation with Professor Ken Stein. I’m proud to call Ken a friend and a mentor, although if you ask him whether he ever thought I would make it in this business, you’ll get a good belly laugh out of him. Ken taught at Emory for decades. Today, he’s the president of the Center for Israel Education, or CIE, a terrific organization that I suggest you check out.

He has been all over the news in recent days in the wake of the death of former President Jimmy Carter. That’s because Ken worked with the former president for decades before the two parted ways not so amicably in 2006. It wasn’t pretty, but it was pretty eye-opening to me. So let’s bring Ken on the program right now to discuss the legacy of Jimmy Carter right here on the “FDD Morning Brief.”

Welcome to the program, Professor Ken Stein.

Ken Stein: Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Schanzer: Great to have you. All right. Well, let’s start with Carter the candidate, Carter the president, Carter the peacemaker. He was, after all, a peanut farmer who went on to forge Israel’s first peace deal with an Arab country. I’m referring, of course, to Egypt. So what did Carter get right, and what did he get wrong?

Ken Stein: I think Carter came out of South Georgia, like most governors who become president, without knowledge of foreign affairs or a lot of knowledge. I think Carter was much more prepared coming out of South Georgia to be a post-president than he was to be a president. I think his values, which he cultivated as a child and growing up and returning to become a peanut farmer, he took with him. I think he had acquired the knowledge of politics, give and take and carrots and sticks, negotiations, as he moved forward.

Inherent in Jimmy Carter’s personality is the desire to bring people together, regardless of the distances they have between them. He fit very well then into position to bring Begin and Sadat together. And finally, I think Hamilton Jordan in his interview at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, in a very lengthy interview which I recommend everyone to read because it’s highly candid about the Carter administration, Hamilton says, “We came to office. We knew very little about national politics. We had to learn very quickly. We had to capture the electoral votes in the ’76 election. We couldn’t have done it without two or three key people.”

And it’s important to state that Carter was able in that election to garner 70 percent of the Jewish vote. He did not garner more than 40 percent in the 1980 election, and he attributed a little bit of his losses, well, a great deal of his loss, in 1980 to the abandonment of the American Jewish electorate.

Jonathan Schanzer: And that, I guess, began to influence how he addressed his post-presidency. We’ll deal with that in a minute. But, so, Carter only serves one term. He loses to Ronald Reagan. He leaves office in 1980, then goes on to create the Carter Center. And you helped him. So what was the goal of creating this institution?

Ken Stein: To give him a voice, a podium, a place. That was the initial goal. I don’t think anyone who was part of the Carter Center staff in ’81 or ’82, the very few numbers of us and very few professors who participated in shaping the center’s outlook or skeleton shape, understood that this was going to be a worldwide humanitarian effort 40 years later.

I think Carter, basically having been crushed, literally crushed, by the Reagan defeat, and I can’t overstate that because all during the Reagan administration, Carter was relentless in his criticism of Reagan as his successor. And he, in his post-presidency, he found this as an opportunity to not only criticize Reagan and SDI and the use of power and all sorts of use of force, but I think Carter wanted very much to show that he was equipped to continue what he couldn’t finish, namely engaging in Middle East mediation.

And he made every effort to persuade every successor president to give him a chance, a shot. I cannot tell you how many times we sat in the back of a limousine, and he would actually say, “If they’d only give me a chance again, I could do it.” And my response was “Sadat is not Arafat, and Sinai is not the West Bank.” And he would just shrug his head.

Jonathan Schanzer: OK, well, so you work closely with the former president. Not many people can say that they did work with a former president so closely. So what did you learn about Carter up close that most of us would not have known about?

Ken Stein: He has a sneaky sense of humor. He is highly conscientious, industrious, has a mind that absorbs information extraordinarily quickly. You can give him a piece of information in January, and in June in a meeting, completely apart from anything you’re believing, he takes that paragraph that you wrote six months later, and he inserts it in the exact appropriate place.

Carter never wanted to see a problem to go unresolved, and that was in part why he wanted to do mediation. He wanted to seek a comprehensive peace. And that’s why he wanted to get involved in all sorts of aspects of humanitarian benefit because he felt he could make things happen.

In one of the latter parts of his life, he begins to embrace what I call the bad boys. He went off to North Korea. He never said no to a dictator. Why? Because Carter thought he could bring credibility to that person. That person would then use Carter as a vehicle to gain acknowledgment through the United States, and then Carter could be that link, that mediator, who would make that connection, not only shape it, but have it develop.

And I think he did that to the very end, even to the point in the early 2000s when he wholeheartedly and for a decade embraced Hamas as a political participant in negotiations with the Israelis.

Jonathan Schanzer: Yeah, and we see those photos of him with Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh. I mean, really kind of jarring photos for a man who fashioned himself as a pacemaker in the region.

So what’s a good vignette or maybe two that you could share about your time with him while you were flying in the air on your way to the Middle East or something that happened on the ground in the Middle East or maybe even at a green room at a major television studio. I know you spent a lot of time with him around other world leaders and other important figures. So, any specific vignettes pop out as we discuss his life?

Ken Stein: Yeah, I just want to reach back to one point. Carter was not a person to allow establishments, elites or previous history to get in the way of what he thought was the proper way to solve a problem. He didn’t understand Middle Eastern leaders had this incredible commitment to their own nationalist ideology, and they couldn’t be compromised.

Carter was willing to change history to fit his own needs. He was willing to rewrite resolutions because he thought it was the right thing to do. I think it’s important for someone to understand that Carter was committed to goals and didn’t want anything to be in his way. No obstacles, no verbal, no historical, no ideological, no obstacles.

Vignettes. There are a couple. The one that stands out would be in the meeting with Hafez al-Assad in March of 1987. Finishing a meeting, a 2½-hour meeting with Assad, he’s standing in front of a picture which is a picture of the Battle of Hattin of 1187, and Carter’s standing next to Assad, and I’m standing next to Carter. And Assad is explaining it in Arabic, and I’m whispering in Carter’s ear in English: “This is the Battle of Hattin. This is the battle where the crusaders lost to the Muslims.” And so Carter nods, he nods, and then he finally says to Assad before the translator can say it, “I think this is the Battle of Hattin, where the crusaders lost to the Muslims.”

And Assad picks up his finger, and he waves it. He says, “No, no, Mr. President. This is where the Arabs defeated the West.”

And I felt about three inches tall. And in that lesson was what we know about Hafez al-Assad the president. He was not defending the Muslim world. He was defending the Arab world, and that was an idea which he carried with him all during his period as president.

I think a second vignette would have been a more sentimental one. Leaving Lebanese airspace in 1983 after we’ve been on our first trip to the Middle East, heading to Morocco, at 20,000 feet he asks the steward to set up the table for dinner. The steward brings out four glasses for wine. Mrs. Carter, President Carter, his very faithful secretary, Faye Dill, and I are sitting there. And then the steward brings out a challah, and then the steward brings out two candles. And he turns to me, and he says, “I know you don’t have a kippah, but will you say the Friday night blessing?” At 25,000 feet.

Now, the question that I always get from many people: Was he an antisemite?

And the answer has to be, he disliked Israeli policies. He absolutely disliked Israeli policies because it prevented his ability from fulfilling his dream of seeing a Palestinian state and self-determination for the Palestinians. That’s what he thought he should do because he was the person who should give the Palestinians a voice. He should represent their agency.

But Carter also in his Palestine Peace Not Apartheid book was viciously angry, and I choose the word viciously appropriately, angry at Israelis. And he actually advocated that terrorism should not stop until the Israelis accepted a road map for peace. And that caused 12 members of the Carter Center board to resign because he was actually advocating the killing of Jews. Now, I’m not certain he understood that. I’m not sure the copy editor of the book understood it. But he claimed, for months afterward, he wrote every word of the book.

And that’s why I broke. I mean, I could disagree with him. I could try and shape his editorial writings, but advisers only advise. We don’t have the ability to actually change a point of view if a person has a very strong point of view. He did acknowledge, he said, “You did at times bend my vocabulary. You did at times make me consider that I have to be more moderate in some tones.”

In 1994, I began to drift away from him, stayed on at the Carter Center, and from ’95 forward he takes more of a view of he’s going around the world to make a difference and make change. He’s not going to have these big meetings anymore in Atlanta, and he doesn’t have his fellows that he has who are in academics, who are in the social studies of the world.

He wants people who are doers, and it’s to Carter’s credit that he goes off and he does health care. And it’s to my successor’s credit as executive director, Bill Fahey, that the center becomes a central place for eradicating disease and doing humanitarian good. And it’s Bill Fahey who deserves an incredible amount of credit for the direction in which the Carter Center headed and where it is now.

Jonathan Schanzer: But you had your falling out. So you talk about how you began to drift in the 1990s, but 2006 is the full rupture. If you would, just a couple of minutes about what happened there and where you left things.

Ken Stein: Carter used to come regularly to my class in the early ’80s. I don’t know if he actually spoke in a class that you attended, Jon. But he would talk about Iran. He would talk about the peace process. He would talk about Begin and Sadat. He used to come once or twice a year. The students loved it, and they grilled him because I had prepared the students in the class prior to give Carter a hard time with questions, and he relished it. He relished it.

Carter was always interested in finding a resolution to the conflict, and I think he wrote his book because he felt people were forgetting that there was this issue out there that needed attention.

When he came to my class in October of 2006, he actually said to me, he said, “I’ve written another book on the Middle East, only this time I’m not going to let you read the chapters beforehand.” Now we had written a book in 1984 called The Blood of Abraham. We played ping-pong with the chapters back and forth. He said, “I’m not going to let you read it.”

And I didn’t pay any attention to it until I went to Powell’s bookshop in Portland. My wife and I were there. And I sat there for 2½ hours, and I read the book and read portions of it and looked at some of the notes I’d taken at the meetings that he had with Assad in 1990 and looked at the notes in my computer, and I looked at the notes in the book. And I said, “Wow, what a difference. He’s completely changed who’s responsible for what.”

And then I read U.N. Resolution 242, which he put in the back of the book, and he said U.N. resolution doesn’t call for withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories. He said 242 mandates Israeli withdrawals, requires Israeli withdrawals.

Now here again was Carter trying to rewrite a document in history because he wanted it to be his way. Why? If he didn’t have Israeli withdrawal from territories, he couldn’t push forward the idea of a Palestinian state and Palestinian self-determination, and that was absolutely critical for him.

So his book, even though he criticized Israel on many things, and there were many things that Israel deserved to be criticized on, he wanted to hammer home the reality that Israel is the obstacle to reaching a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.

Did he ever criticize Arafat? No. Did he ever criticize Bashar Assad? No. Why? He didn’t want to criticize those individuals with whom he could have contact and bring them in from the cold and credibly say, “I’m the person who can be the mediator between that person or that person’s ideology and Washington.”

Carter always had in mind what he wanted to do, even in 2006, which was four years after he got the Nobel Prize, which he earned. I think he was hurt that he didn’t get the Nobel Prize in ’78 with Begin and Sadat, but he got the Nobel Prize for his humanitarian work. Carter felt he did as much as Begin and Sadat for the peace process, and he wasn’t recognized by the Nobel Committee because of it.

Jonathan Schanzer: Well, sounds like he had some unfinished business, and fascinating as always. Ken Stein, thank you for joining us this morning on the “FDD Morning Brief.”

Ken Stein: My pleasure, Jon. It’s always good to see you, and best to your family.

Jonathan Schanzer: All right. You don’t often know a former president for as long as Ken did, and, well, always interesting.