No misinterpretation of comments found
Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Sometimes the only way to avoid
saying something you’ll regret is to
say nothing at all. It’s not the type of counsel that journalists like for public figures to keep, but I daresay that most of us would rather hear, “No comment,” than “I was misquoted.” Former President Jimmy Carter didn’t claim to have been misquoted by our man Frank Lockwood when he said that George W. Bush’s administration was “the worst in history,” though. Instead, he allowed as to how he was either “careless or misinterpreted.” He might have been careless, but anyone who has listened to the audio of Carter’s interview by Lockwood, the Democrat-Gazette’s religion editor, knows that his remark was in no way “misinterpreted” for the benefit of the resulting news story. If you haven’t done that yet, check it out. The audio link was still available on our Web site as I set out to write this. I’ve listened to the audio more than a dozen times. Indeed, as editors on the news side were transcribing the relevant portion of the lengthy interview for publication in yesterday’s editions, I was working on my own transcription for the purpose of today’s column. Except for a few “uhs” and stutters, my transcription squares with theirs.
In case you missed it, Lockwood’s initial news story appeared on Page One this past Saturday under the headline, “Carter pipes up, calls Bush’s way ‘worst in history,’” with the secondary headline, “Foreign relations at ebb, he says.” On Sunday, the White House response appeared on an inside page under the heading, “Carter irrelevant, White House says / Adviser to the former president says comments about Bush not surprising.”
On Monday, Carter made an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show during which, according to The Associated Press, he “appeared to retreat from a statement he made to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for a Saturday story in which he said, ‘I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.’”
Actually, that quote’s verbatim except for this: What he is heard to say on the audio is “the worst in hist, worst in history.” But why split hairs ?
It was a direct response to a direct question.
The question as I heard it: “Now you talked about this war and how you believe it’s wrong. Which president was worse, George W. Bush or Richard Nixon ?”
The answer as I heard it: “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in hist, worst in history, and the overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”
But Carter didn’t stop there.
“We have a new policy on war,” he continued. “We, we now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we, where we go to war with another nation, militarily, even though our own security’s not directly threatened. If we want to change the regime there or if we want, feel fear that sometime in the future our security might be endangered. But that’s been a radical departure from all previous administration policies.
“ And we have had, for the first time since Israel was founded, we’ve had zero peace talks to try to bring a resolution of difference in the Middle East. That’s a radical departure from the past. We’ve also abandoned or directly refuted every nuclear arms control agreement ever negotiated down through history. And I think we’ve had a radical departure, in my opinion, from the separation of church and state policies that have permeated previous administrations. As expressed succinctly by Thomas Jefferson, we ought to build a wall between church and state. We’ve had an abandonment of almost every previous administration’s policy on environmental quality. Many of the basic laws that were passed under Richard Nixon and other Republican presidents, as a matter of fact, we’ve pretty well abandoned those. So I think that the last few years have, has been of most concern to me.” There you have it, and frankly, I can’t see anything in it that could be misinterpreted by anyone—except possibly a former president regretful of his own candor. He shouldn’t be. Sometimes the truth hurts, but it’s still the truth, and by having spoken it, Jimmy Carter has never been more relevant in his life.
—–––––•–––––—Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
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