Don Anderson | My brief encounter with President Carter

As we pay tribute to the late US President Jimmy Carter, I can’t help but reflect on my own brief encounter with him. I always regarded him, strangely, perhaps, as one of the quiet, dignified presidents who was keenly interested in people and humanity in general.

My one encounter with him, after he had demitted office, seemed to confirm my own personal views of him.

The year was 1997, the occasion the visit of the team from the Carter Center to observe the Jamaican general elections of that year – it was another of those tumultuous years in our political history.

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) had been in disarray leading to those elections as the cry for the resignation of Edward Seaga as leader grew louder amid the successive losses in the two previous elections. The period also saw Bruce Golding breaking away from the party and becoming leader of the splinter group, the National Democratic Movement (NDM), which contested the 1997 elections.

The Carter Center had been in touch with me from earlier in the year when a representative met with me at my office to discuss the possibility of writing a chapter on the polling we at Market Research Services Limited had been doing from early in the year.

The 200 Carter Center members arranged a briefing session two days prior to the election on December 17 to review their strategies and also hear from local persons how they felt the campaign was going. Former Director of Elections Noel Lee and I were two of the local presenters at the briefing.

UPDATE

While the Carter Center was primarily interested in how the campaigning was being conducted in the so-called garrison constituencies, I was asked to give a constituency by constituency update, based on our islandwide polling work during the year. I started in the extreme west and progressed without any break until I reached Central St Catherine, the seat held at that time by Bruce Golding, won on a JLP ticket, but now campaigning under the NDM banner.

I boldly indicated that based on our data, the JLP would take that seat. I was immediately stopped by President Carter himself who said: “Mr. Anderson, how can that be? That seat is held by Mr Bruce Golding.”

My response was “Yes, Mr President, but the JLP has sent their most trusted campaigner in the person of Babsy Grange to take it back”. The rest is history. Bruce Golding polled a highly commendable 3,517 votes, the most by any third-party candidate for a long time, but this paled in comparison to Babsy Grange’s 5,746, so the seat was retained by the JLP.

I was then invited to sit with the team for lunch, at which time I would have had the opportunity to also meet with General Colin Powell, a member of the team. Foolishly, I opted out of that luncheon to attend to “urgent matters” at my office.

Meeting with President Carter was special. I had been in the vicinity of Fidel Castro in Cuba on the occasion of the Pan American Games of 1991, been close to President Kennedy at the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, and actually was in the same room with President Putin at an Olympic Congress In Moscow in 2012, but actually talking with President Carter was the first time I had the privilege of exchanging words with one of the world’s key leaders, albeit in retirement.

Don Anderson is executive chairman of Market Research Services Ltd.. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.