A Tribute to Jimmy Carter

The day I met Jimmy Carter

I met Jimmy Carter during the early days of what, at the time, seemed to be his long-shot campaign for the presidency in 1976. I was home in Hickory NC during a university break and he was speaking at PE Monroe Auditorium on the campus of Lenoir Rhyne College (now University) there in Hickory. He was not on schedule and the wait was making a few antsy, despite having a local band play to fill the void.

?I don’t remember too much of what was said, but for some reason I hung around as he stepped down from the podium to mingle with some of the local dignitaries. Lo and behold, my high school homeroom ‘teacher’, Vivienne Stafford, was among those dignitaries. At about the time people were thinning out, Ms Stafford must have caught a glimpse of me heading to the exits and called out loud enough for everyone to hear, “Mark, come and meet Jimmy Carter.”

So how do you have a casual conversation with a presidential candidate? Well, for me, not very well, but here it goes. Ms. Stafford introduced me, and Jimmy began by apologizing for being late. All I knew about Jimmy Carter was that he had been, at some point, the governor of Georgia and had once had the Allman Brothers play an event at the mansion. So the best I could come up with was something like, “well the wait would not have been so bad had you brought along the Allman Brothers as a warm-up act.” Jimmy picked up on that and stayed on topic, expressing regret that the Allman Brothers were not available, and casually naming Dickie Betts, Gregg Allman, and other band members, as if they were best friends.

So that was about it. What I’ve always remembered about that two-minute encounter was his calm yet intense focus on the topic and the conversation. I felt much like his biographer Kai Bird, who not too long ago described an encounter where ‘those bright blue eyes bore into me with an alarming intensity.’?

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Jimmy Carter’s relationship with Merck & Co.

·????? Free access to Mectizan to fight river blindness.

My career has taken me to many different office facilities to meet with hundreds of pharmaceutical colleagues over the last decade. Not too long ago, I was at one of the locations of Merck & Co, where there was an image of Jimmy Carter posted prominently on the wall in the entrance area. As I waited with my colleagues in that lobby area, I was not only quick, but quite smugly happy, to tell them the story of the night I met Jimmy Carter. Mr Carter had long been ‘past President’ by then of course, and his connection to Merck via the Carter Center was known, but not widely.

The relationship goes back to 1988 when, under the leadership of then-chairman and CEO of Merck, Dr. Roy Vagelos, the Carter Center and Merck established the Merck Mectizan Donation Program, allowing countries in need to access the medicine free of charge to treat river blindness. By 2014, over 200 million doses had been administered, and that milestone was celebrated in an additional dose given to a 14-year-old girl named Nancy Akanyo in Uganda. As a result the transmission of river blindness had been eliminated, interrupted, or suppressed in 15 of 17 originally endemic areas. Since then treatment donations have more than doubled.

·????? Mr Carter’s battle with cancer and treatment with pembrolizumab.

About a year after that 200-millionth dose milestone, ?in August of 2015, Mr Carter announced to the world that he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and, as a result, had brain cancer. By December of that year after having been treated with the Merck-developed cancer immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab and radiation, Mr Carter announced that he was ‘cancer-free.’ What a return of favor from Merck, a treatment that gave Mr. Carter another nine years of life. ?

Who will replace my answer in that after-dinner question?

?There have been at least three dinner parties recently, and at about the time of dessert, there is someone who will ask the question “with whom, living, would you like to dine?” Some people have problems with this, but I’ve not, at least not up until now. Top on my list has always been Jimmy Carter. Someone who seemed to use the Presidency as a resume-builder to launch initiatives to make the world even better. Someone who I could talk to about the Allman Brothers, probably Willie Nelson too, or peanut farming, or kudzu, or Middle East issues, or the war in Ukraine. Wouldn’t that have been something. I’ll have more difficulty in answering that question next time.

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To close, I can’t say it any better than Jennifer Boylan, an English professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, in a recent essay in the New York Times, saying “I am still grateful to Mr. Carter for demonstrating that it is possible to govern with morality, honesty and grace.”? I’d only change ‘govern’ to ‘govern and live’ and perhaps add ‘decency’ to that list of virtues. Today I'll toast and eat a peach for Jimmy Carter.

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*Ref: FAIR STAR: A Centennial History of Lenoir-Rhyne College, by Jeff L. Norris and Ellis G. Boatman.?