A President Who Rocked
The time I got a note from Jimmy Carter.
One of the major pieces I published in Rolling Stone near the end of my time there was also one of my first in-depth efforts to document the global trade in banned drugs and chemicals.
Not exactly what you’d expect from a Rock ‘n Roll magazine, eh?
It was called “For Export Only” and it was summarized like this: “What do the multimillion-dollar U.S. pesticide and drug industries do when government agencies ban the use of their products? They find new markets in underdeveloped countries.”
The article appeared in the magazine’s February 10, 1977 issue, which had Peter Frampton featured on the cover as “The Rock Star of the Year” in a profile written by 19-year-old Cameron Crowe.
In those years, long before email, laptops or cellphones, the way we got feedback on our articles was through the mail. And usually there was a lot — we got hundreds of letters, for example, in response to our Patty Hearst stories.
By contrast, I only got one letter in response to “For Export Only.’ Yet it had an intriguing return address — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.
It was from a staff member to President Jimmy Carter indicating that my article had been included in his weekly briefing on new policy issues.
I didn’t think too much of it at the time (maybe it was just standard PR stuff?), until I learned that Carter had also decided to form an interagency task force to study the banned exports problem that I had exposed. Eventually he issued an executive order that for the first time in U.s. history restricted the trade in banned and restricted goods overseas.
This was a major policy victory on what until then had been an obscure issue few kew or cared about. Soon after the article appeared, I left Rolling Stone and co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting, where one of our big early projects was the book I co-authored with Mark Schapiro on the same topic, “Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World.”
That book helped launch a global movement to stem the tide of restricted hazards flowing around the globe — a movement that continues in many forms and many places to this day.
But Jimmy Carter was the only political leader who early on recognized the importance of this issue, which involves the immorality of rich countries dumping dangerous goods in poor countries where regulatory structures are weak, causing heavy damage to human health and the environment.
I never got to thank Carter for his role in taking what at the time was a bold new regulatory attempt to try and rein in what was basically unadorned corporate greed, but I did meet him briefly years later at an event honoring environmental leaders hosted by Ted Turner.
Jimmy Carter was many things — a peanut farmer, ambitious politician, humanitarian, policy wonk, avid reader, big-time rock fan, but I’ll always remember him as the only person who reached out to me and recognized the ground-breaking potential of that seminal piece I published in Rolling Stone.
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Cool story, David, and I think illustrative. Despite his flaws as a political leader, Carter cared about ethics in a way unusual for a politician--and unusual for most of us. You should be proud, also, that your work played an important role in revealing (and ultimately curtailing) those shady practices.
I too did not know this story. Well deserved. It harkens to a time when powerful stories could impact a president—-Watergate anyone? Now it seems presidents and political candidates can act with impunity. We cannot let ourselves be overrun by an anti-science and conspiracy-driven crowd. Your reporting proves it.