Photo: Alex Sanz / AP
Jimmy Carter's last mission? Maureen Dowd visits #39 in Plains, Ga.:
- "The 93-year-old would like to pull another rabbit out of a hat — just not a killer rabbit — and enter into a productive partnership with Donald Trump over North Korea. ... One of the basic premises of the Carter Center is that you should talk to dictators."
- "I would go, yes," Carter told Maureen.
- In 1994, "Carter flew into Pyongyang on his own over the objections of President Bill Clinton and struck a deal with Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the current leader, ... and the man the grandson models himself on — right down to his hairstyle. North Korea secretly cheated on the deal by pursuing another path to a bomb just four years later."
- Carter on Kim Jong-un: "I think he's now got advanced nuclear weaponry that can destroy the Korean Peninsula and Japan, and some of our outlying territories in the Pacific, maybe even our mainland."
- Carter said he has talked to Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser, who is a good friend, including at Zbigniew Brzezinski's funeral when McMaster asked to sit next to Carter, but has so far gotten a negative response": "I told him that I was available if they ever need me."
- Fun fact: "I asked if he had Obama's email address. 'No,' he said flatly."