The Man Who Convinced Jimmy Carter to Run for President
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2018
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet meets with physician, anthropologist, author and Jimmy Carter's former 'drugs czar', Peter Bourne.
Comparing his life to the title character in the film Forrest Gump, the trained psychiatrist and Vietnam veteran looks back on an eclectic career spanning six decades. He talks about his involvement in the civil rights movement, his close relationship with Jimmy Carter (and how he convinced him to run for president), serving as an Assistant Secretary-General at the UN, and his awkward encounter with Saddam Hussein. The author of a Fidel Castro biography, Bourne also caught the attention of the author Robert Ludlum.
Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:33.5 | Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. |
| 0:42.8 | If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:48.3 | And while you're there, please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us. |
| 0:53.5 | This is the BBC. We have an amazing cast for this |
| 1:00.9 | edition of Freethinking. A White House veteran, a man responsible for the eradication of the parasitic |
| 1:06.4 | guinea worm, a biographer of Fidel Castro, a llama farmer in Wales, and a diplomat who had dealings with |
| 1:13.0 | Saddam Hussein. |
| 1:14.4 | And they're all one person, Peter Bourne. |
| 1:21.5 | Now, there's an easy joke here, one about the born supremacy or the born identity, but I'm afraid he's got that covered too. |
| 1:31.8 | The similarity factually, Jason Bourne and the Jason Bourne novels, |
| 1:38.1 | he was in Special Forces, he was of Australian background, |
| 1:42.0 | the whole string of things that you'd have to know me |
| 1:44.9 | and it had to be my name that had been taken. |
| 1:49.9 | Peter Bourne, a doctor, a political campaigner, a person of influence. |
| 1:55.1 | He's Australian by heritage and British by birth. |
| 1:58.6 | But America is the country where his influence has been felt most strongly. |
| 2:03.3 | Without him, the American 1970s would have looked very different. Without him, there would |
| 2:08.8 | have been no President Jimmy Carter. We're going to spend this edition of Freethinking with Peter |
... |
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