In 1977 I was working for the newly elected City Councilmember from the South Bronx, Gilberto Gerena‐Valentin, when President Jimmy Carter came to town. Gerena, as he was called by everyone, upset Ramon Velez in that September’s primary which served as a repudiation of the Bronx Democratic machine. Velez was the archetype of a corrupt politician who amassed a fortune and built an empire on the misery of his constituents. The man Ed Koch called, “a poverty pimp” ruled the social service networks of America’s poorest neighborhood and did little to allay the suffering of those who lived amidst the squalor there. Velez controlled the community school boards, the drug treatment centers, access to public housing and scarce slots in daycare centers. Velez’s crowning achievement was the new municipal hospital in the heart of his district, Lincoln. Lincoln Hospital was where Shirley Vasquez and all the other parents, like her, took their children when they were injured or ill. In a community with few private doctors or residents who could afford medical care, Lincoln has been the busiest emergency department in New York City since it opened on E. 149th St in 1976. And, on Sept. 9, 1977, when Luis (age 7) and Juanna (age 5) were brought to Lincoln by their mother Shirley, they were quite sick. As Daily News columnist Pete Hamill wrote about Mrs. Vasquez’s visits on Oct. 5: “She tried to explain what it was like to have diarrhea for three weeks, to spend day and night vomiting or a fever. She tried to explain that worms had come from her water tap. Not just brown and gray debris. But worms. A quarter inch long and wriggling with poisonous life.” As Hamill recounted, the receptionist at Lincoln told Vasquez that many other residents had come to the hospital with similar symptoms. She advised Shirley to bring in water samples so they could be analyzed, and an appropriate treatment prescribed. But when she returned with the samples and presented them to the attending doctor, she was told there was not sufficient staff to test the water. She left Lincoln without a stool or blood sample being taken, without a diagnosis of her children’s condition or a prescription. Shirley contacted Gerena at the urging of a friend who knew of his Sept. 8 primary victory and his reputation as an advocate. Gerena sought other residents whose water source was the Jerome Park Reservoir. There were dozens of other people who had comparable stories to tell, ailments suffered. They too took their complaints to Lincoln Hospital and to the city’s Department of Water Resources. But almost a month later the water hadn’t really improved. Gerena turned to me and asked me to contact the media. I called Jack Newfield, a renowned, muckraking journalist at The Village Voice. Newfield instantly sensed the power of this story and urged me to bring it to the attention of Hamill, then a columnist for The News. A phone call and subway ride to Brooklyn later, Hamill agreed to write the story the next day. As it turned out, that day, Oct. 5, Carter was in New York at the United Nations giving a speech on human freedom and global development. Hamill’s column landed on newsstands hours before Carter began his appearance in front of the General Assembly. “We can work for a world without want,” he said. “We can build a global community dedicated to these purposes and human dignity.” Hamill finished his column by challenging the president: “Jimmy Carter didn’t really have to lecture the whole world about the need for human dignity or cast his vision as far as Zimbabwe or Namibia to find its violation. All he had to do was go out of that building and get in the limo and move up the East River Drive to the Willis Ave. Bridge and cross over to the Bronx.” To his eternal credit, Carter did just that. One of his aides, Stuart Eizenstat, had been reading Hamill’s article while riding in the limo with the president. Eizenstat shared the tale of Shirley Vasquez and her children with Carter who requested that his driver turn away from the airport and head to the Bronx. Once there he was greeted by a phalanx of residents pleading for federal assistance, activists challenging him to live up to America’s promise of equality for this Puerto Rican and Black community and a line-up of elected officials that included Mayor Abe Beame and Gerena. “It was a very sobering trip for me to see the devastation that has taken place in the South Bronx in the last five years,” Carter said, adding “But I am encouraged in some ways by the efforts of the tenant groups to rebuild. I’m impressed by the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have. I think they still have to know we care.” For the tenants in the South Bronx, caring was not enough. In the face of acres of burned and abandoned buildings, they needed a massive infusion of funds for reconstruction. Amidst the plagues of asthma, diabetes, and hypertension they needed community health programs and centers driven by the force of comprehensive care not corruption. And in the richest nation on earth, they needed leadership that energized the engines of government to work on their behalf. Thanks to the visit from the president the tragedy of the South Bronx became a headline. The images of fires burning in the neighborhood around Yankee Stadium during the World Series became a national nightmare. Koch went on to become mayor, and appointed Ed Logue to head up a redevelopment corporation for the area, but not much changed. Four years later, the Bronx Democratic machine set out to vanquish Gerena-Valentin by gerrymandering his apartment out of the district and red-baiting him. He lost his seat by 49 votes to the machine’s candidate, Rafael Castaneda-Colon. Carter became enmeshed in a primary fight with Ted Kennedy and was absorbed by the demands of hyper-inflation and a hostage crisis. His ability to follow through on his desire to rebuild the South Bronx was sabotaged by the tribulations of his term. Instead of his visit serving as a clarion call for reviving the “inner cities” as he had hoped, it became an embarrassment. When Ronald Reagan challenged him in 1980, he took his turn visiting the same Bronx site Carter viewed; things were unchanged. He too was met by cries from skeptical, angry tenants who shouted, “We want jobs” And, while Reagan blamed the decay and despair on the Democrats, it was not unlike Carter’s comments three years earlier that blamed the despair on Nixon’s cutbacks in urban renewal funding. Through the Reagan era the devastation of the South Bronx deepened. The nature of crime shifted from arson to armed robbery. Crack replaced political corruption as the No. 1 plague at the street level. While in the halls of government those entrusted with upholding the laws were themselves engaged in law-breaking. Rep. Mario Biaggi, Borough President Stanley Simon and several associates were either imprisoned or disbarred because of fraud and misconduct. Poverty ensured that chaos trumped community development. Violence was entrenched as a byproduct of a government that ignored the tragedies faced by those like Shirley Vasquez and her neighbors. Carter left office to assume a new role as the founder of the Carter Center. As he originally conceived, the center would carry forward his work as a global peacemaker. Having successfully brokered the Camp David Accords in 1978, which brought a peace treaty to Egypt and Israel, he believed he would use the center to advance similar efforts at conflict resolution. And in 2002 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of peace-seeking work. However, much of his work with the Carter Center focused on matters of global health, not war and peace. He hired his former Centers for Disease Control director as the center’s first executive director. Working with Dr. William Foege, the former president set out to eradicate Guinea worm disease, a deadly infection contracted by drinking contaminated water. Like his trip to the South Bronx, Carter traveled to Nigeria and Ghana, sites ravaged by the water-based illness. He wanted to understand the sickness first-hand. And, he was fearless in tackling the problem, working with the UN, other nonprofits and corporations to do so. The number of cases of guinea worm has been reduced from 3.5 million in 1986 to 14 in 2023. According to the latest report by the Carter Center, “The Guinea worm eradication campaign has averted at least 80 million cases of this devastating disease among the world’s poorest and most neglected people.” The president learned a great deal in the South Bronx — about the plight of the poor, the importance of a clean environment and the value of community health initiatives. He learned it too late to help Shirley Vasquez and her community. They suffered through the agua sucia (bad water) and the poverty for decades. But the lessons Carter learned, he applied to the Guinea worm infection, and that campaign became his greatest achievement. Goodman is the author of the forthcoming memoir, “Inventing Social Change,” from which this has been adapted.