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On 11 October 2002 the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Peace Prize of 2002 was to be granted to Jimmy Carter. My purpose is to tell the story of the Carter prize: why he did not receive it in 1978 for his mediation between Israel and Egypt; Carter's attitude toward the prize in the following years; the announcement in 2002 and its complications; the Nobel addresses at the award ceremony; and the Carter award in perspective.

At 4:02 a.m. on 11 October the phone rang at the Carter residence in Plains, Georgia. Rosalynn Carter, who answered, was worried, thinking it might be about one of their children. Then she thought it might be a prank. But, to her surprise, it was a call from Oslo, asking Jimmy Carter to phone back at 4:30 a.m. to Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Rosalynn told one of Carter's Secret Service men to inform him directly. The excited messenger, who is from Nicaragua, blurted the words to Carter in Spanish, which, fortunately, Carter understands. Lundestad told him on the phone that in thirty minutes, at 11:00 a.m. in Oslo, the announcement would be made that Carter had won the Peace Prize. We can imagine how the Carters reacted to the unexpected news.

In the announcement, the committee called Carter's mediation in 1978 "a vital contribution to the Camp David Accords" and "in itself a great enough achievement to qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize." Why, then, did he not receive the prize along with Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt?

It was not until some years after 1978 that we learned the reason, from the memoirs of Baron Stig Ramel, executive director of the Nobel Foundation from 1972 to 1992. He told how, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee members were considering the award in September 1978 and had already decided upon Begin and Sadat, they asked Ramel, who represented the governing body of all the Nobel prizes, whether they could add Carter, even though he had not been nominated by the deadline of 1 February 1978, or in the first meeting of the Norwegian Committee later that month. Ramel replied that this would be a violation of the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, and it could not be done.

When the committee announced the prize for Begin and Sadat, it referred to Carter's "great role." Moreover, in the award ceremony Aase Lionaes, committee chair, called Carter "the master builder responsible for the bridge that had to be built between Egypt and Israel." In that ceremony both Begin and Sadat also paid high tribute to Carter.

Looking back, in the award ceremony of 2002, Chairman Gunnar Berge of the Nobel Committee declared in his speech of presentation to Carter that the committee had wished to give him the prize in 1978, but a "mere formality prevented Carter from receiving his well-earned Peace Prize at that time." Elsewhere this has also been spoken of as a "glitch," but there happens to be good reason for it. The very first sentence of the will of Alfred Nobel of 1895, the basis for the establishment of the Nobel prizes, states that the prizes are to go "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." This first sentence is also quoted in Article #1 of the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation.

This time factor has not always been adhered to, and many prizes in all the Nobel fields have been granted for achievements in years earlier than the one just past. This has been justified by considering such accomplishments as generally recognized only more recently. Many scientific achievements, for example, would seem to need more time to demonstrate their true merit. Prizes to statesmen for peacemaking often should actually be left for future historians to judge, after there has been time for consequences to be observed and documents to be examined.

Jimmy Carter's remarkable mediation efforts at Camp David took place only six weeks before the committee announced the prize and long after the nominations for the year had been closed on the first of February. According to the "preceding year" clause, Carter would have been clearly eligible in 1979, but as the prize had gone to Sadat and Begin in 1978, a prize for mediation between them was certainly out of the question for the following year.

Actually, there was good reason for the committee to have waited. Camp David had produced the framework for an agreement, and by 12 October 1978 negotiations to draft the peace treaty had begun, with the hope that the treaty would be ready to be signed on 19 November, the anniversary of Sadat's dramatic trip to Jerusalem, which had made Camp David possible. However, when the committee announced the prizes on 27 October, these negotiations were stalled. On that very morning Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was vainly trying to get Israeli Foreign Minister Moishe Dayan to compromise, and the Egyptian representative was packing his bags to return to Cairo. Vance had to call off the negotiating session planned for the afternoon.