Former President Carter could have won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 had it not been for strict deadline rules for nominations.
That prize was shared by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for signing the Camp David peace accords."The Nobel committee wanted to give the prize to all three," Geir Lundestad, the current committee's nonvoting secretary, said Sunday. "But Carter had not been nominated when the deadline ran out."
Nominations postmarked by Feb. 1 are accepted for that year's prize. The committee can add its own nominations at its first meeting of the year, usually in early March.
The Camp David accords were not signed until Sept. 17, 1978, about five weeks before that year's peace prize was announced on Oct. 27.
It turned out that Begin and Sadat had been nominated by the deadline, while Carter was not. Even though it could not give him the prize, the Norwegian committee recognized in the 1978 awards citation "the positive initiative taken by President Jimmy Carter."
The Nobel Prizes were endowed by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist whose 355 inventions included dynamite. In his 1895 will, Nobel said the peace prize should be picked by a Norwegian committee and the rest by Swedish institutions.
Lundestad said the committee, which works in deep secrecy in its five or six meetings a year, tried to find a loophole in the rules, which are overseen by the Swedish Nobel Foundation.
Lundestad said the committee turned to the Swedish foundation for advice on Carter. Stig Ramel, a Swede who was then director of the foundation, advised against breaking the rules.
Normally, the committee refuses to discuss past candidates in keeping with a strict policy of secrecy in which selection details are sealed for 50 years. Lundestad made an exception because Ramel revealed the Carter dilemma in his 1994 memoirs.
News reports of the incident have apparently not appeared until now.
Carter is among the 139 candidates for this year's prize, which will be announced in Oslo on Friday.