“Afterward,” Carter writes in his diary, “Kennedy drove over from his hotel, appeared on the platform along with a lot of other people, seemed to have had a few drinks, which I probably would have done myself. He was fairly cool and reserved, but the press made a big deal of it.”

They sure did — and for good reason. Kennedy’s challenge of Carter for the ’80 nod was unusually bitter and protracted. Even though Carter won twice as many delegates in the primary and caucus season, Kennedy fought all the way to the August convention, attempting to convince delegates to support a rule change that would have allowed them to vote their conscience on the first ballot — instead of being forced to cast a ballot for the candidate they’d been pledged to during the primary season. Only when this effort failed did Kennedy back down and end his campaign (with what was probably the best speech of his career). So it was only logical that the press would watch the body language closely when the two men came together onstage after Carter’s acceptance speech two nights later — and Kennedy’s discomfort was obvious. As the Washington Post reported it:

When Kennedy did arrive, wearing that familiar tight-lipped smile his traveling press corps has come to call “the smirk,” he strode into the crowd of Democratic officials already on the podium, gave Carter a perfunctory shake of the hand, and walked away to the side of the platform.

There followed a comical ballet in which Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (Mass.) all tried futilely to lead Kennedy back to center stage for an arms-up pose with the president.

When Kennedy went to the left side of the platform to raise a fist toward his Massachusetts delegation, Carter made a beeline to join him and struck the same pose. But Kennedy’s arm had come down a split-second before Carter’s shot up.

You can watch some of Kennedy’s snub of Carter in this video:

Carter has already rasied eyebrows while promoting his diaries. In a “60 Minutes” segment that aired over the weekend, he told Lesley Stahl that “we would have had comprehensive healthcare now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed” as president. “It was his fault,” Carter added. “Ted Kennedy killed the bill.”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jimmy Carter says Americans could have had comprehensive health care coverage decades ago if the Edward Kennedy hadn’t blocked a plan Carter proposed while in the White House.

The former president made the comment in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” to be aired Sunday. Parts of the interview were posted on the show’s website Thursday.

In the interview, Carter accuses Kennedy of “deliberating blocking” comprehensive health care legislation Carter proposed.

Kennedy, who made health care reform a prized cause, died in August 2009 from brain cancer. The Massachusetts senator challenged Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but fell short. Kennedy and Carter had competing health care reform plans.

Gomes, a 30-year old American citizen from Boston, entered North Korea without a visa in January. The authorities tried him in a closed proceeding, sentenced him to eight years of hard labor and fined him $700,000. His crime? Illegal entry and unspecified “hostile acts” against North Korea.

Gomes’s friends and colleagues speculate that he went to North Korea to support Robert Park, another American who illegally entered North Korea in December to call for an end to widespread human rights violations by Kim Jong Il’s dictatorial government. After concerted international pressure, Park was released in early February. Gomes, who taught English in South Korea, had attended rallies calling for Park’s release. Park and Gomes, both devout Christians, participated in campaigns for human rights in North Korea.

North Korea has not tried to hide its intention to extort political concessions from the US for his release. In late June, the (North) Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the government was seriously considering applying wartime laws in his case, which could bring a longer sentence. In early July, KCNA reported that Gomes, disappointed because the U.S. had not come up with a plan to save him, had tried to commit suicide. Sorting threats and hubris from reality in the KCNA reports is a real challenge.

To most Americans, Gomes’s arrest and imprisonment may have read like something out of Orwell’s “1984.” But Gomes faced a reality that tens of millions of North Koreans have been hostage to for decades. No matter how horrifyingly unfair his predicament seemed, his foreign citizenship may have prevented him from facing the worst abuses visited on North Koreans who run afoul of the law — and their family members.

Take Dong-hyuk Shin (an alias). He was born in a forced labor camp in 1982, an automatic prisoner because his parents were. At 14, he was forced to watch the public execution of his mother and older brother, who were caught trying to escape. And that was after prison guards tortured him for weeks, hanging him upside down with his ankles shackled, burning his back with coal, and piercing his stomach and thigh with a metal stick, to extract a confession that he knew about the escape plan. We only know his story because he was lucky enough to finally escape North Korea.

How about Hae-sook Kim (an alias)? In 1975, at 13, she was sent to a mining camp for forced labor with her grandmother, parents and younger siblings because the authorities suspected that her grandfather had defected to South Korea. She spent 28 years there. Her grandmother died in the camp after years of hunger and her mother and younger brother were killed in work accidents.

Inside North Korean detention facilities, especially forced labor camps, humiliation, mistreatment and abuse are simply part of life. Kim told me how she was forced to work 16 hours a day at a mine and how guards would spit into the mouths of imprisoned children. She described the skeletal condition of adults and children alike.

Just as Shin was born a prisoner, so too was Kim imprisoned without a trial. While she was in the camp, Kim never knew why she was there. She only learned about her grandfather’s alleged defection after she managed to bribe camp officials and was released — at age 41. Again, we only know her story because she made her way to South Korea.

It is difficult to imagine that Gomes’s trial met international fair trial standards. As every lawyer in North Korea is on Workers’ Party payroll, even if he were allowed to choose an attorney, it would have made little difference. There has been no report that Gomes was given the opportunity to appeal, and it is not even clear whether court proceedings were translated for him.

North Korea’s criminal justice system is a sham. The judiciary is neither transparent nor independent. Law enforcement agents and judges, prosecutors and lawyers, are appointed by the ruling Workers’ Party. Some of the most harshly punished crimes — such as “hostile acts against North Korea” — are vaguely defined, and appealing a court ruling is practically impossible.

The only effective remedy would be a total overhaul of the judicial system to free it from the government’s absolute control. If North Korea’s leadership were to have any hope for a credible judicial system, it should immediately start engaging U.N. human rights experts to rectify the many problems with its legal system. It is already long overdue.

Kay Seok is North Korea researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Here’s a typical comment from a conservative reader:

“He is personally responsible for this mad regime in Iran.”

The general line of argument seems to be as follows: Carter should have responded to the hostage crisis by nuking Iran, or otherwise initiating military action that would have prevented the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic regime. But he didn’t, which emboldened the forces of revolutionary jihad. The subtext: If Carter had taken a stronger line then (perhaps even before the hostage crisis, by providing military to support to the embattled Shah), maybe we wouldn’t be facing such a mess now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is of course impossible to know what would have happened if Carter had invaded Iran and restored the Shah to power. Our recent track record in invading Islamic nations does not build confidence in the efficacy of such methods in solving long-term problems. Certainly, invading Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t improved our standing with Muslims. It’s entirely possible that an invasion in the late 1970s could have hastened the emergence of al-Qaida-style terrorism. Maybe we’d be even worse of now.

But that’s all speculation. The real problem with such an analysis is that blaming Carter for the success of the Iranian revolution completely misses the historical point — which is that U.S. strategic interests, primarily tied to oil, generated profound antagonism in Iran decades before Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power. If we want to blame someone for this “mad regime” why not Dwight Eisenhower, who was president in 1953 when a U.S-British backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh?

Mossadegh’s sin? Attempting to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company, itself a direct offshoot of Western imperialism and the global race to exploit MidEastern oil resources.

The aftermath of that coup poisoned any chance that the majority of the Iranian population would ever view the United States in a positive light.

As one of the hostage takers told an outraged American embassy staffer: “You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”

The crisis in Iran that destroyed Carter’s presidency was rooted in American and British actions in the MidEast dating back many decades. It strains our understanding of objective reality to call it his fault. In fact, it was Carter, as I wrote yesterday, who pointed his finger at the real villain — American addiction to foreign oil.

Upon further reflection, it may be that Carter’s real downfall was that he told Americans that if they wanted to wean themselves from dependence on foreign oil, they needed to change their ways, and we just didn’t want to hear it. So we elected someone who told us we could have it all. You won’t find a more eloquent articulation of this fundamental difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan than in this snippet of an interview with Andrew Bacevich conducted by Bill Moyers.