Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024
Washington Post , “Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100“
Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary postpresidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the oldest living U.S. president of all time.
[…]“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” Chip Carter said in a statement. “My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.”
[…]Mr. Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, U.S. Navy veteran, and Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first president from the Deep South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected president between Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House.
As the nation’s 39th president, he governed with strong Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more conservative. Four years after taking office, Mr. Carter lost his bid for reelection, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures of the era, Ronald Reagan.
When Mr. Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was widely regarded as a mediocre president, if not an outright failure. The list of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation.
“Stagflation,” connoting both low growth and high inflation, was a description that critics used to attack Mr. Carter’s economic policies. In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as gasoline supplies dwindled and prices soared after revolution in Iran disrupted the global oil supply.
Mr. Carter made energy his signature domestic policy initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened. In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst ever for the U.S. nuclear-energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels.
[…]Mr. Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November 1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out daily on television and did not end until Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Carter left office, when the hostages were released.
In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Mr. Carter authorized a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when two U.S. aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned.
“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Mr. Carter said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in Plains. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Mr. Carter ordered an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual.
As the years wore on, the judgment on Mr. Carter’s presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view. He lived long enough to see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the gas station and U.S. hostages in Iran.
Near the end of Mr. Carter’s life, two biographies argued forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people realized — “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history,” author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”
Both books — the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” — said Mr. Carter was often ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding the number of people of color in federal judgeships.
The biographies concluded that Mr. Carter’s reputation as a poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically.
“He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”
Mr. Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency. He spent 13 days at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978, shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat . In a process that almost collapsed several times, Mr. Carter was instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals.
The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor. In 1978, Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor conferred on Mr. Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace.
Against fierce conservative opposition, Mr. Carter pushed through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward better U.S. relations with Latin American neighbors. He signed a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, SALT II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan.
Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human rights a central theme of U.S. foreign policy, a sharp departure from the approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.
Two Cabinet-level departments — Energy and Education — were created under Mr. Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size of the national park and wildlife refuge system.
Mr. Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”
“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986.
His relations with Congress were often strained, even though it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals.
With the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, Mr. Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under Reagan and his conservative allies. The military buildup under Reagan was often credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that buildup began under Mr. Carter.
Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but it was Mr. Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, when Reagan was president.
In the 2018 Post interview, Mr. Carter said he had “a lot of regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalize relations with China and his focus on human rights.
“I kept our country at peace and championed human rights, and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said, adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth.”
New York Times , “Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100“
Jimmy Carter, who rose from Georgia farmland to become the 39th president of the United States on a promise of national healing after the wounds of Watergate and Vietnam, then lost the White House in a cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga. He was 100.
[…]Tributes poured in from presidents, world leaders and many everyday people from around the world who admired not only Mr. Carter’s service during four years in the White House but his four decades of efforts since leaving office to fight disease, broker peace and provide for the poor. President Biden ordered a state funeral to be held and was expected to deliver a eulogy.
[…]A lifelong farmer who still worked with his hands building houses for the poor well into his 90s, Mr. Carter had long defied death and outlived not only his wife but his vice president, most of his cabinet, key aides and allies as well as the Republican president he defeated and the Republican challenger who later defeated him. Over the years, he beat back a series of health crises, including a bout with the skin cancer melanoma, which spread to his liver and brain, and repeated falls, one giving him a broken hip.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution , “Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100“
Former President Jimmy Carter, a man who redefined what a post-presidency could be, died Sunday. He was 100.
His son, Chip Carter confirmed that the former president died at his home in Plains about 3:45 p.m.
Carter, who lived longer than any other U.S. president, entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia in February 2023 after a series of short hospital stays.
The only Georgian ever elected to the White House, Carter left office after a single term that was highlighted by forging peace between Israel and Egypt, but was overshadowed by the Iran hostage crisis. In the decades after, his reputation grew through his and wife Rosalynn Carter’s work at the Carter Center in Atlanta and his philanthropic causes such as Habitat for Humanity.
“People will be celebrating Jimmy Carter for hundreds of years. His reputation is only going to grow,” Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley wrote in his book “The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”
Because he lived so long, the last few years in poor health and, indeed, nearly two years after entering hospice care, I’ve essentially eulogized him several times already and won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that, while I was very much not a fan of his administration as the time (I turned 15 shortly after his loss to Reagan), and had some quibbles here and there with his post-presidential advocacy, I’ve come to greatly admire him as a man. And, indeed, to see his presidency much more favorably in hindsight.
I am not alone in this. As Nick Kristof writes, “Jimmy Carter Deserved Our Thanks and Respect, Not Our Sneers.”
We in the news media and chattering class mocked Jimmy Carter as a country bumpkin, with cartoons depicting him installing an outhouse next to the White House. His public approval dropped to 28 percent, and when Ronald Reagan succeeded him, the Reagans’ interior designer reportedly smirked about the need to “get the smell of catfish out of the White House.”
President Carter, a member of Congress lamented in 1979, “couldn’t get the Pledge of Allegiance through Congress.” Rolling Stone described Carter as “the great national sinking feeling.” Ousted after a single term, he wasn’t so much criticized as sneered at. Even Democrats like Bill Clinton treated Carter as an embarrassment who had undermined liberals and paved a path for Reagan.
Yet all this speaks to our failure of discernment.
Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, probably improved the lives of more people over a longer period than any recent president. He was a far better president than is generally acknowledged — and is the only one in modern times who didn’t lose a single soldier to combat (although he did lose eight service members to an air collision during the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran). Carter was also the best-ever ex-president: Hundreds of millions of people around the globe are living better lives because of his relentless efforts to overcome violence and disease.
So Carter’s death is a moment to reassess his legacy, but it also is an opportunity to reflect on how we in the news media and the political world got him so wrong and treated him so unfairly.
[…]I’ve interacted in some form with eight presidents (I first encountered Carter when I was a high school senior covering his run for president in 1976), and Carter stands out in three ways.
First, he was less focused on himself than almost any other leader I’ve known. He never sought riches, and he continued to live in the same humble bungalow that he and Rosalynn constructed in 1961 in Plains, Ga. His study was a converted garage.
Second, he took on superhuman challenges: Middle East peace, eradication of Guinea worm, energy independence — and, at a personal level, running as an unknown for president. (When he told his mother he was running for president, she supposedly asked, “President of what?” His campaign rented a hotel ballroom for his Iowa campaign kickoff, and just three people came.) Sure, Carter often fell short, but it’s only because he persistently aimed so unreasonably high that we’re talking about him today.
Third, he was guided by principles more than politics, and he sought to use his platform to help others. That’s not to say he refused all moral compromises: He wanted to be elected governor of Georgia, so in 1970 he stayed quiet on civil rights and even feigned respect for the segregationist George Wallace. That’s an ethically complicated side of Carter, who believed that repudiating racists “would have been the end of my political career,” as he told Jonathan Alter, the author of an excellent biography of Carter and a contributor to Times Opinion. So he could indeed be calculating, but his aims were loftier than his means, and — imperfectly — he regularly did what he thought was right even when it was politically costly.
He was truly a unique figure in American history. May he rest in peace.