Jimmy Carter, who has died aged 100, can fairly claim that he was the best former president the United States has ever had.
His local good deeds, his mediation in troubled areas around the world, and the general prudence of his advice were exemplary. As an independent moral voice, he had few peers. However, his one-term presidency, from 1977 to 1981, is still widely dismissed as disappointing.
Despite clear achievements – the Panama Canal Treaties, the Camp David Accords in the Middle East, the SALT II agreement between Russia and the United States to limit nuclear forces, NATO's dual-track approach to the Soviet Union, and a new focus on human rights – it was defeated by a majority Overwhelmed by voters most affected by spiraling inflation and the debilitating hostage crisis with Iran.
but Carter Then he quietly began to pick up the pieces of his life and devote himself to the kind of problems that he believed an engineer with a developed social conscience would aim to solve.
He has become involved with Habitat for Humanity and can be seen hammering nails and carrying bricks to build low-income housing. He established a presidential library and museum, as all holders of that office do, but increasingly he focused his energies on… Carter Center At Emory University in Georgia. Halfway between an international think tank and a conflict resolution organization that seeks to promote democratic values — along with health initiatives and much else besides — it was the fulcrum of the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
The former president has traveled throughout the developing world. In the 1990s, he led international teams to monitor elections in countries from the Dominican Republic to Zambia, having already helped broker the settlement in Ethiopia that led to Eritrea's independence. The public fondness continued. His statement in 2015 The spread of liver cancer brought grief.
James Earl Carter came to the presidency from the Deep South. He was born on October 1, 1924, in the Baptist farming village of Plains, Georgia, and maintained his family home there for the rest of his life. His mother, Lillian, who became a Peace Corps worker at the age of 68, was a strong influence. This was the case with his former wife, Rosalynn Smith, whom he married in 1946 while he was still a student at the US Naval Academy. she He died in November 2023 At the age of 96 years. Carter is survived by his four children.
His education was in engineering and his early mentor was Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear-powered US Navy. However, Carter's livelihood came from growing and storing peanuts in and around the plains.
He was drawn to politics, winning election to the Senate in Georgia in 1962, because he felt that the old ways of the racist South had to change with the times amid new federal laws. He served as governor from 1971 to 1975, and was considered one of the most progressive of the new breed of southern governors, although he was not a revolutionary.
He set his sights on the White House while still in the Atlanta statehouse and began assembling the team that would carry him to the presidency in the 1976 election. The crushing defeat of George McGovern at the hands of Richard Nixon in 1972 left the national Democratic Party rudderless, while the resignation The Republican in 1974 was an opportunity that Carter appreciated more quickly than other contenders, as did an economy struggling to recover from the 1974-75 recession.
The party's strong liberal wing was not at all enamored with Carter, as Southerners rarely were, but his choice of Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate was an answer to some of their reservations.
After defeating Gerald Ford, he inherited a country eager to recover from the shocks of Watergate and Vietnam, but he quickly found difficulty in Washington, where he was barely known. An early proposal for a tax credit was voted down, while his declaration of the “moral equivalent of a war” on excessive energy consumption found loud legislative ears. His administration's “clean” image was also damaged in the first year by allegations of financial impropriety, never proven, against Bert Lance, an old friend from Georgia who was forced to resign as budget director.
Indeed, although his administration was blessed with establishment figures like Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, the Georgians who came to Washington with Carter were a constant source of controversy and distraction. Although often unfairly derided, the various actions of Hamilton Jordan, the campaign manager turned White House chief of staff, left an impression of chaos and recklessness at the heart of the government.
Carter's micromanagement was not necessarily helpful. It paid off with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David, where the two sides agreed to establish normal relations after having gone to war twice in the past twelve years. The agreement, named after the presidential retreat in the hills of northern Maryland, was preceded by the kind of personal shuttle diplomacy between Cairo and Tel Aviv once made famous by Henry Kissinger. But Carter's micromanagement extended to trivial matters like booking time on the White House tennis court.
However, the first half of Carter's term contained few hints of the serious problems ahead. The conservative revolution that eventually produced Ronald Reagan, whom Ford beat for the Republican nomination, was still mostly at the grassroots level, while economic growth continued apace.
Relations with Europe regarding the withdrawal of US forces, and later regarding US economic policies, were often difficult. They were particularly poor on a personal level in Bonn, where West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt barely concealed his disdain for what he saw as Carter's vacillations. But they at least managed, by mistake or by crook, to formulate a new policy for NATO, which worked to develop the alliance's missile capability while continuing to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The American defense build-up that flourished under Reagan was initiated by Carter.
The collapse of the last two years of Carter's presidency was disastrous at home and abroad. On the economic front, although the budget deficit did not get out of control as it did later, the rise in inflation and interest rates has come to represent stagflation in a malignant form, and the dollar has been exposed to increasing pressure. Inflation peaked at 14.8 percent in March 1980, while the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate to 20 percent later that year.
In August 1979, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Chairman of the US Federal Reserve with the dual mission of controlling the money supply and saving the US currency. But this success came too late for the 1980 election cycle. At the same time, Republicans were able to reverse a tactic Carter had used in the 1976 campaign, using their own economic “misery index” against the president’s record.
Carter helped raise the gradually tense national mood with a televised midsummer speech in 1979 in which he complained of his country's malaise. His diagnosis, as is often the case, was justified, but he left the impression that he was powerless to cure the disease. Comments at the time said presidents were not supposed to admit defeat.
This feeling was reinforced in November when Iran's new revolutionary regime occupied the US embassy in Tehran and took more than fifty diplomats hostage. This crisis, which has captured the national mind and led to yellow ribbons being tied to every available tree, has never been so easily resolved. But when a rescue attempt was finally made in the spring of 1980, it was poorly planned, under-resourced, and ultimately a disaster. Carter also enlisted the services of Vance, who resigned as Secretary of State after opposing the mission, and was replaced by Edmund Muskie.
However, his re-election in 1980 did not necessarily look like a lost cause at first. Throughout the primary, Carter faced Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy but defeated him easily enough, although the losses in California and New York were ominous. After Reagan got rid of George H. W. Bush, he succeeded in obtaining the Republican nomination and chose his rival as his running mate. Republican liberals chose the fictional campaign of John Anderson, a congressman from Illinois.
Anderson remained in the presidential race as an independent and clearly hurt Carter more than Reagan in some narrowly divided states. But opinion polls showed a small difference between the two main candidates two weeks before the end of the elections. Their all-important television debate proved decisive. While the president marshaled his facts and arguments with usual precision, the audience was dazzled by Reagan's non-threatening genius and poignant statements. His response to one of Carter's attacks (“There you go again…”) was disarming.
Reagan won all but seven states, 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter's 41 percent. In the conservative tide sweeping across the country, Republicans regained control of the Senate as well. In a final cruel development, Iran released the hostages on Inauguration Day 1981, placing them on a plane that left Tehran just minutes after Carter handed over the reins of office to Reagan.
For several years afterward, the Carter name remained mud. In 1984, Reagan easily defeated the loyal Mondale by running against Carter's record – and Bush did the same, but to a slightly lesser extent, when he beat Michael Dukakis in 1988. The national ambitions of Southern Democratic governors seemed plagued until Bill Clinton of Arkansas won. Presidency in 1992.
Eventually, several successive presidents relied on Carter for advice and used him as an envoy. However, they were not immune to his rebukes. In his final years, he spoke out against Washington's tolerance of human rights abuses — both by Israel and by its federal agents at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which he has long urged to be closed.
The inevitable result is that Carter became president of the United States before he was fully ready to take office. If all the traits he has demonstrated since leaving office could be deployed when he entered the White House, perhaps the thirty-ninth term of the presidency would have been longer and more productive.
