The surest road to success in politics is to imitate what’s worked before, but Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, always went his own way. As a politician, his greatest strength was spotting opportunity, even if he wasn’t always adept at using power once he got it. As the ex-president who has lived the longest, and for a long time one of America’s youngest and most energetic “elder” statesmen, he became one of the trusted citizens in the world.
Mr. Carter was a “sometimes nagging presence in our national life,” wrote America editor Matt Malone, S.J., in 2015, “a symbol of the better angels of our collective nature”—and, like Pope Francis, he was “the real deal: a leader who says what he does and does what he says.”
Throughout his life, Mr. Carter was true to his Baptist faith, famously teaching Sunday school even while residing in the White House. In the 44 years after his presidency, no longer the object of constant speculation about what was “real” and what was political image, Mr. Carter could act on his Christian principles to unite rather than divide humanity. “What is noteworthy of Jimmy Carter’s approach to public and political life,” wrote Joseph McAuley in America, “is the belief that one’s faith has a part to play in it and that it is something that should not be ignored or undervalued.”
Jimmy Carter roared into Washington like a comet. A one-term governor of Georgia, he was the only Democratic candidate in 1976 who really understood the new way of picking nominees, running in every primary while his better-known rivals picked their battles and plotted to win delegates at a deadlocked convention. By the time party leaders recognized the threat, Mr. Carter was unstoppable. “I’ll never tell a lie,” he declared in that campaign, offering a balm after Watergate brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. “I want a government as good and as kind and as loving as the American people.”
Even in 1976, there were signs that Mr. Carter was a little too direct, too unvarnished, for American voters. He defeated Gerald Ford by only three points, going to the White House only because Southern states temporarily returned to the Democratic Party to support one of their own.
In his inauguration speech, he quoted the prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” The new president, who had served in the Navy’s nuclear-submarine program and had saved his family’s peanut-farming business before entering politics, set the tone for his administration by walking down a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, a folksy upset of standard protocol that had kept presidents gliding by the crowds in an automobile.
President Carter quickly alienated members of his own party, trying to stop billions of dollars’ worth of dams and other water projects—and anticipating by a few decades a bipartisan turn against the practice of pork-barrel spending as a way to please constituents. (He was only partly successful.) He won more praise for his international diplomatic skills, brokering a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978. He also negotiated the treaties under which the United States returned control of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama, signaling respect for the sovereignty of other nations in the Western Hemisphere.
He introduced human rights as a cornerstone of American foreign policy. In his farewell address before leaving the White House in 1981, Mr. Carter said, “America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America.” But, he added, “If we are to serve as a beacon for human rights, we must continue to perfect here at home the rights and values which we espouse around the world: A decent education for our children, adequate medical care for all Americans, an end to discrimination against minorities and women, a job for all those able to work and freedom from injustice and religious intolerance.”
Anticipating ‘Laudato Si’’
Mr. Carter was not one to kick the can down the road, and his insistence on drawing attention to America’s current and future challenges may have been a factor in his defeat in 1980. A televised address on July 15, 1979—now known as the “malaise speech,” though he never used that word—can be seen as one of the great lost opportunities in American history. In that speech, Mr. Carter took on the “crisis of confidence” in America, going beyond the current anxiety about high energy costs and a weak economy to speak about more existential themes: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But…we’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
Similar language would be used by Pope Francis in his “Laudato Si’” encyclical in 2015.
The historian Andrew Bacevich has praised Mr. Carter for attempting to steer the United States away from, not only an increasing dependence on foreign oil, but also from “a false model of freedom.” In a 2008 interview, Bacevich said, “He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.” Mr. Carter’s pledge to “never tell a lie” to the American people turned out to have unexpected, and uncomfortable, returns.
His bid for re-election had been further complicated on Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took more than 60 Americans hostage. Most of them were not released until the day Mr. Carter left office more than a year later. A rescue effort in April 1980 was called off because of mechanical breakdowns on the Iranian desert that grounded three of the eight helicopters sent to retrieve the hostages, one more than planners thought the effort could tolerate.
The mission was aborted and then ended in a helicopter crash that claimed the lives of eight service members. At the press conference announcing his cancer diagnosis this August, Mr. Carter was asked if he had any regrets and replied, “I wish I had sent one more helicopter to get the hostages, and we would have rescued them, and I would have been re-elected.”
The rescue was part of Mr. Carter’s attempt at a tougher image as the 1980 election approached. He also imposed sanctions on the Soviet Union in protest of that country’s invasion of Afghanistan and in March ordered a boycott of that year’s summer Olympic Games in Moscow. The games went on without the participation of the United States and a few other allies.
While dealing with these international crises, Mr. Carter held off a challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. “If Kennedy runs, I’ll whip his ass,” he had told a group of members of Congress in 1979, and he meant it. Mr. Carter was less successful in the fall, losing 44 states and the election to genial Republican Ronald Reagan. He was the only president in the 20th century to oversee his party’s eviction from the White House after just one term.
Advancing human rights
Liberated from short-term political considerations, Mr. Carter reinvented the role of an American ex-president. Richard Nixon spent his post-White House days loudly asserting his brilliance at political analysis; other ex-presidents have used their status to command lucrative speaking fees. Mr. Carter became better known helping to build houses for the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity.
In 1982, he and his wife, Rosalynn, established the Carter Center, in partnership with Emory University in Atlanta, to advance the causes of democracy and human rights and to promote public health initiatives, across the globe. The Carter Center has also monitored 100 elections in 38 countries to help deter fraud and voter intimidation; Mr. Carter personally observed dozens of these elections and was on an election-monitoring trip in Guyana in May 2015 when he fell ill and had to return home early.
His work with the Carter Center was instrumental in his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Mr. Carter wrote more than two dozen books after leaving office, from his presidential memoir Keeping Faith, in 1982, to A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, published a couple of weeks before he announced his cancer diagnosis in August 2015 at the Carter Center, and then Faith: A Journey for All, published in 2018.
“I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” Carter had said in 2015. “I do have a deep religious faith, which I’m very grateful for.” He also mentioned the Carter Center’s success in fighting the debilitating Guinea worm disease in Africa and Asia, which totaled 3.5 million cases in 1986, and said, “I’d like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.” As of January 2023, the Carter Center reported, there were only 13 reported human cases of Guinea worm disease globally.
