Former President Jimmy Carter dead at 100

Confident in his unlikely path to the White House, Jimmy Carter was confident that the American people, weary of Vietnam and Watergate, would welcome a new type of president. He was a peanut farmer who carried his own bag and was worried about heating costs, so he told them about it. Or like it was less than that. And for a while, voters supported him.

But just four years later, in the aftermath of a presidency widely seen as a failure, it sometimes seemed as if all Carter had left was a smile — elect him in the first place. The wide-toothed smile that helped him later became caricatured by countless cartoonists as a symbol of naivety.

But Carter was lucky to have enjoyed the presidency for more than 10 times as long in office — in March 2019, he became the longest-serving president in history — and before his death at age 100., He lived until the verdict of history was softened.

Carter was placed in home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations, the Carter Center confirmed on February 18. His wife Rosalynn Carter passed away on November 19, 2023.

If the 39th president has not achieved everything he sought during his four years in the White House, and he has not achieved it himself, human rights in international affairs, and energy as the defining challenge of our time. and his abiding concern for the environment may now be lost. He is considered a visionary. Even if in later years his unwavering support for Palestinian rights (and frequent sharp criticism of Israel) earned him many detractors, his brokering of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt was a milestone in modern diplomacy. becomes.

Although he was the first president to confront what is now called “Islamic extremism,” he was not the last. And even though the president’s re-election was sacrificed due to his incompetence during the Iran hostage crisis and the failure of the military raid to rescue the prisoners, the administration’s tenacity ultimately allowed all 52 diplomats to return home safely. Ta.

At the time, when there were only six women in the presidential cabinet, Mr. Carter appointed three of them as assistant secretaries, three of the previous five women, and 80% of them as assistant secretaries. Appointed as assistant. Few of the policy and public image battles that Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama faced as first ladies didn’t come first for Carter’s trusted wife Rosalynn: for mental health. Whether it’s campaigning or attending cabinet meetings.

James Earl Carter Jr. may be a devout man (“I will never lie,” he vowed during the 1976 campaign). He may be narrow-minded (his micromanagement of the White House tennis court was thoroughly ridiculed). He may be tone-deaf (preaching to his fellow countrymen about the nation’s “crisis of confidence” in a way that only highlights the problem, and omitting some of the glamor of the presidency that ordinary people actually liked and expected).

But in a political culture where those traits are rarely rewarded, he can also be disarmingly frank (to Playboy magazine, who says he lusted after women who were not his wives and committed adultery on multiple occasions in his mind). Who can forget his confession?) And he had a talent for unlikely friendships – especially with Gerald Ford, whom he narrowly and bitterly defeated, and with conservative John Wayne, whose support helped pass the 1977 Panama Canal Handover Treaty. did.

He grew up in a house without indoor plumbing on a dirt road in rural Georgia, surrounded by poor black people, returned to his hometown after leaving the Navy, and was the only president to live in public housing. After his father’s death, his family ran a peanut business. He was the son of a die-hard racist and frequently addressed racial issues early in his career, right up until his election as governor of Georgia in 1970. But once he was sworn into the state legislature, he declared that “the era of discrimination is over,” and Time magazine hailed him on its cover as the face of America’s New South.

Carter’s life was a classic Horatio Alger story. As a teenager, he joined Future Farmers of America, growing, packing, and selling his own acres of peanuts. He fulfilled his dream of being appointed to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he became a protégé of Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, in the post-World War II submarine fleet. He married his sister Ruth’s childhood friend and they raised four children.

His first political post was a classic American position: chairman of the local school board, where he first spoke in favor of integration in the early 1960s. He served two terms in the Georgia State Senate and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1966, paving the way for his 1970 gubernatorial run. By the end of 1972, he was determined to launch a presidential campaign, but the long odds against him were proven. Although he appeared in What’s My Line in 1973, none of the celebrity panelists recognized him, and ultimately only film critic Gene Shalit guessed that he was the Governor. Ta.

But Mr. Carter’s status as an unknown outsider was a distinct post-Watergate advantage, an advantage that was understood early on by the late R.W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times. He quickly became a front-runner for the Democratic nomination and won Iowa. caucuses and New Hampshire primary. In 1976, he published an election manifesto-cum-memoir, confidently titled Why Not the Best? And the rest is history.

After taking the oath of office, Carter brought a breath of fresh air to Washington by walking from the Capitol to the White House. But he soon took on a harsh, reprimanding tone, ordering the White House thermostat to be set to a frigid 65 degrees (during a televised “fireside chat,” he wore a tan cardigan). (announced recently), he sold his position as president. yacht sequoiabanned hard liquor at White House parties and restricted the performance of “Long Live the Secretary” at official events.

Much of the national media and Washington’s chatty class quickly denounced the new president as despicable at heart and surrounded by the equally uneducated and uncouth “Georgia Mafia.” He retaliated with scathing contempt for his critics. His very style, which once seemed unassuming and breezy, now looks hallowed and awkward, and in essence, it’s like he just couldn’t catch a break at all. He was troubled by a national economy in “stagflation,” and by June 1978 Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution was analyzing why his presidency had failed. That’s because the presidency lacked the most important vision.

In the afterword to an excerpt from the White House diary published in 2010, Carter wrote: I wanted to make a mark in foreign affairs and domestic politics. The three major themes of my presidential term were peace, human rights, and the environment (including energy conservation). “However, in retrospect, my details about and deviations from these themes were not as clear to me or to the White House staff as they were to me,” he added.

In 1980, Carter challenged Sen. Ted Kennedy’s renomination and lost in the November election to his diametric opponent, Ronald Reagan. He sulked for a while, then bought a $10,000 Lanier word processor, wrote the first of more than 20 books he planned to write when he left office, and established an alliance with Emory University in Atlanta. He began establishing the Presidential Library and the Carter Center.

Over the next several decades, he built a “home for humanity,” oversaw foreign elections, conducted semi-sanctioned (and sometimes unilateral) diplomacy, and made various claims against his successors in both parties. He continued to provide honest evaluations. In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s election, he posed in the Oval Office with all the living members of the President’s Club, an old frenemy with whom he had an affair while in office, fellow Southerner Bill Clinton. Carter, a longtime national Sunday school teacher who couldn’t resist putting a noticeable physical distance between himself and his children, was very angry. (He lived on in the role. Carter continued to teach Sunday school in Georgia each year and continued to take photos with everyone in attendance after class.)

Most surveys of professional historians still rank Mr. Carter in the third quarter of effective presidents (coincidentally, on par with his friend Jerry Ford). Carter himself preferred Vice President Walter Mondale’s concise summary. “We followed the law, told the truth and kept the peace.”

This is not the best boast in a long presidency. But it’s far from the worst.