“Hi, my name is Jimmy Carter, and I am running for president,” those words on a television screen covering the Iowa caucuses victory of the mild gentleman from Georgia, were the first time most Americans – and the world – learned of the man who would become America’s 39th president.
The elongated vowels, the noticeable emphasis on consonants, and the slower pace of the gentle Georgia drawl became his instant trademark, as much as the wide, toothy grin that followed.
The crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, magnified on television screens everywhere, gave his face a sense of warmth, compassion and joy that was a welcome contrast to the dour Nixon and hapless Ford images that had descended upon the country since the days of the Watergate scandal.
That accent, those Southern roots, his small-town-man-made-big appeal, and especially his strong Christian faith connected with rural conservatives at once, also appealing to surging progressive and urban constituencies. The man from Plains, Georgia parlayed that Iowa victory into the 1976 nomination of the Democratic party and the American presidency.
He was sworn into office on January 20, 1977.
He would be an awkward politician at times. A hint of a JFK image that helped him capture voters often fell short in the rhetoric. He took actions with a certainty of purpose that was unclear in its strategic context, and that worried the America of the late ‘70s. He followed a blueprint for service made not out of a political foundation but of a guided “moral duty” that set aside political costs in a trade-off to better the world.
President Carter went by a spiritual yardstick that was at once unfamiliar and unsettling to a nation that was confounded with the dimensions of its own power in a Cold War world.
He was not a tough president; there was a gentle soul behind that sometimes-nervous, sometimes certain smile. This was often mistaken as weakness, naivete, or incompetence. He, of course, was none of those things, but the full impact of his actions would have long-term influence that could only be appreciated with the benefit of time.
His inauguration put an end to the United States’ self-critical perception that it was in a moral crisis amid years of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon followed by the questionable pardon of him by Ford before Nixon could be judged. Carter emphasized ethics, morality, faith and patriotism in his campaign and inaugural speech, vowing to restore integrity in government.
By the time he became the first president to walk part of his inaugural parade, there was a sense in 1977 America that the defeated Republican Party needed to do more to clean up its own house and restore its reputation in order to remain relevant. That was also the moment that began a significant shift within the Republican Party toward a more conservative and religion-based issues platform, and the basis for Reagan’s victory over Carter f years later.
Hope soon turned to controversy and conflict into defeat along many of Carter initiatives and actions.
The proposed Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans regardless of sex was defeated despite Carter’s tireless support and campaigning for its passing. He often repeated a pledge he made during the campaign, "Women must have full and equal rights, equal pay for equal work, and protection of their individual rights under the Constitution." But the ERA was not to be.
A series of high-profile missteps, failures and controversial decisions dogged down his presidency, pitting the man from Plains as just too small-town for the big job he held. The Republicans took advantage of that perception, and it was certainly at the core of his defeat by Reagan, a big-dreamer cowboy versus the restrained, idealistic, perhaps too-thoughtful-and-too-cautious Carter.
Reagan’s success in counteracting the appeal of Carter’s Evangelical roots spurred the Republican Party’s wholehearted embrace of politics as religion, some say cynically, in a trend that continues to this day. It was at the core of George W. Bush’s two terms, and successfully co-opted by Trump in attaining the presidency.
Carter’s presidency dealt with many defeats, but he was not defeated. In fact, frustrating those who wanted to define him as a final failure, he had the courage to continue serving and so he amended his final legacy, leaving the failures as mere footnotes.
After his electoral defeat, he worked until it was time to leave the White House for Reagan’s inaugural, having worked tirelessly through the night attempting to secure the release of hostages from Iran. When they were released just moments after Reagan was sworn in, the new president sent Carter to greet the freed hostages when they arrived at the US Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Carter publicly thanked Reagan for turning what would normally be a down day for a defeated president on his first day out of office into a day of celebration of American unity and placing him in the center of it.
Despite the many challenges, setbacks, and shortcomings of his presidency, it was his continued work ahead that kept him relevant in the world. He would rise as a peacemaker, a hostage negotiator, an eternal public servant, and a humanitarian that showed the world who Jimmy Carter really was, rethinking a post-presidential life, and defining his own life though a profound and exemplary commitment to his principles and values, and never stopping.
People as varied in their views as Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush have repeatedly agreed in seeing Jimmy Carter as “the finest and most decent human being” they have ever known.
Historian Stephen Ambrose qualified Carter as “the finest ex-president the country has ever had.”
Back in the ‘90s and several times again, analyst David Broder, who was considered the Dean of the White House Press Corps and who had first-hand knowledge of many presidents, said Carter was “the embodiment of everything that is good and decent in American public life."
He was born on October 1, 1924 to peanut farmer James Earl Carter and Lillian Gordy Carter in the small town of Plains on southwestern Georgia near the Alabama border, about 200 km from Atlanta. Jimmy Carter's youth in Plains was shaped by his experiences growing up in the segregated post-Civil War former Confederacy, on a small farm and close-knit community with all the social and racial dynamics of Grapes of Wrath-era struggles in the rural South of early 20th century America.
As a nine-year-old boy in the middle of the Great Depression until he finished school, he and his siblings Gloria and Ruth helped their parents on the farm, as would younger brother Billy later on.
Carter would later write about working with his father and the influence it had on him; he traced the shaping of his political policies on rural development, environmental protection, and agriculture to his experiences during this time.
This was a time where he also attended segregated schools and he later reflected on the injustices of segregation and discrimination he witnessed, writing about how he was “deeply affected” by the inequality and poverty he saw in his own community.
The combination of farm life and a segregated educational system molded the values he carried into his political career.
In 1946, he graduated from the United States Naval Academy as a nuclear engineer. He married Rosalyn Carter a month later and joined the US Navy, where he spent seven years on nuclear submarine development and operations while stationed in several locations around the world, including Guam and the Panama Canal Zone, then a US territory.
Returning to Plains in the 1950s, and went back into peanut farming, putting his scientific background into experimenting with different cultivars and methods to streamline production and increase efficiency. The resulting success established him as business leader and set the launch of his political career.
He was elected to the Georgia senate in the early ‘60s, and as governor in 1971. Georgia is a small southern state of far less relevance in the ‘70s than today. As its governor, he was virtually unknown to the rest of the American electorate when he announced his run for the presidency in 1974.
His candidacy and victory are the stuff of a legendary rise from humble, small-town beginnings to the biggest job of all, the US presidency.
His presidency was a complex mix of achievements and challenges, triumphs and tragedies, all with the subtext of an economic slog that eroded his political support and defined his presidency. It was his failure in stabilizing the economy in a period of high inflation, high unemployment, high interest rates and rising energy prices that garnered him heavy and near-constant criticism, even from within his own party.
None other than Ted Kennedy, Democratic Party royalty, challenged him for his party’s nomination in the 1980 election (it is unusual in American politics for an incumbent president to be challenged within his own party for a chance at reelection). Kennedy criticised his presidency as a failure on the count of an economy bristling with high unemployment, “and interest rates to match.” Kennedy was ultimately unsuccessful, but the damage had been done (to both Carter and Kennedy, it turned out), humiliating Carter and further undermining his case for reelection.
The economic storm was not the only vortex of powerful forces creating heavy turbulence in the Carter presidency. Just a year in office, he traveled to Teheran and in a New Years Eve speech said Iran was "an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world."
Those words launched the events that defines the US and the West’s relationship with Iran today: Iranians saw in them unwavering the US support for the unpopular tyrannical Shah, fueling strong anti-American feelings for what they saw as a betrayal of their cause for freedom and human rights.
The return of the Ayatollah, the storming of the American embassy and taking embassy staff hostage, the establishment of Iran as an Islamic state, the war with Iraq, the rise of other Islamist movements, open, vehement anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism, and the threat of its nuclear programme, are part of a chain of events that began with that speech.
The hostage crisis tossed Carter around uncontrollably for the rest of his presidency with nightly headlines reinforcing the powerlessness of the great power with him at the helm. A failed rescue attempt in the Iranian desert—which resulted in a crash that left the charred bodies of dead soldiers—directed by Carter from the White House, only sank further his image as a leader.
Future presidents have made it a point to delegate such military actions to commanders on the field.
Undeterred however, Carter plunged himself into the Middle East conflict, successfully bringing enemy country leaders Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the man who ordered the 1973 Yom Kippur attach against Israel, together with the militant Zionist and commander in the Israeli army during the 1948 Arab Israeli War, Menachem Begin.
In Camp David, Carter kept both leaders as his guests and shuttled between their cabins at all hours of the night until they forged the celebrated Camp David Accords that brought peace between the two countries, recognition of Israel, and the first Arab-Israeli diplomatic relations.
Later, successful peace negotiations between Israel and Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, and the current progress with Saudi Arabia can be traced to the moment when Carter, Sadat and Begin clasped hands together in peace on the White House lawn.
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, some 21 years after leaving office, in part for his work on the Camp David Accords, and "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."
On another front, as a way of affirming American commitment to democracy and self-determination in own backyard, and in manner of improving relations with Latin America, Carter negotiated with Panamanian strongman Omar Torrijos a treaty that ceded control of the Panama Canal Zone, an American territory since 1903, back to Panama.
The move lowered tensions between the US and Latin American countries that resented its control of the canal, removing a longstanding thorn on the side by alleviating internal pressure on US-friendly governments and simmering accusations of Yankee imperialism in its backyard.
The treaty also served to stabilize Panama and to set it on a course of economic prosperity that would in turn benefit the US as a strong trade partner in a region still in need of stabilization.
Carter established diplomatic relations with Communist China, signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union and the nuclear engineer would eventually negotiate the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), limiting nuclear arms with Soviet Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev.
On the domestic front, Carter instituted the Clean Water Act, and set up the Environmental Protection Agency as well as Education and Energy Departments, costing him political capital but shaping long-term outcomes.
In 1979, Carter’s reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was chaotic, reactionary, and —arguably— ineffective, yet it had lasting impact. Under the pressure of the invasion, Carter, the peacemaker, significantly escalated the Cold War in a Monroe-doctrine response to stop the spread of the Soviet sphere of influence. The US escalated support for rebels fighting against the Soviet-imposed government.
One of those rebels, a Mujahadeen, who received significant aid under Reagan, was named Osama bin Laden and would ultimately turn on America.
On the political/diplomatic response, Carter imposed a boycott on the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but that move only highlighted to the world his foreign policy failure in preventing the invasion and again in his response to it.
Carter was not anti-establishment, but he was a different paradigm, one based on long-term effects and less so on immediate political costs. The long-term effects of his mild response have yet to fully resolve themselves.
“Failure is a reality; we all fail at times, and it's painful when we do,” wrote Carter in his book 'Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith', “But it's better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, ‘I don't want to try because I may not succeed completely.”
And try he did.
It was his post-presidency, some ten times longer than his presidency itself, that has established him as one of the most respected and admired elder statesmen in the world, a tireless servant of humanity, certainly a quiet global moral leader as an exemplary man who preached his faith by living it.
“My faith demands—this is not optional—my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference,” he wrote and repeated often.
In 1982, he established The Carter Center and, unlike his predecessors and their foundations, he actively led its efforts on advancing democracy and human rights, resolving conflicts, improving global health, and promoting sustainable development. All the while, he became the face of volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, personally helping build homes for those in need. His participation inspired countless others, serving as a multiplier of the humanitarian work.
With the passing of the years and as people everywhere gained perspective, the former president became the conscience of the world, monitoring elections, speaking out on human rights, flying to all corners where conflicts needed to be resolved, and commenting with authority on weighty issues of conflict.
In times of hopelessness and darkness, Carter was a constant source of faith and hope, a light when it was hard to see through the chaos.
"We must also remember that the overwhelming majority of people in the world are peaceful and want to live in harmony with one another," he told Americans after the 9/11 attacks. "As we mourn the loss of those who were killed, let us also honor their memory by working together to build a more peaceful and just world."
Acknowledging that most of the people in the world aspire to a peaceful life, Carter diffused American anger and growing distrust as he made a point he had been making all his life, that there is a constant need for understanding and tolerance among cultures and countries.
His own deep understanding of the complexities of global politics reminded Americans once again of his unique intellect and disciplined courage to lead by conviction rather than by the heated expediency of such moments.
“In the end he was too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives,” wrote American diplomat Stuart E. Eizenstat in his book 'President Carter: The White House Years in 2018'.
Yet, Eizenstat may just as well have been referring to Carter’s entire life.
His post-presidency showed he could transcend time and political divisions, guided by his Christian principles and values that are broader than any agenda.
"Jimmy Carter has lived an admirable life, an example of what a president should be, and what a person should strive to be," said Bill Clinton.
“His contributions to our nation and our world will endure for generations." said Obama.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Carter is “a rare and remarkable leader whose compassion, integrity and wisdom have inspired people around the world.
“An inspiration to all who seek to make a positive difference in the world,” said former US Vice President Al Gore.
The then-senator who was one of the early endorsers of Carter’s run for the presidency, now President Joe Biden, tweeted a message as he entered hospice care, wishing peace to the man from Plains who rose from peanuts to the presidency to global peacemaker. "We admire you for the strength and humility you have shown in difficult times, May you continue your journey with grace and dignity, and God grant you peace.”
Humanity agreed.