Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100

Jimmy Carter was so confident about his improbable path to the White House that he bet Americans weary of Vietnam and Watergate would welcome a new kind of president. Or less. And for a time, voters embraced him.

But just four years later, in the aftermath of a presidency widely seen as a failure, it sometimes seemed like all Carter had left was a smile. It has been caricatured as a symbol of innocence by numerous cartoonists.

However, it was Carter’s great fortune that he was able to enjoy a tenure that was more than 10 times longer than his own. In March 2019, he became the longest-serving president of all time and passed away at the age of 100., He lived to see the verdict of history softened.

Carter entered home hospice care after a series of hospital admissions, the Carter Center confirmed Feb. 18. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, passed away on November 19, 2023.

If it’s 39 ^Day The president did not and has not achieved everything he set out to achieve during his four years in the White House. In international affairs, his unwavering focus on human rights and the defining challenges of our time – energy and the environment – can now be seen as prescient. If his later unwavering support for Palestinian rights (and his frequent sharp criticism of Israel) attracted many detractors, his brokering of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt was a milestone in modern diplomacy. It will.

If he is the first president to fight what we now call ‘Islamic extremism,’ he is far from the last. And although he sacrificed his reelection to the superpower of the Iran hostage crisis and the failure of military airstrikes to rescue the prisoners, his administration’s tenacity was nonetheless ultimately able to bring all 52 diplomats home safely.

At a time when only six women served in the President’s cabinet, Carter appointed three of them. Three out of five women were appointed as Deputy Ministers of the Department and 80% of them as Deputy Ministers. There are few battles over policy or public image that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama faced as first ladies, and Carter’s trusted wife Rosalynn wasn’t the first to fight, whether campaigning for mental health or attending Cabinet meetings.

James Earl Carter Jr. may be pious (during the 1976 campaign, he pledged, “I will never lie to you”). He can be petty (his micromanagement of the White House tennis court was ridiculed). He may be falling on deaf ears (lecturing the public about a national ‘crisis of confidence’ in a way that highlights the problem and omitting some of the glamor of the presidency that regular people actually like and expect).

But he could also be disarmingly honest in a political culture that rarely rewards such characteristics. (Who can forget his confession to Playboy magazine that he lusted after women who were not his wives and committed adultery in his mind several times?) A gift for unlikely friendships – especially when he suffered narrow, bitter defeats. A gift from Gerald Ford, the man who suffered, and John Wayne, an archconservative who nevertheless helped pass the Panama Surrender Treaty of 1977. canal.

He grew up surrounded by poor black people on a dirt road in rural Georgia, in a house without indoor plumbing, and was the only president to live in public housing. The family’s peanut business began after his father’s death. The son of a staunch racist, he often addressed racial issues early in his career, right up until he was elected governor of Georgia in 1970. But when he took office in the state House of Representatives, he declared, “The era of discrimination is over,” and Time magazine featured him on its cover as the face of America’s New South.

Carter’s life was like that of a classic Horatio Alger. As a teenager, he joined Future Farmers of America to grow, package and sell peanuts from his one acre. He achieved his dream of attending the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and later became a disciple of Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, in the submarine fleet after World War II. He married his sister Ruth’s childhood friend and raised four children.

His first political position was a typical American office. He was chairman of the local school board, and in the early 1960s he gave his first speech in support of integration. He served two terms in the Georgia State Senate and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1966, paving the way for the 1970 gubernatorial election. By the end of 1972, he had decided to launch a presidential campaign, but the odds were stacked against him. When he appeared on “What’s My Line” in 1973, none of the celebrity panelists recognized him, and only film critic Gene Shalit guessed he was the governor after all.

But Carter’s status as an unknown outsider was a distinct advantage after the Watergate scandal (an advantage the late RW Apple Jr. of the New York Times understood early on), and he quickly became the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination when he won the Iowa election. Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary Elections. In 1976, he published a campaign manifesto and memoir confidently titled “Why Not the Best?” The rest is history.

Carter brought a breath of fresh air to Washington as he walked from the Capitol to the White House after his inauguration ceremony. But soon he also took on a solemn, scolding tone, ordering that the White House thermostat be set to a cryogenic 65 degrees (a measure he ostentatiously announced in a televised “fireside chat” wearing a tan cardigan). The president was sold. yacht redwoodIt banned hard liquor at White House parties and restricted the playing of “Hail to the Chief” at official events.

Much of the national media and Washington talking heads were quick to accuse the new president of being a loose figure surrounded by an equally ignorant and rude “Georgia mob.” He reciprocated with visible contempt for his critics. The very style that had once seemed simple and refreshing now seemed pious and lazy, and he seemed essentially unable to rest. He was weighed down by a national economy stuck in “stagflation,” and in June 1978 Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution was analyzing why his presidency had failed. Because there was a lack of overriding vision.

In an afterword excerpt from the White House diary published in 2010, Carter wrote: I wanted to achieve in foreign and domestic affairs. “The three big themes during my presidency were peace, human rights, and the environment (including energy conservation).” But he added, “In retrospect, my elaboration on these topics and my departure from them were not as obvious to others as to me and the White House staff.”

In 1980, Carter faced a renomination challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy, then lost the November election to his political opponent, Ronald Reagan. He sulked for a while, bought a $10,000 Lanier word processor, wrote the first of more than two dozen books he wrote upon leaving office, and began working with Emory University in Atlanta to establish a presidential library and the Carter Center.

In the decades that followed, he built Habitat for Humanity, monitored foreign elections, conducted semi-sanctioned (and sometimes unwanted) diplomacy, and continued to offer varied and unvarnished assessments of his successors in both parties. Posing in the Oval Office with every living member of the President’s Club shortly after Barack Obama’s election in 2009, he couldn’t refrain from putting a noticeable physical distance between himself and his fellow Southerner, Bill Clinton. Carter, a longtime national Sunday school teacher, was so upset. (He continued in that role. Carter continued to teach Sunday School in Georgia each year and was photographed with everyone who attended.)

Most surveys of professional historians still rank Carter in the third quartile of effective presidents (coincidentally equal to his friend Jerry Ford). Carter himself preferred this brief summary from his Vice President, Walter Mondale: “We obeyed the law, told the truth, and maintained the peace.”

In a long line of presidencies, that’s not the best boast. But it’s far from the worst.