J.Immy Carter, 39th President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian, died Sunday in Plains, Georgia, the small town where he and his wonderful wife and life partner, Rosalynn, were born.
Carter – the who lived the longest And married the longest The US president is unlikely to be placed in the top tier of America’s leaders, but his single four-year term is now seen in a much better light than it was when he was best known for taking American hostages in Iran and for his mandate. crushing loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The easy shorthand for Carter – incompetent president but superb former president – is a major oversimplification. In office, Carter was a political failure but a political success, with a series of little-known accomplishments and a partially realized vision of peace and a clean energy future. He was an austere, non-ideological moral leader who did not like to think of himself as a politician and only acted as one during campaigns.
With a peculiar combination of zen calm and steely-eyed stubbornness, Carter has essentially lived through three centuries. He was born in 1924 but it might as well have been the 19th century. His family, although well-off in the area, had no electricity, running water, or mechanized equipment on the farm. He has been associated with almost every significant event of the 20th century. And the issues he has addressed during his presidency – global health, democracy promotion and conflict resolution – constitute the major challenges of the 21st century.
As a child, Carter dreamed of attending the United States Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1946. When his father died in 1953, he left the Navy to take over the family peanut warehouse and shouldering his father’s many civic responsibilities. . Eschewing the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and – after appeals to segregationists – as governor in 1970. He immediately turned against his racist supporters and entered state government before launching a brilliant campaign that, with the help of the Watergate scandal and the support of journalist “Gonzo” Hunter S Thompson, took him from 0% in the polls to the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. Although briefly derailed by an interview in Playboy magazine in which the Southern Baptist confessed to having “committed adultery in my heart several times,” he won a narrow victory over Gerald Ford, who had gone to the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon.
With skills ranging from agronomist, nuclear engineer, and sonar technologist to poet, painter, and master carpenter, Carter was the first president since Thomas Jefferson who could rightly be considered a Renaissance man.
He was also the first since Jefferson under whom no blood was shed in war. And his record of honesty and decency, once considered minimum qualifications, has grown over time. At a farewell dinner just before leaving office, his vice president, Walter F. Mondale, toasted the Carter administration: “We have spoken the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace. Carter later added a fourth major achievement: “And we stood up for human rights. »
Carter did this by taking the American civil rights movement on a global scale and setting a new standard for how governments should treat their own people. Although his human rights policies might be hypocritical—the United States continued to support the Shah of Iran and a few other dictators who served American interests—Carter’s new approach contributed to the downfall of more than a dozen authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Asia. Two future heads of state, Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Kim Dae-jong of South Korea, attributed their release from prison in part to Carter, whose words gave hope to thousands of dissidents and, according to some, even conservatives, helped to undermine communism. .
Carter is perhaps best known for the Camp David Accords of 1978, the most enduring major peace treaty since World War II. Israel and Egypt had fought four wars in 30 years when Carter brought together Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at a rustic retreat in the Maryland mountains. On several occasions, Begin and Sadat (a close friend of Carter’s) packed their bags and prepared to leave without a deal. The discussions were saved thanks to Carter’s courage. Averell Harriman, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war envoy, called Camp David “one of the most extraordinary things any president has ever accomplished in history.”
While Israel and Egypt have maintained a cold détente for four decades, the second part of the deal – the path to Palestinian statehood – has not been realized. Carter praised Begin for ceding the Sinai to Egypt, but argued that he had reneged on his promise to freeze Israeli settlements in the West Bank until Palestinian autonomy was completed. He believed that if he had been re-elected, he would have succeeded in achieving comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
Perhaps Carter’s most important achievement was the normalization of relations between the United States and China. Within days of Deng Xiaoping’s historic visit to Washington in 1979, Deng legalized private property and took other important steps toward a capitalist economy. Carter abandoned the clumsy “two China policy” of Nixon and Ford (which favored Taiwan) and established the bilateral relationship that is the foundation of the global economy.
Another foreign policy victory came when Carter overcame steep odds to win the 67 Senate votes needed to ratify the Panama Canal Treaties, which ceded the canal to the Panamanians. The treaties significantly improved the United States’ position throughout Latin America and avoided the permanent deployment of more than 100,000 American troops to protect the canal from guerrilla attacks. But several Democratic senators lost their seats following the vote, and Carter got no credit for preventing a Vietnam-style conflict in Central America.
Carter sharply increased defense spending and developed the B2 stealth bomber and other high-tech weapons that years later helped win the Cold War, contradicting the right-wing narrative that he was somehow “weak” in terms of defense. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was forced to withdraw the Salt II Treaty from the Senate (although its terms were respected by both nations). Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics and impose a grain embargo on the Soviet Union proved ineffective and, ultimately, extremely unpopular.
At home, Carter failed to implement welfare, tax, and health care reform. But he still signed more domestic legislation than any other postwar president except Lyndon Johnson, most of whom had foresight. He created the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; replaced tokenism with true racial and gender diversity in the civil service and federal judiciary; limited the power of banks to “limit” (disinvest in) black neighborhoods; and provided the first whistleblower protections and the first bureaucratic watchdogs, or inspectors general.
Carter placed solar panels on the roof of the White House (taken down by Reagan), a symbol of an excellent environmental record that included the first funding for green energy, the first fuel economy standards for automobiles and first federal requirements for toxic waste cleanup. -up, among other far-reaching laws. With the Alaska Lands Act, Carter protected the state from dispossession and doubled the size of the national park system. Had he been re-elected, he planned to begin tackling global warming, which was then an obscure problem even in the scientific community.
Anticipating the moderate “New Democratic” presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Carter reduced the budget deficit and reluctantly approved a corporate tax cut. Paul A. Volcker’s appointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board led to extremely high interest rates that helped cripple his presidency. But Volcker’s harsh monetary medicine ultimately ended double-digit inflation, a victory whose political benefits accrued to Reagan.
In the second half of his term, Carter was plagued by external problems, many of which were beyond his control. Gasoline shortages caused public “unease,” which Carter referred to in a famous speech, without using the word. Senator Edward Kennedy, a darling of liberals, launched a damaging campaign against him for the Democratic nomination in 1980. After the hostage taking in Tehran, American public opinion rallied for a time to Carter, which helped him fend off Kennedy. But when a helicopter mission to free the hostages was aborted in the Iranian desert, Carter’s popularity plummeted again. Although he was unable to free the hostages before the election (perhaps because of an “October surprise” deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government), he did so afterward – although the liberated Americans did not clear Iranian airspace until moments after Reagan. took the oath.
For four decades after leaving office, Carter continued his work as a peacemaker and promoter of human rights and democratic accountability. He helped eradicate disease, built homes for the poor and taught Sunday school until the mid-1990s.