3 days ago

Jimmy Carter, peacemaker guided by moral vision but laid low by politics

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a Nobel peace prize-winning humanitarian, died on Sunday in Plains, Georgia, the tiny town where he and his formidable wife and life partner, Rosalynn, were born.

Carter – the longest-lived and longest-married US president – is unlikely to be placed in the first rank of American leaders, but his single four-year term is now seen in a much better light than it was when he was best known for the seizure of American hostages in Iran and for his crushing loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The easy shorthand on Carter – inept president but superb former president – is a major oversimplification. In office, Carter was a political failure but a policy success, with a string of unheralded accomplishments and a partially fulfilled vision of peace and a clean energy future. He was an austere, non-ideological, moral leader who didn’t like to think of himself as a politician and operated as one only during campaigns.

With a peculiar combination of Zen calm and steely-eyed stubbornness, Carter essentially lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924 but it might as well have been the 19th century. His family, while well-to-do for the area, had no electricity, running water or mechanized equipment on the farm. He was connected to almost all of the significant events of the 20th century. And the issues he tackled during his post-presidency – global health, democracy promotion and conflict resolution – are the cutting-edge challenges of the 21st.

As a child, Carter was driven by a dream of attending the US 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 assume his father’s many civic responsibilities. Ducking the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia senate in 1962 and – after dog-whistle appeals to segregationists – as governor in 1970. He immediately turned on his racist supporters and integrated state government before launching a brilliant campaign that, with the help of the Watergate scandal and the support of the “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S Thompson, brought him from 0% in the polls to the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. Though briefly derailed by an interview in Playboy magazine in which the Southern Baptist confessed to having “committed adultery in my heart many times”, he won a narrow victory over Gerald Ford, who had assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon.

With skills ranging from agronomist, nuclear engineer and sonar technologist to poet, painter and master woodworker, 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 seen as minimum qualifications, have loomed larger with time. At a farewell dinner just before leaving office, his vice-president, Walter F Mondale, toasted the Carter administration: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” Carter later added a fourth major accomplishment: “And we championed human rights.”

Carter did so by taking the American civil rights movement global and setting a new standard for how governments should treat their own people. While his human rights policy could be hypocritical – the US continued to support the Shah of Iran and a few other dictators who served American interests – Carter’s new approach contributed to the demise 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, credited their freedom from prison in part to Carter, whose words gave hope to thousands of dissidents and, even by some conservative accounts, helped undermine communism.

Carter may be best known for the 1978 Camp David Accords, the most durable major peace treaty since the second world war. Israel and Egypt had fought four wars in 30 years when Carter brought the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, together at a rustic retreat in the Maryland mountains. At various times, Begin and Sadat (a close friend of Carter) packed their bags and prepared to leave without an agreement. The talks were saved by Carter’s grit. Averell Harriman, Franklin D Roosevelt’s wartime envoy, called Camp David “one of the most extraordinary things any president in history has ever accomplished”.

While Israel and Egypt have maintained a chilly detente for four decades, the second part of the deal – a path to Palestinian statehood – has not been realized. Carter praised Begin for turning over the Sinai to Egypt but argued that he reneged on a pledge to freeze Israeli settlements on the West Bank until the completion of Palestinian autonomy. He believed that had he been re-elected, he would have achieved a comprehensive Middle East peace.

Carter’s most far-reaching accomplishment may have been the normalization of US relations with China. Within days of Deng Xiaoping’s historic 1979 visit to Washington, Deng legalized private property and took other big steps toward a capitalist economy. Carter jettisoned Nixon and Ford’s awkward “two China policy” (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 votes in the Senate needed to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which turned over the canal to the Panamanians. The treaties sharply improved the standing of the US throughout Latin America and avoided a permanent deployment of more than 100,000 US troops to protect the canal from guerrilla attacks. But several Democratic senators lost their seats over the vote and Carter won no credit for preventing a festering Vietnam-style conflict in Central America.

Carter sharply increased defense spending and developed the B2 stealth bomber and other hi-tech weapons that years later helped win the cold war, contradicting a rightwing canard that he was somehow “weak” on defense. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was forced to withdraw the Salt II Treaty from the Senate (though its terms were respected by both nations). Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and impose a grain embargo on the Soviet Union were ineffective and, eventually, hugely unpopular.

At home, Carter failed to enact welfare, tax and healthcare reform. But he still signed more domestic legislation than any other postwar president except Lyndon Johnson, much of it far-sighted. He established the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; replaced tokenism with genuine racial and gender diversity in the civil service and federal judiciary; curbed the power of banks to “redline” (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 a stellar environmental record that included the first funding for green energy, the first fuel economy standards for autos and the first federal requirements for toxic waste clean-up, among other far-reaching statutes. With the Alaska Lands Act, Carter protected that state from despoilment and doubled the size of the national park system. Had he been re-elected, he planned to begin to address global warming, which was then an obscure problem even in the scientific community.

Anticipating the moderate “New Democrat” presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Carter reduced the budget deficit and reluctantly approved a business tax cut. His appointment of Paul A Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve board led to sky-high interest rates that helped cripple his presidency. But Volcker’s harsh monetary medicine eventually ended double-digit inflation, a victory whose political benefits accrued to Reagan.

In the second half of his term, Carter was beset by external problems, many beyond his control. Gasoline shortages led to a public “malaise”, which Carter addressed in a famous speech, without using the word. Senator Edward Kennedy, darling of liberals, launched a damaging campaign against him for the 1980 Democratic nomination. After the seizure of the hostages in Tehran, the American public rallied around Carter for a time, which helped him fend off Kennedy. But when a helicopter mission to free the hostages was aborted in the Iranian desert, Carter’s popularity sank again. While 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 afterwards – though the liberated Americans didn’t clear Iranian airspace until moments after Reagan was sworn in.

For four decades after leaving office, Carter continued his work as a peacemaker and promoter of human rights and democratic accountability. He helped eradicate diseases, built houses for the poor and taught Sunday school into his mid-90s.