Jimmy Carter lived longer than any other American president, passing away on Sunday at the age of 100. Given that he devoted much of that life to serving others, it is fitting that Carter was blessed with so many years.
During his extra time on Earth, the 39th president was involved in charities all over the world, from the peacemaking and disease-fighting Carter Center to Habitat for Humanity, which constructs affordable housing. He also remained politically active. During Donald Trump's first term, Carter told Salon that "the government is worse than it has been before." He added that it was the first time during his life that "the truth is ignored, allies are deliberately aggravated, China, Europe, Mexico and Canada are hurt economically and have to hurt us in response, Americans see the future worse than the present, and immigrants are treated cruelly." These words are an accurate encapsulation of his legacy, for in so many ways Carter fought against every single value he saw violated during Trump's administration. Jimmy Carter was the anti-Trump.
Born in the small Georgia town of Plains on Oct. 1, 1924, Carter was the son of a successful small business owner and a registered nurse. After serving in the United States Navy, he expanded his family's peanut-growing business by utilizing the latest advances in agricultural science and technology. Carter started his political career in 1962 by being elected to the state senate in a hotly contested election. After serving two legislative terms, he campaigned for governor — first without success in 1966, and then eventually winning in 1970. Shortly after his victory, Carter declared an end to the Jim Crow era in Georgia politics, announcing in his inaugural address that "the time of racial discrimination is over." He later installed portraits of African-American Georgia leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Lucy Craft Laney and Henry McNeal Turner in the state capitol.
Carter quickly developed a reputation as the leader of a so-called New South, a moderate governor who focused on honesty and integrity in a notoriously corrupt region. This image later became crucial to his presidential ambitions in the 1976 election. During the Democratic primaries, Carter pioneered innovative grassroots campaign tactics, overcoming a crowded field despite being an underdog. Once nominated, Carter faced off against the incumbent president, Republican Gerald Ford. Carter entered the campaign with a major advantage: Ford was still politically struggling from his controversial decision to pardon disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal. Famously promising that he would always tell the truth if he won, Carter defeated Ford in a close election in which the Democrat eschewed ideology and instead cultivated an anodyne image as a folksy populist.
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It is at this point that the reality of Carter's life conflicts with the myth. According to the spin promulgated by conservative Republicans after Carter's presidency, he was an ineffective leader who was sent packing by an angry electorate when Ronald Reagan beat him in the 1980 election. While the second half of this statement was true, for Carter was indeed electorally humiliated by Reagan, the Georgia peanut farmer was also an accomplished president in both foreign and domestic policy. His legacy was stymied by his shortcomings as a politician rather than by any serious weaknesses as a policymaker. Journalist Theodore H. White perhaps best captured this dichotomy between Carter's accomplishments and his image in the book, "America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-1980."
Jimmy Carter was always a mystery, this man with the straw-colored hair and clear blue eyes, whose enemies came to despise him while those who would be friends could not understand him. Carter fit no mold nor any of those familiar journalistic diagrams by which political writers try to explore the nature of a presidency through the personality of the President. He could not describe himself, as Roosevelt so jauntily did, as having passed from being "Dr. New Deal" to "Dr. Win the War." Nor could he be described, as was Richard Nixon by so many of us, in the twenty years of Nixon's eminence, as being the "Old Nixon" or the "New Nixon," with new Nixons succeeding one another every two or three years in the public print. The personality of Jimmy Carter was the same from the day he decided to run for the presidency until he lost it. And that personality, rather than changing from an "old" to a "new" Carter, had to be examined as a set of layers of faith, of action, even of unpleasantnesses.
To be sure, Carter had more than his share of disappointments — his tax reform agenda, national health insurance plan, labor law proposal, instant voter registration bill, energy mobilization board and many other ambitious ideas never became reality. Yet as White was quick to point out, Carter was hardly a failure. In foreign policy, Carter is perhaps best known for negotiating the longest-enduring Middle Eastern peace agreement of all time — namely, the historic deal struck between Israel and Egypt after Carter's delicate negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. This was not his sole geopolitical achievement of historic magnitude: Despite the staunch opposition of conservatives in Congress, Carter unequivocally denounced white supremacist African governments such as those in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, unlike previous administrations. In stark contrast to the antisemitic Nixon, Carter prioritized the rights of Soviet Jews facing antisemitism when shaping his Cold War policies. Finally, he defied American jingoistic tendencies and returned the Panama Canal to the people of Panama, despite (once again) the protests of many conservatives. In doing so, he articulated a humanitarian rationalization for all of his foreign policymaking that could not be in starker contrast to the bellicosity and imperialist aspirations of Trumpism.
"This agreement with Panama is something we want because we know it is right," Carter explained, after reviewing the history of the Panama Canal in detail. "This is not merely the surest way to protect and save the canal, it's a strong, positive act of a people who are still confident, still creative, still great. This new partnership can become a source of national pride and self-respect in much the same way that building the canal was 75 years ago. It's the spirit in which we act that is so very important."
By contrast, President-elect Donald Trump is talking about trying to reacquire the Panama Canal.
On domestic policy, Carter was also far ahead of the curve. He passed landmark ethics legislation in response to the Watergate scandal and avoided any serious scandals during his own presidency. He also doubled the size of America's national park system, created tax incentives for families to install solar panels (while putting them on the White House) and established a so-called Superfund to clean up contaminated factory and mining sites. Economically Carter endorsed the Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates and thereby "squeeze out inflation." (This ultimately worked, but the benefits were not seen until after Carter left office.) When it came to promoting diversity, Carter appointed more women and more Black people to senior positions and to the federal bench than all 38 presidents before him put together.
"The energy security we enjoy today is due to the energy bills he passed," former Carter domestic affairs adviser Stu Eizenstat told Salon in 2018. "The ethics legislation, more important than ever today, all was done during his time. He was the greatest environmental president, doubling the size of the National Park System with the Alaska Lands bill."
Perhaps most importantly, the Carter administration was alarmed by the existential threat posed to humanity by climate change. In an era before the fossil fuels lobby had successfully blanketed Washington with fear at the mere thought of effectively addressing global warming, American government officials recognized the need for reform and had started working on clean energy policies. Before any meaningful policies could be implemented, however, the 1980 election rolled around. Americans' eyes were on Iran, where 52 Americans had been held hostage by radical Islamists since 1979. The military mission attempting to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran was a disastrous failure, albeit through no fault of Carter's own. Meanwhile, the economy struggled with spiking oil prices, causing Carter's approval ratings to further tank. It didn't help matters that he had become a dull and listless speaker, in sharp contrast to both his early homespun style and the sparkling rhetoric and optimism the former actor Reagan regularly supplied.
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Reagan's subsequent defeat of Carter in the 1980 election proved a watershed moment in not just American history, but world history. Most prominently, it ushered in the so-called "Reagan Revolution," a period in which the Republican Party became staunchly associated with ideological conservatism and dominated the political landscape. On a deeper level, though, it marked the end of a period of hope. After Reagan weakened labor unions, income inequality skyrocketed; when he did the same thing to civil rights legislation, systemic racial barriers were left even harder to surmount. Many promising Carter initiatives, such as orienting foreign policy to prioritize human rights and supporting an Equal Rights Amendment for women, died along with his dreams of re-election. Perhaps most importantly, if there had been a chance that the human species could have reversed the effects of severe environmental pollution — in particular, climate change — and avoided ecological catastrophe, that slender reed broke once Reagan's reactionaries took over.
Rick Perlstein, an American historian and journalist who has penned acclaimed books on the 1960s and 1970s like "Before the Storm," "Nixonland" and "Reaganland," has been critical of Carter, but speaking with Salon last year he acknowledged that Earth as a planet would be better off today if Carter had defeated Reagan in 1980. Although Perlstein argued that Carter's progressive energy programs were motivated more by economic nationalism than environmentalism, they still would have included the essential environmental regulations humanity needs.
"Carter's policies, had they continued, would have been bad," Perlstein told Salon at the time. "But Reagan's were downright cataclysmic. He and his advisors simply despised the notion of using the power of government to regulate environmental harm."
It would be unfair to close a tribute to Carter's life on such a bleak note. When I had the privilege of interviewing him for Salon back in 2018, he offered inspiring words of wisdom. We mostly focused on the administration of then-President Donald Trump — and needless to say, Carter wasn't impressed. Yet we did not only talk about what was wrong with America. We also discussed Carter's role in advancing disability rights by supporting Section 504, a provision of a 1973 civil rights act protecting disabled individuals from discrimination. Because I am autistic and physically disabled, this is why I personally admire Carter, and why I thanked him for his work. Reflecting on his legacy, I asked Carter what advice he had for younger Americans who also look up to him. His response is extremely appropriate to the America we enter as Trump commences his second term. Carter may have lacked Trump's bombast and charisma but made up for that with a sincerity and substance that we are guaranteed to sorely miss in the years ahead. Whereas Trump left his first term without a single notable foreign policy achievement, and only a pair of impeachments (plus an unsuccessful coup attempt) to distinguish him on the domestic front, both during and after his presidency Carter made America and the world a better place. That is why his parting words to me hit so hard:
"Never give up, and follow the advice of my school teacher: 'We must accommodate changing times but cling to principles that do not change.'"
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