By The Editorial Board
There’s no predicting history’s verdict. Up to now, Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100 in Plains, Georgia, has been judged to be a middle-of-the-pack president, his one term in office remembered for circumstances and events that simply overwhelmed him: the seizure in Iran of 52 American hostages, the bungled attempt to rescue them, the gasoline lines, inflation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yet he is also considered one of America’s greatest ex-presidents, for using the residual star power of his office to help his successors and his country as a peacemaker, backstage diplomat, human rights champion, monitor of free elections and advocate for the homeless while finding time to write poetry and, by his own example, providing the best possible case for traditional religious values.
In 2002, having been nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter finally won it for his “vital contribution” to the Camp David agreement, which set the stage for peace between Israel and Egypt, as well as for his commitment to human rights, his work fighting tropical diseases and for furthering democracy everywhere.
His life offers countless lessons for leaders everywhere.
Carter came to the presidency owing little to anyone, including his own party. Assembling a formidable coalition of small-town and rural voters, white blue-collar voters and African Americans, he surprised everyone in America — except perhaps himself and his wife, Rosalynn — when he beat Gerald Ford in the 1976 election.
In retrospect, he could not have run at a more auspicious moment. The previous decade had been brutal for the United States. One president, Lyndon Johnson, chose not to seek another term because of rising public anger at an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Another, Richard Nixon, resigned to avoid impeachment. Assassinations claimed the lives of yet another Kennedy, Bobby, and the nation’s premier civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The war ended in humiliating failure.
Then along came this born-again farmer-businessman from Georgia with a record of service in the Navy. He was a disciplined man of integrity and rock-solid values whose vision was to restore honor to government and, thus, change the mood of the capital and the country.
“Trust me,” Carter said again and again on the campaign trail. “I will never lie to you.” His opponent, the incumbent president, Ford, was an honorable man, but had few defenses. The burden of the multiple duplicities and corruption of Ford’s predecessors was simply too heavy.
On the whole, Americans liked Carter. They liked that he took the oath of office on a Bible used by George Washington, that he jumped out of his limousine during the inaugural cavalcade and walked the rest of the way to the White House. They even liked the dutiful cardigans he wore during his television appearances. Although some of this was political theater, there was no doubting his decency and idealism and, as a manager, his drive and determination.
These traits helped him achieve some big and good things. On foreign policy, Carter courageously faced down the demagogues on the Panama Canal, giving Panama long-overdue sovereignty over its own territory. He energetically pursued new controls on strategic arms. He risked much to achieve what was by any measure his most important victory, the Camp David Accords, in which Egypt and Israel agreed to make peace. The agreement would not have been possible without Carter’s tireless, day-to-day stewardship of the negotiations.
There were triumphs as well on the home front. Among the most important of these was the deregulation of oil and natural gas prices, aimed at increasing supply, lowering energy costs and reducing America’s increasingly risky dependence on foreign oil.
There is just as much to admire in Carter’s powerful conservation ethic, which led eventually to a legacy of wilderness protection that few presidents can match, most prominently the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, signed just before leaving office, protecting more than 100 million acres of Alaskan land in one stroke.
Signing that act was one of the few bright spots in Carter’s last year in office, when everything seemed to fall apart, when it became clear that moral suasion and good intentions and hard work were of little use in the face of powerful forces that were largely beyond his control. Try as he might, he could not get a grip on rising prices and gas shortages, nor could he brighten the national mood in ways that he had hoped. In this he was often his own worst enemy; his efforts to get the country to face the facts as he saw them often left his audiences dispirited. He seemed downbeat, having lost some of his original joy, and his disdain for the political impact of his actions caught up to him.
Just as the nation was ripe for a good man in 1976, so it was ripe in 1980 for an upbeat, relentlessly happy, cheerfully disorganized, politically shrewd Hollywood pitchman named Ronald Reagan, a guy who talked not of sacrifice but of endless possibilities, of America as a shining city on a hill. Carter, still in his 50s, went back to Georgia and embarked on one of the busiest and most fruitful retirements ever.
As this board observed in 1994, compared with Carter, most former presidents struggled to use their stature for the common weal. Most wrote memoirs. Some disappeared into private life; some set up foundations; some went around collecting large sums for speaking. Carter took risks and played crucial roles as an honest broker in nuclear talks with North Korea and in civil conflicts on the continent of Africa and in the Middle East.
He described his second career as “waging peace.” That work remains far from finished, and it remains for those who admired Carter to continue.
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