Jimmy Carter, US President and Champion of Human Rights, 1924-2024

Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, can make a valid claim that he was the best former president of the United States to date.

His domestic good work, mediation in world-wide problems, and general counsel were exemplary. As an independent moral voice, he had few peers. Yet his one-term presidency from 1977-81 is still widely dismissed as a disappointment.

Despite significant achievements – the Panama Canal Agreements, the Camp David Accords in the Middle East, the Salt II Treaty between Russia and the United States to limit nuclear forces, NATO’s crossroads approach to the Soviet Union, the new focus on human rights – he was plagued by hyperinflation and the devastating hostage crisis with Iran. People have been defeated in a big way.

But Carter Then he began to quietly pick up the parts of his life and devote himself to the kind of problem that an engineer with a highly developed social conscience could solve.

He was involved with Habitat for Humanity and was seen hammering nails and hammering bricks to build low-income housing. He established a presidential library and museum, as all holders of that office do, but his energies increasingly Carter Center at Emory University in Georgia. Between an international think tank and a conflict resolution organization seeking to promote democratic values—among health initiatives and many other things—the institute culminated in the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

The former president traveled to developing countries. In the year In the 1990s, he led international election monitoring teams from the Dominican Republic to Zambia, and already helped the Ethiopian settlement that ended Eritrea’s independence. The love of the people remained; His 2015 statement The spread of liver cancer caused grief.

James Earl Carter came to the presidency from the soil of the Deep South. In the year Born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plain, Georgia, a Baptist farm, he maintained the family home the rest of his life. His mother, Lillian, a 68-year-old Peace Corps worker, was a powerful influence. So was his wife, the former Rosalyn Smith, whom he married in 1946 while a student at the US Naval Academy. She He died in November 2023 Carter, 96, is survived by their four children.

His education was in engineering and his early mentor was Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear-powered US Navy. However, Carter’s livelihood had to come from peanut farming and warehousing in and around the fields.

In the year In 1962, he won election to the Georgia Senate and was drawn into politics because he realized that the old ways of the racist South had to change with the times under new federal laws. In the year He served as governor of the state from 1971-75 and, although not a revolutionary, was considered one of the most progressive of the new breed of southern governors.

While still in the Atlanta State House, he set his sights on the White House and began assembling the team that would lead him to the presidency in 1976. In the year A landslide by George McGovern to Richard Nixon in 1972 left the national Democratic Party leaderless, and the Republicans’ resignation in 1974 created an opportunity that Carter appreciated faster than any other challenger.

The party’s powerful liberal wing had little sympathy for Southerners and was never favored by Carter, but his choice of Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale as his running mate answered some of their reservations.

By defeating Gerald Ford, he inherited a nation anxious to recover from the twin traumas of Watergate and Vietnam, but he soon found himself in a difficult position in Washington where little was known. An earlier tax cut proposal was rejected, and his declaration of excessive energy consumption “amounting to the morality of war” fell on stony legislative ears. The “clean” image of the administration was also damaged by accusations of lack of funds against his former friend of Georgia, Bert Lance, who was forced to resign as the director of the budget in the first year.

Indeed, although his administration was crowded with established men such as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the Georgians who came to Washington with Carter were a constant source of controversy and distraction. The campaign manager of the White House chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, had left a sense of chaos and disrespect at the center of government, albeit often unfairly.

Carter’s micromanagement didn’t necessarily help. With Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David, the two sides agreed to formalize ties after two rounds of war. The treaty, named after the presidential retreat in the hills of northern Maryland, was a type of private shuttle diplomacy earlier made famous by Henry Kissinger between Cairo and Tel Aviv. But Carter’s micromanagement extended to minor matters, such as scheduling appointments on the White House tennis court.

However, the first half of Carter’s speech contained few hints about the serious problems ahead. The conservative revolution that produced Ronald Reagan, Ford’s nominee for the Republican Party, was still largely in the grassroots, and economic growth was continuing apace.

Relations with Europe were often strained over US troop withdrawals and later US economic policies. They were especially poor on a personal level with Bohn, whose West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt concealed his disdain for what he saw as Carter’s vacillation. But at least they managed by hook or by crook a new policy for NATO that developed the alliance’s missile capabilities while continuing to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The build-up of US defense that grew under Reagan was started by Carter.

The revelations of Carter’s presidential rhetoric over the past two years have been disastrous both at home and abroad. On the economic side, while the budget deficit is not as out of control as it has been, inflation and interest rates are rising sharply, putting pressure on the dollar. In the year Inflation reached 14.8 percent in March 1980, and the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate to 20 percent later that year.

In August 1979, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the US Federal Reserve with the dual mission of controlling the money supply and saving the US currency. But that success came too late for the 1980 election cycle. Meanwhile, Republicans use their own economic “misery index” to compare Carter’s strategy in 1976 to the president’s record.

Carter In a televised speech in the mid-summer of 1979, he complained about the ill health that was plaguing the country. His diagnosis, as usual, was positive, but he knew he was powerless to cure the disease. Presidents, commentators said at the time, should not admit defeat.

This sentiment was heightened in November when a new revolutionary regime in Iran seized the US embassy in Tehran and detained more than 50 diplomats. This crisis has taken over the national mind and led to tie a yellow ribbon on all the trees, the problem was never easy to solve. But when a rescue mission was finally attempted in the spring of 1980, it was poorly planned, under-resourced, and ultimately a disaster. Carter also cost Vance, who resigned as secretary of state after protesting the mission and was replaced by Edmund Muskie.

His reelection in 1980, however, did not initially seem like a lost cause. Carter faced primary competition from Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, but his losses in California and New York, though devastating, were enough to win him over. Reagan overturned George HW Bush’s nomination for the Republican Party and chose his rival as his running mate. Republican liberals chose the eloquent campaign of Illinois Congressman John Anderson.

Anderson is independent in the presidential race and will clearly hurt Carter over Reagan in some narrowly divided states. But with two weeks to go before the polls, there was little to show between the two main candidates. Their climactic televised debate proved pivotal. While the president met his facts and arguments with his usual precision, the public was captivated by Reagan’s fearless wit and effective one-liners. His response to one of Carter’s attacks (“There you go again…”) was disarming.

Reagan won all but seven states and 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent. In a conservative wave across the country, Republicans also regained control of the Senate. In a final cruel twist of fate, Iran released the hostages on the 1981 anniversary and placed them on a plane that left Tehran minutes after Carter handed over power to Reagan.

After a few years, Carter’s name was mud. In the year In 1984, Reagan easily beat loyalist Mondale, matching Carter’s record — something Bush did in 1988, narrowly defeating Michael Dukakis. Southern Democratic governors’ national ambitions dimmed until Bill Clinton won Arkansas. His presidency was in 1992.

Eventually, several successive presidents came to rely on Carter for advice and use him as an emissary. However, they were not immune to the warning. In later years, he protested Washington’s tolerance for human rights abuses — both by Israel and its own federal officers at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which he urged to close.

The inevitable conclusion is that Carter became president of the US before he was ready for the job. If all the qualities he saw after leaving office could have been deployed upon entering the White House, the 39th presidency could have been twice as long and fruitful.