Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, can rightly lay claim to being the best American president ever.
His good deeds at home, his mediation in troubled areas around the world and the broad wisdom of his advice were all exemplary. As an independent and well-mannered voice he had few peers. Yet his one-term presidency, from 1977-81, is still widely dismissed as a disappointment.
Despite the apparent success – the Panama Canal agreements, the Middle East Camp David agreement, the Salt II agreement between Russia and the US to reduce nuclear power, Nato's approach to the Soviet Union, a new emphasis on human rights – he. was defeated in a landslide by an electorate more influenced by inflation and the delicate tensions with Iran.
But Carter then he quietly began to pick up the pieces of his life and devoted himself to the kind of problems he thought an engineer with a developed social conscience was meant to solve.
He became involved with Habitat for Humanity and was seen driving nails and bricks to build low-income housing. He established a presidential library and museum, as all office holders do, but his power was used The Carter Center Emory University in Georgia. Halfway between an international think tank and a conflict resolution organization that seeks to promote democratic values - and health initiatives and much more besides – the center is the brainchild of the work for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
The former president toured the developing world. In the 1990s he led international election monitoring teams in countries from the Dominican Republic to Zambia, having helped broker a settlement in Ethiopia that led to Eritrea's independence. The will of the people is gone; his 2015 report if liver cancer spread it brought sadness.
James Earl Carter came to the presidency from the deep south. He was born on October 1, 1924 in the Baptist village of Plains, Georgia, and made his family home there for the rest of his life. His mother Lilian, who became a Peace Corps worker at age 68, was a powerful influence. So was his wife, the former Rosalynn Smith, whom he married in 1946 while still a student at the US Naval Academy. He He died in November 2023 he is 96 years old. Carter is survived by their four children.
His education was in engineering and his first mentor was Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US Navy's nuclear power. However, Carter made a living by farming peanuts and stocking inland and on the Plains.
He was drawn to politics, and won election to the Georgia senate in 1962, because he felt that the old ways of southern racism needed to change with the times amid the new federal laws. He served as governor of the state from 1971-75 and was considered the most progressive of the new breed of southern governors, although not a revolutionary.
He set his sights on the White House while he was at the Atlanta state house and began assembling a team that would take him to the presidency in the 1976 election. George McGovern's crushing defeat by Richard Nixon in 1972 left the Democratic national party without a ticket while the Republican withdrawal in 1974 provided an opportunity Carter appreciated more quickly than his rivals, as did an economy struggling to recover from the 1974-75 recession.
The powerful liberal wing of the party did not exactly like Carter, as is rarely the case with southerners, but his choice of Senator Walter Mondale from Minnesota as his running mate answered their reservations.
Defeating Gerald Ford, he inherited a country that was anxious to recover from the trauma of Watergate and Vietnam, but he soon found it difficult in Washington, where he was unknown. A tax rebate proposal was immediately voted down, while his declaration of “the moral equivalent of war” for excessive use of force fell on deaf ears in the legislature. The “clean” image of his administration was also damaged in the first year by accusations of financial irregularities, he did not prove, against Bert Lance, an old friend from Georgia who was forced to quit as director of the budget.
Indeed, although his administration was filled with establishment figures such as Cyrus Vance as secretary of state, the Georgians who came to Washington and Carter were a constant source of controversy and disruption. Although often done unfairly, the various antics of Hamilton Jordan, the campaign manager who became the chief of staff in the White House, left an impression of chaos and disrespect in the middle of the government.
Carter's young administration did not help. It paid dividends with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin at Camp David, where the two sides agreed to establish normal relations after going to war twice in the past 12 years. The agreement, named after the president's retreat in the hills of northern Maryland, was forged in the kind of personal diplomacy between Cairo and Tel Aviv once popularized by Henry Kissinger. But Carter's micromanagement extended to trivia such as booking time on the White House tennis court.
However, the first half of Carter's tenure contained few hints of serious problems to come. The revolution that eventually produced Ronald Reagan, who Ford ran for the Republican nomination, was still largely in the south, while economic growth continued at a rapid pace.
Relations with Europe regarding the withdrawal of US troops, and later regarding American economic policies, were always tricky. They were even poorer on a personal level with Bonn, where West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made no secret of his disdain for what he saw as Carter's volatility. But at least they managed, by hook or by crook, to create a new NATO policy, which developed the alliance's missile capability while continuing to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The US defense buildup that grew under Reagan was initiated by Carter.
The unfolding of the last two years of Carter's presidency was a disaster at home and abroad. In the economic context, while the budget did not get out of control as it would later, inflation and interest rates came to represent stagflation in a virulent form and the dollar was under increasing pressure. Inflation peaked at 14.8 percent in March 1980 while the Federal Reserve raised its rate to 20 percent later that year.
In August 1979, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to be the chairman of the US Federal Reserve with the dual task of controlling the money supply and bailing out the US currency. But that success came too late in the 1980 election cycle. Meanwhile, the Republicans were able to turn on its head the strategy used by Carter in the 1976 campaign by using the “suffering index” of the economy against the president's record.
Carter contributed to the nation's progressive climate with a televised midsummer address in 1979 in which he lamented the poverty affecting his country. His diagnosis, as was often the case, was correct, but it left the impression that he was powerless to cure the disease. The presidents, comments said at the time, should not have conceded defeat.
That logic was heightened in November when a new reformist government in Iran took over the US embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 diplomats. The problem, which captured the nation's consciousness and led to the tying of yellow ribbons on every available tree, was not prone to be easily resolved. But when a rescue operation was finally attempted in the spring of 1980, it was poorly planned, under-equipped and ultimately a disaster. It also credits Carter for the services of Vance, who resigned as secretary of state after opposing the mission, and was replaced by Edmund Muskie.
However, re-election in 1980 did not appear to be a lost cause at first. Carter faced all of the primaries with Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy but narrowly defeated him, although the losses in California and New York were disastrous. Reagan, after rejecting George HW Bush, went for the Republican nomination and chose his rival as his running mate. Liberal Republicans chose the incredible campaign of John Anderson, a congressman from Illinois.
Anderson remained in the presidential race as an independent and clearly hurt Carter more than Reagan in other divided states. But polls showed little between the two front-runners with two weeks to go. Their climactic televised debate proved pivotal. While the president prepared his facts and arguments with customary 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 seven states with 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter's 41 percent. In a chaotic time around the country, Republicans regained control of the Senate. In a final cruel twist, Iran released the hostages on Inauguration Day 1981, putting them on a plane that left Tehran just minutes after Carter handed the reins of office to Reagan.
For some years after that, Carter's name was mud. In 1984, Reagan easily defeated loyalist Mondale by running against Carter's record – Bush did the same only narrowly when he beat Michael Dukakis in 1988. president in 1992.
Eventually, many successive presidents would come to rely on Carter for advice and use him as a messenger. Yet they were not immune from his punishments. In his later years, he spoke out against Washington's tolerance of human rights abuses — either by Israel or by its staff at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, whose closure he had long urged.
The inevitable conclusion is that Carter became president of the US before he was ready for the job. If all the qualities he has shown since leaving office could have been used when he entered the White House, the 39th president could have been twice as long and productive.