Jimmy Carter, who has died aged 100, can lay fair claim to have been the best ex-president the US ever had.
His domestic good works, his mediation in trouble spots around the world and the general sagacity of his advice were all exemplary. As an independent-minded moral voice he had few peers. Yet his one-term presidency, from 1977-81, is still widely dismissed as a disappointment.
In spite of conspicuous achievements — the Panama Canal treaties, the Middle East Camp David accords, the Salt II agreement between Russia and the US to limit nuclear forces, Nato’s twin-track approach to the Soviet Union, the new emphasis on human rights — he was defeated in a landslide by an electorate more influenced by spiralling inflation and the debilitating hostage crisis with Iran.
But Carter then began quietly picking up the pieces of his life and devoting himself to the sort of problems that he thought an engineer with a highly developed social conscience was intended to solve.
He became involved in Habitat for Humanity and could be seen hammering nails and toting bricks to build low-income housing. He established a presidential library and museum, as all holders of that office do, but increasingly his energies were applied to the Carter Center at Emory University in Georgia. Halfway between an international think-tank and a conflict resolution organisation seeking to promote democratic values — along with health initiatives and much else besides — the institution formed the fulcrum of the work for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
The former president travelled all over the developing world. In the 1990s he led international election-monitoring teams in nations from the Dominican Republic to Zambia, having already helped broker the settlement in Ethiopia that led to the independence of Eritrea. The public fondness lingered; his 2015 statement that liver cancer had spread brought sadness.
James Earl Carter came to the presidency from the soil of the deep south. Born on October 1, 1924 in the Baptist farming hamlet of Plains, Georgia, he maintained his family home there for the rest of his life. His mother Lilian, who became a Peace Corps worker at the age of 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. She died in November 2023 at the age of 96. Carter is survived by their four children.
His education was in engineering and an early mentor was Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear-powered US Navy. Yet Carter’s livelihood was to come from peanut farming and warehousing in and around Plains.
He was drawn into politics, winning election to the Georgia senate in 1962, because he sensed the old ways of the racist south had to change with the times amid new federal laws. He served as state governor from 1971-75 and was considered one of the most progressive of a new breed of southern governors, though hardly a revolutionary.
He set his sights on the White House while still in the Atlanta state house and began assembling the team that would carry him to the presidency in the 1976 election. The landslide defeat of George McGovern by Richard Nixon in 1972 had left the national Democratic party rudderless while the Republican’s resignation in 1974 presented an opportunity that Carter appreciated more quickly than other contenders, as did an economy struggling to recover from the 1974-75 recession.
The party’s powerful liberal wing was never exactly enamoured with Carter, as it rarely has been with southerners, but his choice of Senator Walter Mondale from Minnesota as a running mate served to answer some of their reservations.
Defeating Gerald Ford, he inherited a country anxious to recover from the twin traumas of Watergate and Vietnam, but he soon found the going rough in Washington, where he was barely known. An early tax rebate proposal was voted down, while his declaration of “the moral equivalent of war” on excess energy consumption fell on stony legislative ears. The “clean” image of his administration was also damaged in the first year by allegations of financial impropriety, never proved, against Bert Lance, an old friend from Georgia who was forced to resign as budget director.
Indeed, although his administration was well larded with establishment figures such as Cyrus Vance as secretary of state, the Georgians who came to Washington with Carter were a constant source of controversy and distraction. Though often unfairly pilloried, the assorted antics of Hamilton Jordan, the campaign manager who became White House chief of staff, left the impression of chaos and irreverence at the very centre of government.
Carter’s micromanagement did not necessarily 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 twice going to war in the previous 12 years. The agreement, named after the presidential retreat in the hills of northern Maryland, had been preceded by the sort of personal shuttle diplomacy between Cairo and Tel Aviv once made famous by Henry Kissinger. But Carter’s micromanagement extended to such trivia as booking time on the White House tennis court.
Nevertheless, the first half of Carter’s term contained few hints of the serious problems to come. The conservative revolution that eventually produced Ronald Reagan, whom Ford had pipped to the Republican nomination, was still mostly in the grassroots, while economic growth continued apace.
Relations with Europe concerning US troop withdrawals, and later about American economic policies, were frequently tricky. They were especially poor at the personal level with Bonn, where West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt barely concealed his contempt for what he saw as Carter’s vacillations. But at least they managed, by hook or by crook, to forge a new policy for Nato, which developed the alliance’s missile capability while continuing to negotiate with the Soviet Union. The US defence build-up that flourished under Reagan was initiated by Carter.
The unravelling of the last two years of Carter’s presidency was cataclysmic at home and abroad. On the economic front, while the budget deficit did not get out of control as it would later, rising inflation and interest rates came to represent stagflation in virulent form and the dollar came under increasing pressure. Inflation hit a peak of 14.8 per cent in March 1980 while the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate to 20 per cent later that year.
In August 1979, Carter recruited Paul Volcker to be chair of the US Federal Reserve with the twin mission of controlling the money supply and rescuing the US currency. But that success came too late for the 1980 electoral cycle. Meanwhile, the Republicans were able to turn on its head a tactic deployed by Carter in the 1976 campaign by using its own economic “misery index” against the president’s record.
Carter contributed to the progressively sour national mood with a televised midsummer address in 1979 where he complained about the malaise affecting his country. His diagnosis, as was frequently the case, had merit, but it left the impression that he was powerless to cure the sickness. Presidents, commentaries said at the time, were never supposed to admit defeat.
That sense was heightened in November when a new revolutionary regime in Iran occupied the US embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 diplomats hostage. This crisis, which captured the national mind and led to the tying of yellow ribbons on every available tree, was never susceptible to easy resolution. But when a rescue mission was finally attempted in the spring of 1980, it was poorly planned, under resourced and ultimately a disaster. It also cost Carter the services of Vance, who resigned as secretary of state after opposing the mission, and was replaced by Edmund Muskie.
Yet re-election in 1980 did not necessarily look like a lost cause at the outset. Carter was confronted throughout the primaries by Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy but defeated him handily enough, though losses in California and New York were ominous. Reagan, having disposed of George HW Bush, cruised to the Republican nomination and chose his rival as running mate. Republican liberals opted for the quixotic campaign of John Anderson, a congressman from Illinois.
Anderson stayed in the presidential race as an independent and clearly hurt Carter more than Reagan in some narrowly divided states. But the polls showed little between the two main candidates with two weeks to go. Their climactic TV debate proved crucial. While the president marshalled his facts and arguments with customary precision, the public was taken by Reagan’s unthreatening geniality and effective one-liners. His response to one Carter attack (“There you go again . . .”) was disarming.
Reagan won all but seven states and 51 per cent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 per cent. In a conservative tide that ran all over the country, the Republicans regained control of the Senate as well. In a final cruel twist of fate, Iran released the hostages on inauguration day 1981, putting them on an aircraft that left Tehran just minutes after Carter had handed over the reins of office to Reagan.
For some years afterwards, Carter’s name was mud. In 1984, Reagan easily defeated the faithful Mondale essentially by running against the Carter record — Bush did the same to only a slightly lesser extent when he beat Michael Dukakis in 1988. The national ambitions of southern Democratic governors appeared blighted until Bill Clinton from Arkansas won the presidency in 1992.
Ultimately, several successive presidents came to rely on Carter for advice and use him as an envoy. Yet they were not immune to his reprimands. In his later years, he spoke out against Washington’s tolerance of human rights abuses — whether by Israel or by its own federal operatives at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, the closure of which he long urged.
The inevitable conclusion is that Carter became president of the US before he was quite ready for the job. If all of the attributes he displayed since leaving office could have been deployed when he entered the White House, the 39th presidency might have been twice as long and productive.
