When Jimmy Carter launched his successful longshot 1976 presidential campaign, his mother Miss Lillian reacted by asking: “President of what?” A half century later, tributes are flowing in from around the world.
Carter is remembered as architect of the peace accord between Israel and Egypt, for the peaceful transfer of the Panama Canal to Panamanian control — which Donald Trump has spoken of trying to get reversed — and the 104-million-acre Alaska Lands Act, which doubled size of America’s national park system.
He also lived to be 100 and was the most active former president in the history of the republic. He monitored elections in Nicaragua and Panama, campaigned to eradicate the Guinea ringworm, wrote 23 books, traveled to North Korea to free a prisoner, and climbed Japan’s Mount Fuji at the age of 70.
He was a pious Baptist who taught Sunday school every two weeks, and stayed loyal to wife Rosalynn in a marriage lasting 77 years. She died late last year.
Mrs. Carter accompanied the president on global travels. They returned to their farmhouse in Plains, Georgia, when his tenure in the White House ended. They had a peanut business to bail out, doing so with a $1 million land purchase by Archer Daniels Midland, and a mission of peaceful resolution of the world’s conflicts.
Carter sought to downplay the imperial presidency. Gone were the Ruritanian uniforms for White House guards. The new president walked blocks to the White House in his inaugural parade. Carter carried his own luggage onto Air Force One.
He was also a conservationist. He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House — Reagan had them removed — and the Carters celebrated one holiday by rafting the middle form of Idaho’s Salmon River, with U.S. Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus as guide. Out of office, the couple went rafting in the Arctic Refuge, with time out for a news conference denouncing oil companies’ plans to drill there.
The Atlanta-based Carter Center, located on John Lewis Freedom Parkway, has carried on his human rights and peacemaking activism.
Carter was an everyman’s president. He loved peanut butter and banana sandwiches. He could give lessons on how to cook a possum. He was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, trained as an engineer and executive officer on the USS Nautilus, our first nuclear submarine. He sweated details, down to the identities of those using White House tennis courts.
His obsession with details was memorably spoofed by Dan Aykroyd in the inaugural season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Details proved a lot more useful during the 13-day marathon talks at Camp David that produced the Begin-Sadat Camp David Accords. Similarly, he was able to reassure the country after the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania yielded the worst nuclear power calamity in American history.
Carter’s was an unlucky presidency. The rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini in Iran ended the rule of the Shah, who at one point fashioned himself “God’s Shadow on Earth.” (The Carters celebrated one New Year’s Eve in the imperial palace before the Shah hit the fan.)
Oil prices shot up during the crisis and dozens of employees of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were taken prisoner. A botched rescue effort cost eight American lives. The word on their release finally came on the last morning of Carter’s presidency. He tried to call Reagan, but word came back that his successor had gone to bed.
The Ayatollah’s rise, coupled with long gas lines and a botched effort to rescue the hostages, did him in. So did Reagan’s affable demeanor in the candidates’ lone debate, Carter marshaled facts while the Gipper delivered a memorable rejoinder that Republicans still try to trot out to this day in imitation: “There you go again.”
One pundit, in a post-debate analysis, termed it a confrontation between an affable old Dr. Bernard and a snarling Pekingese. Carter was never strong on television, while Reagan had years of commercials for General Electric under his belt.
Western Washington had a trio of memorable encounters with our 39th president. Carter came to the Pacific Northwest after leaving office to sell books and tout his son Jack’s bid to be governor of Nevada. I caught him while he was watching a Mariners game.
Carter picked Seattle to announce that he would pardon Vietnam War objectors who found refuge in Canada. We saw him again touring the Mount St. Helens blast zone. Asked what the state needed, then-Governor Dixy Lee Ray spelled out “m‑o-n-e‑y.”
A poignant moment came at the close of the 1980 campaign. Carter held a ‘cookin’ rally at Boeing Field. The crowd was on fire. The president returned to Air Force One to learn from pollster Pat Caddell that he would lose in a landslide.
No discussion of the Carter presidency would be complete without mention of race relations. He grew up in the segregated south, his father the backer of a segregationist governor. Yet, Carter put Black Americans in top jobs, notably Andrew Young as our United Nations ambassador. He nominated women to federal judgeships. In a goodbye book published in 2018, he reminisced about having Black playmates as a little boy.
Jimmy Carter was a preachy man, but with a purpose.
This article also appeared in The Northwest Advocate.
In 1978 Carter legalized home brewing which sparked the craft beer industry.
That’s a whole other PNW story.
Here’s to Jimmy!
I had the pleasure of interviewing Jimmy Carter in Caracas in 2004, after his Carter Center delegation observed and validated the failed recall election of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This was during the George W. Bush presidency, when US relations with Communist countries in Latin America had gone from bad to worse. Carter invited the LA Times, Washington Post and NPR correspondents to his hotel suite and spent two hours with us talking about the Center’s mission to ease tensions with all countries, allies and adversaries alike, by building voters’ confidence in their elections. He was a genuinely considerate person who got dealt a bad hand by history but instead of making excuses for losing in 1980 went on to make the world a better place. RIP, Mr. President.