Former US president Jimmy Carter served four years in the White House and an indefatigable 43-year ‘retirement’ travelling to all corners of the world promoting human rights in international affairs, the protection of the environment and energy conservation. In many ways, he anticipated the defining challenges that the world faces today.
US President Joe Biden described Carter’s achievements in a nutshell. He said: “America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian. With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us.”
Carter came from humble origins. He grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, on a dirt road in rural Georgia, surrounded by poor people, and was the only president to have lived in public housing.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the US was suffering from the social blight of racial discrimination. When Carter was elected governor of Georgia in 1970, he proclaimed that “the time of discrimination is over”. Time magazine hailed him on its cover as the face of America’s New South. This was an extraordinary moral stand for a politician whose father was a staunch segregationist.
Most political historians rank Carter’s presidency as among the least effective in the last century. Still, in 1978, he brokered a rare, enduring Middle East peace deal between Israel and Egypt that stands to this day.
Carter also put human rights at the centre of US foreign policy and showed unyielding support for Palestinian rights.
His political success was ultimately felled by a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, in which revolutionary students flouted the US superpower by holding dozens of American citizens in Tehran. His political fortunes were also battered by a daring and ultimately disastrous rescue bid in which a US helicopter carrying special forces crashed in the desert, killing eight US servicemen.
Carter’s unpopularity at home was also fuelled by a sluggish economy, inflation and an energy crisis.
Carter’s contribution to the well-being of millions of people in the US and worldwide only began when he limped out of the White House, humiliated by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Republican landslide.
In his 1982 memoir Keeping Faith, Carter wrote: “As one of the youngest former presidents, I expected to have many useful years ahead of me.”
He spent his time in retirement doing good to humanity and became a humanitarian icon, perhaps more popular outside the US than he was at home.
His efforts on behalf of his Carter Centre, founded to “wage peace, fight disease and build hope”, yielded a Nobel Prize in 2002.
In his old age, Carter never gave up speaking his mind and he frequently criticised sitting presidents when he disagreed with their policies.
Carter’s enduring success as a statesman and a global leader is evidenced by the houses he helped build for Habitat for Humanity, the monitoring of elections in developing countries, conducting semi-sanctioned diplomacy and offering various unvarnished assessments of his successors of both parties.
Andrew Young was a US ambassador to the UN under Carter. When Carter left the White House, Young said: “In his presidency, he got a sense of the fact that the world can be changed, and it doesn’t take a government to change it; it can be changed by one person at a time, one disease at a time, building one house at a time.”
Global political leaders will do well to work for the common good even after they leave politics.