Jimmy Carter: Human Rights Champion
When we examine the entirety of his long life, we see that Jimmy Carter was among the very best of us.
After almost two years in hospice care, former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. This makes him the longest-lived former president in US history. The exact medical circumstances are still unclear, but at a century old, it’s fair to assume that his death was the result of natural causes.
As the obituaries, retrospectives, and op-eds about Carter’s life and career roll in, commentators—particularly those on the American left—have been zeroing in on Carter’s time in office, which has cast a shadow over his legacy. A single-term president, Carter was narrowly elected before being defeated in a landslide. His presidency was marred by an economic crisis that he did not create but could not satisfactorily reverse. As a result, he is likely to be remembered primarily as a mediocre leader. But while his failures in office are not in dispute, they don’t tell the full story. When we examine not merely his four years in the White House, but the entirety of his long life, we see that Jimmy Carter was far from mediocre—he was, in fact, among the very best of us.
Born in Plains, Georgia, on 1 October 1924, James Earl Carter Jr. grew up steeped in evangelical Christianity and agricultural life and surrounded by the pervasive poverty of the Depression-era segregated South. After graduating from the US Naval Academy in 1946, Carter was deployed in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, where he served with distinction on two battleships and two submarines, as well as with the US Atomic Energy Commission, and ultimately rose to the rank of lieutenant. During Carter’s seven years on active duty, he earned the American Campaign Medal, the China Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. When his father died in 1953, Carter took over the family farm back in Georgia, where he famously worked as a successful peanut farmer.
He entered politics in 1962, with the announcement of his candidacy for the Georgia State Senate. Carter ran as a “new Southerner,” someone who bucked many of the cultural trends of the American South by speaking out in churches and on the campaign trail about the need for racial tolerance, desegregation, and an end to racism. He was the only white man in his community who refused to join a segregationist group called the White Citizen’s Council. Shortly thereafter, he found a sign on his office door that read: “Coons and Carters go together.”
Ronald Radosh
Carter won his election, and was re-elected to another two-year term in the State Senate in 1964. From there, he set his sights on the governor’s mansion. After he was defeated in the Democratic primaries in 1966, Carter returned to his farm for several years. He launched a second gubernatorial bid in 1970 and won, becoming the 76th Governor of Georgia. Now a rising star in the Democratic Party, Carter ran for president in 1976 and won against Republican Gerald Ford. Carter ran on a campaign of reform and optimism against an incumbent unpopular both for pardoning President Richard Nixon of crimes related to the Watergate scandal and for the recession of 1974–75. Soon enough, though, Carter would have his own economic problems to worry about.
Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, several years into “stagflation”—the period from the mid-1970s to early-80s during which inflation was rampant and economic growth slow. The Carter administration raised interest rates sharply—a tried-and-true method to curb inflation. This eventually worked to lower inflation, but not before causing the worst recession since the Great Depression, with an unemployment rate that reached into the double digits. By 1982, inflation, interest rates, and unemployment numbers had substantially improved—but this improvement came too late for Carter’s re-election hopes and his successor, Ronald Reagan, was able to take the credit for it.
Theo Zenou
Several other emergencies arose during Carter’s presidency. During the Oil Shock of 1978–79, rising global demand and events in the Middle East led to a sharp spike in the price of oil. Carter responded by attempting to persuade the American people to consume less oil, a strategy advocated in his now-infamous July 1979 “Malaise speech.” Recognizing that government policy can do relatively little to control energy costs and cognizant of the role that public confidence plays in economics, Carter appealed to the public to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. While this approach was ethically laudable, it went over predictably poorly, and has since become a cautionary tale for politicians. The civic virtue embodied in President John F. Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” was, by the late-1970s, a relic of a bygone era. The American people were indeed mired in a malaise—one they could not be talked out of with any feat of oration. Inspiring the country to take action was once a part of what leadership meant. That ethos was replaced by one in which leaders were—and still are—seen as quasi-parental figures who promise to fix everything and ask nothing of the citizenry save their votes.
Theo Zenou
In November of that same year of 1979, the Iran Hostage Crisis erupted, after Iranian militants took 70 Americans hostage in the US embassy in Tehran. Carter handled the situation with great caution in order to minimize loss of life. Negotiations stretched on for 14 long months, but his tactic eventually worked. His patience, however, took a heavy political toll on him, since the crisis was still unresolved on election day. Every hostage was finally released alive on 20 January 1981, the day on which Carter left office to make room for his successor, Ronald Reagan, who walloped him at the ballot box. Carter had swept into power atop a tsunami of support, but the political tide receded when he failed to make swift progress in solving the major challenges he faced.
Still, the 39th president’s time in office was not without its notable achievements, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. In 1978, Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty, and in 1979, he ratified the SALT II Treaty, a strategic mutual agreement with the Soviet Union to reduce each country’s respective nuclear arsenals. He also established full diplomatic relations with China. Most notably of all, he brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt—two nations involved in armed conflict five times over the 30 years from 1948 to 1979, and not once in the 45 years since then. Throughout his presidency, Carter was an outspoken champion of human rights—a cause that was to remain dear to his heart for the rest of his life. During his time in office, he protected 103 million acres of land in Alaska through the national park system, pardoned all Vietnam War draft dodgers, and hired record numbers of women and racial minorities to his administration. Carter also strongly promoted renewable energy, even placing solar panels on the White House for the first time in history. (They were removed in 1986 by the Reagan administration, as part of their dismantling of renewable energy policy.)
Jimmy Carter’s finest moments came in the decades after his presidential career had ended. From the early 1980s through the mid-2010s, he advocated human rights and diplomacy in Taiwan, Egypt, North Korea, Darfur, and other places. This statesmanship earned him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Carter also used his influence to liaise between governments and NGOs to aid the fight against diseases of the developing world such as lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, river blindness, and schistosomiasis. His efforts were instrumental in the near-eradication of Guinea worm, a gruesome and often debilitating parasite, which can grow up to three feet (90 cm) long inside the human body. In 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease. In 2022, there were 13. According to the World Health Organization, the disease will be wiped out by 2030.
Ronald Radosh
Carter is perhaps best known for his work with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit that helps construct affordable homes for those in need. According to Habitat, since 1984, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter “have worked alongside nearly 104,000 volunteers in 14 countries to build, renovate, and repair 4,390 homes.” Nearly all this work was done when Carter was in his 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
President Carter is now mainly remembered not for what he did, but for what he failed to do. But Jimmy Carter’s tenure as president from 1977–81 was not tarnished by poor governance, but by bad luck. Only a miracle worker could have completed the tasks that faced him, given the major economic crisis and succession of emergencies that beset his single term in office. Looking at his life as a whole casts the man in an altogether different light.
