Carter may have been overshadowed by other American presidents, but he lived longer than any other, and his legacy is substantial.
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The long-enduring media image of President Jimmy Carter is the soft-spoken guy in the cardigan who stumbled through an oil-embargo energy crisis and failed to rescue scores of US hostages in Iran. But the truth is that Carter, who died today at the age of 100, was a truly decent man who stood up, for the rest of us, against the profound indecencies of the world.
Carter had a faculty for making the right decisions, which he then struggled to effectively communicate to the American public.
As a consequence, many consider his single-term presidency a failure. Yet Carter’s life was unlike that of any other president in American history. He is one of only four US presidents to win the Nobel Prize and — in contrast to the other winners, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama — Carter was awarded his prize for accomplishments that took place after his presidency was over. He was one of the few national leaders whose reputation and legacy grew substantially once he left office.
A Good Deed Punished
None of this would have seemed likely while Carter was still in the White House. His undoing was unquestionably the Iran hostage crisis, when a student mob overran the American Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and held more than 50 American foreign service officers prisoner for 444 days.
Ostensibly, Iran’s newly formed theocratic regime was furious that Carter had granted a humanitarian visa for the deposed Shah of Iran to receive medical treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The real reason may have been more complicated. Many of the Revolution’s leaders held American passports, and the new regime in Tehran worried that unless there was an irreversible break, Washington might reassert its influence in the region.
Carter initially tried to reason with Iran’s new regime, but he decided in the end to listen to his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who argued for a more confrontational approach.
The Pentagon mounted an elaborate rescue attempt, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, which Carter greenlighted on April 24, 1980. Eight helicopters carrying Delta Force special operations commandos were sent to a rendezvous point designated Desert One. Only five made it. One of the helicopters had hydraulic problems, another was crippled by a cracked rotor blade, and a third was caught in a sandstorm.
Military commanders had advised aborting the mission if fewer than six helicopters made it to the rendezvous. Accordingly, Carter pulled the plug and ordered everyone home. But leaving Desert One, one of the remaining helicopters crashed into a transport plane. The plane’s fuel caught fire, and eight American servicemen were killed.
If Carter had been criticized for indecisiveness before the attempt, he was dismissed after it as a bumbling incompetent. When the disaster hit the news, I was working as a reporter in Paris. I remember attending a meeting of American Democrats Abroad and telling the committee, “I have done everything in my power to support this man, but it is frankly impossible.”
I was wrong.
Two decades later, as a magazine correspondent accompanying a US Marine Reconnaissance unit in the Saudi Arabian desert, I was preparing to go into Kuwait with Operation Desert Storm — the US-led effort to repel an Iraqi invasion force. In just half an hour, my sunglasses were frosted by the Saudi Arabian sand, which was so fine that it penetrated literally everything and had a corrosive effect on engines. (I later heard that, after the hostage rescue failure, the US had quietly shipped tons of sand from Saudi Arabia and practiced tossing it at various military engines until engineers could devise filtering systems efficient enough to counter the sand’s catastrophic corrosion.)
Cyrus Vance, who had advised strongly against the rescue attempt, resigned as secretary of state in protest against Carter’s decision to go forward with it. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini bragged that the catastrophe had been an act of the angels of God to protect the new Islamic Republic.
Khomeini finally released the hostages on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Some suspected that Reagan had relayed “suggestions” through back-channels that the Iranians would get more from the release if they waited until Carter was out of office.
In fact, the hostage situation had been a trap, which Carter, to his credit, managed to sidestep. Russia, still fully engaged in the Cold War and competing with the US for influence in the Islamic world, had been ready to exact maximum advantage from Iran’s revolution. It was clear that a violent US military response to Iran’s provocation would alienate the Muslim world and undermine US sway throughout the Middle East.
If the US had gone into Tehran with guns blazing, the chances are that a number of the hostages would have been killed, and the US would have alienated the rest of the Islamic world. By keeping his head despite the provocation, Carter not only got all the hostages out alive, but he saved American influence in the region. That reality was hard for an American public, imbued with shoot-first myths from America’s frontier past, to accept.
Reagan’s Blunder Rewarded
Reagan, although generally more popular than Carter, was not so lucky. In 1983, Reagan dispatched 800 US Marines to Beirut as part of a multinational peace-keeping force to stabilize Lebanon and oversee the evacuation of Palestinian guerrillas from the country.
I was at a news briefing just outside Beirut airport, when then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James D. Watkins told the gathered reporters, “We have had quite a success with our show of force here in Beirut; We are looking at other places in the world where we can do the same. You could say that we are taking the high ground.”
I said, “Pardon me, Admiral, but those mountains behind you are full of Syrian artillery that is pointed right where you are standing. I don’t see how you can say that we’ve taken the high ground.”
“Well,” he said, “it is just a figure of speech.” A few weeks later a truck bomb blew up the US Marine barracks, killing 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel, and three US Army soldiers. Another 100 service members were injured in the blast. Not long after that, Reagan pulled US forces out of Lebanon, effectively handing the country over to Islamic extremist groups.
Reagan’s missteps were far more costly than Carter’s, yet Reagan remained popular and beloved by his admirers while Carter’s presidency was generally dismissed as a failure. The difference may have stemmed from their respective personalities. A magazine profile of Reagan noted that while Carter was famous for spending hours each evening studying the voluminous top-secret file of instructions dictating the procedures that a president needs to follow in case of a nuclear attack, Reagan rarely looked at the book.
Most inside observers felt more comfortable around Reagan. Carter was harder to decipher.
From and Back to Rural Roots
That Carter was something of an enigma should not be surprising. James Earl Carter Jr., the future 39th president, was born in rural Plains, GA, two-and-a-half hours south of Atlanta. According to the 2020 census, Plains has a population of roughly 575 people. Carter’s father, Earl, had moved to Plains shortly after his father was murdered by a business partner. Never wealthy, Earl Carter initially worked as a traveling salesman, then opened a general store in Plains and began farming peanuts.
Jimmy Carter joked that the males in his family line had a tradition of not graduating from high school. Despite his limited formal education, Carter’s father was elected to the Georgia Legislature in January 1953. He died six months later. After finishing high school in Plains, Jimmy studied engineering at Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He then applied to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. Graduating 60th in a class of 821 midshipmen, he was soon assigned to submarines.
He reached the rank of executive officer before transferring to the US Navy’s nuclear submarine program, where, under Adm. Hyman Rickover, he became involved in developing the atomic reactors that would eventually power US nuclear-missile-armed subs. Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, whom he had married after graduating from Annapolis, moved with their children to Schenectady, NY, while Carter was on temporary assignment at the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, DC.
When a nuclear reactor at Canada’s Chalk River research laboratory melted down, Carter, still a Navy lieutenant, was lowered into the melted reactor core to make an emergency adjustment on a single screw. So deadly was the level of radiation that he had only 90 seconds to complete the task. Although he emerged unscathed, the intervention demanded a high degree of personal courage — with the future president demonstrating a quiet fortitude all too distinguishable from the chest-thumping antics seen in too many of today’s politicians.
With his advanced knowledge of an exciting new field, Carter could have had a brilliant career as an engineer working in nuclear energy, but when his father died he returned to Plains to wind up the estate. Rosalynn was less than pleased at the prospect of going back to the rural South. She later said that she initially considered it “a monumental step backwards.”
By the time Carter closed his father’s estate, he was pressed for cash, but along the way he had become interested in the family’s peanut farm. Instead of nuclear physics, he put his energy into studying agriculture, took out loans, and moved the family into low-rent public housing.
At the time, Georgia had a reputation as one of the most racist states in the Jim Crow South, where the rallying cry “states rights” had turned into a euphemism for rabid anti-Black sentiment. Carter’s father had been a staunch segregationist, but Jimmy had had several Black friends when he was a child, and his natural inclination was against discrimination.
A Political Novelty
As a successful peanut farmer, Carter was gradually drawn into the local political scene. Describing his amorphic ideological approach as “conservative, moderate, liberal and middle of the road,” he managed somehow to present himself as a Southern version of a “man for all seasons.”
Carter was elected to the Georgia state Senate in 1963; three years later he entered the race for governor, only to lose in the Democratic primary — to Lester Maddox, an extreme racist. In the 1970 campaign for governor, Carter attacked his primary opponent, Carl Sanders, for supporting Martin Luther King.
Once Carter was elected governor, however, he set about actively moving Georgia away from racist policies. Georgia’s segregationists felt that they had been betrayed. But by then, it was too late. Leroy Johnson, a Black Georgia state senator, later said, “I understand why he ran that kind of ultra-conservative campaign. I don’t believe you can win this state without being a racist.”
In 1976, Carter entered the race for the US presidency. To many observers, his candidacy looked like a long shot, but in fact, the sordid revelations of the Watergate scandal had shocked the American electorate, which was ready for a fresh face.
At the time, I was in Washington and was one of the volunteers who agreed to read over the air on National Public Radio the transcripts of White House conversations that President Richard Nixon had secretly recorded. Nearly every sentence Nixon uttered contained a scabrous expletive that needed to be deleted in order to avoid violating FCC rules against broadcasting obscenities.
Nixon resigned as president in August 1974. The ascendancy of his vice president, Gerald Ford, momentarily soothed a rattled nation. But Ford, who had to campaign for reelection in 1976, was something of a political light-weight. At best, he appeared to be an awkward version of the standard-issue Republican politician, which brand, in any case, Nixon had effectively besmirched.
Carter, in contrast, emerged from the early primaries as a level-headed candidate who made sense, had an intriguing back story, and came across as a man who could move the country out of its Watergate morass. He soon became the favorite of political reporters, who were happy to find a candidate without Ford’s ineradicable baggage.
Crises and Accomplishments
Although the Iran hostage dilemma ultimately made Carter’s administration look weak, he actually accomplished a great deal. One of his first actions was to declare an unconditional amnesty for all the Americans who had skipped out on the draft during the Vietnam conflict. His administration was responsible for creating the Department of Education and the Department of Energy.
Besides Iran, he had to contend with the Nicaraguan revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the multinational boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics, a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and lethal water pollution at the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY. More than 800 families had to be evacuated and 500 homes destroyed after it was learned that their houses had been built on top of a toxic waste dump. That scandal led to the creation of superfund laws, which authorized federal funding to clean up industrial disasters.
In the Middle East, Carter initiated the talks that resulted in the Camp David accords, in which Egypt ended its war with Israel and formally recognized the Jewish state’s right to exist. Carter also signed the SALT II nuclear arms reduction treaty, which dramatically reduced the nuclear threat engendered by the Cold War.
When Carter became president — in spite of bringing along with him to Washington some scandal-prone Georgia cronies — he was seen as sincere, honest, and well-intentioned. After four years of dealing with Washington’s bare-knuckle politics and multiple foreign crises, he was generally dismissed as a better person than president. Compared to Reagan’s genial but movie-star-manly facade, Carter was seen as indecisive — not a real leader.
Ironically, it was Carter’s peacekeeping efforts once his presidency was over that earned him greater accolades than anything he had done in the White House.
The Atlanta-based Carter Center continues to be a significant force in at least 80 countries. Among other things, it is credited with having worked together with the World Health Organization to eradicate Guinea worm disease, which infected some 3.5 million people in the 1980s. By 2021, this crippling disease had practically been eliminated and only 10 cases were reported.
Besides health matters, the Center has been a dynamic force advocating for voting rights, democracy, and human rights around the world. Jimmy and Rossalyn Carter also played a significant role in promoting Habitat for Humanity, which, with the Carter Works Project, has built and restored nearly 5,000 homes in 18 countries.
Few who know Carter’s record would question that, as an individual, he has been a unique success. The miracle is that he lived long enough to see his true worth widely recognized, and celebrated.
