Former President Jimmy Carter had more post-White House accomplishments than any other American leader.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He helped virtually eradicate a devastating global disease. He wrote more than 30 books. He built houses for the unhoused and for low-income families every year with his wife, Rosalynn. And he traveled the globe trying to stop violent conflict and human suffering.
Carter also visited dozens of nations as an election monitor, calling out vote fraud by dictators and any corruption he found in democratic elections abroad. Working as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, I vividly remember watching him inspect the voting process in Panama and then publicly and harshly condemn its strongman president, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, for trying to steal a 1989 election.
Observing the voting process in fledgling democracies around the world, I never imagined a corrupt American president or political party would work so hard to suppress the vote in my country and try to overturn a free and fair election here. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol left me wishing Carter would monitor our own elections.
Much has been made of his struggles as president — too much, in fact. He should be remembered most for his pure human decency, something voters needed when he was elected in 1976. He was a moderate Democrat back then when the nation hungered for an outsider to bring back the public good in Washington. He kept his promise never to lie to the voters.
Carter was appalled by Donald Trump’s leadership — calling Trump “a disaster” on human rights, in treating people equally and for being careless with the truth. The 39th president, Carter pushed himself to live long enough to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. When he died on Sunday at age 100, Carter was by far the oldest former president in U.S. history.
But he was so much more, not just because he reinvented himself and had the most successful post-presidency in American history. Carter was a living example of the struggle to end war and suffering around the world and to promote peace, justice and human rights. He rose from a rural upbringing in Plains, Georgia, remembered his teacher’s call to live by principles and applied his strong moral compass to embody the honest leadership and public service that America sorely needs right now.
To be sure, his presidency was deeply troubled by high inflation, gas lines and the Iran hostage crisis, but he is increasingly seen more favorably by historians as having accomplished some far-reaching achievements. He deregulated key industries, called out climate change, put solar panels on the White House and restored honesty, decency and integrity to the presidency after the Watergate scandal.
He also moved the nation toward energy independence, set the tone for the work America has done since on climate change and doubled the size of the national park system with an act that set aside 157 million acres in Alaska for conservation and refuges.
He grew up in the then-segregated South and became a champion of diversity, later naming 57 minority judges and 41 female jurists to the federal bench as president, more than all previous presidents combined. A humble man, he once told me with pride in an interview that all 26 members of his family had voted for President Barack Obama.
Abroad, he negotiated for arms reductions with the Soviets, normalized relations with China, made human rights a centerpiece of American foreign policy and negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords forging peace between Israel and Egypt.
Even with all of America’s flaws and missteps abroad, from engineering coups in some nations to misguided wars in others, the United States, through the modern era, strove to champion freedom, democracy and leadership on human rights.
No president embodied those values with more integrity and moral leadership than Carter — an underrated one-term president whose post-presidency became a model of humanitarian activism, philanthropy and good works, negotiating for peace, finding preventative measures to help wipe out Guinea worm and nurturing democratic progress from Africa to Latin America.
The last time I interviewed him, I asked him in 2009 what he considered to be his most important legacy as president. Without hesitation, he replied, “The peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.”
“His presidency will be remembered by most as a disappointment. It is his post-presidential career as a diplomat, a pro-democracy crusader and anti-poverty home builder, along with his personal decency and public morality, that Americans will recall more fondly,” said Michael Allen, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University.
“Jimmy Carter was a good man but an ineffective president who faced the difficult task of leading a nation that was uncertain what it wanted in a president and which direction it wanted to go. In the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Americans elected him because he was an unknown outsider uncorrupted by Washington’s power politics. Then they blamed him when those very attributes left him unable to steer the nation and world through the material and spiritual challenges that plagued his presidency.”
In some ways, Carter’s decency, which voters craved, got in the way of his governing. Like Joe Biden, who passed more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Carter will be judged better by history than by many of the voters of his time. His Camp David Accords are the only Mideast peace agreement that has stood the test of time. The world saw this, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
“War may sometimes be a necessary evil,” he said at the conclusion of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
Storer H. Rowley, a former national editor and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, teaches journalism and communication at Northwestern University.
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