~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The history of Jimmy’s Carter’s presidency gives him little quarter; according to too many, he failed.
An honest person is more likely doomed to fail in politics than a person who can dissemble; a person who wants to work in a profession that takes a lot of compromise without compromising one’s own integrity is rare.
I think such a person is Jimmy Carter, now in his 98th year, in the hands of Hospice, and thus on his way out.
Knowing he couldn’t live forever and amazed that he lived so long, I will miss him when he’s gone. He has lived an exemplary life, whatever the pundits had to say about his presidency. An opinion is just that; history takes a while to even know what happened in a presidency let alone judge it; later biographies of him may be more forbearing, less accusing.
But the history of his life beyond that short four years in the White House is more of an open book – no secret meetings, no hair-raising decisions about nuclear missiles, war, the budgeting of taxpayers’ money, fewer self-important personages to avoid, less of a bureaucratic maze to wade through.
He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his humanitarian work and his human rights protocols having to do with disease control via the Carter Center. Among other reasonable missions, he settled disagreements among world leaders and monitored voting in foreign countries. (Our “since-2020” debacle on who won the presidential election must have driven him nuttier than it drove us.)
Although Habitat for Humanity, Carter’s choice to work on in his retirement to help poor people unable to afford a home, was not started by Carter, he became its face, its spokesman and worked on building the houses like any other volunteer.
Carter did not leave politics entirely behind, for he was willing to give his opinion and his ideas to the cliff-hanging decisions of presidents since him. His temperament and his experience compelled him to speak to problems he might help. That was a brave thing to do, especially when not asked as well as being a one-term president, but I have a feeling that to him it was the only way to be.
Carter was elected senator from Georgia and then governor of the state. In a press conference during that campaign, he described his politics as “conservative, moderate, liberal and middle-of-the-road….” Apparently a politician who could see all sides; would that they all could. During his governorship, he became a Civil Rights activist, making enemies of the Ku Klux Klan.
Soon after his brief sojourn in the White House, Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalyn sat down to write their memoirs of the trying (an energy crisis and inflation, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a war in Nicaragua) and satisfying (the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, for one example). To their dismay, the married writers could not agree on anything. Finally, their editor stepped in, assigned a room to each of them and told them to write their own versions, and in the book, the chapters would intertwine. Brilliant solution to a simple marital discord and a comfortable story about a famous – and nice – fellow married to a woman who could accept compromise as easily as he.
During his private life after that brief job, Jimmy Carter toted up a long record of helping people, advancing peace and civil rights, integration and the goal of much-needed fellowship among us. Although he may never reach high marks with historians for his American Presidency, he will go down in history as an influential ex-president and an extraordinary human being.
