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carter center
Carter’s Legacy Will Live on to Inspire Future Generations
He nourished the norms of personal and civic decency, dialogue, truth-telling, and working for a just society, expressing his Christian faith in action.
Jan 01, 2025
Jimmy Carter was the last president to actively open the government for engagement by citizen groups. Right after his November 1976 election, he agreed to address a huge hotel ballroom in D.C. full of local and national citizen advocates. It was a great success never again repeated by succeeding president-elects.
Mr. Carter then chose civic leaders and other solid progressives to head regulatory agencies such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and for other high positions in government. He chose the formidable longtime consumer-labor advocate Esther Peterson to be his consumer protection special assistant in the White House. He also supported an independent consumer protection agency which Congress, after a fierce struggle between corporate lobbies and consumer groups, narrowly defeated in 1978. Starting in 1981, Ronald Reagan undermined many Carter Administration health and safety initiatives.
Compare Jimmy Carter’s life with the rancid, corrupt, cowardly politicians spoiling today’s Washington landscapes.
Mr. Carter was also the last president to authentically recognize Palestinian rights and charge the Israeli government with imposing a system of apartheid (“worse than in South Africa,” he said) over Palestine. However, he failed to get Israel to agree to a comprehensive peace settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state, and had to settle for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
Citizen Carter was easily our greatest former president. For over 40 years his indefatigable work ethic was applied to advancing peace efforts, initiating health programs in developing countries, supervising fair elections overseas and, with Rosalynn, joining Habitat for Humanity as a manual laborer (he was an expert woodworker, among his many skills) to build houses around the country for needy families.
The range of interests expressed through his 32 books and conferences revealed a practical, results-oriented, humble Renaissance man. His compassion and honesty infuse the Carter Center to this day.
He nourished the norms of personal and civic decency, dialogue, truth-telling, and working for a just society, expressing his Christian faith in action.
Compare Jimmy Carter’s life with the rancid, corrupt, cowardly politicians spoiling today’s Washington landscapes.
There are legitimate criticisms of Carter’s foreign and domestic policies that others will examine. But overall, his legacy will live on to inspire future generations of Americans to elevate their expectations and strive toward them with civic dedication and commitment.
I was always in awe of how efficiently he used his time every day—and truly amazed by his relentless productivity. This alone would have been a worthy book by Mr. Carter were it not for his genuine humility.
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Jimmy Carter Almost Outlived the Guinea Worm
In his campaign against the disease, Carter showed what a determined person can accomplish through single-minded purpose driven by compassion, and the pursuit of strategic partnerships and cooperation.
Dec 30, 2024
On the occasion of former President Jimmy Carter’s death, I am reprinting this column with some updates.
The guinea worm may be the second major human disease after smallpox to be completely eradicated. It is a parasite that you get from drinking water with small fleas in it. The larvae of the worm are in the fleas, and they migrate into your muscles. After growing there for a year, as a long thread gathered in a bump, the worm works its way out over two or three days, which is extremely painful and potentially debilitating. The disease mainly existed in Central Africa, and especially in South Sudan. At its height it afflicted 3.5 million people in 21 countries. The technical name for the disease is dracunculiasis.
The Carter Center is reporting that in 2024, only seven human cases were reported worldwide! Carter had wanted to outlive the disease and he came very close.
He brought a debilitating disease’s toll down from 3.5 million people over nearly two dozen countries to almost zero.
After he left the White House, Jimmy Carter did a lot of traveling for his foundation. In Africa, he saw those suffering from the guinea worm, and asked what could be done about it. He was told that the flea that carries the larvae is big enough so that even just filtering water through cloth would get rid of it.
From 1986, Carter put together a coalition of the World Health Organization and health ministries in the afflicted countries (which then included Pakistan) to get the word out to people about the need for water filtration.
He even at one point in the mid-1990s helped negotiate a cease-fire between the north and the south in Sudan so that his activists could reach affected villagers and teach them how to filter the water!
The Garter Center thus spearheaded this effort, though it became an international movement with many participants.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, “Since 1986, WHO has certified 200 countries, areas, and territories as dracunculiasis-free. Five countries with ongoing endemic dracunculiasis (Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and South Sudan), plus Sudan, which has not yet completed its dossier and follow-up visit, have not been certified by WHO.”
Carter showed what a determined person can accomplish through single-minded purpose driven by compassion, and the pursuit of strategic partnerships and cooperation. He brought a debilitating disease’s toll down from 3.5 million people over nearly two dozen countries to almost zero. The former president has given the world a model that should be deployed to solve other pressing problems. He was one of the world’s few true heroes.
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Jimmy Carter, Middle East Peace, and The Man Who Killed My Dog
On how I ended up having more affection for Jimmy Carter than for any president before or since in my lifetime.
Dec 30, 2024
In January 1977 the nuns where we used to attend church in Lebanon gifted me the only dog I ever owned, a mutt they’d called Jimmy, after the newly elected American president. American politics was the world’s most accessible entertainment even then, so Jimmy Carter was big news in Lebanon. To those Antonine nuns Carter was something of a sex symbol. He wore his Christianity on his sleeve with a leer worthy of Mary Magdalene, allowing them to lust for him in their heart. In consequence they delivered me a Jimmy more frisky than pious.
Not being a registered Democrat I promptly renamed my new dog to something more presidential (King). Little did I know that I’d end up having more affection for Jimmy Carter than for any president before or since in my lifetime, which began a year to the day after JFK’s assassination. Maybe it’s because Carter was still president when I landed in the United States as a permanent resident in 1979. Inflation meant nothing to me. Gas lines were way shorter than they’d been in Lebanon. No one was shooting at me even in New York City, where we lived at what was to be the height of its post-Prohibition crime wave. It was a great time.
I’d come to admire Carter from another memory in 1978. This was the president who’d managed what no other president before or since has managed. He’d gotten Egypt and Israel to sign a peace treaty and Israel to give up the Sinai, the biggest and last real achievement in Middle East peacemaking since France and Britain turned that region into a hellhole on time-release after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
Egypt’s Anwar Sadat thought he was a latter-day pharaoh, but he’d started the impossible by going to Jerusalem and daring the Israelis to the peace table. Israel’s Menahem Begin was (and remained) a terrorist, his hatred for Arabs overmatching in weaponry and violence Arabs’ berserk hatred for Jews. Carter’s skill and smarts, and a self-righteousness almost as distressing as Woodrow Wilson’s, looked past all that in those famous 13 days at Camp David.
Opinion polls told Carter he was nuts. He looked past them. He ignored the imperious convention that presidents should not personally engage in negotiations. Mostly, he looked past the bigoted Kissinger doctrine–that Israel is always right, that nothing in Middle East initiatives ought to be done without Israel’s approval first. The approach had prevailed since Kennedy (Eisenhower, the last president to stand up to Israel, had no use for it) and would prevail again after Carter, as it does to Biden-bloodied day.
Camp David was the exception.
Of course neither Begin nor Sadat gave a shit about Palestinians. No Arabs and no Israelis ever have. They just wanted to remove their militaries from each other’s faces so Sadat could go back to repressing his people and Begin could go back to repressing Palestinians in the rest of the occupied territories. Peace with Egypt was to be the recalibration of repression in the West bank and Gaza. Carter, so often naive, looked past that, too, thinking Camp David was a start, not an end. (Clinton repeated the mistake with the deservedly doomed Oslo accords a decade and a half later.) He took at face value both men’s promises that they’d turn to the Palestinian problem some other time. Maybe Sadat meant it. It’s doubtful. It’s certain Begin, who called Palestinians “beasts walking on two legs” while Rafael Eitan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, called them “drugged roaches in a bottle,” didn’t mean it.
Sadat was assassinated for signing the Camp David accords. Reagan was elected. The Middle East bored him once he vaguely learned it wasn’t to the right of the Midwest. He cleared the way for more unlawful Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
Begin took advantage, going on an orgy of “settlements”–a sanitizing euphemism that reduces land theft to something like summer camp and that the servile American press uses still. The orgy accelerated under Sharon and Netanyahu, with American money. Begin and Sharon in 1982 invaded Lebanon (with American weaponry) in the deadliest of all Israeli invasions until then, kicking off a 20-year occupation. Begin thought he was getting rid of the PLO. The invasion inseminated the more brutal and indigenous Hezbollah, provoking yet more wars–1996, 2006, 2024–with America turning a blind eye and thousands of Lebanese civilians paying the price, as always.
The 1994 peace between Israel and Jordan gave Israel still freer rein in the West Bank, once the brief hopes of the Oslo accords–which were supposed to lead to an autonomous Palestinian state–were discarded with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by an Israeli terrorist a year later–a Jewish ultra-nationalist, but really the twin of Sadat’s assassins. The so-called two-state solution to which every American president paid lip service and Israel never took seriously died about then, reinforcing what Carter called, with unfortunate restraint, Israeli apartheid.
At home, Carter’s presidency is remembered as a failure. Carter biographer Kai Bird has discredited the myth, documenting too many accomplishments to count. Not that this amnesiac country is interested in fact. The two crises that overwhelmed Carter’s legacy were the oil shock of 1979 and its subsequent inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, when 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Tehran after the fall of the Shah. The oil shock was not Carter’s doing. The hostage crisis was.
The Shah was one of the most vain and mass-murdering leaders of the 20th century, a sort of dandy Idi Amin. He was the mutant child of an abominable union between Winston Churchill and the CIA in 1953. He’d been flattered, financed and fellated by every American president since Eisenhower on the cynical calculation that tyrannizing over 40 million Iranians in exchange for blocking Soviet control of the Persian Gulf was ok with them. We finally paid the price. The Shah was ousted by the identically reprehensible but also vengeful Khomeini.
Carter despised the Shah and initially resisted for most of a year letting him into the United States. The Shah was now himself battling what he’d been to his country: cancer. Carter’s aides and Henry Kissinger (as always) kept up the pressure. Kissinger threatened to undermine Carter’s arms control treaty with the Soviets by condemning SALT II before the Senate.
Just as Carter was building what seemed like constructive relations with the new Iranian regime, he gave in and let the Shah check into New York Hospital, despite warnings from the American embassy in Tehran that it would endanger the staff there. It was the single worst decision of Carter’s presidency. Nine days after the Shah entered the United States, Iranian militants took the Americans hostage.
But for one more error–again giving in to hawks with an attempted rescue that ended in disaster in the Iranian desert, with the death of eight Americans–Carter handled the crisis with admirable diplomacy, refusing escalations to safeguard the life of the hostages even at the cost of his plummeting poll numbers.
He might have won their release but for the Reagan campaign repeating the Nixon campaign’s treachery against Johnson in 1968. Nixon go-betweens carried out secret negotiations with the enemy for electoral gain. So did Reagan’s with Iran. It was a preview of Oliver North’s secret negotiations and illegal arms deals with the regime a few years later as Reagan secretly siphoned millions of dollars and weapons to Nicaraguan terrorists he called “freedom fighters.”
As Kai Bird wrote, “now we have good evidence that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey made a secret trip to Madrid in the summer of 1980, where he may have met with a representative of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and thus prolonged the hostage crisis. If this is true, such interference in the hostage negotiations sought to deny the Carter administration an October surprise, a release of the hostages late in the campaign, and it was dirty politics and a raw deal for the American hostages.”
Of course it’s true: Khomeini released the hostages minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, the day the most scandal-free administration of the 20th century gave way to the most scandal-ridden. It was Fantasyland again in (white) America.
Americans like their country to be run as a theme park. Annoyances like reality, responsibility and malaise have no place. Neither did Carter. The fantasists have been taking their revenge on him ever since, even as Carter’s legend grew in the 43 years since his presidency. He became the busiest ex-president in history, if still the least celebrated and the most shunned. The great conciliator out-hustled some of his predecessors’ actual presidencies (notably the senescent Reagan, Trump and all those zeros between Wilson and FDR), and of course out-living two of those who followed him. I thought he had a good chance of outliving Biden and Trump II. He’s decided otherwise. His one hundred years of solitude are over.
As for King, my dog, I’m glad I renamed him. A year after I left Lebanon he, too, was assassinated. I wouldn’t have wanted to have Jimmy’s death on my conscience. My poor dog was running after a neighbor’s chickens. The neighbor, Khalil, shot him dead. The same neighbor who not long afterward shot his own son, Munir–who had been one of my closest friends–dead. Khalil was finally imprisoned.
Lebanon, like the rest of the Middle East, could have used a few dozen Carter Centers: “Waging peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.” So could the United States, a nation proudly and vindictively becoming more Begin than Sadat, more Khalil than Carter, by the day.
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