Will Dunham and Jasper Ward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Jimmy Carter, a hard-working Georgia peanut farmer who struggled as U.S. president with a recession and the Iran hostage crisis but brokered peace between Israel and Egypt and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, has died at his home. The Carter Center said Sunday in Plains, Georgia. He was 100 years old.
“My father was a hero not only to me but to everyone who believed in peace, human rights and selfless love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son. “My brothers, sisters and I shared him with the world through this shared faith. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together. “We are grateful to honor his memory by continuing to live out these shared beliefs.”
A Democrat, he defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford (NYSE:) in the 1976 US election and served as President from January 1977 to January 1981. Carter was forced out of office four years later in a landslide election when voters embraced Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, a former actor and California governor.
Carter lived longer than any other U.S. president after his term. In the process, he developed a reputation as a better former president than the president himself, a fact he readily acknowledged.
His one-term presidency marked the culmination of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which brought some stability to the Middle East. But he was hampered by an economic downturn, a continued decline in popularity, and the Iran hostage crisis that consumed the final 444 days of his term.
In recent years, Carter has suffered from several health problems, including melanoma that has spread to her liver and brain. Rather than receive further medical intervention, Carter decided to enter hospice care in February 2023. His wife, Rosalyn Carter, passed away on November 19, 2023 at the age of 96. He looked frail as he attended her memorial service and funeral in a wheelchair.
Although Carter left office largely unpopular, he worked energetically for humanitarian causes for decades. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his “unrelenting efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to promote democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Carter was the governor of Georgia when he entered the White House as the 39th president of the United States and was a centrist with populist tendencies. He was an outsider in Washington at a time when the country was still reeling from the Watergate scandal that led Republican Richard Nixon to resign as president in 1974 and elevated Ford to vice president.
“I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president. I will never lie to you,” Carter promised, smiling from ear to ear.
Asked to evaluate his presidency in a 1991 documentary, Carter said: “The greatest failure we had was a political failure: I could never convince the American people that I was a strong and powerful leader.”
Despite the hardships of his time in office, Carter had few rivals for his accomplishments as a former president. He gained a global reputation as a tireless defender of human rights, an advocate for the disenfranchised, and a leader in the fight against hunger and poverty, earning him the respect he had never received in the White House.
Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote human rights and resolve conflicts around the world, from Ethiopia and Eritrea to Bosnia and Haiti. His Carter Center in Atlanta has sent international election monitoring delegations to polls around the world.
A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher since his teens, Carter brought a strong moral character to the presidency, speaking publicly about his religious faith. He also tried to take some of the glamor out of his increasingly imperial presidency, such as walking in the 1977 inauguration parade instead of riding in a limousine.
The Middle East has been a focus of Carter’s (NYSE:) foreign policy. The 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, based on the 1978 Camp David Accords, ended the state of war between the two neighbors.
Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland for talks. Later, when the agreement seemed to be unraveling, Carter saved the situation by flying to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal round-trip diplomacy.
The treaty provided for Israel’s withdrawal from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the establishment of diplomatic relations. Begin and Sadat each won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
The most important issues leading up to the 1980 election were double-digit inflation, interest rates exceeding 20 percent, soaring gasoline prices, and the Iran hostage crisis that humiliated the United States. These problems damaged Carter’s presidency and undermined his chances for a second term.
hostage crisis
On November 4, 1979, revolutionaries supporting Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, seizing Americans present and demanding the return of ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was receiving treatment with U.S. support. . American hospitals.
The American public initially supported Carter. However, his support disappeared after a plane crash in the Iranian desert in April 1980 killed eight American soldiers and failed to rescue hostages by commandos.
Carter’s final humiliation was that Iran held 52 hostages until minutes after Reagan was sworn in to replace him on January 20, 1981, before releasing the plane carrying them.
In another crisis, Carter protested the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics. He also asked the U.S. Senate to delay review of a major nuclear weapons agreement with Moscow.
Undeterred, the Soviet Union stayed in Afghanistan for ten years.
Carter narrowly won Senate approval in 1978 for a treaty transferring the Panama Canal to Panama control, despite critics who argued the waterway was essential to U.S. security. He also completed negotiations for a full relationship between China and the United States.
Carter created two new U.S. cabinet departments: the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. He called America’s “energy crisis” amid high gasoline prices a “moral war” and urged people to embrace energy conservation. “Our country is the most wasteful country on earth,” he told Americans in 1977.
In 1979, Carter delivered what became known as his “malaise” speech to the nation, but he never used the word.
“After listening to the American people, I realized once again that all the legislation in the world cannot fix America’s problems,” he said in a televised address.
“The threat is barely noticeable in the ordinary way. It is a crisis of trust. It is a crisis that strikes at the heart, soul and spirit of our national will. If our trust in the future is eroded, it risks destroying society. .” and the political structure of the United States.”
As president, Carter, who suffered from angina pectoris, was embarrassed by the behavior of his drunken brother, Billy Carter, who boasted, “I bought red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.”
‘Please go again’
Jimmy Carter withstood a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but withdrew politically ahead of a general election race against a powerful Republican opponent.
Reagan, a conservative who projected a tough image, threw Carter off balance in a pre-election debate in November 1980.
During one debate, when Reagan felt the president had misrepresented Reagan’s views, the Republican challenger dismissively told Carter, “There you are again.”
Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan, who won 44 of 50 states and won the Electoral College by a landslide.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born in Plains, Georgia on October 1, 1924, one of four children of a farmer and store owner. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and served in the nuclear submarine program before leaving to manage the family peanut farming business.
He married his wife, Rosalynn, in 1946, a union he called “the most important thing in my life.” They had three sons and a daughter.
Carter became a millionaire and was a Georgia state legislator and governor from 1971 to 1975. He mounted an underdog bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, outpacing his rivals for the right to face Ford in the general election.
Carter, who had Walter Mondale as his vice presidential running mate, was boosted by Ford’s key gaffe during the debate. Ford said that despite decades of such domination, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Carter beat Ford in the election, even though Ford actually won more states. Carter won 27 states out of 23.
Not all of Carter’s post-presidential accomplishments were appreciated. Former President George W. Bush, a Republican, and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, are known to have been dissatisfied with Carter’s liberal diplomacy in Iraq and other places.
In 2004, Carter called the Iraq war launched by the young President Bush in 2003 one of “the most serious and destructive mistakes our country has ever made.” He called George W. Bush’s administration “the worst administration in history” and said Vice President Dick Cheney was “a disaster for our country.”
In 2019, Carter questioned Republican Donald Trump’s fitness to be president, saying “he took office because Russia interfered on his behalf.” Trump called Carter a “terrible president.”
Carter also visited North Korea. A 1994 visit brought the nuclear crisis to a halt when President Kim Il-sung agreed to freeze the nuclear program in exchange for resuming talks with the United States. This led to an agreement in which North Korea promised not to restart the reactor or reprocess spent nuclear fuel in exchange for its support.
However, Carter irritated the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton by announcing negotiations with the North Korean leader without first confirming with the United States.
In 2010, Carter freed an American who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor for entering North Korea illegally.
Carter wrote more than two dozen books, ranging from presidential memoirs to children’s books, poetry, religious beliefs, and works on diplomacy. His book ‘Faith: A Journey for Everyone’ was published in 2018.
(Reporting and Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott and Diane Craft)
