His four years in office were fraught, bedeviled from the start by double-digit inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate bad mood. His fractious staff was dominated by the inexperienced “Georgia Mafia” from his home state. His micromanagement of the White House tennis court drew widespread derision, and his toothy, smiling campaign promise that he would “never lie” to the country somehow curdled into disappointment and defeat after one rocky term.
Yet James Earl Carter Jr., who died today at his home in Plains, Georgia, surely has a fair claim to being the most effective former president his country ever had. In part that’s because his post-presidency was the lengthiest on record—more than four decades—and his life span of 100 richly crowded years was the longest of any president, period. But it’s also because the strain of basic decency and integrity that helped get Carter elected in the first place, in 1976, never deserted him, even as his country devolved into ever greater incivility and division.
During his presidency, Carter was a kind of walking shorthand for ineffectual leadership—a reputation that was probably always overblown and has been undercut in recent years by revisionist historians such as Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, who argue that Carter was a visionary if impolitic leader. But his career after leaving the White House offers an indisputable object lesson in how ex-presidents might best conduct themselves, with dignity and a due humility about the honor of the office they once held.
Not for Carter was the lucrative service on corporate boards, or the easy money of paid speeches, or the palling around on private jets with rich (and sometimes unsavory) friends that other ex-presidents have indulged in. After leaving office at age 56, he earned a living with a series of books on politics, faith, the Middle East, and morality—plus several volumes of memoirs and another of poetry. With his wife, Rosalynn, he continued to live modestly in Plains, Georgia. He forged what both participants described as a genuine and enduring friendship with the man he beat, Gerald Ford. (In his eulogy at Ford’s funeral, in 2007, Carter recalled the first words he had spoken upon taking office 30 years earlier: “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” He added, “I still hate to admit that they received more applause than any other words in my inaugural address.” It was a typically gracious tribute, and a typically rueful acknowledgment of wounded ego.)
Carter promoted democracy, conducted informal diplomacy, and monitored elections around the globe as a special American envoy or at the invitation of foreign governments. He taught Sunday school at his hometown Baptist church, and worked for economic justice one hammer and nail at a time with Habitat for Humanity, the Christian home-building charity for which he volunteered as long as his health permitted. In 2002, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
True, he sometimes irritated his successors with public pronouncements that struck them as unhelpful meddling in affairs of state. He backed the cause of Palestinian statehood with a consistency and fervor that led to accusations of anti-Semitism. He retained a self-righteous, judgmental streak that led him to declare Donald Trump’s election illegitimate. His fundamental faith in his country was sometimes undercut by peevishness regarding the ways he thought its leaders had strayed. But he never seemed particularly troubled by the critiques.
Indeed, one of his most criticized comments seems prescient, even brave, with the hindsight of history—not so much impolitic and defeatist, as it was seen at the time. In the summer of 1979, Carter argued that his country was suffering from “a crisis of confidence” that threatened “to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” That pronouncement seems to have predicted the smoldering decades of political resentment, tribal anger, and structural collapse of institutions that followed it.
“As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions,” Carter said then. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.” Weeks later, the New York Times correspondent Francis X. Clines forever tagged Carter’s diagnosis with an epithet that helped doom his reelection: Clines called it the president’s “cross-of-malaise” speech, a reference to William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 warning that the gold currency standard risked mankind’s crucifixion “upon a cross of gold.”
Just how much Carter’s own missteps contributed to the problems he cited is a legitimate question. His communication skills left a lot to be desired; he could be prickly and prone to overexplaining. His 1977 televised “fireside chat,” in which he urged Americans to conserve energy by turning their thermostats down, was politically ham-handed: It seemed stagy and forced, with Carter speaking from the White House library in a beige cardigan sweater. But his focus on the environment (he installed solar panels on the White House roof) was forward-looking and justified, given what we now know about climate change. His insistence on the consideration of human rights in foreign policy may have struck some as naive in the aftermath of Henry Kissinger’s relentless realpolitik during the Nixon and Ford years, but few could doubt his convictions. It was a bitter blow that his atypically hawkish effort to rescue the diplomats held hostage in the American embassy in Iran failed so miserably that it helped ensure Ronald Reagan’s election. (In the fall of 1980, when it seemed unlikely that the hostages would ever be released on Carter’s watch, undecided voters fled to the former California governor.)
But Carter clocked substantial achievements too: the peaceful transfer of ownership of the Panama Canal; the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt; full normalization of relations with China; and moves toward deregulation of transportation, communication, and banking that were considered a welcome response to changing economic and industrial realities.
“One reason his substantial victories are discounted is that he sought such broad and sweeping measures that what he gained in return often looked paltry,” Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s former chief domestic-policy adviser, wrote in October 2018. “Winning was often ugly: He dissipated the political capital that presidents must constantly nourish and replenish for the next battle. He was too unbending while simultaneously tackling too many important issues without clear priorities, venturing where other presidents felt blocked because of the very same political considerations that he dismissed as unworthy of any president. As he told me, ‘Whenever I felt an issue was important to the country and needed to be addressed, my inclination was to go ahead and do it.’’’
In his post-presidency, Carter went ahead and did it, again and again, with a will that his successors would do well to emulate—and that, to one degree or another, some of them have. Carter tackled the big problems and pursued the ambitious goals that had so often eluded him in office. He worked to control or eradicate diseases, including Guinea worm and river blindness. His nonprofit Carter Center, in Atlanta, continues to advance the causes of conflict resolution and human rights, and has monitored almost 100 elections in nearly 40 countries over the past 30 years. And he never stopped trying to live out the values that his Christian faith impelled him to embrace.
Carter’s model of post–White House service almost certainly served as a guide for the bipartisan disaster-relief work of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and for Clinton’s global fight against AIDS. George W. Bush works to help post-9/11 veterans through the Bush Institute. In many ways, Barack Obama is still establishing just what his post-presidential identity will be, though his My Brother’s Keeper initiative promotes opportunities for boys and young men of color. Carter showed the country that presidents’ duty to serve extends well beyond their years in office.
During his presidency, Carter kept Harry Truman’s The Buck Stops Here sign on his desk as a reminder of his ultimate responsibility. Truman left office with a job-approval rating of just 32 percent, close to George W. Bush’s, Trump’s, and Carter’s last ratings—the four worst in modern times. Truman lived for almost 20 years after leaving office, but he still did not live long enough to see the full redemption of his reputation as a plainspoken straight shooter who did his best in troubled times. Carter, who left office a virtual laughingstock but left this earthly life a model of moral leadership, did.
