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Defeated Ford in 1976, lost heavily to Reagan in 1980
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Egypt-Israel peace was the supreme diplomatic achievement
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The Iran hostage crisis ended the last 444 days of his presidency.
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In 1979, he lamented America’s ‘crisis of confidence’
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Won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his peacekeeping work.
by Will Dunham
Washington, 2024 – Jimmy Carter, the honest Georgia peanut farmer who struggled with the poor economy and the Iran hostage crisis as U.S. president, but brokered peace between Israel and Egypt and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work. Received, he has passed away. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sunday. He was 100 years old.
A Democrat, he served as President from January 1977 to January 1981, after defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford in the 1976 U.S. election. Four years later, Carter was removed from office in an electoral landslide as voters embraced Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor of California.
Carter lived longer after his term than any other American president. During this time, he earned a reputation as a better former president than a president – ​​a position he readily accepted.
His one-term presidency was marked by the highs of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which brought some stability to the Middle East. But it was a struggling economy, persistent unpopularity and the embarrassment of the Iran hostage crisis that doomed his final 444 days in office.
In recent years, Carter had experienced several health problems, including melanoma that spread to his liver and brain. Carter decided to receive hospice care in February 2023 rather than additional medical intervention. His wife Rosalynn Carter died on November 19, 2023, at the age of 96. He looked frail as he attended his memorial service and funeral in a wheelchair.
Carter left office with extreme unpopularity but worked energetically for decades on humanitarian causes. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his “tireless efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, advance democracy and human rights, and promote economic and social development.”
When Carter entered the White House as the 39th US President, he was a centrist with populist tendencies as the Governor of Georgia. He was a Washington outsider at a time when America was still reeling from the Watergate scandal that led to Republican Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in 1974 and Ford’s promotion to Vice President.
“I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president. I would never lie to you,” Carter promised with a smile from ear to ear.
Asked to assess his presidency, Carter said in a 1991 documentary: “Our greatest failure was political failure. I was never able to convince the American people that I was a forceful and strong leader. ”
Despite his difficulties in office, Carter had few rivals for accomplishments as a former president. She won global praise as a tireless human rights advocate, a voice for the disenfranchised, and a leader in the fight against hunger and poverty, and earned the respect that eluded her in the White House.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 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 sent international election-monitoring delegations to elections around the world.
A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher since his teens, Carter brought a strong sense of morality to the presidency, while speaking openly about his religious faith. He also tried to take some of the pomp out of his increasingly royal presidency, such as walking instead of riding in a limousine in his 1977 inauguration parade.
The center point of Carter’s foreign policy was the Middle East. 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 Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland for talks. Later, as the agreements began to unravel, Carter saved the day by flying to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal shuttle diplomacy.
The treaty provided for Israel’s withdrawal from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the establishment of diplomatic relations. Begin and Sadat both won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
By the 1980 election, the major issues were double-digit inflation, interest rates over 20% and rising gas prices, as well as the Iran hostage crisis which embarrassed the US. These issues plagued Carter’s presidency and diminished his chances of winning a second term.
hostage crisis
On November 4, 1979, revolutionaries devoted to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, seizing the Americans stationed there and demanding the return of deposed King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been imprisoned by the United States. He was receiving medical support and was being treated. An American hospital.
The American public initially rallied behind Carter. But his support faded in April 1980 when a commando raid failed to rescue hostages, when a plane crash in the Iranian desert killed eight American soldiers.
Carter’s ultimate infamy was that Iran held 52 hostages until minutes after Reagan took the oath of office to replace Carter on January 20, 1981, then released the planes carrying them to free them. Gave.
In another crisis, Carter protested the former Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. He also asked the US Senate to postpone consideration of a major nuclear arms deal with Moscow.
Undeterred, the Soviets remained in Afghanistan for a decade.
Carter won Senate approval in 1978 of a treaty transferring control of the Panama Canal to Panama, despite critics arguing that the waterway was vital to U.S. security. He also completed negotiations on full US relations with China.
Carter created two new US Cabinet departments – Education and Energy. Amid high gas prices, he said America’s “energy crisis” was the “moral equivalent of war” and urged the country to embrace conservation. “Our country is the most dysfunctional country on earth,” he told Americans in 1977.
In 1979, Carter gave what would later become known as his “malignant” speech to the nation, although he never used that term.
“Listening to the American people, I am reminded again that all the laws in the world cannot fix what is wrong with America,” he said in a televised address.
“The threat is almost invisible in normal ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that attacks the heart, soul and spirit of our national will. The erosion of our confidence in the future threatens social destruction and America’s political warp weft.”
As president, the straight-laced Carter was embarrassed by the behavior of his hard-drinking younger brother, Billy Carter, who claimed: “I’ve got red necks, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer.”
‘There you go again’
Jimmy Carter fended off a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but came up short politically in the general election battle against a strong Republican opponent.
The conservative Reagan, who projected an image of strength, kept Carter off balance during their debates before the November 1980 election.
When the Republican challenger felt the President had misrepresented Reagan’s views during a debate, Reagan dismissed Carter, saying, “There you go again.”
Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan, who won 44 of the 50 states and an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924 in Plains, Georgia, one of four children of a farmer and a shopkeeper. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, served in the nuclear submarine program and left to manage the family peanut farming business.
He married his wife Rosalyn in 1946, a union he called “the most important thing in my life.” He had three sons and a daughter.
Carter became a millionaire, a Georgia state legislator, and Governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975. He made a weak bid for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, and bested his rivals for the right to face Ford in the general election.
As Walter Mondale’s vice presidential nominee, Carter got a boost from a major mistake Ford made during one of their debates. Ford stated that despite decades of such dominance, “there is no Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Carter outpolled Ford in the election, even though Ford actually won more states – 27 to Carter’s 23.
Not all of Carter’s work after his presidency was appreciated. Former President George W. Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, both Republicans, were said to be unhappy with Carter’s independent diplomacy in Iraq and elsewhere.
In 2004, Carter described the Iraq War, started by the young Bush in 2003, as one of “the most serious and damaging mistakes our country has ever made.” He called the administration of George W. Bush “the worst in history” and said Vice President Dick Cheney “was a disaster for our country.”
In 2019, Carter questioned the legitimacy of Republican Donald Trump as president, saying, “He was put in office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Trump responded by calling Carter “a terrible president.”
Carter also visited communist North Korea. The 1994 visit defused the nuclear crisis, as President Kim Il Sung agreed to halt his nuclear program in exchange for resumed negotiations with the United States. This led to an agreement in which North Korea promised not to restart its nuclear reactor or reprocess the plant’s spent fuel in exchange for aid.
But Carter upset the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton by announcing the deal with North Korea’s leader without checking with Washington first.
In 2010, Carter won the release of an American sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korea.
Carter wrote more than two dozen books, ranging from presidential memoirs to children’s books and poetry, as well as works about religious faith and diplomacy. His book “Faith: A Journey for All” was published in 2018.
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