[But the Democratic Party has disappointed me. Like the Trumpsters, I’m looking for change and action – however I’m looking for measured change and acts of compassion by the Democratic Party.]
Washington Post February 17, 2025 by Shadi Hamid
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Disappointment in Democrats
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
VIRTUE????
VIRTUE
In 1800, the year after George Washington’s death, “Parson Weems”
(Mason Locke Weems) wrote a narrative of Washington listing his virtues as
including the following: generous,
reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his
comrades.
Can you imagine someone listing the virtues of Trump similarly?
Trump Is the most non-virtuous, and non-compassionate person
I know (with Musk running a close second.)
In our society today, is “virtue” even considered an
admirable trait to have? What people who
are well-known, are known for their virtues today? When was the last time that any of us
admitted to having any virtues? When we talk praise about our spouse, or our
children, do we ever include their virtues?
(Or do we only speak of their achievements?) Is “virtue” a lost word today?
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Christians and Gaza
Christians and Gaza:
When I meet with most Christians and mention the word “Gaza”, they turn around and run
like a chicken being chased by a fox. As
they distance themselves from me, I hear them yelling, “It’s too political”, “It’s
too complex”, It’s an insolvable problem that has been in existence for many
years”, (As if we aren’t supposed to
include our spiritual beliefs along with our
politics, or that the principles of Christianity are for simple scenarios.)
Being a member of the National Coalition for Dialogue and
Deliberation for several years, I’ve tried to figure out how to get these
pseudo-Christians to talk about Gaza. I
now have the answer: I’m not concerned
about talking about guilt, or blame, or justifications, or
rationalizations. When one thinks of
Gaza (or sees the pictures of Gaza) there is only one word that should come out
of a Christian’s mouth or mind – “Compassion”.
When you look at Gaza, don’t look at the 16,000 dead children, and women, and
men – look at the One Million people who have been dislocated. ONE MILLION.
And that means there are One Million people who are unemployed and have
been unemployed for many months. One
Million displaced people includes how many mothers and/or fathers that have no
way of caring for their children? One
Million displaced people includes how many
children who have not been able to go to school? Or play with their friends? Or develop intellectually or socially? One Million displaced people includes how
many people who have lost all of their belongings because they could only take
what they could carry on their backs when they left while being displaced? One Million displaced people includes how
many people who will be returning to their hovel only to find it
demolished? One Million displaced people
includes how many people will be unable to rebuild or reconstruct their homes
because of the destruction? One Million
displaced people includes how many people who did not have, and won’t have,
adequate medical attention? One Million
displaced people includes how many children, women, and men have been
traumatized and will suffer/experience PTSD for the rest of their lives? One Million displaced people includes
how many people who have been separated
from family and friends and community?
When someone mentions the word “Gaza”, one should
immediately think of Compassion for these victims without trying to lay blame,
or justifications. If Christians believe
in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus taught, they would think in terms of
Compassion. But I find that most
Christians would rather think about the unloving god of the Old Testament rather
than the teachings of Jesus – which is why they would rather post the 10 Commandments in public
areas rather than post the Beatitudes.
I challenge any Christian to tell me why they don’t think of
Compassion when they think of Gaza.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Empathy and Questioning
Empathy comes through questioning:
How many people had
to evacuate? How many of these people
had their houses burned? How many of
these people had a friend or a relative where they could stay? What happens to those without friends of
relatives in the area? How many of these
people had their place of their jobs burned?
How many of these people are now unemployed? How many people can exist more than one month
without an income? How many people will
want to reconstruct their homes? How
many people will want to reconstruct their homes where the infrastructure (e.g.
gas stations, schools, churches, hospitals, etc.) is decimated? How many people will want to reconstruct
their homes before there are work opportunities? How many people will have to move permanently
in order to get another job? How long
will it take for someone to move away and find another job? How many people have enough money to tide
them over until they get another job (in the
neighborhood? Or some other
city?) How many companies will want to
reconstruct the infrastructure before people move back into the
neighborhood? How long will any
reconstruction take (one year? Two
years? Three years?) How many companies
are going to want to reconstruct before
people move back into the
neighborhood? Which will come first,
companies with jobs? Or people living in
the new neighborhood? How long will it
take for people to get insurance money to reconstruct or relocate?
Note: Los Angeles
is supposed to host the Summer Olympics in 2025.
Does LA have the resources (time and money) to reconstruct the infrastructure, the homes,
the places of business, etc. AND also the infrastructure and venues for the
Olympics? Is Gov Newsom’s positive
comments about the Olympics based on his personal attitude? Or based on realistic facts about the
reconstruction of the neighborhoods? How
much longer will the fires continue before they can get an accurate appraisal
of the plans for reconstruction?
Climate Refugees
Climate Refugees
Whether you feel that the California Fires are the result of
Environmental balance run amok, or just a portend of what’s to come later, it
raises a serious question: What is the
responsibility of our society to these refugees (Climate refugees and
non-Climate refugees).
Tens of thousands are leaving their homes. Tens of thousands are not working their
normal income-producing jobs and it will be weeks/months/years before they be
gainfully employed at their level prior to the disaster. These are people who have lost their jobs,
lost their houses, lost their pets, lost their friends, lost their roots, lost
their schools, and lost their possessions.
How long of a journey is it going to take each of these people to
rebound before they wind up where they were before the disaster? Resiliency is long-term.
What is the responsibility of the government to help these
internal refugees to bounce back.
Internal refugees/Environmental refugees is also happening
in Alaska (the Aleutian Islands) where entire villages have been forced to
relocate to other parts of Alaska as “internal refugees”.
And more and more Climate refugees can be expected shortly
in areas like the South Sea Islands.
This is a problem that will only get bigger and bigger and will bust
open if it is not addressed in a transparent mode.
How much empathy can we expect from Trump on this issue?
Challenges
DO NOT BE A TRAITOR
Because I do not consider myself a Republican,
I can Challenge
the Republicans without being traitorous.
Because I do not consider myself a Democrat,
I can Challenge
the Democrats without being traitorous.
Because I do not consider myself a US Citizen, (I am a
Global Citizen,
I can Challenge the U S policies without being
traitorous.
Because I do not consider myself a Jew,
I can Challenge
the policies of Israel without being traitorous.
Because I do not
consider myself a Christian, (I do not believe in the supernatural)
I can Challenge
Christianity without being traitorous.
Challenge #1 for Christians:
How do you
interpret the story of The Good Samaritan
By substituting
“Palestinian” for the word “Samaritan”?
Challenge #2 for Christians:
How do you
interpret the atrocities of the Zionists
In light of the
Sermon on the Mount?
The problem is not with the Hamas, the problem is not with
the Jews, the problem is not with Palestine, the problem is not with
Israel. The problem is with those who
feel the murdering of innocent men, women, and children is an appropriate
action or reaction. (And that includes
the Zionists and fringe Palestinians.)
(And that includes Netanyahu.)
You should never belong to any group to the point that you
cannot Challenge its words or actions without being traitorous. For then you have become a slave to its ethics
and values rather than being responsible for your own ethics and values. And ultimately, you are responsible for them
through your actions or lack of actions.
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter Washington Post
Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize
winner, dies at 100
The tenacious Southerner was turned out of office by
disillusioned voters after a single term. But he had a brilliant
post-presidential career as a champion of health, peace and democracy.
Washington Post, 12/29/24
and
Edward Walsh
Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern
governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned
voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary postpresidential
life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to
his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the oldest living
U.S. president of all time.
A cause of death was not immediately provided. In a
statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former president, after
several hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his
remaining time at home under hospice care. He had been treated in recent years
for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that spread to his
liver and brain.
His wife, Rosalynn, died Nov.
19, 2023, at 96. The Carters, who were close partners in public life, had been
married for more than 77 years, the longest presidential marriage in U.S.
history. One of his final public appearances was at her funeral in Plains,
where he sat in the front row in a wheelchair. Carter was last photographed
outside his home with family and friends as he watched a flyover on Oct. 1 held
to mark his 100th birthday.
Mr. Carter is survived by his children Jack, Chip, Jeff and
Amy; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren, according to the Carter
Center.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who
believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” Chip Carter said in a
statement. “My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world
through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he
brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing
to live these shared beliefs.”
The Carter Center said Sunday that public observances will
be held in Atlanta and Washington, to be followed by a private interment in
Plains. President Joe Biden said he ordered a national day of mourning on Jan.
9, but other details for the final arrangements, including all public events
and motorcade routes, are still pending. Biden issued a proclamation ordering
U.S. flags to be flown at half-staff for 30 days at federal buildings and
military installations.
“Jimmy Carter stands up as a model of what it means to live
a life of meaning and purpose, a life of principle, faith and humility,” Biden
said in remarks earlier Sunday night. “What I find extraordinary about Jimmy
Carter though is that millions of people all around the world, all over the
world, feel they lost a friend as well, even though they never met him.”
Mr. Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, U.S. Navy veteran,
and Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first president from the Deep
South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected president between Lyndon B.
Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House.
As the nation’s 39th president, he governed with strong
Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more
conservative. Four years after taking office, Mr. Carter lost his bid for
reelection, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures
of the era, Ronald
Reagan.
When Mr. Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was
widely regarded as a mediocre president, if not an outright failure. The list
of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was
long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy and
stubbornly high unemployment and inflation.
“Stagflation,” connoting both low growth and high inflation,
was a description that critics used to attack Mr. Carter’s economic policies.
In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as
gasoline supplies dwindled and prices soared after revolution in Iran disrupted
the global oil supply.
Mr. Carter made energy his signature domestic policy
initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened.
In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst
ever for the U.S. nuclear-energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that
nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels.
Mr. Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November
1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52
Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out
daily on television and did not end until Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Carter
left office, when the hostages were released.
In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Mr. Carter
authorized a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when
two U.S. aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen.
Secretary of State Cyrus
R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned.
“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I
was in my final year,” Mr. Carter said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in Plains.
“But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I
wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an
emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Mr. Carter ordered an embargo of
grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a U.S. boycott
of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many
Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual.
As the years wore on, the judgment on Mr. Carter’s
presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view. He lived long enough to
see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment
that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the gas station and
U.S. hostages in Iran.
Near the end of Mr. Carter’s life, two biographies argued
forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people
realized — “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history,”
author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a
Life.”
Both books — the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, “The
Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” — said Mr. Carter was often
ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use
and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding
the number of people of color in federal judgeships.
The biographies concluded that Mr. Carter’s reputation as a
poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on
doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically.
“He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would
take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier
to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”
Mr. Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was
also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the
Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency. He spent 13 days at
the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978,
shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin and Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat. In a process that almost collapsed several times, Mr. Carter was
instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals.
The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli
withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty
that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor. In 1978, Begin
and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor conferred on Mr.
Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace.
Against fierce conservative opposition, Mr. Carter pushed
through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and
strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward
better U.S. relations with Latin American neighbors. He signed a
nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, SALT II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it
from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan.
Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard M.
Nixon, Mr. Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human
rights a central theme of U.S. foreign policy, a sharp departure from the
approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second secretary of
state, Henry A. Kissinger.
Two Cabinet-level departments — Energy and Education — were
created under Mr. Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites.
The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size
of the national park and wildlife refuge system.
Mr. Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In
June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the
White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the
sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on
foreign oil.”
“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a
curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small
part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the
American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986.
His relations with Congress were often strained, even though
it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern
presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals.
With the deregulation of the airline and trucking
industries, Mr. Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under
Reagan and his conservative allies. The military buildup under Reagan was often
credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that buildup
began under Mr. Carter.
Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but
it was Mr. Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the
early 1980s, when Reagan was president.
In the 2018 Post interview, Mr. Carter said he had “a lot of
regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his
not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud
of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalize relations with China and his
focus on human rights.
“I kept our country at peace and championed human rights,
and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said,
adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth.”
Roving ambassador
Mr. Carter was a former president for more than four decades
— longer than anyone else in history — and he was only the second to live to
94, after George H.W. Bush, who died in
2018.
He dedicated his postpresidential life to public service at
home and supporting democracy and human rights abroad. It was a career that
even some of his supporters said seemed better suited to him than being
president.
“Nothing about the White House so became Mr. Carter as his
having left it,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished
Presidency,” a 1998 account of Mr. Carter’s life after the presidency.
Mr. Carter lived more modestly than any ex-president since
Harry S. Truman, whom Mr. Carter called his favorite president. He and Rosalynn
lived in Plains until the end in the ranch house that they built for themselves
in 1961, and where Mr. Carter will be buried with her next to a shady willow
tree near a pond that he helped dig.
Mr. Carter declined the corporate board memberships and
lucrative speaking engagements that have made other ex-presidents tens of
millions of dollars. He said in the 2018 interview that he didn’t want to
“capitalize financially on being in the White House.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other
people for doing it,” Mr. Carter said. “It just never had been my ambition to
be rich.”
Instead, he wrote 33 books on topics ranging from war to
woodworking, which gave him a comfortable retirement income. He also won three
Grammy Awards for his recordings of audio versions of his books.
For decades, the Carters spent a week a year building homes
with Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based nonprofit organization that
constructs housing for low-income people. Wearing their own tool belts, they
helped build or renovate about 4,300 homes in 14 countries.
In 1982, the Carters founded the Carter Center at Emory
University in Atlanta. It became the base from which they traveled widely on
peacemaking and other humanitarian missions. The Carter Center sponsors
programs in education, agricultural development and health care and supports
fair elections in countries around the world.
Mr. Carter became an unofficial roving ambassador,
monitoring elections, mediating disputes and promoting human rights and
democracy. In 1994, at the request of President Clinton, he helped forge an
agreement that removed a brutal military regime in Haiti and averted a possible
U.S. invasion of that country.
Mr. Carter’s missions required meeting with some of the
world’s most notorious despots, including Kim
Il Sung of North Korea and Moammar
Gaddafi of Libya. Fledgling democracies trusted him, and he was asked
to monitor elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Zambia, the West Bank and Gaza. The Carter Center has monitored 115 elections
in 40 countries, according to its website.
He was not always successful, but Mr. Carter never seemed
discouraged about his efforts to resolve conflicts. He spent the days leading
up to the 1994 Christmas holiday in the Balkans, engaging in negotiations that
included a shouted conversation by shortwave radio with Serbian strongman
Radovan Karadzic, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Mr. Carter’s efforts resulted in a
four-month ceasefire in the bloody conflict.
From Atlanta, the Carter Center coordinated dozens of
initiatives, including a decades-long effort that helped to virtually eradicate
Guinea worm disease, a painful and disabling condition that once afflicted
millions of people in some of Africa's poorest countries.
Mr. Carter’s freelance diplomacy, which at times included
outspoken criticism of U.S. policies, could provoke outrage. He angered Clinton
in 1994 by thrusting himself into a dispute over U.N. inspections of North
Korea’s nuclear facilities. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”
(2006), Mr. Carter set off a storm of criticism by seeming to equate Israeli
occupation of Palestinian territories with the former apartheid regime in South
Africa.
Over the years, Mr. Carter was a constant source of
irritation to conservative critics. In a book about Mr. Carter’s life after the
White House — a book whose subtitle called him “Our Worst Ex-President” —
conservative political commentator Steven F. Hayward accused him of engaging in
“usually embarrassing and often disastrous peace missions around the world.”
The far more common judgment was that Mr. Carter’s tireless
pursuit of peace and human rights was admirable and set a new standard for
ex-presidents. In awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Nobel
committee lauded him “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful
solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights,
and to promote economic and social development.”
Introducing the 2002 Peace Prize laureate in Oslo, Gunnar
Berge, a member of the Nobel committee, said: “Jimmy Carter will probably not
go down in American history as the most effective president. But he is
certainly the best ex-president the country ever had.”
The Carter image
That Mr. Carter became president was something of a
historical accident, one that followed an unprecedented chain of events. The
progression began in 1973 with the resignation of Vice President Spiro T.
Agnew, who was caught in a web of corruption dating from his time as a Maryland
politician. That led to the appointment of then-Minority Leader Gerald
Ford, a respected but relatively little-known U.S. House member from
Michigan, as Agnew’s successor. And, finally, in 1974, there was the
resignation of Nixon to avoid impeachment stemming from the Watergate scandal.
Two years later, Mr. Carter narrowly defeated Ford, but the
person he really campaigned against was Nixon. Mr. Carter was the peanut farmer
from Georgia, the candidate who carried his own garment bag off the aircraft
and promised to bring an open and honest style of leadership to the nation’s
capital. It later became commonplace for presidential candidates, and most
challengers to incumbents, to run “against Washington.” Mr. Carter was among
the first of the modern era to do so.
Mr. Carter signaled his disdain for the “imperial” trappings
of the presidency on Inauguration Day in 1977, when he, Rosalynn and their
daughter, Amy, stepped out of the presidential limousine on Pennsylvania Avenue
and walked the parade route to the White House.
“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Stuart E.
Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said in 2018.
While that seemed refreshing to many people after the Nixon
years, it ultimately grated on those who thought that Mr. Carter’s style —
refusing, for example, to have “Hail to the Chief” played when he entered rooms
— demeaned and diminished the presidency.
Eizenstat said Mr. Carter’s order eliminating drivers for
top staff members was meant to signal a more frugal approach to governing.
Instead, he said, it meant that busy officials were driving instead of reading
and working for an hour or two every day.
Two years later, in 1979, Americans were in a sour mood, and
Mr. Carter’s response to events seemed to make matters worse. In July, he
abruptly canceled a speech on energy and retreated to Camp David, where he held
intense discussions with a cross section of guests. When he emerged July 15, he
delivered a nationally televised address that was soon dubbed the “malaise”
speech, although Mr. Carter never used that word in his address
In the speech, Mr. Carter spoke of a “crisis of the American
spirit” and, before setting out several energy policy proposals, warned that
“we are at a turning point in our history.”
“There are two paths to choose,” he continued. “One is a
path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and
self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to
grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of
constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It
is a certain route to failure.”
The speech, initially well received, was soon turned against
Mr. Carter, who was accused of blaming the American people for the failures of
his administration. Mr. Carter did not help his cause when, two days later, he
demanded the resignation of his entire Cabinet and fired five of the
secretaries. Then came the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian student
protesters.
By the early 21st century, Mr. Carter’s warning about the
fragmentation of American society leading to political paralysis appeared
prescient to many. So, too, did his emphasis on concerns then only dimly
perceived as threats — foremost among them, the spread of nuclear weapons to
unfriendly and unstable regimes. But hindsight was of no benefit to him then.
Mr. Carter’s dignity was ruthlessly assailed by reports in
August 1979 of his encounter with a “killer rabbit” a few months before while
fishing in Georgia. “President Attacked by Rabbit,” a front-page headline in
The Post proclaimed. His use of a paddle to fend off a rabbit swimming toward
his small boat was widely lampooned as a desperate struggle. The story,
inconsequential in itself, reinforced an impression, cultivated by his
political opponents, that Mr. Carter was a hapless bumbler unequal to his office.
He also had been mocked for wearing a cardigan in February
1977 while sitting next to a fire to deliver his first speech on energy, in
which he called the nation’s response to a growing energy crisis “the moral
equivalent of war.” But his energy policies led to a reduction in U.S.
consumption of foreign oil.
Long after he left public office, there was a public outcry
over congressional “earmarks” and other forms of pork-barrel spending because
of the soaring federal budget deficit. One of Mr. Carter’s first acts as
president was to veto a bill authorizing a number of federal water projects he
considered wasteful, incurring the lasting enmity of some of the Democratic
barons of Capitol Hill.
“If you are president and you’re going to diagnose a
problem, you better have a solution to it,” journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, who
as a White House speechwriter worked on the “malaise” speech, later observed.
“While he turned out to be a true prophet, he turned out not to be a savior.”
To many who were sympathetic to Mr. Carter and considered
his presidency underrated, his shortcomings stemmed largely from the way he
defined the role more in moral than political terms, which reflected his deep
religious faith.
He craved political power to do good as he saw it, and he
was adept at gaining power. But he was not a natural politician, and he was
never at home in the messy world of politics and governing in an unruly
democracy.
He was always far more at home in Plains, the speck of a
town in South Georgia that he never really left. Until late in their lives, he
and Mrs. Carter frequently were seen walking hand in hand along Church Street
on their way home from Saturday dinners at the home of their friend Jill
Stuckey.
Mr. Carter was a champion for the town, which is essentially
a living museum of his life, with old-fashioned storefronts and shops selling
everything from Carter Christmas ornaments to campaign memorabilia. He helped
woo a Dollar General store to Plains, then shopped for his clothes there.
In the 2018 interview, Mr. Carter said he and Mrs. Carter
wanted to be buried in Plains partly because they knew their gravesite would
draw tourists and provide a much-needed economic boost to their hometown.
They celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021 with a party for more than 300 people at Plains High
School, which they both had attended about eight decades earlier. The guests
included country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, a married couple
who had worked with the Carters for years building homes for Habitat for Humanity.
(Brooks and Yearwood quietly presented the Carters with a 1946 Ford Super
Deluxe convertible, in honor of the year they were married.)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came to the party, as did
billionaire and CNN founder Ted Turner, who was Mr. Carter’s longtime friend
and fly-fishing buddy, and civil rights leader Andrew Young, whom President
Carter appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and who later served as
mayor of Atlanta.
Also there was Mary Prince, an African American woman who
was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1970. She met the Carters when she was a
prisoner assigned to work at the Georgia governor’s mansion. Rosalynn Carter
was convinced of her innocence and hired her to be Amy Carter’s nanny.
After he became president, Mr. Carter persuaded the parole
board to let him be Prince’s parole officer. She moved into the White House and
lived there for all of Mr. Carter’s presidency, looking after Amy. She later
received a full pardon. She still lives in Plains and sometimes cares for the
Carters’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Most notably, Bill and Hillary Clinton made the
long trip to Plains. The Carters and the Clintons had tense relations for
decades but seemed ready to set their differences aside in the twilight of
Carter’s life.
Onstage, Mr. Carter, who was then 96, spoke haltingly,
showing the combined effects of his age and many health problems, including
brain cancer that appeared to have been treated successfully in 2015.
Seated next to his wife, Mr. Carter expressed “particular
gratitude” to her for “being the right woman.” Then he flashed his trademark
toothy grin, looked out at an auditorium jammed with family and friends, many
of them choking up, and declared, “I love you all very much.”
Friends said it felt like a goodbye.
The next morning, an exhausted Mr. Carter was wheeled into
the Baptist church where he had until recently taught Sunday school. He kissed
Pelosi’s hand when she walked in.
“I thought he was a great president because he was a
president of values, and he acted upon the values,” Pelosi said later. She
admired him for his vision, for his striving to help free the world of nuclear
weapons, and for the way he inspired people by his good works in his
post-presidency. “He went from the White House to building houses for poor
people,” she said. “He glorified that work. Others wanted to do it because he
did it. That’s powerful.”
Despite the feeling of farewell in Plains that summer
weekend, Mr. Carter did not fade completely from public view. Nearly five
months later, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump
supporters, he
wrote an op-ed for the New York Times decrying “unscrupulous
politicians” who guided the mob and the “lie” that the 2020 election had been
stolen.
He called on Americans to reject political violence,
polarization, disinformation and embrace “fairness, civility and respect for
the rule of law.”
“Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening
abyss,” Mr. Carter warned. “Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of
civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside
differences and work together before it is too late.”
The man from Plains
James Earl L. “Buddy” Carter Jr., the eldest of four
children, was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, a farming town about 150 miles
south of Atlanta.
The Carters lived on the family farm in Archery, Georgia,
about two miles west of Plains, in a house with no electricity or running
water. But that was not uncommon in the rural South of the time, and the
Carters, though not wealthy, were not poor. As they prospered, the Carters
eventually moved to a larger and more modern, although still modest, home in
Plains.
Mr. Carter’s father, who was known as Earl, was ambitious,
hardworking and shrewd. Over the years, he enlarged his farm holdings in the
region and branched into other business ventures, including a peanut warehouse.
Running for president, Jimmy Carter was often described, and
described himself, as a peanut farmer, but that label did not capture the full
extent of the family’s business interests. By the time he entered state
politics in the early 1960s, Mr. Carter was an affluent agribusinessman, the
head of a sizable and thriving commercial enterprise.
It was his mother who probably had the most influence on the
future president. A nurse by training, Lillian Gordy Carter was talkative,
outgoing, at times irrepressible. In 1966, at the age of 68, “Miss Lillian,” as
she came to be known, decided to join the Peace Corps, and she spent nearly two
years serving in India. She slipped quietly out of town to begin her training
because, she said later, the family thought her joining the Peace Corps might
arouse conservative suspicions about her son’s campaign for governor.
Mr. Carter grew up in the rigidly segregated South of the
1920s and ’30s. But unlike in much of the North, which was segregated in fact
if not in law, contact between Black and White people was part of everyday life
in much of the South. There was only one other White family in Archery, and
many of Mr. Carter’s boyhood friends were Black.
His mother turned the family home into a social center where
Black and White people were welcome and where she dispensed medical treatment
and advice to the sharecropper families who worked the Carter land.
In his youth, Mr. Carter made no attempt to conceal his
ambition. Perhaps influenced by an uncle, Tom Watson Gordy, a Navy enlisted man
who sent messages to the family from exotic places, he declared at an early age
that he intended to enter the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and
eventually become chief of naval operations. He also told a friend that one day
he would be governor of Georgia.
Mr. Carter graduated from Plains High School in 1941. To
qualify for the Naval Academy, he enrolled at Georgia Southwestern College in
nearby Americus, and he later spent a year studying at the Georgia Institute of
Technology in Atlanta. In 1943, as World War II raged, he was admitted to the
Naval Academy.
He was a good student, a quick study who seemed to move
through the academy’s rigorous academic schedule with ease. He was also popular
with his classmates, viewed as a “nice guy,” but not necessarily destined to be
a leader. He was officially a member of the Class of 1947, but under the Navy’s
accelerated wartime schedule, he graduated in 1946, ranking 59th in a class of
more than 800.
Shortly after his graduation, Mr. Carter married Eleanor
Rosalynn Smith of Plains, a close friend of his sister Ruth’s. The new Mrs.
Carter, three years younger than her husband, was from a respectable Plains
family and shared Mr. Carter’s values and outlook.
After graduating from the Naval Academy, Mr. Carter spent
two compulsory years on Navy surface ships and then applied for the submarine
service. He was accepted and soon won entry to the Navy’s newest and most
glamorous program, which was developing the nation’s first nuclear-powered
submarines under the ironfisted direction of a captain (later admiral) named
Hyman G. Rickover.
Rickover was a cold man who drove his subordinates
relentlessly. He never praised his men; he signaled his approval by allowing
them to remain in their jobs. Years later, Mr. Carter would say, “I think,
second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other
man.” The title of his 1975 presidential campaign autobiography, “Why Not the
Best?” was based on his first encounter with Rickover, who asked him whether he
had always done his best at the Naval Academy.
The young lieutenant junior grade answered honestly that,
no, he had not always done his best. After a long pause, Rickover asked icily,
“Why not?”
Rickover was not a man who cultivated friendships, and his
influence on Mr. Carter might have reinforced the same tendency in the future
president. Supremely self-confident, Mr. Carter, too, was a taskmaster, and he
was not a favorite president among those who served on the permanent White
House staff and saw chief executives come and go.
When Mr. Carter came to Washington as the newly elected
“outsider” president, he had few real friends in the capital, even among
members of his own party. In four years, he did little to forge the bonds of
friendship and loyalty that can help carry a president through times of
turmoil. He alienated potential allies, and the engineer in him was given to
micromanagement. Early in his term, Mr. Carter personally controlled access to
the White House tennis court.
“Although most considered Mr. Carter a kind, amiable man, he
could turn nasty in an instant,” Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency.”
He added, “At times he was downright vicious; in fact, his trademark steely,
laser-sharp stare usually preceded a hurtful put-down. Even in the most
informal settings, Mr. Carter had to let everybody know he was in charge.”
Mr. Carter, however, did develop deep friendships. One of
them, surprisingly, was with Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. Out of office,
the two men saw each other frequently and collaborated on various projects. Mr.
Carter delivered a eulogy at Ford’s funeral in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2007.
Mr. Carter never stopped taking positions on personally and
politically difficult issues. He cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention
in 2000, citing its “increasingly rigid” views, especially on the role of women
in society.
“I’ve made this decision with a great deal of pain and
reluctance,” Mr. Carter told the Associated Press at the time. “For me, being a
Southern Baptist has always been like being an American. … My father and his
father were deacons and Sunday school teachers. It’s something that’s just like
breathing for us.”
But he added: “I personally feel the Bible says all people
are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel that women should play an
absolutely equal role in service of Jesus in the church.”
The political life
By 1952, promoted to lieutenant and assigned as the
engineering officer on the USS Sea Wolf, the fleet’s second nuclear submarine,
Mr. Carter’s Navy career was off to a good start.
But his father died in July 1953, leaving the farm and other
family business interests in shaky financial condition. As the oldest of the
Carter siblings, the young naval officer felt a duty to return to Georgia and
take his place as head of the family. And his mother wanted him at home to hold
things together through a challenging time. He resigned from the Navy on Oct.
9, 1953, and headed home.
His return to Plains reunited him with his sisters, Gloria
and Ruth, and his brother, Billy, who became a well-known figure during the
Carter presidency. Always the family rebel, Billy Carter reveled in the role of
Georgia good ol’ boy at the gas station he owned in Plains. He also marketed a
beer — Billy Beer — under his own name. But he became an embarrassment to his
brother when it was disclosed that he had accepted a $220,000 loan from Libya
and registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government. Mr. Carter’s
siblings all died before him — all from pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Carter’s Navy resignation was a difficult decision,
especially for Rosalynn. She enjoyed the adventure and security of military
life, and as a young girl, she had yearned to leave the confines of Plains for
the wider world. Now, at 26, with three small children, she headed back to the
small town amid the dusty farm fields of southwest Georgia and a life she
thought she had escaped.
But the Carters soon found their footing in their native
region. They formed an effective business partnership, with Rosalynn handling
the bookkeeping and other managerial duties at the warehouse and her husband
immersing himself in the technical and scientific details of modern farming.
They began to prosper.
The Carters remained partners in all facets of life. At the
White House, Rosalynn Carter was an unusually activist first lady, regularly
attending Cabinet meetings and policy sessions and serving as a trusted adviser
to the president. She placed special emphasis on mental health issues and
served as the active honorary chairman of the President’s Commission on Mental
Health. After the White House years, she accompanied her husband on his global
missions.
Like his father before him, Mr. Carter became an active
member in community institutions — Plains Baptist Church, the Lions Club, the
local school and library boards, and the county planning commission.
Earl L. “Buddy” Carter had been elected to the Georgia
legislature the year before his death, and in 1962, his elder son embarked on a
political career. He ran for a state Senate seat representing Sumter and six
other counties.
Mr. Carter ran an energetic campaign for the Democratic
primary, the only election that counted at that time in the Deep South, but he
came up just short against the incumbent. On the day of the primary, however,
his operatives in the small city of Quitman witnessed widespread voting
irregularities, including ballot stuffing. It was the way things had been done
in Quitman for years.
Mr. Carter convinced John Pennington, a young investigative
reporter for the Atlanta Journal, that there was a good story to be had in
Quitman. Pennington’s subsequent stories exposed the extent of voter fraud in
the county and brought Mr. Carter statewide attention.
Through intermediaries, including Griffin
Bell, who became attorney general in the Carter administration, Mr. Carter
made contact with Charles Kirbo, a partner in a prestigious Atlanta law firm.
Kirbo, who had never met the Georgia peanut farmer, agreed to represent him in
a challenge to the primary election’s outcome. Kirbo remained a friend and
trusted adviser.
Mr. Carter prevailed, and in January 1963 he took his seat
in the Georgia Senate. He served four years, his only legislative experience,
generally keeping a low profile while achieving a reputation for diligence and
hard work. He promised to read every bill introduced in the legislature, and
when he had trouble keeping up, he took a speed-reading course.
In 1966, Mr. Carter announced that he was running for the
congressional seat held by Howard “Bo” Calloway, a wealthy Republican and
graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When Calloway unexpectedly
dropped his reelection bid and entered the race for the Republican nomination
for governor, Mr. Carter jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination.
His primary opponents included Ellis Arnall, a former
governor who was regarded as a progressive, and Lester
Maddox, an Atlanta restaurant owner who dispensed ax handles to patrons as
a symbol of his resistance to the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Mr.
Carter finished third in the primary, which was won by Maddox.
The 1966 defeat affected Mr. Carter profoundly. It was then,
he later wrote, that he underwent a deep religious transformation, a
“born-again” experience that guided him for the rest of his life. From then on,
he pursued a moral as much as a political agenda and tended to define issues in
terms of right and wrong. When he ran for president, he described himself as a
“born-again Christian,” at the time a new and somewhat jarring term in the
lexicon of presidential politics.
He almost immediately began planning to run a second
campaign for governor in 1970. His main rival in the Democratic primary
was Carl
Sanders, a well-regarded former governor with a moderate record on race.
Mr. Carter had taken courageous stands on the issue of race,
although he was never in the forefront of the civil rights movement, which was
gathering momentum and tearing the South apart.
In the 1950s, he withstood intense pressure from his
neighbors and threats to the family business as one of the few White men in
Plains who would not join the local chapter of the White Citizens Council, an
organization whose thinly veiled purpose was the continued subjugation of Black
people. In 1965, he and other members of his family stood virtually alone in
opposing a resolution barring Black people from Plains Baptist Church.
But in the 1970 campaign, Mr. Carter aggressively courted
the state’s conservative, rural voters, kept his distance from the African
American community and relentlessly attacked Sanders as the wealthy crony of
the “bigwigs” of Atlanta’s business establishment. Sanders had refused to allow
Alabama Gov. George
C. Wallace (D), the most prominent segregationist politician in the
country, to address the Georgia legislature. Mr. Carter promised repeatedly to
invite Wallace to the state.
Mr. Carter was endorsed by some of Georgia’s leading
segregationists, but the 1970 campaign cost him the support of some old allies.
Mr. Carter defeated Sanders in a primary runoff and easily
won the general election. He then executed a stunning political pivot. On Jan.
12, 1971, Mr. Carter delivered his inaugural address in front of the Georgia
Capitol, declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over. … No poor,
rural, weak or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of
being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.”
The speech was probably the most important of his life,
including those he delivered as president. It brought him national attention
and soon landed him on the cover of Time magazine. Mr. Carter became a leading
figure in a generation of young New South politicians who were seen as
determined to move their region beyond the rancorous politics of race.
As governor, Mr. Carter largely lived up to his lofty words.
He appointed more women and minorities to state government positions than all
of his predecessors combined. He also continued efforts, begun in the state
Senate, to upgrade Georgia’s public schools, and he overhauled the prison
system and judiciary.
Eye on the presidency
Mr. Carter was constitutionally limited to one term as
governor (Georgia governors can now serve two consecutive terms), but his
ambitions were not similarly constrained. He began to think of running for
president, a goal that might seem wildly out of reach even for a bright young
governor with a progressive reputation. As late as October 1975, a
public-opinion poll on possible 1976 Democratic presidential contenders did not
include his name.
By the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Carter had acquired
the services, and the fierce loyalty, of two young Georgians who would be at
his side through his presidency. One was Hamilton Jordan, a political science
student who volunteered to work for Mr. Carter in 1966 and became his closest
political strategist and White House chief of staff. The other was Jody Powell,
who began as Mr. Carter’s driver in the 1970 campaign and went on to be his
chief spokesman and White House press secretary. Jordan died in
2008; Powell died in
2009.
While still governor of Georgia, Mr. Carter quietly pursued
the presidency with the same determination that marked all of his endeavors. He
managed to get appointed to an important Democratic National Committee campaign
post, providing a vehicle to meet Democratic politicians and activists around
the county. Jordan, his executive assistant, left Atlanta for a job with the
DNC in Washington, where he served as the unannounced candidate’s eyes and ears
at national party headquarters.
Jordan also wrote a long memo setting out the changing
contours of the nomination process and a strategy that would lead to victory.
Mr. Carter, with Powell at his side, crisscrossed the country tirelessly,
impressing the people he met and gradually building a foundation of support.
It all came together on a cold January night in Iowa. Mr.
Carter did not win the Iowa caucuses in 1976 — the most votes were cast for
uncommitted delegates — but he finished first among those who competed. That
gave him a burst of publicity and momentum that carried him to victory in the
New Hampshire primary and eventually to the nomination as his rivals dropped
out of the race one by one. It was the 1976 Carter campaign that firmly
established Iowa as the starting point of the road to the White House.
After Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon
administration, it was a good year to be a Democrat. Mr. Carter chose
Sen. Walter
F. Mondale of Minnesota, a Northern liberal with strong ties to
organized labor, as his running mate, and they headed into the fall campaign
with a 30-point lead in the polls over their Republican opponents.
They almost lost. Ford ran a disciplined campaign that made
maximum use of his status as the incumbent, and Mr. Carter’s lead in the polls
steadily dwindled. Shortly before Election Day, Playboy magazine published a
long interview with the Democratic nominee. As a final question, Mr. Carter was
asked whether he thought that he had reassured people who were uneasy about his
religious beliefs and fearful that he would be a rigid, unbending president.
In the midst of a long, rambling response, Mr. Carter said:
“I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart
many times.”
Public doubts about the born-again peanut farmer and
one-term governor deepened. Mr. Carter won the election by two percentage
points.
His steep slide during the 1976 campaign was an early
warning signal of his political vulnerability. Four years later, Mr. Carter was
the incumbent, but that was hardly an advantage. One July 1980 poll put his
approval rating at 21 percent, one of the lowest ever recorded for a president.
Mr. Carter was the first president to openly embrace
rock-and-roll music, and he credits the Allman Brothers and other musicians
with helping him win election in 1976. “I was practically a nonentity, but
everyone knew the Allman Brothers,” Mr. Carter said in a 2020 documentary,
“Jimmy Carter: Rock-and-roll President.” “When they endorsed me, all the young
people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”
Mr. Carter was challenged for his party’s nomination
by Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a hero to Democratic liberals who
had come to detest Mr. Carter for what they considered his conservative
policies. The Kennedy campaign badly damaged Mr. Carter’s reelection chances,
but it also exposed weaknesses in Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. Mr.
Carter won the nomination, and the youngest of the Kennedy brothers never again
sought the presidency.
In the fall, Mr. Carter faced Reagan, the hero of a rising
conservative movement. As he had in the 1970 campaign for governor of Georgia,
Mr. Carter played to win. He mounted a negative assault that depicted Reagan as
a right-wing ideologue who was too dangerous to entrust with the nation’s
future.
In the only nationally televised debate of the fall
campaign, Reagan disarmed that portrayal. “There you go again,” he said in his
avuncular, optimistic style, responding to Mr. Carter’s accusations. Reagan won
by almost 10 percentage points, sweeping 44 of the 50 states.
For years, people in Mr. Carter’s orbit believed that Reagan
supporters had been in contact with Iranian officials and urged them to delay
the release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 election. The
purpose, allegedly, was to make sure that Mr. Carter didn’t pull off an
“October surprise” that could swing the election in his favor. Investigations
by the U.S. House and Senate concluded that there was no credible evidence of
any such plot.
In March 2023, while Mr. Carter was in hospice care, the New York Times reported allegations made by Ben
Barnes, a longtime politician and operative from Texas, that supported those
suspicions. Barnes said that he had accompanied his mentor, former Texas
governor and former U.S. treasury secretary John
B. Connally Jr., to several Middle East countries in the summer of 1980 and
that Connally urged leaders there to pass a message to Iranian officials that
they should wait until Reagan was president to release the hostages.
Connally and most other key players had died, and Barnes’s
allegations could not be independently confirmed. But the Times story felt like
a vindication to Mr. Carter’s allies. Gerald Rafshoon, Mr. Carter’s White House
communications director, told the Times that the allegations were “pretty damn
outrageous.”
After the Times story was published, grandson Jason Carter
told The Post that he believed that Mr. Carter remained alert enough to know
about the article and that the family was gratified by what it added to the
historical record, but “my grandfather had moved on.”
Jason Carter said he never once — despite all that had been
written about dirty politics played at the expense of the hostages and Mr.
Carter — heard his grandfather talk about it. “I think that tells you a lot,”
Jason Carter said. “He believed there were other things more important than
politics.”
In his first act as a former president, performed at the
request of the new president, Mr. Carter flew to a U.S. air base in Germany to
greet the American hostages who were returning from Iran. He was 56 and could
not know how much time he had left or how he would use it.
But in a farewell address a week earlier, Mr. Carter
suggested that although he had lost an election, he was not finished with what
he saw as his life’s work.
“In a few days,” he said, “I will lay down my official
responsibilities in this office to take up once more the only title in our
democracy superior to that of president, the title of ‘citizen.’”