Author Robert Fulghum once wrote that Jimmy Carter wasn’t exactly a great president, but that he was hands-down the best ex-president we’ve ever had.
As James Earl Carter, Jr., 39th president of the United States, approaches the end of a very long, very distinguished, altogether admirable life,2 it is no great effort to see that Fulghum had it exactly right: among the US presidents, there has been no better after-the-White-House life lived than Carter’s.
He was my first presidential vote, back in 1980, when I was a college sophomore. And I, for one, don’t count him the failure that most seem to (historians, I am pleased to note, do not).
There are the accomplishments that everyone knows about: the pardoning of the Vietnam draft dodgers; the Camp David Accords, bringing Israel and Egypt to the table; he brokered the Panama Canal Treaty; he led the second round of SALT negotiations to curb nuclear proliferation; he created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.
But there’s much we didn’t hear about at the time. Did you know, for instance, that he was the second-most experienced military man to serve as president during the 20th century, second only to Eisenhower? And did you ever hear about how he strengthened NATO in response to Soviet arms build-up, holding our partner countries’ feet to the fire? That his administration set new records in posting women, blacks and Hispanics to key positions?
Moreover, he was a pretty spectacular guy before he ever entered politics. Did you know he helped avert a nuclear disaster in Canada in 1952, while serving as a US Navy submariner?
That year in Ottawa, an experiment plant went into partial nuclear meltdown. Carter was part of the then-new US nuclear submarine program under the legendary Captain Hymen Rickover, and had been his liaison to the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission.
It was this expertise that qualified Carter to be part of the response team when the NRX reactor at Ottawa’s Chalk River Labs, where millions of gallons of radioactive water had been released into the building’s lower levels. Along with other team members, Carter donned protective gear and was lowered into the hot water for 90 seconds at a time, shutting the reactor down step-by-step before full meltdown could occur.
After leaving military service upon the death of his father, whereafter he took up the family peanut farming business, he became active in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-Sixties – which damaged his initial prospects in Georgia politics.
As a young father, he served on local school boards. And though a liberal Democrat, he was in his tenure as governor of Georgia an efficiency monger and a budget hawk, overseeing state government reorganization and imposing fiscal discipline across the board.
But for all this, it was indeed his post-presidential life that set him apart as a human being of once-in-a-generation note.
Two years after leaving office in 1980, he created the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of human rights, public health, and conflict resolution. In its 40-plus years, the Center has carried out projects in 80 countries, from election monitoring assistance to conflict mediation between nations, from programs to eradicate disease to advocating for victims of human rights abuses. The work of the Carter Center led to his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 2002.
There’s his well-known work with Habitat for Humanity – likewise non-profit, likewise located in Atlanta, and likewise servicing 80 countries. Habitat builds homes and community buildings using volunteer labor – much of it Carter’s own – and has, since its inception in 1976, built or restored more than 35 million homes. As of 2013, it is the largest non-profit builder in the world.
And he may be the most accomplished US diplomat in the nation’s history. He followed his Israel-Egypt peace deal, Panama Canal treaties, SALT negotiations and official China recognition with a flurry of post-presidential diplomatic missions, including
Egypt/PLO negotiations in 1983
A mission to North Korea in 1994 to freeze that country’s nuclear weapons program (becoming the first to cross the demilitarized zone since the Korean War)
He worked with Nelson Mandala in Johannesburg to create an international association of leaders working to promote human rights, following those efforts with a world tour to meet and recruit leaders in other countries
He worked with Egypt in creating for that country a new constitution
He returned to North Korea to negotiate the release of Aijalon Gomes, a teacher from Seoul who crossed the border with intent to offer humanitarian aid
As his amazing life draws to a close, it’s poignant that our attention will be drawn to the life of a man who utterly devoted to humankind and the well-being of others – all the more poignant because those who have followed him have done so poorly by comparison.
Here’s hoping the lessons of Carter’s life cause us to stop settling for so much less.
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