When might we see the equal of Jimmy Carter again?
By most recent accounts, he was a middling president.
In the latest Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr. ranked 22nd, sandwiched between Andrew Jackson and William Howard Taft, and three spots below George H.W. Bush (No. 19). Caught up in what The New York Times called a “cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran” and what The Wall Street Journal branded a “listless economy and stubborn inflation, squabbles within his party [and] gridlock in Congress,” our 39th president served just a single term from 1977 to 1981.
But Jimmy Carter was a remarkable man. Morally upright as a Sunday School teacher who was genuinely religious, he was committed to peacemaking and democracy at home and across the world. He was devoted to his wife of 77 years, whom he had met when he was 3 and she was just a day old. And, in all that and more, he demonstrated how there could be room in our politics for the high road.
Despite his failures – and circumstances he could not control, such as the prolonged seizure of hostages by Iran, an Arab oil embargo and domestic stagflation – Carter did log extraordinary achievements that sprang from his personal decency and integrity. A 1946 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who left active service as a lieutenant in 1953 and was a reservist until 1961, he proved to be a global peacemaker, bringing together Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978 to forge a peace treaty between their countries that still endures.
Carter knew all too well the risks of war, especially in the nuclear age. As a submarine officer, he had a small hand in helping to develop the nuclear submarine fleet, working with Adm. Hyman Rickover, known as “the father of the nuclear navy.” Between November 1952 and March 1953, Carter served with the Naval Reactors Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C., aiding “in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels.” He often visited the Hanford Works in Washington State, where plutonium was made, and Idaho, where the Nautilus prototype reactor was being built. He helped build a prototype nuclear reactor at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York, according to Rear Adm. (Ret.) Sam Cox, who directs the Naval History and Heritage Command.
The Navy named a nuclear submarine for him. The U.S.S. Jimmy Carter is an advanced Seawolf-class submarine, a hunter-killer designed for special missions.
Because of his knowledge of the field, Carter once helped prevent a nuclear disaster. Carter and his team were called in when a power surge at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada, caused fuel rods to melt in a nuclear reactor, damaging its core.
“Carter and his 22 other team members were separated into teams of three and lowered into the reactor for 90-second intervals to clean the site. It was estimated that a minute-and-a-half was the maximum time humans could be exposed to the levels of radiation present in the area,” Military.com reported. “It was still too much, especially by today’s standards. The future president had radioactive urine for months after the cleanup.”
During his presidency, Carter also signed a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union that restrained nuclear weapons expansion. He formalized diplomatic relations with China. And he drove treaties turning over the Panama Canal to Panama.
At home, he was in some ways a precursor to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. A centrist Democrat, he pushed for deregulation of airlines, railroads and other industries, and established the Energy Department to regulate sources of energy and fund research into alternative sources. As historian Heather Cox Richardson noted, Carter tried make the government more representative of the American people: his domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat said that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”
Of course, the longtime peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, is most remembered now for his post-presidency. He built houses for the poor through Habitat for Humanity, an outfit that was born on an interracial Christian farm about 10 miles from where he grew up. He established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease, especially Guinea worm, and to combat social inequality. As a freelance diplomat, he traveled the world to promote democracy and peace and earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
A polymath, Carter wrote more than two dozen books. His memoir, “An Hour Before Daylight,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002. He also held forth on religious themes, poetry and even wrote a children’s story. At least three of his works dealt with the Middle East, where he stirred up a tempest in one of by likening Israel’s policies on the West Bank to South African apartheid.
As a new BusinessWeek bureau chief in the late 1980s, I was fortunate enough to discuss his successes and disappointments about the Middle East with him on a private jet flight on one of his post-presidency humanitarian trips. While Carter’s insights no longer remain with me, my overall impression endures. He was soft-spoken, humble enough to be well aware of his shortcomings, and someone patient enough to put up with a young journalist’s sometimes-naive questions.
As we all know all too well, our politics has changed since Carter’s days.
Some nowadays might see common decency and honesty as failings or at least unhelpful traits in a president. Many, albeit a minority of American voters, in our latest election chose a man notorious for his personal and political defects. There’s no need here to list the many well-documented foibles in a man who, ranking 45th, dead last, in that historians ranking, makes Carter look like an exceptional success.
Let’s just say the two couldn’t be more polar opposites. The gulf between them in a dozen respects is reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. And that gap is, tragically, a sad statement about America.
Despite the circumstances that did him in politically, Carter set a high bar that only a few presidents and former presidents since have come close to. As The New York Times headlined an editorial memorializing the former president, “America Needs More Jimmy Carters.” We’ll not see his like again, certainly not in the coming four years, and perhaps longer. RIP, Mr. President.